randissimo

Great pics Barak.. Thank you for posting them..

I fell into bed around 8 pm and slept until 4:30 am, had a nice big glass of wine and went online until 6:30, then crashed again until noon.. WOW .... WHAT A TRIP !!! I'm going to spend at least the next week digesting the whole thing.. Looking forward to the photos taken....

young and raw, partly self-digested in its own pancreatic slime. yum! Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and traditionally in the south of the Netherlands this means: stop partaying (carnival) and sober up. Nothing better than raw herring for that job! in spite of all the goriness, this "haring" tastes really good. Those Dutch girls look pretty tasty!

Definitely. The last gig we did was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I was very inspired by the surrounds. Joe spent most of his time in a Japanese Tea Ceremony..

Have a great birthday bro..

I had a ball playin' that gig.. By the way, the "Heart Of The Forest" CD is available on the Muse label...

Shirley was not only a nice person but truly a great musician, organ player, and organ tech. She really knew the instrument inside and out... When I did the "Heart Of The Forrest" gig with Shirley Scott and Jimmy Forrest in 1978 she really blew our minds! We all got together in the afternoon at the nightclub to load in and rehearse our show. The B3 and leslie that was furnished had serious issues, and was badly in need of a tune up. There were broken wires and the organ hadn't been oiled in quite some time.. Shirley spent hours in that organ with a light and a soldering gun, oiling the organ, adjusting the leslie, and adjusting the pedals so it was playable, so we took a long break and had only time for a short rehearsal before the doors opened.. When we started playing that organ sounded sweet .. It was a great night of music and was originally released on the Palo Alto label and has since been re-issued on CD.

How about this trio??

