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Be A Jazz Record Producer & Have Somebody Cut...


JSngry

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This ought to be a fun, if meaningless, exercise. And since this is jazz, you can use dead guys too!

I got the idea back on The Board That Time Is In The Process Of Forgetting when I asked if Johnny Griffin had ever recorded "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You". The answer came back negative, and I'm thinking to myself, "Well dammit, he SHOULD!" So that's one to get the ball rolling.

Here's another - Hank Mobley, ca. '61-62, would have made a great take on "Come Fly With Me", I think. Those changes, especially on the bridge (ESPECIALLY on the bridge!) seem tailormade for the SOUL STATION-era Hankster. In fact, I've got the performance so etched into my brain that it pisses me off royally evey time I go to the shelves to pull it out and it's not there. Bad Blue Note, BAD!

This kinda ties into Lawrence Kart's teenaged dream he had about hearing a record that didn't exist, so feel free to come up with all sorts of configurations. But the bottom line is this - nobody's recorded everything, so what tunes and what artists are (or in the case of the dead guys, were) a match waiting to happen? Anybody comes up w/an entire album by a single artist, replete w/appropriate backing, is elligible for a grant! (but not from me...)

Ok, one more - The Dewey Redman/Keith Jarrett group doing "Jealous Guy". No doubt out of sync w/where their heads were at then, but in theory, it coulda made for a really good record, and if Dewey & Keith ever reunionize (imagine a day when Dewey tours with The Standards Trio :excited: ), it maybe still could.

That's enuff from me for now. Your turn!

Edited by JSngry
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Funnily enough, another thread (about the interpretations of 'Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise') got me thinking about which players would be ideal for such a tune.

I know we're not restricted to tenormen but I am wondering if Scott Hamilton has ever recorded this one. 'Scuse me if he has (was it any good?).

Cheers, tonym.

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Would like to hear Miles & Joe Henderson do "My Funny Valentine". Actually, would have liked to hear Miles and Joe do anything. I don't think Joe every recorded this song.

Another good one (IMO) would be Miles doing "Night and Day".

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(Before Joe "went to Vermont"), back when he was doing those 'songbook' albums for Verve (Strayhorn, Miles, Jobim, himself, Porgy & Bess), I seriously had dreams of Joe Henderson doing an all Zappa album of some sort. Didn't get so far as to pick the sideman, but I really did have dreams of hearing Joe work his magic on "King Kong", "Let's Make The Water Turn Black", "Alien Orifice" and a couple dozen other Zappa tunes.

(I would have given my right arm for a project like that to have seen the light of day.)

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Thanks Jim. I've heard it before, but I haven't bought it yet. Very cool concept, but I just haven't been in the right place at the right time with that particular CD in my hot little hands, with the extra $cratch to make it mine. One of these days, one of these days...

Actually, there are a dozen really cool "all-Zappa" CD's out there, most "classical", but a couple "jazz"-related. Most are well worth picking up. I'll have to start a new thread about Zappa 'cover' albums sometime, and tell ya'll which one's are the best (IMHO).

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Well, I had hoped for Joe Henderson to do a Kenny Dorham tribute album, maybe with Don Sickler playing Kenny's part ..... was disappointed the Verve big band CD didn't feature any Dorham tunes as they had a rehearsal band back in the 1960's.

I'd love to see organist Jeff Palmer do an all-Monk CD. With Billy Pierce on tenor.

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Funnily enough, another thread (about the interpretations of 'Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise') got me thinking about which players would be ideal for such a tune.

I know we're not restricted to tenormen but I am wondering if Scott Hamilton has ever recorded this one. 'Scuse me if he has (was it any good?).

Cheers, tonym.

When the Softly thread came up, I could have sworn that I had a version by Sonny Criss. I couldn't find it anywhere, and couldn't find any discographical information online either.

I must have fabricated this entirely in my imagination... either way Sonny Criss should have been recorded blowing through Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise.

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This is only tangentially related but if I could be a jazz record producer, I would absolutely bring Ira Sullivan and Eddie Higgins into the studio together. Amazingly, though they've been friends for nearly 50 years, I learned in my interview with Eddie that though there have been plans in the past, they've never recorded together.

On top of that lengthy time playing gigs together, Eddie described Ira as one of his favorites to play with because Sullivan "makes me play better than I think I can."

Heck, if I had the $$, I'd bring those two guys together on my own coin!

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Laugh if you want, but...

GENE AMMONS PLAYS JIMMY WEBB

ewwwwww, Jimmy Webb, flashbacks, flashbacks....I was on a lounge gig for about 6 months where the piano trio would get a couple of songs without the vocalist. Being that the pianist was a total prima donna, he would sing one of the three tunes singerless tunes per set. One of them would ALWAYS be Witchita Lineman or By the Time I Get To Phoenix. ewwwwwww....skin still crawling.....ewwwwwwwww.....eeeeeewwwwww

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Laugh if you want, but...

GENE AMMONS PLAYS JIMMY WEBB

Jug did record "Didn't We", didn't he?

I'm not laughing, not at all. A song is only as good (or as bad) as the player, and after hearing what Ammons (and Dewey Redman, for that matter...) did with "Alone Again, Naturally", I make no prejudgements, especially about Webb songs. There's some meat in those songs, decades of inane, half-baked/assed interpretations notwithstanding.

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