johnlitweiler

The SIMA.com web site is a useful intro to what's current in Australia, or rather, Sydney. Thanks to Terry Martin, some of the good ones made it to the Chicago Jazz Festival: David Dallwitz band in the 1980s; Bernie McGann, quite a distinctive alto player, in the '90s; the band 10 Part Invention a few years ago. In t he 00's Ross Bolleter made a tantalizing CD of piano improvisations for Emanem (owned by a one-time Australian). Any other worthy outside players there?

Thanks, Chas. Definitely original.

66 next month. Born the day after Jimmy Yancey's 42nd birthday. Although we may never recapture our youth, we may remain immature as long as we wish. (Who originally said this?)

Didn't mean to quote Larry's whole posting, just the 3rd paragraph, about Jazz's relationship to us is so close-up, etc. -- that's the sort of insight that makes you say, Of course! That why I respond that way!

Flutists play the flute. Flautists play the flaut. / Jesse Owens, the great runner, in later years was a disk jockey on an all-jazz station in Chicago. Once he played a record by Penis Newborn Jr.

David Izenzon, b. 1932, began studying how to play bass in 1956 (Feather-Gitler).

Too bad that ad isn't in color, Nessa's LP cover designs were xlnto! (as Hank Mobley might say).

Well, it was said that Monk, Barry Harris, Sadik Hakim, and 100 or so cats -- meow-type cats -- lived at her house in NJ and that she bought the uniforms that Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers wore.

See the web site http://www.suntimes.com/output/jazz/cst-ftr-sonny25.html -- as usual, the Chicago Sun-Times gets it right while the Tribune doesn't get it.

Is David Brent Johnson the Ghost of Miles, then? A wonderful article. Charles Tyler came from 1950s Naptown, too. Any link between the city's blues, ca. Leroy Carr, and jazz? Speed Webb ran a funeral parlor in South Bend and died in his 90s. I've come to regret that I didn't look him up and try to interview him a couple dacades ago. - Some jazz musicians wound up working in the musical instrument factories in Elkhart. John Pierce, who recorded w/George Russell, was one. Some of these cats play in an Elkhart County big band called Truth In Jazz that my cousin David Plank directs.

Not Lil Green's "Romance in the Dark," but Lil Green's "Why Don't You Do Right?" -- Peggy Lee approximates Lil Green.

Sorry to say, no. What happened there Sun.?

Lazaro, the Chicago Sun-Times review was severely truncated but as usual still more accurate than the Chicago Tribune review: http://www.suntimes.com/output/jazz/cst-ftr-grimes14.html Really, it was the Grimes-Anderson-Ra trio with interruptions by Marshall Allen. It was apparently the 2nd time Grimes and Anderson have played together, and they have great affinity. Especially since, with the loss of Malachi Favors, Anderson hasn't had a lot of really empathetic bassists to work with, this is a relationship that I hope will be pursued.

Truck Parham, a not always reliable source, played with Jimmie Lunceford in the 1940s and said that the whole band was Muslim.

How does this South Side baseballic affiliation affect your relationship with the other members of the mafia?

Boston Market began in Naperville, IL, years after I graduated from North Central College there. Naperville water comes from wells. That is GOOD. But then Boston Market moved headquarters to Aurora in Arapahoe county, CO, a suburb of Denver on a dry plain. That was BAD. When I was a boy, my father got a scholarship to Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, so my family spent a summer high up in Gunnison county, western CO, beside a rushing mountain river. CO's laws are such that a few years ago Arapahoe county tried to exersize its legal rights to drain away the water from that beautiful stream so that all the Arapahoe county residents could water their vast lawns. Fortunately, Crested Butte has lately become a popular resort town and, last I heard, the yuppies there able to out-legal the Arapahoe folks. But I have sworn to never eat Boston Market food or knowingly buy anything produced in Arapahoe county. / Some folks in Michigan have big heads. Big big heads. Indiana John

Yeah, I was there one time when a guy was selling some Hank Mobley Japanese lps. For some reason they didn't want the one with Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan, so I made the guy an offer on the spot. Let me repeat - JRM did not want it. Needless to say I learned a lesson that day ... I think (I later followed the guy down the street and bought good ole' 1540 from him on the corner) One day in 1965 when I worked at JRM, Koester was w/a customer and I was behind the counter when Wayne Jones came in, selling old LPs. Wayne approached me first, offered me the Cecil Taylor-Gigi Gryce Verve for a couple dollars, so I bought it -- Bob lost 10 years of his life while watching that transaction and mentally calculating how much he could have marked up the resale price (and Wayne, of course, knew very well what he was doing).

Enjoyable album, + good liner notes by LKart. / Yes, Jim DeJong runs the jaz dept. at Tower Records on North Clark St.

Is a company somewhere systematically reissuing MPS LPs on CDs?

When I interviewed David Sanborn for the Chicago Tribune in 1989, I asked him about any possible Roscoe influence -- David, an extemely nice guy, said none, but in his apprentice days in St. Louis he had been friends with fellow apprentices Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, etc. and had probably absorbed some of their ideas. / Sanborn was part of probably the most hilarious thing I've seen on TV in the last 20+ years. It was over the closing credits of a Night Music broadcast -- Screaming Jay Hawkins sang, very slowly and in a perfect William Warfield voice, the first strain of Old Man River; Sanborn and John Zorn then did a 2-alto sax freakout. It is probably on a Hawkins CD.

I've heard Von play Avalon. Sorry I couldn't hear him play it again on Sunday. / Kalaparush and the Light tonight at the Cultural Center. Re Dave Douglas last night, see tomorrow's Sun-Times. Usually I just admire his playing, this was one of the times I quite liked it. Lester Bowie would have approved of everything except maybe the Bowie tribute piece. / Henry Grimes w/Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Avreeayl Ra at Hot House on March 11-12.

On the other hand, for half a season at the end of his playing career Canseco came out of nowhere and became a useful DH for the Chicago White Sox. gratefully, JL

Charles Tyler -- wonderful lyrical thematic improviser, very intense. He attacked themes like a starving carnivore. The Nessa LP "Saga of the Outlaws" is terrific, there's also a great but short "Saga" on Charles's Silkheart CD w/the Brus Trio. He was a hell of a baritone player, too, and near the end of his life he played some lovely tenor sax, too. / Mario Schiano has his moments, though he's also recorded a lot of throwaway stuff.

After the Dixie Chicks' dust-up with Bush supporters, it seems something like my patriotic duty to appreciate their music.