johnlitweiler

$16 from Downtown Music Gallery.

Chris, you deserve it.

When did Newhouse acquire the NO Times-Picayune? And the Huntsville Times? 40 years ago when I clipped newspapers for a living, those were good ones. Especially the T-P. In those days the Mobile, Birmingham, and Montgomery papers were almost as worthless as Gannet or Conrad Black newspapers. Might local ownership have saved the Times-Picayune? That big thick newspaper sure seems to have meant a lot to people there a few years ago, even after the year of the 2 hurricanes. Shit, this is gloomy news.

Jim, have an Xlento! birthday.

Among AACM folks it looks like Hamid and Nicole and Wadada will be at the Vision Fest this year. Roscoe used to be there yearly but he hasn't since he moved to CA. Fred Anderson and Joseph Jarman were there annually for quite awhile, I was there for the Muhal and Fred lifetime achievement concerts. Other AACM musicians have played there. The festival does favor improvising units, often apparently ad hoc groups, over working groups with a composed repertoire. I believe Mike Reed is the only Umbrella Music musician who's led a band there and as for 8 Bold Souls, Fast Citizens, Josh Berman's Old Idea, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, Lucky Sevens, etc., let's not hold our breaths. For a change I'll miss this year's Vision fest. The move to downtown Brooklyn is inconvenient - my cheap lodgings are usually in downtown Manhattan and late-night subways are few - that stuff about "the city that never sleeps" is not true.

The web site sima.org.au is a good place to start when looking for Australian jazz. Quite up to date now. It used to post reviews by John Clare, who is a thoughtful critic, and included my "Bernie McGann on CD" survey article, but those are gone from the site now. Sandy Evans is a forceful inside-outside post-Coltrane tenor saxist and quite an inventive composer - she composed "Testimony," a musical homage to Charlie Parker set to poems by the American Yusef Komunyakaa, among other things. That's not on CD but some of her other, more personal work is, in various Oz groups she leads or plays in. Including Ten Part Invention - Terry Martin brought them to the 2004 Chicago Jazz Festival. Some really fine veteran musicians on that band. Kenny, is there an outside/ free-jazz / free-improvisation scene in Oz? Also, a few years ago I heard various kinds of pop-Asian folk-jazz-fusion musics from Oz musicians like Evans and Lloyd Swanton, including the very minimalist trio The Necks. These things are often attractive but unfamiliar to me, so they seem more distinctive that the more Western jazz-rock fusions I've been hearing. How popular are these in their native land? (Judging from what I've read by Stuart Nicholson, he is totally uninterested in organic developments in jazz. So he's really comparing U.S. fusions with other countries' fusions. Novelty per se seems to be a positive value to him.)

Yes I guess there is. Record stores like this - including listening booths - just weren't around anymore (least of all over here) by the time most of us "young(ish) uns" got into jazz. Great. Steve, where did you find that photo? That's his old store on Michigan Street. I can almost smell the cigarettes.

Yes I guess there is. Record stores like this - including listening booths - just weren't around anymore (least of all over here) by the time most of us "young(ish) uns" got into jazz. Great. Steve, where did you find that photo? That's his old store on Michigan Street. I can almost smell the cigarettes.

There's a generation gap here. I became interested in jazz when I first heard 2-beat music such as Firehouse 5 on a once-a-week radio program. The South Bend record stores / departments had listening booths where I could pretend to be a custopmer and hear 45s - Bessie Smith, JRM, Armstrong Hot 5 reissues. Al Smith's Record Bar ("The House of Jazz" IIRC) was downtown and even advertised in Down Beat. The first disk I bought and soon lost was a Lu Watters 78. Read JRM/Lomax, Really the Blues, and eventually Inside Bebop at the neighborhood branch library. A few years later I got a 45 rpm player and found a dime store that sold jukebox cutouts, mainly Chess/Checker blues. They weren't scratched at all, either. WLAC in Nashville was a good education in blues, good for a lot of Midwestern kids. Finally in college near Chicago in 1958 I started seeking music in earnest and finding more recent jazz, Bartok, and Seymour's record store, ancestor of Jazz Record Mart.

We'll have to invite George Bean, the Chicago trumpeter, and Charles Hamm, the music historian, and Hal "Cornbread" Singer. And Bird, of course. For refreshments, Pops, Ronnie Beer, and Lu Watters. For dessert Sugarpie DeSanto, Sweets Edison, Jelly Roll, and Roosevelt "Honeydripper" Sykes. The party would be a flop without Lester Young and Billie Holiday.

It would have to be a potluck. Louis Armstrong can bring red beans and rice, Kid Ory can bring New Orleans delicacies, Randy Weston can bring North African goodies, Count Basie can bring the same old beef stew, Hank Williams can bring jambalaya, Screaming Jay Hawkins can bring alligator wine, Bessie Smith can bring gin, George Lewis can bring ice cream. Maybe Charles Ives can bring Concord grapes. Need some more women guests.

Heard half of disk 1 last night - apart from double-time passages this is among the most Prez-like Mobley. The pure melody, the ways his melody line curves, the phrase contrasts. The invention is just endless. Even at the end in those coarse 1980s captures, for all Hank's difficulties he still had a blessed sense of melody.

Larry, as you know, I'm certainly indebted to your insights and, most of all, indebted to your generosity through the years. 57 minutes from now, I hope you celebrate a groovy birthday.

No. Writing about music is worth two in the bush.

Does he call himself NAB-a-tov or na-BAT-ov? I'll play something from his terrific new album of Herbie Nichols songs tomorrow, Monday, on Zoundz!, 6:30 to 9 pm Chicago time on WHPK 88.5 FM and www.whpk.org. Also, Armstrong, Ornette, Beiderbecke, Jimmy Lyons, etc.

BTW there's an intriguing interview with Cecil in Howard Mandel's book "Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz."

I don't think these obfuscation accusations are at all fair to Cecil. He was very gracious, friendly, and patient with me, and the musicians and students I've met who've worked with or befriended him have had similar experiences. About 36 years ago the critic J.B. Figi introduced Cecil to Fred Anderson at a late-night concert. The two chatted awhile and Cecil's encouragement meant a lot to Fred, who in those days was playing for tiny audiences and got damn little encouragement from anyone else.

Jim, it's a scream.

How was the concert?

Good for you. Keep on living.

Kalamazoo her home town - interesting. There's a pamphlet, a short history of the old, pre-Civil War black community in SE Mich. (Cass, Berrien, St. Joe counties), that claims Abbey grew up away down there. (A Niles newspaperman wrote it.) IIRC she did not claim a Michigan background. I do remember in 1975 moseying across a pre-subway Washington DC with Ran Blake to catch a Jeanne Moreau movie. He was a Jeanne Moreau completist. He had good taste (probably still has).

Very interesting, Allen. I heard Albany in 1981 and as I recall his piano playing was completely lucid. Though the setting was a quartet and Jimmy Knepper had to coerce him into playing a solo piece.

I have been highly offended at the obituaries that refer to Skowron as a White Sox star. True, he spent the end of his career playing for us. It was penance. He and Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford and a few others ruined my childhood by torturing the White Sox year after year.

Steal a car. Ran Blake is worth it.