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gmonahan

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Posts posted by gmonahan

  1. Help w/ Bechet

    in Discography

    Posted

    I just checked disconforme's website. They have a complete Bluenote set and a complete RCA set still in print and available through them. Why RCA and Bluenote don't have them in print themselves is a travesty.

    Yes, well, I'm pretty sure the blue note set ripped off the now oop Mosaic set, and RCA has put out some Bechet in the past, but that is one place to get it.

    Lon, is that King Jazz material the stuff he did with Mezzrow? I'm at work rather than home and can't check!

    gregmo

  2. All the Things You Could be If Concord were your Mother

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    Planned/announced but never issued was a Counce set. Have all the material on lp and cd but it would be nice to recognize the body of work.

    It was a great group, but Gambit did a 2-cd set of all of Counce's Quintet masters for Contemporary, and "Exploring the Future" has been issued, though it's kind of spendy now, so I don't imagine we'll ever see it. I think that Jack Sheldon, in particular, does fine work on those quintet sides.

    gregmo

  3. Chris Connor

    in Artists

    Posted

    I have about thirty. I love her singing. And her piano playing.

    Me too. I'm particularly fond of Carmen's later stuff for Novus--the Monk album stands out. I came to Connor later as well, but she sort of grew on me to the point where I like her better than Christy. A chacun son gout.

    gregmo

  4. jazz books

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    Will have to finish it some day, but Pee Wee Erwin's autobiography "This Horn For Hire" seemed excellent until the point I was interrupted and began to read something else. Also, here is a piece I wrote about Arthur Rollini's excellent autobiography:

    [1987]

    Arthur Rollini’s name does not loom large in the history of jazz, even though he was the younger brother of a major artist (bass saxophonist and mallet percussionist Adrian Rollini) and a member of Benny Goodman’s saxophone section from the inception of Goodman’s band until 1939. But perhaps because of his cog-in-the-wheel status, Rollini has written a very moving autobiography , Thirty Years With the Big Bands --a book that captures the feel of the Swing Era from a sideman’s point of view with an attractive blend of stoicism and wit.

    Rollini’s tale also is suffused with a casual, peculiarly American grace, as though, like one of Sherwood Anderson’s narrators, the seeming innocence with which he addresses us were essential to his message. Rollini records that any early childhood memory was of “the brass and crystal Ansonia clock on our mantel, which never ceased functioning as long as it was wound every eighth day. It was always wound on time, and its little mercury pendulum kept beating back and forth and intrigued me. I would view it for hours.”

    Nothing more than nostalgia, one thinks, until, several pages and decade or so further on, Rollini’s father dies and “the only sound in the living room was the little clock on the mantel, which ticked away and gonged softly on the hour and half hour, its little pendulum still beating back and forth in perfect rhythm.”

    Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Rollini was a professional musician at age seventeen--traveling to London to work with Fred Elizade’s orchestra at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince of Wales often sat in on drums. (“He was, let us put it this way, not too good,” Rollini says.)

    Jazz fans will be most interested in Rollini’s account of his time with Benny Goodman, which confirms the widely held belief that Goodman was a difficult man to get along with. “Inconsiderate Benny, the best jazz clarinetist in the world!”--Rollini uses that tag, and variations thereof, time after time, even when a harsher adjective than “inconsiderate” might apply.

    Rollini and Dick Clark were Goodman’s initial tenor saxophonists, and “even at this stage,” Rollini says, “Benny would look at Dick’s bald head with disdain. He wanted a youthful looking band. ‘Fickle Benny,’ I thought, ‘the best jazz clarinetist in the world!’ Dick was a good player.”

    Quietly authoritative, Rollini’s tales of the sideman’s happy-sad life have a cumulative power. And two of them, when placed side by side, virtually define the big-band musician’s paradoxical role.

    In the first, Rollini is playing a dance with Goodman when he meets an old high school friend, one Johnny Baker, who requests that the band play “Always,” on the recording of which Rollini had a solo. At the dance, Rollini deliberately plays “something entirely different from what was on our recording, and after it was over Johnny Baker said to me, ‘What did you change it for?’”

    Then, in the mid-1940s, when Rollini was an NBC Radio staff musician, he stops in a Manhattan bar after work and notices that “two young men were playing the jukebox and had selected Will Bradley’s ‘Request for a Rhumba,’ which we had recorded in 1941. Finally I stepped off the bar stool and asked, “Boys, why are you playing that record over and over?” One replied, “We like the tenor sax solo.” I felt elated, but did not tell them that it was I who played it.”

