Kalo

Art Blakey--Free For All (RVG) Don Byron--Ivey Divey Johnny Griffin/Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis--Tough Tenors (OJC) Thelonious Monk--Misterioso(OJC) Louden Wainwright III--So Damn Happy All from BMG Jazz Club for just over $40 including shipping.

I love that early Spinners stuff. I did then, I do now. Thom Bell was, indeed, bad! What else would you point to as his best, Jim?

This sounds great. I haven't bought a Mosaic in ages, and my funds are stretched rather thin of late. But I gots a birthday coming...

Those Hungarotons look great.

I've been listening to this a lot of late, inspired by the discussion of Ellington's Suites on a previous thread. Amazing record. Definitely a favorite. A while back another thread asked for a favorite Ellington album cover. Though I didn't post at that time, this was the cover that came to mind. That's an amazing photograph of Duke's face. He looks so wise and clearsighted. His expression has the most delicate equilibrium between sadness and humor. The face of a man who saw and felt it all and in his music was able to capture and express all that he saw and felt.

Nuggets was still in Kenmore Square last time I looked. It was Planet Records that burned down. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is definitely worth checking out.

I just took a look at my copy of But Beautiful. I had forgotten that the other figures he writes about are Monk, Mingus, Ben Webster, and Lester Young. Guess I'll have to reread this one myself.

There are a lot I probably should have walked out on. Only one I can remember walking out on was Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, as much because it was the second film in a double feature as because it was boring me. I usually love double features, though. That was Owen Wilson, who was easily the best thing in the picture.

Thanks, Jim, that was cathartic. Ringtones are sort of like screen savers -- semi-pathetic assertions of individuality that attempt to disguise the fact that you're just a cog like everyone eles, tethered to this machine. I hate cell-phones. My day job is in a retail store (selling wine) and it is incredibly annoying the way people walk around the store having private conversations on their cell-phones at the top of their lungs. Also, it's incredibly annoying to be put on hold in person while a customer takes a call... Shouldn't the person you're face to face with take priority? Don't get me started.

The "new" band I listen to the most would be Fountains of Wayne, all three albums.

I can't believe I've never even heard of him before (though it's obviously impossible to be unfamiliar with his work). Especially with a name like Thurl Ravenscroft!

Great album titles...

That's a great book, Cat on a Hot Thin Groove(Fantagraphics Books). It also reproduces all the covers he did for the magazine.

I predict that you will love "Labour of Lust"! I also highly recommend Lowe's "Party of One" album from his 'comeback' period of the early 90's. (Or you might call it his middle period at this point.) And don't forget Pinker and Prouder Than Previous. Despite a not-so-great title and a terrible front cover, this is a solid Nick Lowe album. I agree with what BruceH wrote. A few days ago I listened to Party of One for the first time in years and it really holds up.

I always like A. Whitney Brown, a very clever comedian. Some of the more intellectual stuff ever on SNL.

Chiming in late here, but I think Ferrell can be funny. He's actually very good at playing the comic oaf and making it genuinely amusing, instead of merely oafish. (I can't comment on his elfish performance, not having seen it.) I thought Anchorman was funny, in the same way that, say, the first Austin Powers was funny, because it was so off the wall at times. I wonder what posters to this forum think of the jazz flute scene in this film? I thought it was hilarious, capturing jazz flute schtick to a t (I've never been a fan of the flute in jazz, Dolphy excepted). Jazz flute is a pretty off the wall thing to satirize in a mainstream movie, no? The whole film has an interestingly skewed perspective, going for the odd as often as for the obvious. Certainly not a masterpiece (or even, really, a good movie) but a very good comedy, with a nice ensemble feel to it not far removed from the Christopher Guest films.

I second (or third?) Randy Weston.

Well, there are a lot of blowhards around here B-)

...and Roy Haynes, Steve Kuhn, Gary Burton, Jaki Byard, Charlie Mariano, Alan Dawson, and the dean of the Boston jazz scene (because he stayed with it), Herb Pomeroy. And slightly outside of Boston, Boots Mussulli, Frankie Capp, Don Fagerquist, Don Asher, Barbara Carroll... Yes. I should have remembered Alan Dawson--I'm a big fan. I was lucky enough to see him play with Benny Carter at the Regattabar in Cambridge. He played an entire solo chorus on Take the A Train that was entirely coherent and beautifully musical. I didn't miss the other instruments at all. Isn't Chick Corea from Massachusetts, too?

Hard to resist. I'll get it, too.

I voted No. Though I buy an absurd amount of music by most people's standards (used stuff mostly), I usually have no trouble listening to it at least once in the first few days of ownership. I don't download from the internet, so that helps me to keep up, too. I guess I'm still stuck in the old paradigm.

I recall really liking Sanjuro when I saw it on the big screen years ago. I actually have the Criterion DVD of this and of Yojimbo as well, but haven't watched either of them yet. I'll do so this week and report back.

Sounds very interesting. Chet Flippo wrote a biography of Hank Williams that read very much like a novel, and used a lot of invented dialogue. As far as I remember, though, it was not in the first person (I read it a long time ago). Have you read Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful? That's a very good book written as a suite of fictionalized meditations on various jazz figures, putting the reader inside their heads. Subjects include Bud Powell, Art Pepper, and Chet Baker. The whole book is knit together with little short passages evoking Harry Carney and Duke driving across county together from gig to gig as Ellington composes in the back seat. Highly recommended.

Wow!

I'd have to agree with Guy, here. I passed on the Hill because I already had about half of it on CD and figured the rest of it would slowly come out as individual discs. I guess I called that one right.