JohnJ

Not best of CD's exactly, buy I do enjoy the Blue Note best of box sets like the 4CD Grant Green Retrospective that offer a detailed overview of an artists career.

Obvious I know, but it's 'Round Midnight' for me.

Jim, your daughter might want to check out http://nippop.com/ That is supposed to be the best English language resource for J-Pop (or J-Rock).

I really like all the Blue Notes that I have heard, but my favourite is probably the somewhat neglected 'Patterns'.

As a Lutonian I must say I resent all the digs at Luton. Has anyone ever spent any time there? It is no better or worse than most large industrial towns and is actually a lot more cosmopoliitan than most with the large immigrant population and all the Chinese and other Asian students at Luton University. Moreover, you have one of ther most reliable rail services in the UK (only 30 minutes to central London), Luton Airport (particularly good for budget airlines like Easy Jet) and a great professional football team, one of the most entertaining around (come on you hatters!).

Definitely not true in Tokyo. The used stores here are great and there are some real bargains to be had. Japan doesn't count. Somehow they've jumped off the evolutionary chart and have split off as a civilized race with good musical taste. Believe me Soul Stream, if you heard any of the J-Pop that dominates the airwaves here, you would retract that statement.

Definitely not true in Tokyo. The used stores here are great and there are some real bargains to be had.

Not mentioned yet, but as an old glam rocker my vote goes to Roxy Music.

Mark Winkler, a favourite is 'Tales from Hollywood'.

Nice picture Chandra (even if Norah does have weightlifters arms) So how many Grammys does Miss Jones have now?

Seven, counting the Mosaic as three. All BN, no Verve.

Mike Zwerin writes about Wayne and the "Footprints" biography in todays IHT. I thought the article might be of interest. Shorter punches his way free Mike Zwerin Wednesday, February 9, 2005 PARIS In "Footprints," Michelle Mercer's important new biography of Wayne Shorter, she describes Carlos Santana's first take on her subject. "I didn't have words or facility to talk to him. It's the same thing with Wayne or Miles or Coltrane. You don't just stroll up and say, 'Hey man.' If you're sensitive in your heart and have some dignity, you don't approach them like that. So I admired him from a distance." . "Like Herbie, Miles, Duke or Bird," Mercer writes, "Wayne has one-name-only status." She refers to the principals in her story by their first names or nicknames. This nominal informality is in fact the sensitive way to approach writing about jazz; it is one example of what sets jazz apart from so-called "serious" music. There is at least the fiction that it is family. It helps her set the right style for her task. . Shorter can certainly seem distant. His voice is quiet and introspective, his ideas abstract. There is at times the uneasy feeling that a level is escaping you. Mercer holds that Shorter belongs in the elite line of jazz greats not only because of his compositional and instrumental importance, but also for the depth of his intelligence. . Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, Shorter has played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis, Weather Report, Milton Nascimento, Santana, Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan, plus a multitude of his own groups. A Buddhist, he has been known to answer the question, "Do you know what time it is?" with an essay about eternity. . Shorter tends to speak in parables. He will ask his band to play "some stem-cell research music." He learned that sort of thing from Davis, who once told him to play like Humphrey Bogart throwing a punch. Shorter sees a lot of movies and reads a lot of books. . Listening to him play the saxophone is a bit like watching a film by Eric Rohmer. His body language is introverted, his sound is soft and engulfing and he will never honk or screech without a good reason. You need to interact with, more than listen to, Shorter. Mercer writes that he has "produced one of jazz's great oeuvres, crowding out the likes of Ellington and Coltrane for space in the fake book, the collection of standards that is required study for most jazz students." . "Music is like a piece of clay," Shorter once said. "You get inside it, make a cubbyhole and then punch your way out." . Shorter wrote a composition called "Syzygy," a word he found by coincidence in a dictionary, meaning a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies, like the sun, moon and earth in an eclipse. Shorter's wife, Carolina, said that he "wrote it while watching television the whole time. He likes to see what is directing people's minds." . Shorter told Mercer, "When your wisdom is developed, anything and everything is a ways and means of creating something valuable." "Syzygy" was first performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as part of its Millennium Jazz Celebration. . In December 1965, the Miles Davis quintet - Shorter was Coltrane's replacement - played a historic engagement at the Plugged Nickel club in Chicago. The rhythm section was young: Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass, and Tony Williams, drums. They had already worked together, but Davis had been sick, and now that he was ready to go, they realized that they were tired of playing hits like "So What" and "My Funny Valentine" the same old way every time. Williams suggested a solution: "What if we play anti-music? Like, whatever somebody expects you to play, that's the last thing you play?" On the seven-CD box, "Live at the Plugged Nickel," you can hear how the looseness of the form and the importance of the silences, and Shorter, would change the future of the music. . In the early 1970s, Shorter co-founded Weather Report with the keyboardist and fellow composer Joe Zawinul. Although it was only a jazz-rock fusion band, they wanted to change the song form. Why did a song have to have eight bar phrases? Why not more or less? "We were talking about doing music that had mountains and streams and valleys and going over hill and dale," Shorter told Mercer. "We were trying to do music with another grammar, where you don't resolve something, like writing a letter where you don't use capitals." . His return to acoustic music was big news in the 1990s. Mercer says that the scene has gotten to the point where "Wayne isn't just on the scene. He is the scene." Once he was rehearsing his composition "Water Babies," and his musicians wanted to know how he planned to establish the tune's tempo after its loose rubato intro. "Let's not set it," Shorter said. "We'd rather go for elusiveness than clarification."

