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johnblitweiler

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Everything posted by johnblitweiler

  1. Bless you, Jim. Mojo Snake Minuet takes place entirely in Chicago. Augie March takes place in other places besides Chicago. Native Son by Richard Wright is wholly a Chicago novel, as is Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Among more recent writers, Leon Forrest's novels are about Black Chicagoans. I suspect his last, posthumous novel, Divine Days, was published before he lived long enough to complete a final take - it is full of tons of wonderful invention, but it is 1100 pages long and has lots of repetitions. He'd felt fortunate that Toni Morrison of Random House had been his first book editor, and Divine Days needed an editor. All 3 of Howard Browne's Halo novels are fine choices, and his 4th Paul Pine novel, Taste Of Ashes, is my favorite - but it half takes place in suburbs. For thrillers, check out the north side Chicago atmosphere of Fredrick Brown's Ed and Am novels.
  2. Mephistopheles Peetie Wheatstraw Peter Cook
  3. He played with an imagination and clarity of projection that jazz fiddlers lacked (Eddie South excepted). There was a memorable pbs tv show 30 or so years ago titled Tribute To Charlie Christian. The band was Gimble, Willie Nelson, 2 other guitarists, and a bassist, and sure enough, the repertoire was all Django songs.
  4. The Harry James session with Evans is priceless. Evans also played beautiful tenor on an outstanding 1938 Lionel Hampton date, 4 tunes: I'm in the Mood for Swing, Shoe Shiner's Drag, Any Time at All, Muskrat Ramble.
  5. Never mind Lord Buckley, I want that great album cover.
  6. Teagle Fleming Eagle-Eye Cherry Banana Nose Zeke Bonura
  7. Looks like Niels is having the most fun among all of us. Reminds me of when jazz was new to me.
  8. this discussion reminds me of when RCA Bluebird was reissuing LPs 30 or more years ago, and my neighbor Little Brother Montgomery wanted to get paid for his 2-LP album, music he'd recorded in 1935-6. RCA told him sorry, but they'd paid him $5 a side for all performance rights, no more $ for you. But Jim O'Neill got RCA to send Brother all their Bluebird reissues. I happened to be visiting Brother when the Fats Waller piano solo album came in the mail and remember how overjoyed he was at hearing those beauties again. Incidentally, that $5 would be around $100 a side today and his album had 32 tracks. (But in the 1980s he may have collected a pittance for songwriting - I don't remember whether.)
  9. Thanks, Chris. Your web site won't let me comment there, so I'll comment here: I was fascinated by the interview with Val Wilmer from 26 years ago. But now, in 2015 - how many black jazz critics do we have? How many women jazz critics? How many black and women scholars are there who specialize in jazz in music and black studies departments? Five years ago Wilmer very kindly sent me a copy of "Mother Said...," which was out of print by then. It's a fascinating book, partly because it also tells of her travels in America's south during the civil rights movement years. (Lost it, I'm afraid, in the fire.) Certainly her intelligence, serious, and humility re the music and black culture communicate. Not mentioned - I believe she was the first person to interview some important musicians for print, Hank Mobley among them.
  10. I believe I paid around $25 for Jazz In Search Of Itself. That would amount to around 500 insights, or an insight and a half per page. Actually, there are more insights than 1-1/2 per page, so your price must have increased since I bought the book.
  11. Melancholy is the best Cecil Taylor solo piano record among these. But another of his solo FMPs is a long and, to me, dreary rehash of "E.B." Don't remember which one.
  12. But a few years ago Muhal told me that Hank never actually produced those arrangements.
  13. Giuseppe Sinopoli Giuseppe Verdi Morning Joe
  14. Steve, the critic J.B. Figi described the Breuker band's rhythm section as sounding like "Dutch wooden shoes." I tend to agree and I think Bennink and Glerum slipped into the same thing last week - fatigue perhaps, though some other times I've heard Bennink so preoccupied with his showmanship that he didn't remember to swing. Yes, ICP offered the best improvisers - Mary played the best I've heard her play this time. Guus Janssen is now on the band, yay.
  15. Jim, thank you for posting that article. My DB copy of that was among the stuff that vanished after the fire, and now I have a copy again.
  16. Has anyone here actually purchased and listened to MOPDTK's Kind Of Blue? Is it really a note-for-note reproduction of the real thing? Heard the ICP Orchestra in concert last Saturday. Stiff-sounding bass and drums, though possibly unintended - the band hadn't slept in 24 hours - are their unswinging occasions and Han's antics post-modern? Some grand improvising by most of the others. The material was marches and ditties by Misha and others and concluded with their best performances: 2 Monk and 1 Herbie Nichols songs, very straightforward even as the improvising went outside the changes. Those marches and ditties seem like a contemporary Gilbert & Sullivan view of jazz, as opposed to the Weill-Brechtish approach to jazz of the Wm Breuker Collective. Both these and in fact the European orientation of free jazz from Europe over the past 50 years seem like a natural evolution rather than the ironic or otherwise self-conscious attitudes that I associate with the idea of post-modernism. Similarly, Air playing Joplin and Roscoe and the Art Ensemble playing pre-free jazz pieces may have a playful surface, but the musicians' playing sounds downright earnest. Again, not post-modern in inception.
  17. There were apparently some barnstorming games between Negro League and MLB players. Bill Veeck wrote that the best game he ever saw was a 1-0 pitchers duel between Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean and also that before Paige came to Cleveland in 1948 he and Bob Feller had barnstormed vs. each other.
  18. Jeff, Magic Bus is where I found some American Music CDs that I used to cherish. Did anyone (apart possibly from LA Music Factory) ever take Magic Bus's placer?
  19. Seems like a whole lot about pitching and batting changed when the strike zone was reduced in the 1980s. I don't have stats to prove this, but it surely seems like there are fewer bases on balls now than when I was a kid in the 1950s; today's batters have better reflexes and there are a lot more foul balls, since all pitches are in that litttle strike zone; no knuckle balls any more - the pitch was too uncontrollable; starting pitchers now throw more pitches in fewer innings. Babe Ruth and a current mlb batter can't be compared, neither can Eddie Cicotte or Hoyt Wilhelm be compared with any pitcher today. No doubt some folks have said these things on previous threads. Speaking of Eddie Cicotte - the spitball was outlawed in 1920, only 8 older pitchers in each league were allowed to still throw it. Ruth couldn't have faced many spitballers when he set those records.
  20. Yes, Hank was (as he put it) helping Shepp and Byas get Gonsalves back to the band on time.
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