AllenLowe

and here's me with still another guy who's much more famous - you may recognize him - this is 1980 -

that guy's an animal - well, here's a picture of me around 1970, Senior Variety Show in High School - I'm the guy with the long hair - the guitar player is now somewhat more famous than I am -

is that Ghost of Miles? Jeez, I think I met that guy in prison - I just didn't recognize him without a shiv in one hand -

my son watches Seconds From the Disaster - I like the show, but the opening credits are, I think, a little bit exaggerated: "WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS. ONLY THE NAMES OF CERTAIN PEOPLE HAVE BEEN CHANGED. BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR ASS THAT IF YOU RIDE ON A PLANE, TAKE A TRIP IN A BOAT, DRIVE A CAR, OR GO ANYWHERE BY ANY MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION: YOU WILL DIE!

the point here is Hoffman's hypocrisy - because he often criticizes specific work that is done, bad mastering, bad companies, bad pressings - but apparently this is not to be done if he has a direct financial interest - cowardice andd hypocrisy of the worst kind - and if he had threatened to follow my work around the internet I would have filed a formal complaint with some agency; this is a kind of harrassment -

actually, without getting into it again in too much detail, the Pepper issue is like the one Jim and I discussed via Max Roach, though Jim would likely argue that Max was more successful at it than Pepper - an attempt to be "contemporary" by applying certain "contemporary" techniques to essentially bebop lines; problem is, he applied them in arbitrary ways which showed he had little comprehension of how to use the kind of scaluar/chordal extrapolations which go into a, let us say, post-Coltrane approach. They end up coming out as merely little slurs and occassional yelps and nothing more. And yet, when he just PLAYS - Pepper could still be brilliant. When I met him in Boston during his comeback tour, in the middle 1970s, he played at Paul's Mall and was absolutely great - he played right on the money, still had all the old intensity and invention. Only for brief moments did he try to show he had "new" chops as well, and it made little musical sense when he did it. But man, he was still incredible - between sets someone handed him a clarinet, and he went on-stage and played as well as any clarinetist I have ever heard. Of course, he was still a mess personally; I was working for a Boston magazine and went to his hotel to do an interview, and instead we spent the day driving all over town trying to make, shall I say, a connection - he was an extremely likeable guy but still into old bad habits, and that certainly did not help give him any focus - and I always disliked the Vanguard Recordings, though they were highly praised - they seemed a bit narcissistic, especially on the ballad playing. As for Konitz, I don't know if the book goes into it, but Dick Katz, who was his pianist for quite a while in the middle/late 1970s at a club called Gregory's (where I saw Konitz often, along with bassist Wilbur Little; great little club, and was the same place I got to know Al Haig) told me not long afterward that Konitz fired him because, at least for a while, Konitz would only work with Scientologists (Danko was one as well). And there was a period of time there where I remember hearing Konitz, post-Katz, and his playing seemed to be unfocused, to drift and wane. On other nights he was fine. I think the whole Scientology thing played into his own personal confusion and tendency toward self-obsession, and replaced the Tristano orthodoxy with yet another one. I don't know, however, if he is still a follower -

funny thing, by the way, about Konitz's comments on Moody - I never thought of Moody as a player who played like he had planned everything in advance - when I last saw him (maybe 1993) he was absolutely brilliant, hot as hell and incredibly inventive. Much as I like the whole Tristano school of players, they can get overly critical of people with different methods and goals - thinking of Tristano's whole id/ego stuff and his idea of eliminating ego in playing - and his famous quote about Sonny Rollins playing with "all emotion and no feeling" - a great line that describes many players, but not Sonny. I also would have liked to have heard Konitz's comments on Bud Powell, whom Tristano admired greatly. as I've mentione before, I spent an afternoon with Tristano, maybe around 1975/76, in an attempt to interview him (and that's a whole other and funny story); he scared me, and had a definite "aura" and incredibly dominating presence. If he'd asked me to drink the cool-aid, I might very well have done so -

something about vertical vs horizontal playing, I think -

I'm negotiating now with John Steadman at JSP about possibly doing a boxed-set of my rock and roll pre-history (to go along with my rock and roll history, which covers 1950-1970) - was wondering if anybody here had any direct experience with JSP from the business side - or any second or third-hand impressions -

