Nate Dorward

Check out the Opies' books, they print a lot of these rhymes in all the variants.

& I'd add that while the music on Jimmy Smith's Open House/Plain Talk is great, it's a very poor recording with lots of distortion. If you can get beyond that it's excellent. Maybe The Sermon instead if you're looking for Smith. Penguin Guide recommends the Smalls Paradise set but frankly I mostly hate it. & Stanley Turrentine's Hustling and That's Where It's At are sublime. I didn't think Never Let Me Go was up to their calibre, though it's perfectly fine.

The Thad Jones dates The Magnificent... & Detroit/New York Junction are very fine, a little underrated too. Sonny Rollins, the Vanguard trio sessions & Don Cherry's Complete Communion is a classic of 1960s free jazz. There are probably a zillion Art Blakey albums you could get, but make sure not to miss the two with Clifford Brown at Birdland & the 1960s edition on Free For All & Mosaic. In terms of Jackie McLean, just about anything for the label. I like his more avantgarde-leaning stuff for the label: Destination Out!, Let Freedom Ring, Action, Demon's Dance. In fact the only one I'd recommend avoiding until you've got some of the others is the odd encounter with Ornette Coleman (simply because it's somewhat disappointing that Coleman plays only trumpet on it). Dexter Gordon--the one I like most is the encounter with late-period Bud Powell on Our Man in Paris. Some people are keen on the ones with Sonny Clark (Go and A Swinging Affair) but they seem just OK to me.

yes. I'm actually off to see the BGNO this month in Vancouver.

I have both sets, review copies. The pianist Joel Forrester is great, the tunes & arrangements are great. On the other hand, the rhythm section is so-so & the solos (except for Forrester) are just OK (with Sewelson kinda annoying me). Worth hearing but I think I like the idea of the Micros more than the actual discs. I don't get the "cleverness no substance" claim at all--it's a handy putdown but seems wilfully blind to the imagination & passion that went into the music. As I said, I think they got everything right in terms of the mix of ingredients, it just seems uneven in execution. If you are OK with that, then you'll like them. If you want my copies PM me & I'll mail them.

Most sites like allmusic.com seem to generate such information with a random computer generator. Might work for your site too. Jazz Mad-Libs.

Sure, I'm in.... PM sent.

I think the problem is that it's longer than 80 minutes so some CD players won't read it.

Yes Adam Lane's discs for the label are very good. The duo & quartet with Tchicai is a charmer, & the trios with Golia & Vijay Anderson are excellent. & Dresser/Anderson is great. I also like the first Frank Lowe disc Bodies & Souls & James Finn's Faith in a Seed. But, yes, the hit/miss ratio is pretty low, as is inevitable with any label releasing such a ridiculous amount of material. That's setting aside issues about the sound quality.

Hey Chuck--happy birthday! (a day late, but never mind...)

Speak for your own children, bub.

Re: the room: no it hasn't got a piano, it's basically a living room I believe, which is why it sounds like a pretty dead space not like a concert space. You can hear the fire in the fireplace on some of the sessions recorded in winter. -- The few CIMP sessions recorded with a piano were done elsewhere, at an auditorium nearby if memory serves. I'm no longer writing for Cadence & I suppose I could weigh in here (god knows that during my tenure there I had to tread very carefully every time I was assigned to review one of their own releases), but truthfully I think the topic's been covered ad nauseam over the years.

Wow, that's an impressive lineup. I'll think about going... I work Friday till 2:30 pm, probably could get off earlier. Any Organissimo denizens planning to be there? If you lived in Toronto you wouldn't complain about getting 10 hrs of quality improv/free jazz in a row....... Besides, if you get the day pass then just go to the stuff you want, or dip in & out.

Very sad news--I only have Impressions of A Patch of Blue but it's pretty extraordinary.

Hey, looks great! Funnily enough I really couldn't think of anything to write up for that list of 50 personally significant artefacts.... I guess I'm not much of a collector or a sentimentalist. (Which isn't to say that there aren't things a treasure, just that they don't have a material form. A long conversation with Simon Fell in 2002, for instance, or being present for one of Steve Lacy's last solo recitals.) But it's fun to read about what's meaningful to other contributors to the mag.

Oh, that's it? Fine. I don't care about mushiness, mere nudity or general steaminess; I just don't want anything actively coital to deal with. The strategically-covered-by-a-sheet strategy in Hollywood films drives me NUTS, it's so phony. I suppose I should check out the Lord of the Rings films, Spiderman, &c.... not really a big Tolkien fan so I avoided the former at the time they came out, & Anne was too young (4 yrs old when The Fellowship... came out).

Hm, just thought I'd ask if this one was suitable for the 10-yr-old here. The NY Times review mentions a scene of (clothes-on) sex, but the IMDB's "Parental Advisory" page has "None" under "Sex & Nudity". (Well, I suppose she's approaching the age where the birds & bees talk becomes inevitable, but I don't think I want a superhero blockbuster film to be the flashpoint for it....) Anyway, would like to see this one myself, & ideally take the little one too.

!!! Can't imagine dumping Bud's (best) stuff--the best tracks on the early Roost, Blue Note & Verve dates are as close to out-of-body-experiences as you can get in jazz. The concentrated invention on Jazz Giant makes just about every other pianist sound half-asleep. I've always liked having a little extraneous vocalizing & background noise round the fringes of recordings--doesn't bother me, the human element's nice. (Like the weird rasping noises on some Art Tatum discs--I couldn't figure out what that was till I read an annotator who mentioned that it was the sound of his rings scraping the keys during glisses.) Mose's vocalizing is quite charming, for instance. My problems with Jarrett are entirely with what's coming out of the piano not his mouth (either during his performance or during his extramusical rants).

Sad to hear. He always seemed a pretty rough hewn player, but his music always had a great sense of fun & cameraderie & a tendency to throw in chunks of his fave jazz standards even in abstract contexts. Saw him in the mid 1990s at Victo--the concert was nice, & it's been released as Social Security.

Chaka Khan's done a couple. Or is that too far afield from what you're looking for?

Jeez, that's sad to hear. I do a little indexing & could have done it for a low fee.

"King Korn"? Try Bley/Swallow/LaRoca, Footloose! on Savoy.

The duo with Roger Kellaway, Inside + Out, is pretty remarkable.

My parents walked out on it, I managed to make it to the end at least. Perhaps the most offputting thing about the film (aside from the arch witticisms, aside from the treacly-ironic music) is that it seems to be trying to sell the adoption as a happy ending, with that baby ending up in the clutches of that creepy motherhood-obsessed nutcase. It's the happiest ending since the kid ended up with her dad at the end of Chinatown.

Hey, even Daniel Smith gets a nod! I'd certainly vote for him in a "worst of the year" poll....!