AllenLowe

just listening - the Minneapolis recordings are an improvement over the Columbia issues, though a little un-naturally quiet; still, ok - HOWEVER - on the Goodman cuts, whoever did the sound work has de-hissed to the point of that disgusting gurgling/underwater sound in places - so some of these cuts are virtually unlistenable. I'm sorry I bought this thing. Sunnenblick, who has used great engineers in the past, has found someone here who has gone overboard on the de-hiss.

surprise

somebody I know found him in Philly -

well, as I said elsewhere, Driggs' notes to the Christian CD are incoherent and historically suspect.

re: Schultz - his name is mentioned a lot, I think by Bob Wills, but by others as well. We have third-party testimony but no recordings, so it's hard to gauge, though I think we can assume he was very important. Another interesting guy is Mose Rager, a white guitarist in the whole lineage of Blind Blake/Merle Travis/Ike Everly line and also a major influence; Larry Cohn has unreleased recordings of his, though I think something is on youtube - it's very hard in this whole thing to say who influenced whom, but that whole guitar/banjo picking tradition is extensive and complicated. We usually assume that black musicians were the source, but given the isolation of some of those areas, there were probably a lot of regional players who had their own thing, black and white.

neither true nor false - Eddie Lang is a closer link to jazz; Lonnie was an incredible guitarist, but not really a jazz player - his real importance is to the modern blues, IMHO. He did perform with important jazz people, but jazz critics, since they don't know enough other forms, often oversimplify. He comes out of an old-time black string band tradition more than jazz.

just picked this up, have not even listened, but I have to say that the notes by Frank Driggs are just terrible - inaccurate (he complains that almost no one has written about Lonnie Johnson; where has he been?) incoherent and grammatically a mess; badly organized, little continuity, and nothing about the original sources of the music - I hope the actual recording is better (I'm sure it will be); this is just disappointing because Uptown's notes are usually quite good. oh well

I'd go get Bird's axe and whup that guy.

well, once you've heard Wanda Landowski boogie her woogie, you'll never be the same -

damn, missed it; what was it called?

Fess Manetta (perhaps only Jeff and Kenny will understand) - if that doesn't work, a karate kick to the nuts, a flying Matrix leap, two Bruce Lee waves, and one AK47 (thank god this country lets me buy one of those).

well, in that case, I'll live forever, here in Maine,.

I wonder if Barton is reading this in the joint.

les baxter was a real musician and did a lot of great stuff; he was way superior to most of the rest of the Exotica school.

thinking about it, I really do think that Sun Ra belongs in that Pantheon - here's what I wrote in my unpublished book on 50's Jazz: "The pianist Herman Blount, self-named Sun Ra, a man of vague spiritual but clearly defined musical goals, led a band in Chicago in the middle 1950s that, all by itself, and in a strangely isolated yet universal manner, pointed, with breezy confidence, the way to the future of jazz. The album Supersonic, which they made in 1956, should have heralded a new day for the music and provoked a meaningful critical dialog, though it’s not surprising that it did not. Aside from the fact that it was poorly distributed, it would have required a seer to recognize how prophetic a work it was, how accurately it (and Sun Ra, who composed everything the band played), with uncanny and ingenious foresight, mapped out all that would befall jazz in the next ten years. There was the exotic modalism of India, a piece with a single chord backed with hand percussion and desert-sand mallets, stretching itself out and revealing, with meditative patience, its from-the-crypt secrets; the freebop of Super Blonde, with its dissonant and dynamically compressed chorus, and theme full of unlikely melodic leaps; the leader’s piano solo piece Advice to Medics, played on an electric piano, not to mention his solos throughout the album, packed as they were with clashing tones, characterized by a deliberate and highly unusual (for its time) discontinuity, and modified by more recognizable (if still dissonant) triadically based progressions, all delivered like the work of a slightly dysfunctional space age cocktail pianist; the deliberately outward-bound solos of the trumpeter Art Hoyle, who was toying with non-tonality and with breaking the trumpet’s own sound barriers, all the while suggesting more conventional bebop motifs; the claustrophobic chromatic harmonies of El Is A Sound of Joy, broken up by sudden whole tones and voiced, prophetically, like a post-modernist homage a Ellington; and the ironic (but not tongue-in-cheek) romanticism of Springtime in Chicago, less a send up of the while idea of the emotion-soaked ballad than a happy celebration of it’s cheaper and cheesier aspects."

are you sure? I have a fair amount of Charley/Chess reissues which sound suspiciously like masters, though done in the days before CEDAR.

I love Bix. You should too.

I'm with Jeff on this; and by the way, though I think he oversells his points, I would recommend Graham Locke's book Blutopia with it's intererting study of Su Ra.

interesting; the guy who turned me on to this group was Larry Gushee, who made the dubs I used on Devilin Tune (the sound is pretty bad on these and, as I mentioned, they hadn't been reissued yet). In many ways I like them better than the ODJB.

yeah, I;m hoping they send me the check before they read the liners - I've been turned down for so many things by the Arts Commission here I almost didn't apply this year (this was maybe the 5th time I tried for this particular award).

thanks, guys - the only depressing thing is that it's all probably gonna go for my daughter's college tuition -

just found out to my utter shock that I won the Maine Arts Commission Individual Artists Fellowship. One of you guys wasn't punking me, were you?

just on face book, and this appears in the right hand corner: Dancing Bill Barton and 12 other friends like this.

the Original New Orleans Jazz Band is early and significant - they have some mention in Devilin Tune, which has some cuts (rough sound; at the time I had trouble finding decent sources). There's also a John R T Davies CD out there with much better sonics (not sure if it's the CD Joe mentions).

I'm in favor of the whole forgiveness thing - I think ultimately it helps both internally and externally - it doesn't mean you don't seek justice or punishment or that you associate with the person who is the object of the forgiveness - I think it means you don't let it consume you to the point of warping your whole world view.