johnblitweiler

Major Hoople Charles Major Minor Hall

Thanks, Joe, it's good to hear Hardman in the vido. Intriguing Bennie Maupin solo - he seems to try to seize that theme and it keeps escaping him.

Tammy Grimes Leann Rimes Emily Dickinson

Intriguing looks at a recent sub-genre that I'm unfamiliar with. I enjoy David Whiteis's writing and often agree / disagree with him. Denise Lasalle's foreword is a charming history of the blues.

He used to play a lot of notes, but they were really musical notes - more rewarding music than some virtuosos trumpeted. I interviewed him in Down Beat in 1976; nice guy, serious.

Lance Armstrong Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy A Jackson in Your House

Scarlet O'Hara Bridgid O'Shaughnessy Maxine O'Flaherty

Very good people there. The owner is a former WHPK disk jockey.

I've never heard "Sweet Slumber", but Little Willie Jackson was Joe Liggins' alto man. Thanks, Paul. And was Jackson's brother the tenor player for Liggins? I don't have the albums any more, so may be wrong about about L.D. sounding like Jackson. But Jackson had a singing sound. The Lush Life CD may be a reissue of an LP that originally was titled Sweet Slumber.

Gene Ammons made a recording of "Exactly Like You" that was popular around the early 1960s or late '50s. In the 1970s Blue Note issued a Lou Donaldson LP in which L.D. phrased the theme just like Jug - very distinctive. The trick was, Lou had recorded that one before Ammons had recorded his version. Other pieces now and then, "Blues Walk" for ex., suggest a real felllow feeling between the two. That lovely Lou Donaldson version of "Sweet Slumber": Who does he sound like? It certainly reminds me of the alto player in the Joe Liggins 1940s band.

Aloc, I hope you weren't covered in snow and ice there in Ohio.

I wish that the LPs I lost in the fire were on CD. Cecil Taylor and Byrd-Gryce at Newport, for example, and the Indiana Hoagy Carmichael anthology box.

and I am insolvent

Mark, thanks mightily for that Public Collectors link. It's true, Malachi was certainly one of the non-musician MVPs here in Chicago. And reading this reminds me of the despair we felt during the long, long Bush-Iraq War years.

from the Anti-House CD, "Big Bang" is hilarious

Long ago in a Chinese-Filipino restaurant I ordered the cheapest shrimp dish on the menu. Took one bite: it tasted like a garbage truck smells. Tried to wipe the taste out of my mouth and heard a bunch of people laughing at me. They were the non-English-speaking employees of the restaurant behind my back - they apparently liked to snoop on gringos who made the mistake of ordering that stuff. It was apparently fermented and apparently a familiar dish back home.

I spent much of today in at&t telephone-hold hell. Prolonged exposure to awful music wears down the soul, so that even a pre-high-school-level version of "Girl from Ipanema" was welcome relief from the rest of the stuff on the line.

Allen, don't break a leg and don't break down. Just play good music.

Boots Mussulli Walter "Foots" Thomas Thomas "Fats" Waller

I heard a Miles Davis quintet with Jimmy Heath, Kelly, Chambers, Cobb at the Regal Theater in Chicago in spring, 1961.

Fun, surely. Many years ago at a Chicago festival Roscoe led a sextet of bass sax, baritone sax, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, bass violin, and bass drum - as I recall the others were Wallace McMillan, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, and Lester Bowie. The earth shook.

sharp and flat in the same solo often enough. His intensity sometimes really grabbed me.

M.Night Shmalayan Gary Smulyan David Schnitter

Yes indeed. In so many different groupings, too. Wouldn't it be great to hear him again with Mobley, Ammons, Dexter, Stitt, Art Pepper, Konitz-Marsh, Jimmy Raney, etc.? Too bad we're too young to have heard that quartet of Monk-Griffin-Ware-Campbell. Let's see, there are records of Wilbur Campbell with Ira, Von Freeman, E. Parker McDougal, Muhal - who else?