New York Jazz Clubs This is by noted trumpeter Marvin Stamm. It is an important and sobering article we should all pay attention to, reflecting on the state of the jazz club scene today. --------------------------- New York Jazz Clubs by Marvin Stamm When on tour, I am often asked about the Jazz scene in New York City and the clubs that feature this music. Most of my work these past 15 years is out of town “on the road,” but when at home I most often do concerts with my quartet, in duo with Bill Mays, or with the Westchester Jazz Orchestra. So though I perform quite a bit in the New York area, I don’t play often in New York City. To a great extent, most of what I know about what’s going on in the clubs today comes from what I hear from many of the musicians I talk with, and much of this really disturbs me. A few places, mostly the smaller clubs, put a lot of effort into presenting and preserving this music. They do a wonderful job, and for this they are to be extolled. Among these are the aforementioned Kitano, Smoke, The 55 Bar, and a few other small clubs. The larger clubs seem to present whatever bigger-name Jazz artists bring in the most money, and groups that don’t produce right away are not asked back. Whatever can be said about the business, most club owners aren’t necessarily people who are in it because they love the music, as did Max Gordon, the gentleman who opened and ran the Village Vanguard for many years. Max, who passed away a number of years ago, dearly loved the music and the musicians. He was at the club every night – a true fixture on the New York Jazz scene. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore! The business today isn’t about the music, but rather about how to make money from it. Being the entertainment center that New York is, tourists from around the world come here to enjoy the Arts. All kinds of music compete for their dollars, and the Jazz clubs want their share of the spoils. I don’t take issue with this fact – we all have to survive – but I do take issue with some of the practices they employ to satisfy their wants at the expense of the musicians. As most musicians will tell you – “the biz just sucks!” The one thing that bothers me as much as anything is that many clubs no longer allow a group – one that might not be very well known in New York – the time or the opportunity to develop an audience in their venues. The “old way” of doing things was for club owners to work with artists and groups to develop a following in their clubs. Over a period of time this business practice paid off quite well. It might have taken an artist or group a few times around in a club to gather a large audience, but as the people came to know and enjoy those musicians, they looked forward to returning again and again to hear them. This practice gave a group or artist longevity in a particular club and provided audiences with a lasting opportunity to become familiar with the music these groups were presenting. While working this way took an investment of time, money - and faith - it many times resulted in a significant payoff for the clubs’ owners. It also gave the artists a bit of a “home base” in New York where they could get high-profile exposure and excellent PR. It was a “win/win” situation for all concerned even though, in a number of instances, it was a gamble for the club owner. But that IS what business is all about, isn’t it? Today you find a radically different picture. Many club owners refuse to take any chances with musicians and their groups, and are rarely willing to expend an effort to develop any kind of working relationship with them. The artist is expected to assume total responsibility; rarely do you find a club willing to share any of the risk. This is a very sad situation, particularly for some of the newer groups or lesser-known artists, because it places many clubs more or less off limits except for an off-night or those times when or if the musician shows a willingness to “pay to play,” a practice with which I strongly disagree. The “pay to play” syndrome is something I don’t remember occurring when I came to New York in 1966. It now seems to have been going on for a good while and exemplifies what I have been writing about. If an artist or group is new or unknown, some clubs - even the larger clubs - will ask that the artist or group’s record company guarantee that the club will break even. If there is no record company to back the artist, then he will probably have to guarantee this himself. An example of this is something I was told recently by someone close to me about a young saxophonist approaching the booker or owner of a club about bringing his quintet into the club on an off-night. The club agreed to pay the quintet five hundred dollars, but the musician had to guarantee the club attendance by thirty people for their performance – at twenty-five dollars a head, or a total of seven hundred and fifty dollars. If the artist didn’t draw those initial thirty people, the difference had to come out of his pocket. So, in essence, the leader of the quintet had to “pay to play.” Sad! Disgusting! Certain clubs will have the artists “play for the door,” meaning that the club makes no real investment. The groups play for the admission alone; all proceeds from sales of food and alcohol are kept by the club. But then, some owners even want a percentage of the door in addition to the food and drink receipts. In the end, the investment in the evening is all at the expense of the musicians. Now here’s a fair proposal: I will work for the door and give a percentage of that money to the club owner IF the club owner will share that same percentage of the money brought in by food and drink. Now THAT would be a good deal! This way, both management and the musicians win. But as I have already said, I don’t frequent many of the clubs. Since I am on the road a great deal, I tend to spend my spare time around home. That is, I don’t go clubbing as I did when I lived in Manhattan. The club business, like the Jazz recording business, has become all about the money, just like most other things in our country. I find this situation particularly troubling because, to some extent, this is supposed to be about the music. For the musicians, the whole point of performing IS the music. In the earlier times of the Village Vanguard and the Half Note, this is what it was all about. I knew Max Gordon from my six-and-a-half years playing at the Village Vanguard with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. I also knew the Cantareno family that owned the old Half Note down at Spring St. and Hudson Ave. from playing there with the Duke Pearson Big Band and sitting in with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, and others. These club owners loved the music; it was as much part of their lives as it was the musicians’ lives. That is what “Art” is all about! Those were wonderful times - a great deal of camaraderie and a real feeling of community. I loved it and loved being part of it. This joy of sharing the musical experience doesn’t seem to exist today. Or if it does, it is the exception rather than the norm. With rare exception, the New York situation is really not much different than in any other United States city. The shame of it all is that most of the people who own or manage these places come from a different place and time in the music business than Max Gordon and the Cantarenos. Nevertheless, and sadly, one must understand that today is today, yesterday is gone. As they say, it’s a different world – and because of this, the club scene today rarely holds any attraction for me.

Give David Mathews my best regards.. We used to play together in the late 80's ..

I think we should learn "Freedom Jazz Dance", one of my all time faves.. I heard his rendering of it driving home last night from Detroit..

Any good? Tony, what is that on your avatar? Kind of looks like a bicycle frame ..

Well we're going to be in Amsterdam for 12 or 13 hours on our way to Tel-Aviv. Seriously, we would love to play in Europe. We have a friend from Glasgow who would be the perfect roadie especially for the UK gigs..

There might even be some more video clips.. Stay tuned....

Likewise, I was wondering why Randy was getting frisky after the Ravi Shankar concert.

Don't forget Zoey..