In Japan it is easy. Women buy men chocolate for Valentines Day, and not just wives and girlfriends but relatives and co-workers also. Men are not expected to buy anything. Our turn comes one month later on March 14th, 'White Day'.

'Lethal Sherry Enema' - sounds like a good name for a rock group. B-)

Sacrilege!

Actually 1500 Yen is close to $15 these days. Also, of course, there are no alternates.

I took a look at the Venus link and the three other tunes are: Cleopatra's Dream Summer Night Yesterdays

I thought the following interview with Metheny from Tokyo's free weekly magazine 'Metropolis' might be of interest. One only has to try and count Japan's profusion of jazz bars and legions of jazz fans to understand the country’s importance in the worldwide jazz marketplace. Because of the size of Japan’s jazz audience—second only to the U.S.—performers have been crossing the Pacific (some even putting down roots) for as long the journey was made simple by modern transportation. So it was that the most influential guitarist of late 20th century jazz found himself in an anonymous hotel room in Shinjuku in December to promote the release of his Pat Metheny Group’s ninth and latest album. “I’ve been coming since 1979,” the famously shaggy Metheny said, leaning forward in his seat. “And as much as you hear about Japan being a special place in the jazz panorama, it’s true. The level of intense and deep scrutiny that is applied to what we do and the genuine support we feel from the people here really does set it apart from anywhere else on earth.” Entitled The Way Up and released this week on specialty label Nonesuch, part of Warner records, the album is the latest in a long series of collaborations between Metheny and pianist Lyle Mays, the pair at the heart of the group. The two shook up the jazz world in the late ’70s and early ’80s with recordings that defied the norms of mainstream and avant-garde jazz, and even fusion, despite Metheny and Mays’ extensive use of electric instruments. Wildly popular albums like 1979’s American Garage were built around decidedly non-blues-based, folksy melodies that shifted imperceptibly into extended improvisations. Their songs jettisoned the standard jazz form of beginning with a melody, followed by improvisations from each instrument, and ending with a restatement of the melody, establishing a new template for jazz and bringing it to fresh audiences at a time when its future looked iffy. The Way Up, says Metheny, came at a critical juncture for both the group and the culture at large. “This time there was a certain urgency. We really changed our band around drastically as of the last record. We got a new drummer, and we needed a record and a tour to bring the new guys into the fold and bring them to the point where they can speak with comfort and fluency in this really odd dialect that we trade in.” Metheny explains that after more than two decades, it was time to bring the group’s experiments to their logical conclusion. “Much of the group’s platform from the beginning was to look at ways in which we could expand the general idea of what a quartet could be, because at the core of it in fact is this guitar, piano, bass and drums sound. We’ve always been interested in using form in an expanded way...and it really felt like this was the time to finally follow through on what we’d been hinting at on a couple of records, which was in fact to use an entire CD as a platform for one single statement.” Symphony is the form that comes perhaps closest to describing what Metheny and Mays were aiming at, but listeners will still recognize the hallmarks of the Pat Metheny Group sound: Metheny’s fleet, uplifting guitar work and Mays’ impressionistic piano and synth playing are at the heart of The Way Up. Their almost telepathic interplay is enriched by new textures provided by the recent additions of Vietnam-born trumpeter/vocalist Cuong Fu, Swiss/American harmonica virtuoso Gregoire Maret, and Mexican drummer Antonio Sanchez. But Metheny says the