AllenLowe

even better, the first 100 sold will be signed by Bird himself -

no

mmmmm.....truffles.................

I wanna know when this stuff's coming out in Quadrophonic -

it's actually in housewares -

Dial Soap has just announced that they are reissuing the Charlie Parker California recordings in both original mono and remastered stereo. Apparently Ross Russell did some early experimentation, and panned the band to once side and Bird to the other, revealing many hitherto unknown personal details about the alto genius: one can hear him coughing in several places; in others he is making phone calls to his drug connection, and in still others he is arranging dates with hip white Chicks. the recordings will be housed in a box shaped like a laundry soap container, with a narrow spout shaped like a syringe. There will be separate boxes for scented and unscented.

are you sure it's not Melvin Belvin?

the one with the T Bone Walker guitar solo?

I was hoping they would release the Christmas Specials - I just can't get enough of Bing harmonizing with the wife and kids - also love the fake snow -

the one with the songs I listed was originally a Verve, and released, originally, on a VSP LP - and it's much better, IMHO, than the Atlantic (Bags Groove, Night in Tunisia, as I recall), in which he sounds off-balance - have you guys listened to it lately? It's Rollins at his absolute peak - You Are Too Beautiful is astounding, as is everything else on there -

well, considering he was one of maybe the 3 or 4 most influential male vocalists of the 20th century, it sounds like a perfectly good idea -

my favorite Rollins is the "live" set with MJQ (on Verve) where he does Limehouse Blues, You Are Too Beautiful, Doxy, etc. If you can sit through the MJQ, this is worth finding -

interesting guy, though I always thought his writing had the same weakness and pitfalls as Patti Smith's-the ideas were compelling but the language failed. It's interesting that so much of the work of that "group" suffered in the same way. Richard Hell's lyrics just fall apart when he pushes them as poetry, same for Tom Verlaine (also Patti Smith's). It's a pity because they sometimes work well with the music - which I suppose is the point, but they all remind me of Dylan's tendency to just write and write without editing. The problem becomes, I think, that when you are convinced of your own "genius" by others, you start to assume that anything you write is automically a work of genius. This is why Lou Reed has become such a shadow of himself. I was just reading the lyrics to People Who Died, and there are just some very awkward things in it -

see my previous post -

Russ was a terrific pianist, and a very nice man. I think he's under-appreciated partly because his life lacked the drama of people like Pepper and Chet Baker - though he was, it turns out, a junkie for some time. I'm using his duo version of Billie's Bounce (with Shelly Manne) in my blues collection - I got to know him a little bit before he died, I had called him up (he was living and working in Vegas) to talk to him about my book on jazz of the 1950s. He was very open and very easy to talk to; I was very saddened when he died rather suddenly.

I do my own with the home-colonoscopy kit.

pretty well, so far. At least I don't have to read my Hitler jokes anymore.

one more teaser - and I was going to post this as a new topic but I figure you guys have seen enough of new topics on my alleged blues project - but - true nerd that I am becoming, I woke up in the middle of the night last night and realized that I had inadvertently discovered the earliest recorded blues from - 1906 - yes, 1906, and it's a recording by an African American, and it not only contains the blues but it was, as the saying goes, in plain sight for over 100 years - sorry to be a tease, but that's all I am going to say until the project comes out - film at 11 - right now I have to rest, as I am bone-fried (to quote Larry Kart, sorta).

well, no actually - I consider the modern era of rock and roll to have begun around 1964-65 - I am using the term modern in the classic (sic) way, as in the modernization of the form, which began in that era.

I intend it as a listener's guide to guitar players, to cover through what I consider the beginning of the modern era of rock and roll, which I believe had a cataclysmic effect on the sound and use of the instrument - and in the way I do things, I try to avoid what is usually called "the canon," meaning, basically, the usual suspects. So it's not a guide to the under-appreciated but to the reality, which is that music history is always much more complicated than popular histories indicate.

thanks for the continued suggestions - as for: "Given your previous projects, why devote time and energy to the most overused, over-hyped, and cliched instrument on the planet?" actually, I want to do it for that very reason - like with a lot of jazz and blues histories, guitar history tends to be written over and over in the same cliched way -

in Braille?

actually Ikey played tenor guitar as well - and maybe I'll mesh all plectrums together - or at least the ones who play solo lines.

somebody should do an oral history of Albert - because in 5-10 years that list is going to shrink, I am sorry to say.

so am I; it occurs to me that Roswell Rudd is one of the last people around who played with Ayler, and I've known Roswell for about 15 years, and it's never occurred to me to ask him about Ayler - time to fix that -