Give Dr. John & Co my "Best Regards"..

Got this message from Pat Metheny in my myspace inbox.. It's the NYT's story.. Michael Brecker Dies at 57; Prolific Jazz Saxophonist By BEN RATLIFF, New York Times Michael Brecker, a saxophonist who won 11 Grammy Awards and was among the most influential musicians in jazz since the 1960s, died yesterday at a hospital in New York City. He was 57 and lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The cause of death was leukemia, said Darryl Pitt, his manager. Having taken a deep understanding of John Coltrane's saxophone vocabulary and applied it to music that merged with mainstream culture — particularly jazz fusion and singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and 80s — Mr. Brecker spread his sound all over the world. For a time, Mr. Brecker seemed nearly ubiquitous. His discography — it contains more than 900 albums — started in 1969, playing on the record "Score," with a band led by his brother, the trumpeter Randy Brecker. It continued in 1970 with an album by Dreams, the jazz-rock band he led with his brother and the drummer Billy Cobham. His long list of sideman work from then on wended through hundreds more records, including those by Frank Zappa, Aerosmith, James Brown, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Funkadelic, Steely Dan, John Lennon, Elton John, and James Taylor, as well as (on the jazz side) Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Papo Vasquez. His 11 Grammys included two for "Wide Angles," his ambitious last album, released in 2003 with a fifteen-piece band he called the Quindectet. His highest achievements were his own albums, both under his own name (starting in 1986) and with the Brecker Brothers band, as well as his early 80s work with the group Steps Ahead. Mr. Brecker was scheduled to tour with a reunited version of Steps Ahead in the summer of 2005 when his condition was publicly announced — initially as myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder, which finally progressed to leukemia — and much of his work had to stop. Mr. Brecker grew up in a musical family in Philadelphia; his father was a lawyer who played jazz piano. He started playing the clarinet at the age 6, switched to alto saxophone in the eighth grade, and finally settled on tenor saxophone in the tenth. He started to attend Indiana University — as did his brother Randy. After initially pursuing a music degree and then briefly switching to pre-med, he quickly discovered he preferred to be playing music. He left for New York at 19. For most of the 1970s and through the mid-80s he worked hard in studio sessions, becoming a fixture on albums by the Southern California pop singer-songwriter movement, including those by Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. But for hard-core jazz enthusiasts, it was his work of the early 80s — on Steps Ahead's first two albums, when the band was simply called Steps — as well as Chick Corea's "Three Quartets," from 1981, and Pat Metheny's "80/81," from 1980, that cemented his reputation as a great player. His tone was strong and focused, and some of his recognizable language echoed Coltrane's sound. But having worked in pop, where a solo must be strong and to the point, Mr. Brecker was above all a condenser of exciting devices into short spaces. He could fold the full pitch range of the horn into a short solo, from altissimo to the lowest notes, and connect rarefied ideas to the rich, soulful phrasing of saxophonists like Junior Walker. In the 1980s and 1990s he experimented with the electronic wind instrument called the EWI, which allowed him to blow through an electronic hornlike device, play a range of sampled sounds, and multitrack them in real time. He began experimenting with the instrument again in the last few years. With the onset of his illness, he and his family called for bone-marrow donors at international jazz festivals, synagogues, and Jewish community centers around America; tens of thousands responded. Working sporadically over the last year, he managed to complete his final album two weeks ago, Mr. Pitt said. He is survived by his wife, Susan, of Hastings-on-Hudson; his children, Jessica and Sam, of Hastings-on-Hudson; his brother, Randy, of Manhattan; and his sister, Emily Brecker Greenberg, of Philadelphia.

The 2nd group of five is an alternate pick for the island..

HC, Theze would be my picks... Jimmy Smith Frank Zappa Miles Davis Herbie Hancock Jack DeJohnette Charles Tolliver Keith Jarrett Oregon Elvin Jones Capt. Beefheart

Had a nice ride on Thursday!

How about "Marshfellow"

I bought one of his sides and have to agree... I was underwhelmed and never gave it another listen..