rostasi

Rough month so far: Al Caiola, Robert Vaughn, Leonard Cohen, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Kay Starr, Bob Cranshaw, Zoltán Kocsis, ...

Tenor player from Finland, but not what you may expect. Good place to go... but then he's gone here too: then you have this with him and Uri Caine, Toots Thielemans, & Ernst Reijseger among others: and with the great Tony Allen:

been listening to that one recently. there are some fun YouTube vids out there as well.

not an album cover, but related:

Just went to Amazon a few days ago and saw them there, and so I pre-ordered them.

This topic got me thinking... If you wanted to suggest a recent jazz album to a young person - one that 30 years later they could proudly say that they bought, which would you choose? "Recent" is kinda open, but maybe a 21st Century album (?)

Ahhh, but it's vinyl - something he may not be interested in. I'd like to see a CD version as well, but that is what I come across every-once-in-a-while here: no CD versions.

I really need to start visiting more of this vinyl around here. Billy Harper - Knowledge of Self

"One of Chicago's earliest African-American disc jockeys, Herb "The Cool Gent" Kent, has died at age 88 after a seven-decade career..."

Yeah, that's the one that has Light My Fire. It's called September 17, 1969. I remember this because it's the same birthday as my half-sister.

You beat me to Wailing of the Willow. Actually, probably her finest album. Also, Windy is pretty good if you're sugared up for the title tune. The Marcos Valle song, "Crickets Sing for Anamaria" is the highlight. Another thing: I think Pat Williams did the arrangements.

Fun stuff! But what were they thinking when it came to the third (and, thankfully, last) season? They must've been playing off the "secret agent" craze. As an aside... I read that the reason that Honey West didn't last more than one season was because it was cheaper to import The Avengers than to pay to produce another season.

I was gonna offer up the USB Phono Plus, but then I looked at the above link and there it was! ha! Don't use the turntable as much as I use to, but when I do (as in helping with the latest Blindfold Test), it's always been an extremely easy and effective way to transfer stuff.

Jazz music (and sometimes musicians) were around the house often, so I was born into it (my mother was pregnant with me when she went to see Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing Hotel Lounge). but, the first jazz album(s) that I bought with my own money were, IIRC, these two together in '70.

Almost didn't recognize him in the video above, but then I noticed that it was from the early 80's. Nice guy, good interpreter. He was here about 9 or 10 years ago for a concert (Feldman's Triadic Memories and Cage's S& I...) and another time for a Cage seminar. Nice to have been able to hear a number of various versions of the S&I... live (Goldstein, Margaret Leng Tan, Jerry Hunt, a.o.), and now Boris Berman is coming here next year.

Speaking of this ... It's worth listening to another Ajemian version of an incomplete "Sonatas ..." on the Avakian-produced Town Hall concert set that was released in '59. The 3-LP set (quite the undertaking in those days) was partially funded by Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg.

Thanks for the heads-up! Have the Roach, Abrams, Murray and Waldron on pre-order.

I hope this isn't too much info. I think that we have an older group of people here who probably wouldn't write "tl:dr" afterwards. Tho the "Sonatas ..." wasn't the first work that Cage wrote using the prepared piano, it is his most well-known. When dancer Syvilla Fort requested a work from him with an African "inflection," he intended to write a piece for percussion (of major interest to him at the time), but the performance space was small and he only had a piano to work with. Cage probably acquired this talent for creating new ideas, sometimes under time constraints, from his father who was a prolific inventor. So, "Bacchanale" was born in 1940, as was the prepared piano. First performance was April, 1940. When the "Sonatas ..." was written (1946-48), it was during a time when Cage was interested in Hindu philosophy and he decided that he wanted to express the eight permanent rasas (emotions) of the Indian tradition in this work. I'm unsure as to how much of the various emotional ups-and-downs of his personal life played a part in the composition of this work, but as he was completing the piece, his composer friend, Lou Harrison, suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanatorium and so Cage immediately began trying to help with the cost of Harrison's treatment and contacted Charles Ives to help secure some kind of financial assistance. That, and his recent divorce from his wife, Xenia, I'm sure added to the emotional exploration he would undertake during this time (but would soon drop about 3 years later). Ajemian (for whom the "Sonatas ..." are dedicated) gave its first partial performance in April of 1946 with Cage himself giving the first complete performance almost exactly 2 years later. My introduction was thru the CRI 199 LP in the late 60's. I picked up the Dial recording later. Throughout his life, Cage rarely seemed interested in "firsts." He would happily refer to previous attempts at ideas he would become famous for. In July of 1943, in a letter to Merce Cunningham, Cage mentioned that he, with pleasure, read (in Grove's "Dictionary of Music and Musicians" - this would be the 1879 edition) about the term "sordini" referring to mutes or dampening mechanisms which came to the conclusion that "... a plain penny put between violin strings is better than a fancy mute." Cage continues by saying, "Every now + then the past smiles at me."

Oh, man... that Transition album ... I named my first radio show after that. ... and, not mentioned, but Kulu Sé Mama (along with the Transition album) actually became one of those "let's go over to Rod's house" kind of exigencies for at least a couple of junior-high friends - one of whom made off with my original copy of Kulu and the soundtrack to The Andromeda Strain (Gil Mellé) - both, since recovered.

That's where I stand too. I can't say that the 5 or 6 I mentioned are the best "of all time," but they certainly gave my ears a Capital hubbub of the extremely incorrigible kind way back then.

My disgust with Dylan has been made very clear on these pages, so I'll just say that I prefer all the originals to the plagiarized ones. The church songs and "Negro spirituals," the Scottish folk tunes, the English folk tunes, Confederate poets, and our very own folkies.

Leaving it at five titles is a real challenge, but as I stared out onto a beautiful night in my backyard from our garden room, I decided that the real test was which ones had impacted me so intensely that I had uncontrollable tears running down my childhood face. Even for then, 5 are too few, but these not only got a lot of loud and constant play in my bedroom and in my practice room, but it would often cause shouts of disgruntled misapprehension loudly sounding from just outside my sound-shelter palace. The beauty of young discovery coupled with a desire for a less jaded older discoverer that still is possible if one learns to start, each time, from zero. This is also so very close in the mix. It made me want to play alto then.