who you calling an old fart? just because the first Charlie Parker record I ever bought was purchased at the A&P in Massapequa, circa 1968 - allright...first one to ask "what's the A &P?" will have to answer to Harold -

that's, I think, the ACE CD from the late 1960s, early 1970s. I found the LP last night but did not have time to compare - however it has a different title and it's on United - I promise I will report back tonight -

great stuff - explains why I am so bored with so much jazz playing -

I gotta send that guy my book -

thanks - I'll try to pull the LP tonight and compare titles -

just a point of info, there is a Kent CD of Ike and Tina live which is not the same as the LP I refer to; the CD that ACE distributes of the Kent show is recorded, I think, 1970 or 1971 (not certain); the LP I refer to is likely early to mid-1960s.

well, maybe she was buried at sea -

I'm glad you can affirm this, Chris, as I was pretty young at the time and so I worry about my memory playing tricks - it's doubly reassuring because a few years back I got a rather scathing "peer" review of my (still unpublished) rock and roll history from an anonymous reader at U of Illinois, who took me to task for not emphasizing Coltrane's influence on 1960s rock and roll (the reviewer, by the way, as I later learned, was likely Burton Peretti; as I told my wife, having him reject my book was like being turned down for a human rights award by Adolf Hitler) -

these day I'm buying little - only advice is to see if the seller has a tube tester; best ones are Hickock -

it's funny about the Coltrane and rock and roll thing - I wasn't exactly "there" but I was growing up and listening like crazy to rock and roll in the later 1960s, going to the Fillmore and Central Park to hear the Dead (first concert, 1967) seeing Zappa at Columbia U in 1968, and reading all I could, and even with Bloomfield's East/West, George Harrison, and all the rock press on psychedelia et all, Coltrane's name barely, if ever, came up - Ravi Shankar was the one talked about, long meditations on Indian scales via him and not Trane - to me a lot of the "Trane-was-the-big-influence" on rock and rollers like Bloomfield and the Jefferson Airplane etc etc sounds revisionist and not reflective of the local reality - and after Miles played at the Fillmore (a strange concert for which I attended the Saturday night show; Miles dressed like a piece of carpet and Laura Nyro opened with one of the most bizarre and narcissistic exhibitions I have ever seen in my life) HE much more than Trane became a focus of rockers looking to jazz for help - now this does not really include people like Davy Graham, who may have looked more that way, but I was living and listening on this side of the ocean -

as long as somebody mentioned Tina Turner (he said, sidestepping the main argument here, which was giving him a headache) I would say that she IS out of the sanctified tradition - I have an old LP on Kent or some such label which is allegedly her and Ike and the Review recorded "live" - and I say "allegedly" because in those days they made plenty of bogus "live" albums - that's the closes thing I've ever heard to a fly-on-the wall in the club in the neighborhood where-the-white-dare-not-go. Probably the real thing, crowd noises and all, and should be heard by anybody who does not frighten too easily.

I like Bessie Griffin - if you can find her stuff it's quite amazing - I also like Aretha - and on some of the early Columbia stuff she sings a Jolson song - can't remember the name of it - and shows that Jolson was a continuing influence, interstingly enough (and I'm a big Jolson fan) - and I think Mahalia is best on the Apollo material - she's less of a star, more of a singer -

now this is weird - I just looked back and realized that I actually started this thread in 2004 - I completely forgot about that - especially since most of the topics I start die a quick and painless death -

thanks for the citation Niko - I have a few of those cuts on CD, and it's interesting to hear them, but he does not play very well yet. I also have a Howling Wolf CD with a cut that has a piano intro which is uncredited, but which I'm willing to bet is played by Phineas Newborne -

funny about Dupree Bolton - I was in San Francisco in Chinatown, I don'r remember the year, probably the middle 1980s - my wife comes up to me and says, you should hear this guy playing trumpet on the corner over there, he sounds good; I go over, and there's clearly something a little different about this guy, a sound and phrasing that makes him not just another street performer. Well, I go up to him, ask him his name - and it's Dupree Bolton! I almost fell over, he was very pleased that I knew who he was, we talked, he was basically a street-guy and a a junkie, very nice but very sadly deteriorated. I think a few other people ran into him in this way as well - and I know he has since died -

or, one might live on 35 Cup Drive, Apartment DD - or, as one might say, that's a cup that's more than half-full.