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AllenLowe
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Posts posted by AllenLowe
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they will bury me face down with as many LP's as will fit inserted into my butt crack, vertically, facing into the sky.This is
a re-creation of an old collector's ritual (or maybe it has to do with virgin sacrifice. I don't really remember).
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On 9/17/2020 at 3:02 AM, Big Beat Steve said:
At any rate, Cannonball Adderley is off the usual tracks of what Cary Ginell would have been expected to cover. It certainly is a surprise to see his name there (to me, anyway). His work for the "Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing" book was exceedingly detailed, and as the author of The Decca Hillbilly Discography 1934-1945 and co-author of the Discography of Western Swing and Hot String Bands, 1928-1942, he left no stone unturned either. Not to mention his numerous liner notes for LP and CD reissues of Western Swing.
Not that I would want to pin him down in the Western Swing corner only, but Cannonball Adderley is sort of "far" removed from that field, right? So maybe this explains that?
P.S. Forgot that he also brought the words and recollections of Terry Gibbs for his autobiography into book form (but I guess Terry Gibbs was an easy assignment to handle, judging by the contents of that hilarious and light-hearted work), and judging by his personal bio on the Origin Jazz label website Ginell has been an all-out hillbilly and roots music man for a long time and has only relatively recently moved away into modern jazz fields. Makes you wonder ...
my problem with Ginnell is that, in his Milton Brown book, there is not a single, and I mean not a single, mention of black musicians or black musical influences related to the genre in general or Milton Brown in particular. I found this lapse just incomprehensible.
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I saw him for the first and last time playing trumpet in Chicago at the Jazz Showcase; early 1980s? It was more than great, it was astounding.
He was one of the free-est improvising beboppers I have ever seen. I was just floored.
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not a good thing, but having been to Denmark I can tell you that the good thing about all of this is that the overall jazz scene there will come back,
if on a less famous level, because there is heavy government subsidy of even private businesses who run jazz concerts and events.
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On 9/20/2020 at 2:52 PM, sgcim said:
He had cancer on and off for the last approximately ten years or so. Maybe it was on at that time.
yeah, he was pretty spry that day, playing, and talking to everyone except me. It's ok. I was mildly offended but that's life.
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On 9/18/2020 at 3:00 PM, Dan Gould said:
Did you mention you've made more than a few records?
Of course he could have known exactly who you are, and has regretted ever teaching you anything.
that was the weird thing; I told him I had been very active in the music, and he clearly was uninterested. It was....odd. But that's life, as I've learned.
I actually had something coming up at the time at Lincoln Center, a teaching thing I would have used him on, but forget it. I felt too deflated.
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it was basically: "Hi, I was your student 50 years ago." He was perfectly cordial, but just kind of indifferent.
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3 hours ago, Guy Berger said:
Condolences to Crouch's loved ones.
I liked Iverson's obituary.
I guess the first thing I'd say re "speaking ill of the dead" is that Crouch was a provocateur and liked causing controversy... if there's an afterlife, he's probably a little disappointed everybody is being so nice to him right now.
When I first started listening to jazz in the late 90s, I was listening to fusion made by mostly white guys - and so the Murray/Crouch/Marsalis ideology was really frustrating to me. I know that frustration existed in other corners of the jazz world - the avant-garde, European jazz, MBase, corners of US straightahead that the ideology downplayed in favor of Marsalis.
My antipathy softened a lot over time. Maybe Crouch and Marsalis became less antagonistic over time, maybe they just became less relevant. I dunno. I also found I enjoyed some of Stanley's writing. Once you got past the confrontational style you found he could be pretty nuanced.
The last thing I'll say is Stanley's bullshitting sometimes got the best of him. I'm thinking of this interview:
this happened because Crouch knew next to nothing about music, technically speaking, but tried to bluff his way through. As for that account of what Lyons, etc supossedly said, I think Crouch was was flat out lying.
and this sure as hell doesn't sound like Cecil:
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19 hours ago, sgcim said:
Wow! Did you grow up on Lawnguyland? Leo taught HS there somewhere. I was thinking about him the other day. We had a session once, and Leo said he was glad I didn't comp 4/4 rhythm like Freddie Green. I told him I only comp like that on a big band when we're doing Basie-type charts. We were playing small group bop stuff.
So then he told me about a small group gig he led in a big hotel in NYC, and the guitarist would comp 4/4 rhythm on every tune. Leo started yelling at the guy for playing that way, but the guy wouldn't stop. Leo let him have it again, and the guy packed up and walked off the gig!
I asked Leo who it was, but he said he was a very heavy, well known guitarist, and he couldn't tell me, because the guy was still around. Now I'll never know.
I had him as a band teacher in 8th grade out in Massapequa, and used him for lessons for a year or two when I was in high school. I was always proud because he told my mother I was the best student he ever had (probably the only one who could play chord changes). Last year, maybe in June, I found out he was playing at a restaurant on the North Shore so my wife and I went out, and it was an odd experience. He didn't remember me, which was fine and understandable, but he was also oddly stand-offish. But he was still playing very well.
