johnlitweiler

Very bad news, but not catastrophic. Makes it real hard for Chicago musicians and for the festival programming committee who did such a good job last year, despite some severe obstacles. For audiences, at least the JIC and the Park District have been adding a few events to festival week in recent years.

Congratulations, Alfredsons. You're on a winning streak.

didn't know Ran developed stationery too. What a wonderful pianist as well as a good guy. He and I both loved Jeanne Moreau, so one night in 1974 we rode a bus halfway across Washington D.C. to see one of her movies. An obscure one with lots of dark shadows.

Happy birthday, Chris, and 10 Q - seems like I've been listening to music you've recorded and learning from your writings for about 1/2 a century by now.

Now you can buy Mojo Snake Minuet with PayPal even though the non-working PayPal button is gone. Or go to Sandmeyer's Books, 714 South Dearborn, or to the Jazz Record Mart. Or I'll sell you a copy from here at Goodbait Books headquarters. And deface it for you if you wish (books defaced by the author increase in resale value).

That is a variation on a scene in "The Grapes of Wrath": Boy & girl are watching 2 cows mate. He says to her, "I wish we could do that." Girl: "Go ahead, it's your cow."

And he's never played the same thing twice. Amazing creativity.

Thanks, Clifford -- the most revealing Bill Dixon interview I've yet seen, and I appreciate your responses to his music. A lot of the Bill Dixon recordings and live performances of his own compositions somehow seem like one single long trumpet solo, interrupted perhaps by years and distances, with changing accompaniments. The music is pure abstraction, but lyrical abstraction. Quite a painter, too.

For the present it may be easiest to buy Mojo Snake Minuet at 57th Street Books or Seminary Co-op Books in Hyde Park or through http://semcoop.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp. The actual price is $15 -- my Goodbait web site is wrong. Hope to get that and the PayPal button corrected in a few days.

My new novel "Mojo Snake Minuet" is now for sale. The web site goodbaitbooks.com is finally up, so you can buy it there. The publisher is Goodbait Books, an obscure but honest company. To quote a blurb: "'Mojo Snake Minuet' takes place in an America where black people are the majority aalnd white people are the oppressed minority. The hero is Yakub Yakub, a typical music critic: tall, dark, handsome, beloved by lovely ladies, and a talented but unappreciated songwriter. The plot is a murder mystery with gangsters and crooked cops; legal cannabis and cocaine, illegal alcohol; a movement for white civil rights; an Orthodox Voodoo priest and priestess; beautiful divas Shakeaplenty and Honeypie who sing opera arias in inner city symphonic joints; a licensed, hardboiled private witch; griots who sing the news on TV; and much more arbitrariness. "'Mojo Snake Minuet' blows the cover 'off the black-and-white race racket, the music racket, and the newspaper and politics and religion rackets, among other shameful rackets.'" FWIW one reader has already accused the book of being satirical. Nevertheless, I hope it brings some readers some smiles.

This had to be approximately the time that Gene Shaw had his nightclub, IIRC the Old(e) East Inn on Stony Island Avenue, on the South Side. It was popular with musicians for a time and then Shaw gave it up and dropped out of music again. A very nice guy and a sweet melodic player. He believed in the philosophies of Gurdjieff. The rumor was that as part of his religious beliefs, he was required to give up what he loved the most, which explained why he gave up the trumpet and dropped out of music on various occasions. When he came back again, late 1960s or in the '70s, he led a group with an organ at a North Wells St. club and I reviewed him in Down Beat. A year or 2 later he was out of music and back in Michigan again. Re Rpklich's post: McDougal was a terrifically swinging tenor saxophonist, more directly connected to Prez than other Chicago tenorists. Yes, those 2 LPs of his are gems, too bad he didn't make more.

An interview with Muhal Richard Abrams: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/musi...-jazz04.article A review of the first night of the festival: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/musi...-fest06.article Both articles got cut between the writing and the printing. Aram Shelton played lovely alto sax in Rolldown.

Haven't seen this JT article, but there was an interesting paragraph from him in Sounds And Fury about 43 years ago. The Inquiring Photographer, a pretty young lady, was asking famous musicians if there was any homosexuality among jazz musicians. IIRC LD said, "No! Jazz is screwing music!"

