AllenLowe

it's about time they got rid of Franki Valli, as he CANNOT act - that's cause enough to wack him -

I love that music ("old time music" is probably a good label, and I also like "hillbilly" and "country" as historically accurate) - that's about 90 percent of what I listen to these days. Yazoo is a superb label and they have the right idea about sound - they use enough restoration to make it listenable but they leave the ambience. The current proprietor is Rich Nevins who, I think, from some personal dealings, is the biggest asshole on the face of the earth; he does, however, have the records (primarily, I believe, from the collection of the late Nick Perls), he transfers them well, and Yazoo restores them correctly. Just don't read Nevins's occasional line notes, which are the equivalent of Yogi Berra writing about literary history -

beautiful album - and speaking of Mating Call, I have a theory that Coltrane got the idea for the melody of Giant Steps from the opening phrase of the melody "On a Misty Night" - check it out -

or Mary Wells -

I don't think I made my point clearly - I wasn't talking about smooth jazz, per se - I was only pointing out that if you complain about an entire form of music while only listening to one segment of it, you're being myopic and betraying an unwareness of the big picture - it's like people who complain about current-day rock - there's a guy on my local FM station who plays incredibly intersting indie-rock groups that I would never encounter outside of that show.So it's there for the finding, but part of the problem is that the mass media have become more and more conglomerated - on the other hand, things like the interenet (and this group) are great antidotes -

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

well, if you're talking out of tune, try to play an old Busecher, tenor or alto - and if you can make the octaves match you're a better man than I - I heard Sonny Rollins talk about the Buescher he played on Alfie and he said,"I loved that horn but I could not get it to play in tune." speaking of out of tune, Bill Triglia once told me that Dave Schildkraut was pissed off for some reason at the session he did with Ralph Burns and played deliberately out of tune - and sure enough, listen to that session and there's Davey playing just enough off-pitch to make the whole thing sound a little bit out of wack - but interestingly enough in Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz poll Burns named Davey as one of his favorite saxophonists -

funny, this reminds me of the time I saw Duke Jordan in concert, sometime around 1977 or so - it was at Cami Recital Hall in NYC - he had Tommy Turrentine on trumpet, who played the ENTIRE concert a quarter-tone sharp - it was weird. Nobody said anything, nobody commented, they just went through the set like nothing was wrong. At that pitch Turrentine played well, I guess you could say he was in-tune in the Bizarro world -

well, I actually like a lot of it - his analysis, as I recall, of the problems of jazz historians' metholdogy is quite brilliant and original - it's just that, in the larger picture, using Hawk and McGhee as a focus is problematic -

well, I've been hesitant to get too deeply into this out of respect for his memory, but it is frustrating to hear, posthumously, stories of few gigs and poorly-attended gigs - the gist of it is that Jackie, when I was booking that festival - and I heard this confirmed by one of the largest bookers of jazz talent - was asking for much more money than he should have been asking (or, really, is manager was asking for too much) - it was unrealistic and as a result he worked a fraction of the gigs that he could have - as a matter of fact at one point he was picked up by Max Roach's agent, who dropped him a few months later in frustration - and Max was one of the highest paid jazz acts at the time, so this guy was not afraid to ask for real money -

skieth - I agree - I read a lot of the book but I don't know that I ever actually finished it -

interesting and unfortunate to hear about the relatively poor turnout for that NYC gig - I will tell you, based on people I spoke to who were booking agents, and also based on my own experience (I booked a very large Jazz Fest in New Haven, Connecticut for a few years back in the 1990s) that Jackie was really a victim of mismanagement, and it's a damn shame, as he could have worked much more than he did. I wonder if, looking at this late gig, he suffered in these last years from the period if time - 1980s and 1990s - that should have been his prime performing years and during which he might have reached a new generation of audiences. But I know that he worked a fraction of the gigs he could have and would have with proper management -

not exactly - Crouch ALWAYS has an agenda, as we see when he refers to the experience in the South that made Jackie a true bluesman - this is a lot of horseshi*, a real ideological spin by Stanley who is happy to have this so he can make sure that Jackie has the right credentials - BS and more BS, sorry, but that's what I think -

Jackie was a nice man, I got to know him a little bit in the middle 1980s. Walter Bishop worked with my group in Hartford, and Jackie came to hear us, and it was a lot of fun (Bish was a sweetheart) - at one point Jackie told me something very interesting. I will quote: "when I was still having a lot of personal problems, one day, Cecil Taylor came to my door because he wanted to play. I sent him away, didn't even let him in, and I always regretted it. Bird had told me to keep my mind open, to listen to everything."

well, yes and know - this phrase "Now and again they evoke no particular emotion, only an earnest refusal to be run down by life that translates as heroic." It's like the work of a high school student, I believe they call it a misplaced modifier - in other words - what "translates as heroic"? Life? No, he's probably referring to the "earnest refusal," in which case he's made a major grammatical gaffe - as a writer, Crouch is a rank amateur -

well, you can wait for set 3 - if you live that long - just to mention - Deveaux's book is quite smart with a lot of very expert analysis of jazz as as a historic discipline - my one caveat would be that its emphasis on Hawk and Howard McGhee, great as they both are, is, in my opinion, a distorting angle that is not really justified by events per the birth and development of bebop - so it becomes a fasinating portrait from their perspective but not one that I would not consider representative of what was going on in the music -

Delmark put out the early sessions with Hawk and Dizzy, Max, Pettioford, etc - get it -

Hank - yes, that's the guy - Brisbane Bop -

Phil Schaap, who knew Andy Kirk Senior very well, said he was never able to talk about his son, that the memory was too painful -

Ubu, 1971? Yikes, I did not know that - do you guys have electricity?

Jimmy Rivers -

I have two words for you - Stormy Weather - a life-changing performance. That's all you need to know -

my mother actually took piano lessone with Wittgenstein's brother many years ago - she used to show me the piano books with his writing, which was very rough - as a matter of fact Ravel wrote a special piece for him (I think he lost one arm in WWI) -

I'm glad someone figured that one out -

actually, I listened to three clips of the same guitarist on that page - he really has no feel for the music, in my opinion - his time is all jittery, he falls into patterns, there's no sense of nuance or real expression - which I think is a common problem for musicians whose technique exceeds their deeper understanding of the music - this may change, it may not -