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for those of you who have been thinking about the new collection, Turn Me Loose White Man, 30 cds and the book. I am now selling the CD side of it in 10 CD sets; it costs a bit more, unit-price wise, but you can now stretch it out a bit if you want to overpay. I will divide it into 3 sets:
Volume 1 CD 1-10
Volume 2 CD 11-20
Volume 3 CD 21-30
Each volume is $65 shipped media in the USA. If you buy any of these individual sets I will sell you the book or E book at a discounted price (email or message me for details) -
(for Euro shipping check with me first, as I will have to price it out)
thanks -
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On 1/27/2020 at 1:46 AM, sgcim said:
Alto sax player, Leo Ursini passed a few days ago at the age of 82, after a long battle with cancer. He played and recorded with the Louis Armstrong Society Jazz Band, the Birdland Big Band, and The Lew Anderson Big Band. He taught Jazz saxophone at Columbia University. He was well known for performing with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and appeared in the motion picture "When Harry Met Sally', plus any Woody Allen movies featuring a jazz big band or small group,and countless Broadway shows. In short, he was the prototypical, successful NY sax player.
I played many gigs with him in various bands, and he completely floored me once by an astoundingly perfect, 'night in tunisia'-like ' break on my big band arr. of "Motherless Child", the first time he ever saw it! Many other alto players underwhelmed me with their attempts at playing this break at a blistering tempo....
just spotted this. Mr. Ursini was my first and last saxophone teacher, during a few of my high school years. Great man, incredible saxophonist (and clarinetist, too) -
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feeling so desperately helpless these days; there's still some ways to just do stuff without all the crap.
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On 9/11/2020 at 7:00 PM, Larry Kart said:
I have nothing against note smearing/note bending per se, but the way Akinmusire does this makes me feel like I'm drowning in a vat of chicken fat.
I've only listened to a little of this guy; is there a particular cut or album where you think he does this in particular?
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so I just started to listen to On the Tender Spot. This guy is great. And I'm old, but I think he is terrific, terrific ideas, terrific sound.
I think you guys are just jealous because he's more popular than you are.
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I never heard of the guy.
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the only thing I will add to this discussion is that there are hundreds of African and Africana studies departments in the United States.
Why have they not addressed this problem?
(rhetorical question that I will answer anyway: because they are as full of crap as the rest of academia)
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paypal is not only completely safe, but much better than any other entity I have ever dealt with when it comes to returns and seller misrepresentation. And yes, they have my bank account info, all of my medical records, and a few snapshots of my wife.
I mention all of this because of some of the suggestions here that it is risky to give them access.
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not to rove too far from the subject, but those older horns just breathe like newer ones don't - weirdly enough it's like the difference between tubes and solid state.
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that's quite a nice solo on You Don't Know What Love Is. As for saxophones of choice, well, it's the reason so many contemporary players have that buzzy, kazoo-like sound. But they've been seduced by how much easier modern horns play. But it's a real loss for the soul of the music.
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I wouldn't know where to start, so I think I won't.
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2 hours ago, JSngry said:
I think I hear what you're trying to say, but is there maybe a different way to put it? Just saying, the people who forget those who stood by them when things are really at the lowest, those are what we tend to think of as "real assholes", correct?
Or is this one of those "artist" things Larry's talking about?
Seriously, when it's all over, if you can own your decisions and their outcomes, hey, you win. That shit is personal and not for anybody else.
well...if it were that straightforward. Sometimes I see it as replacing one self-destructive dependency with another. And I have seen it more than once, though I should not mention any more names....
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4 hours ago, Larry Kart said:
IIRCAllen Lowe had some inside-the-beltway views on Doll's (in his view, negative) role in shaping the final not-so-great phase of Jackie's great career.
yeah, Dolly was so proprietary about Jackie's career and so over-demanding in terms of fees that he gigged relatively little in his last years. When I ran the New Haven fest and tried to book him she was impossible to deal with, and I offered some real money. I always noted that at his death there was relatively little acclaim, relative to his musical stature, because he just wasn't out and about that much. She thought she was being slick, but I remember a well-known jazz agent at the time telling me he had removed Jackie from his roster because Dolly was so impossible to deal with. Jackie was a very nice guy, but he deferred to her in everything, in that way that recovered junkies and alcoholics tend to give absolute loyalty to those who stuck with them when things were really at their lowest.
As for Jackie's playing in those last years, his sound became that buzzy, Yamaha-thing (that's the way those horns sound and I hate them). I called it dissident indifference above because his playing had, to my ears, a kind of angry (at the business) indifference to what he seemed to think was musical and sonic focus. It lost its connection to the earth, in a way which I find hard to explain. It's just all spread out, brilliant technically but cold and distant. But, clearly, other people hear it differently. To me he peaked in his '60s playing.
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those Steeplechases are my favorite Jackie; he seems to have reached a peak, influenced by the "new freedom" but not trying to play in any way other than his accustomed style. As for his intonation, it is beautifully expressive in its early sharpness; his later work has a kind of dissident indifference which completely turns me off (though it still has more than traces of the old brilliance). (and I defer to Larry Kart, who has very smartly, in this forum I believe, explained why McLean's later work leaves him cold). It probably has nothing to do with Jackie, btw, but anyone who plays older, non-Selmer saxophones understands how hard they are to play in tune, especially in the more-noticeable upper register. But that's another story.
Monk Palo Alto review
in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...
Posted
I wonder if Colomby ever got his commission. It is possible that Monk paid him.