Missed Saturday, but Sunday night at the Velvet was pretty amazing - no Muhal or Lake, though. It was the most melodic I believe I've ever heard Kidd Jordan play and Fred was a long stream of melody -- better than at the festival, I thought. Henry Grimes played that fiddle again, but this time it sounded more together. Later on he played bass. There were a number of high points this weekend. One on Sunday was James Falzone's KLANG which played rearrangements of Benny Goodman-associated songs along with J.F. originals. Even with vibes and guitar it didn't sound like a BG combo. J.F. was so melodic, the music moved so freely, the arrangements were so shapely and purposeful that he presented a whole different kind of sensibility altogether -- more intense, in his way, than BG. (Larry Kart wrote revealing liner not for his first CD.)

"Ornette Coleman Anthology" by Aki Takase and Silke Eberhard is an Intakt 2-disk set of 33 Coleman songs played by pianist-arranger and alto saxist-clarinetist. The whole album is a delight.

Happy Birthday to Roscoe. Have a great show.

Good news, Lazaro, here's the Penguin Encyclopedia on Donald's web site: http://www.donaldclarkemusicbox.com/encyclopedia/index.php

Fascinating, Chris -- thank you. Did she discuss her Decca recordings too?

Jeff is so right about the rewards of this music. But for all his NewO expatriates, Oliver's band refined their style here in Chicago and may have even formed it here. Oliver & co. pre-1923 must have sounded different. For one thing, note the violinist in the 1921 photo -- he would have repeated the melody lines over and over while the others played their embellishments and variations. (That's what he did in the original Creole Band.) Bud Freeman claimed jazz was actually born in Chicago because the NewO players who came here got their musics together here. After you take a grain of salt, consider how much truth there may be in his words. A few more things: 1. The second group of Oliver OKehs (c. Oct. 25-26) used to have the best sound of the Oliver sessions in reissues -- what part did Richard M. Jones play in the production of those? Did he have any say in how the engineers set up the st udio? An amazing feature of the Off The Record collection is the sound quality of the Paramounts, which were previously hard to listen to. The balance varies from session to session, and I still haven't heard the melody of Weather Bird (Gennet, April 6). That's not a criticism of Off The Record, of course. 2. The OKeh Riverside Blues and Working Man Blues are surely among the most beautiful of all blues ever played, along with Morton's Peppers Original Jelly Roll (the originally released take) and Yancey's At The Window. 3. In the Dixie Syncopators' version of Someday Sweetheart, Johnny Dodds' chorus is a perfect example of what jazz is -- you could almost derive a definition of the idiom from that solo. Dodds' sound is so distinctive, his inflections and rhythm are so incisive, his small variations are so subtle -- this is expression that exists in no other kind of music. Interesting that the 1923 band recorded Someday Sweetheart but it was never released. Is the 1926 version a variation of the Creole Band's arrangement? 4. As I sd in my review, if any jazz has ever been profound, some of these 1923 Olivers are -- those 2 OKeh blues for their beauty, the OKeh Mabel's Dream for its interplay, pieces like Just Gone, Snake Rag, Chattanooga, Buddy's Habits for sustained intensity, the OKeh Dippermouth for the inspired Armstrong choruses that frame Oliver's solo. Etc. I mean 'profound' in its original life-enriching sense -- over the last 40 years it keeps getting applied to all kinds of rock music, pop literature, politicians' spewings, etc, but I hope I can use the word again and be understood.

Thanks for the suggestions. It's interesting to read these and find that some of our former Wild Onions from Chicago, like Kyle Bruckman, Aram Shelton, and Weasel Walter, are now active Yerba Buenas.

Is there a web site that lists free / outside jazz-new music-etc. events in the San Francisco Bay area? Or a Bay area paper with reliable entertainment lists? I'm going to be in SF April 16-20.

Plays with Henry Johnson and Deep Blue Organ Trio. Well worth hearing, super swinging. Stretches out at length and has an amazing knack for turning every standard into a greazy blues within a minute. (Greg Rockingham is a perfect drummer for an organist and he always plays with Foreman.) He also plays melodic-bluesy piano on singer Kimberley Gordon's CD.

Clifford, thanks for that interview with Alvin. Did you do it in NYC?

By the late 1950s Monk was finally making a living from his piano playing and didn't seem to want to take the time to write lots of songs any more.

I've loved her singing and Todd Duncan's on that old Decca Porgy & Bess album (almost original cast - no John Bubbles, unfortunately) ever since it was on 78 rpm. Very interesting obit in NY Times yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/theater/18brown.html