extended form the album took was also intended as a political statement to the culture at large. “This record in a lot of ways is a protest record. Lyle and I both feel completely out of step with the direction that the larger culture is moving in: a culture that’s about reducing things, placing less demands on listeners, and making things shorter. It went from a five-minute tune to a three-minute tune, to now you just have to have a ring tone. We reject that. That’s not an effective way of getting to a deeper point of understanding and the good things that we have found through our research in music that lead us to conclusions that are in fact enlightened or enhanced views of wisdom. “They don’t come through reduction, they come through nuance and detail and expansion and development. And there’s several hundred years of musical wisdom and truth that also support that. The general tendency of the culture to go for the most common denominator is something that with this record we’re fighting against.” While the polemical aspect of The Way Up will probably be lost on most listeners, this is not the first time Metheny has dipped his toes into the treacherous waters of jazz politics. A few years ago, he excoriated smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G for overdubbing himself onto old Louis Armstrong recordings, igniting an instant controversy in the jazz world. “I kind of zipped something off, never expecting it would turn into this international thing that it has,” recalls Metheny. “I was shocked that anyone would give a shit what I think that much, but on the other hand everything I wrote I completely stand by. To me it was incredible that there wasn’t more of a reaction to someone overdubbing themselves on a dead guy’s record and saying it’s theirs. Have we really gotten to a point where that’s cool? And the answer is, yes.” Metheny opposes the current neo-orthodox movement in jazz, embodied by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his amply funded Jazz at Lincoln Center program, with as much passion as he did Kenny G’s necrophiliac use of jazz great Louis Armstrong. “The tendency of jazz to become an academic music is one I resist with the same fervor I reserve for guys overdubbing themselves on a dead guy’s record. To me, they are both directions that will lead nowhere. Within the world of jazz there is a strong fundamentalist, neoconservative movement. In fact it parallels in amazing ways the political issues that involve fundamentalism and religious issues. “To me, the academic part is one that presupposes that it’s OK to go to this idealized, mythological version of what a form of music is. ‘Let’s put it in that box. That’s what it is, it’s done. If it doesn’t have the right key, it’s wrong.’ This would make jazz like baroque music or some kind of clearly defined form. To me it needs to remain malleable, so that each new generation can reinvent it using the found materials that are true to them, and can keep replenishing the supply.” Tokyo International Forum, April 21-22. See concert listings for details.

Congratulations from Tokyo to you and your family

Interesting use of words Mike.

Chandra, don't worry, there are plenty of people here who like Norah. Anyway, welcome.

And what a great win for Serena. Another epic.

Anyone here familiar with the Japan based pianist Tom Pierson? He does a very nice solo version of "Invitation" on the disc 'Live II'.

Thanks again Nate. Out of curiosity I just checked eBay and the CD set sold a couple of days ago for $500! Wow. I assume this is an aberration but it makes $140 seem like a bargain.

Nate, thank you. I saw the CD version of the Larry Young Mosaic in a used store the other day and was thinking of asking for opinions here so your analysis is very timely and much appreciated. The price was around $140 which I know is cheap by eBay standards but still seems kind of pricey if all the best material is available elsewhere. Anyone else have any thoughts on whether this set is worth acquiring?