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j lee

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  1. 48 oz. Steel Reserve 211. 2.5(750ml) of Franzia Crisp White. Soon to be augmented. What are you so interested in what I drink? Are you a cop? No. I work a straight job tomorrow so consider all the Franzia drunk before tomorrow and the work clothes come on.
  2. Yeah, about the blog — I don't know the author nor his playing, but IMHO it's a little confused. It's a good manifesto, and the author can shuck words as good as anybody, but I do agree that the term//concept is pretty loose. Like, "Parisian Thoroughfare" — sure, just Rhythm in F with a weird bridge. A few Bud tunes did the same thing on Rhythm, but I'm not remembering. Or "Eternal Triangle," a little more straightforward, but same idea. I have no problem with the word "contrafact" (even if I can never remember how to spell it), but I agree with the above that it's just a "thing." It doesn't really need a name, but since one is handy, might as well use it. As an aside, I find it amusing that while everybody knows "Donna Lee" and "Perdido," it seems that it's really the organ players who go back to the originals, "Indiana" and "Candy," respectively. Don't know why that is, but just tradition, I guess. ETA and yeah, I don't see the difference between calling it "scrapple" or "gumbo" or whatever — I just don't like adding more technical terms for something everybody already knows. I'll stick with the "dry, academic" term, mostly because it's already there and everybody knows it.
  3. j lee

    Grant Green redux

    Thanks for the tip. If I have a few idle moments that could be a nice little way of organizing the music if I were to rip the CDs to mp3.
  4. j lee

    Grant Green redux

    Well, I can't speak for the above-referred poster, but I think it's clear his raw technique (well, at least in terms of speed) was up to anybody's. Certainly he could play fast bebop lines (see the whole Sonny Clark sides for quite a few examples), but it seems he just didn't want to a lot of the time. Yeah, I do have to agree that when it comes to creating a concise, memorable solo, a good many of Wes's classic solos probably stand out, for me, more (or equal) to anybody else. For me, the surprise of "rediscovering" Grant Green is just how much he was able to create with a pretty simplified toolbox. No, he's not doing things like Jim Hall on *Intermodulation*, or Wes on a number of records, but he really did make a lot from some pretty simple ideas.
  5. Why? I like the tune "Idle Moments," so bad-a-bing, I make up a new tune based on that. Or, I want to do rhythm changes in five over four and call it "Five." I think it's a good topic.
  6. j lee

    Grant Green redux

    I do agree. It really shocked me that so early (well, maybe "late" compared to some prodigies like Ray Charles or somebody), GG just really had it all together. No, I don't find much difference at all in his lines and his tone, as his years went on. But, then again, I'm not really a scholar of GG's music, and I also don't know too much about guitar gear except what I hear and friend/past-bandmates-type thing have passed down by ear. Yeah, I did the same thing when working through the US-release of the Sonny Clark collaborations — broke it down into the albums as they were originally programmed. I'll have to listen to "Moon River" again; the one I spent most time transcribing was "The Things I (We?) Did Last Summer." The only other person I know who did that tune was Groove Holmes, but it's such an unusual tune. ETA actually, that could be a fun idea, to sort a bunch of these sides by performance date. I don't think all the information is there about what exact time everything was recorded on a day, but for a budding young computer programmer, that could be a fun project for doing basic data structures. As an aside, I'm impressed by how well, after, say, twenty years, my old redbook CDs have held up: how many disk drives have I gone through since then? A lot, that's how many! These old discs still play. Vinyl too, but I'm more impressed because of the plastic, digital nature of the CD.
  7. Yeah. I'm not a master musician like Jim, but I think most people are like me and have a whole book of contrafacts (sp?) they just made up to have something to play. I think if you look at most classic jazz musicians, you're going to find that most of their original tunes are in some way based on some other well-known pattern everybody knows. I guess you could call something like "Countdown" a contrafact, but that's the extreme. Even just any given eight-bar blues is sort of a copy of another one. Trouble in Mind? Sure, sort of like Key to the Highway. Same thing, really. IMHO.
  8. Yeah, like everybody, I've heard all his albums a million times. But I'm still keeping in the CD-changer in the car "Feelin The Spirit" and "Grant's First Stand." It's hard to imagine that in the latter album, with Baby Face Willette using that vibrato choice, at the age of...I guess thirty or so, Grant Green was already about fully formed. I'm still trying to get my head around just how many melodies he came up with that seems to me off the regular diminished scale (W-H, you know). I've done my time transcribing his and Sonny Clark's lines from their albums together, but it just took a few years and a new environment of hearing a couple of albums on repeat while commuting for some new aspects of GG's melodies to sink in. I couldn't say for sure what the theory is, much less anything about his tone, just a nice refresher to me of how to make a good line, and follow it up with one as good or better. In a mellow way, of course.
  9. Oh, it's a mix of learning and memorizing. I'm really into the A maj and A min English Suites of Bach, but the préludes to both (especially the A minor) are just very, very long. I'll be happy if I can just keep the Bourées from A major in memory with a nice brisk tempo. András Schiff is the only person I listen to for Bach, nowadays, but then again I don't like to just sit and listen to the music when I can stumble through it myself. Still trying to commit to memory Beethoven's Op. 26 (especially the Rondo) and Op. 27 no. 1 (whole sonata). Beyond that, I just chip away at Debussy (I like Angela Hewitt for guidance or ideas, but again, I don't really sit around and listen to records that much, except to steal some ideas).
  10. Tried in vain to find on Youtube the scene about the mix tape from Death Proof. What kind of equipment is people using now? Like Nakamichi and fancy stuff or just regular? But enough about my idiocy -- speaking of improvised music I think Mary Elizabeth Winstead was in an incredibly moving movie called Make it Happen and also the prequel/whatever The Thing and also the Scott Pilgrim thing. Seem to beon a one-track mind.
  11. I think the only thing I have that still "works: (without me cleaning heads and sh**) I have is an old Dictaphone unit. Some reason, I guess, I been keeping some of those "old" tapes. And I'm only 35 37. Fucking A, that was the currency and even then it was getting old.
  12. Inorite?! ok?? kk! Hey, Sultanov's performance of the second movement is very...moving. Good tip on that one.
  13. Thanks, homes. I think the Pollini is familiar -- if that isn't brisk and effusive, I don't know what is Sultanov is a new one for me -- I'd have gone with a different haircut, myself, but that's certainly that fiery emotive style of playing it's hard to argue with. Authoritative. What's his deal, anyway? The name sounds vaguely familiar, but first time hearing him. I always thought it was Rachmaninov who had the famously huge fingers, but getting into the more densely-textured parts, it seems Prokofiev must have had some Fats Waller in his genes as well. That's quite a stretch in RH for some of that: you expect it in LH in (to stick with the Russians/Soviets) Scriabin and everybody, but it's always kind of weird to splay too much in RH. Even when you can just let the thumb cover a few notes. Since this a jazz forum, I was checking out the "official" transcription of Booker's "Put Out the Light" sometime a few weeks ago. Not sure the transcription is exactly for sure what JB played, but that was a neat surprise to see the stuff all spelled out in ways I wouldn't have automatically gone with. Nice tune, though -- as I get older, I kind of admire some of the simpler, matter-of-fact things a bit more.
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