    I've not heard of this one. I'll try and locate a copy!

    gregmo

  5. New Monk bio in progress by Robin Kelley

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    wanting to know about the life is basic intellectual curiosity. And to me, the life supplements the music - I find the life and the music largely inseparable, and though I believe the art can and always will stand by itself, regardless of the personal details, jazz and other forms of vernacular music have a strong relationship to those details. The picture gets clearer with the details; for me it's also vocational in a weird way. If you want to play or write about this stuff, the life of others like Monk, however it plays out, clarifies your own, even by contrast.

    knowing what Monk did, what he said, where he went, how he reacted to everything, is extremely educational, in the deepest sense, too. This stuff happens as a strange coincidence of people and events - I want to know what those were.

    Exactly. I'd add that compositions are often the direct result of specific life experiences, and I think that knowing what Monk was doing at a given moment he wrote a given piece can enrich even further one's enjoyment of that piece.

    gregmo

  6. jazz books

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

    I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

    Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

    gregmo

    Thanks for the heads up -- I just ordered "Drew Page's: Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands" from Amazon -- $5.77 including shipping!

    I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. Like I said, hardly an essential jazz classic, but interesting reading.

    gregmo

  9. jazz books

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    Funny this thread should come along. I just finished Drew Page's _Drew's Blues: A Sideman's Life with the Big Bands_. I'd had it on the shelf for years and finally decided to read it. Very episodic and anecdotal, but also very readable and interesting, and definitely a different perspective from the "star" bios one usually reads.

    I've read that some of it was pretty fictional, but I still like Bechet's autobiography, _Treat It Gentle_. Just got Gioia's _West Coast Jazz_ based on recommendations here and am looking forward to reading that.

    Mention of Simon's _Big Bands_ brought back memories. I think it was the first book of its type I ever read! There are many, many books on jazz music and artists worth reading, some of them by regular contributors to this Board.

    gregmo

  13. New Monk bio in progress by Robin Kelley

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    I may try to pick this one up. I've always been fascinated by that line in "Straight No Chaser" where Monk is said to have intimated to Nellie fairly late in his active career (I think it's Nellie--might be someone else--been a while since I've seen it) "You know, I'm very ill" or words to that effect. And no, it's not about scandal mongering or some kind of weird nosyness about his mental state. I'm just fascinated by the way genius coexists with personality--and Monk had one very individual and eccentric personality, especially in his later years.

    Does the author delve into this late period very much? Or does he mostly stay with the more creative earlier period of the 40s and 50s?

    greg mo

  14. James P. Johnson's last rent party

    in Artists

    Posted

    thanks - it's nice to read about such things actually happening -

    of course, Wynton could just write a check and pay for the whole thing, save everyone a lot of time -

    True, but then those present (I wish I had been among them) would have missed out on what sounds like a really great night of music. The headstone will be nice, but remembering James P. with some fine piano strikes me as nicer!

    greg mo

  16. Bad news from Mosaic

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    You guys are lucky, I have 10 Mosaic sets, but they have become too expensive for me to buy more, with custom, vat and shipping, but the on the other side, I don't play mine much, I really seem to forget my boxsets much.

    Vic

    Hi Vic,

    Do you keep them in the boxes? I've found I play mine a *lot* more by taking them out of the boxes and putting the jewel cases on the shelf with other cds.

    greg mo

  17. Threadgill and Air

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    There's a big "superficial" difference between Air & the Sextet...sometimes...Air could get "open-ended" in a way the Sextet seldom did. But Air often swung like mofos too...hey, Steve McCall, I mean, hey.

    Them that worry about Henry being "too" avant-garde should at least hear some of the Sextet before signing off on that position. You might still, but you might not. Depends on where your "line" is...

    I'm willing to keep my ears open, Jim. Just got the Don Cherry Blue Notes and have been listening to those. What Sextet album would you recommend?

    'You Know the Number' has some wickedly swinging blues on it, well worth a listen IMHO.

    Thanks--I'll check it out!

    greg mo

  20. Threadgill and Air

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    There's a big "superficial" difference between Air & the Sextet...sometimes...Air could get "open-ended" in a way the Sextet seldom did. But Air often swung like mofos too...hey, Steve McCall, I mean, hey.

    Them that worry about Henry being "too" avant-garde should at least hear some of the Sextet before signing off on that position. You might still, but you might not. Depends on where your "line" is...

    I'm willing to keep my ears open, Jim. Just got the Don Cherry Blue Notes and have been listening to those. What Sextet album would you recommend?

  21. Freddie Hubbard -- where to go from here?

    in Discography

    Posted

    If you're looking for straight-ahead blowing, it's hard to go wrong with just about any of Freddie's Blue Note dates. The CTIs can be a mixed bag on that score--he gets a bit fusiony on some of those, and least to these ears. That doesn't mean I don't like them, it just means they're different kinds of dates. I also like the Impulses. The Atlantics, not so much.

    greg mo

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