sgcim

Aaron Johnson completely killed on his last alto solo of the night! He stayed inside, and every note was perfection!

I got a ton of wax removed from my ears last year by an ENT, and I was hoping it would make a big difference in my hearing, but when the ENT asked me if I heard the change, I had to say no. He just said, "You're probably so used to it that you don't hear the difference. Then his nurse gave me a hearing test, and the results were I had mild hearing loss. That was a relief to me considering the thousands of gigs I played throughout my life. I was afraid it was going to be much worse.

Yeah, listening to that now. Allen sounds great on tenor! The alto player's also great, but I prefer his clarinet playing to that wild Dolphyesque stuff. The rhythm section is excellent. The guitar player shreds a lot, but I can't play that fast so I can't criticize it. Very enjoyable, turn on YouTube and dig it!

Damn, it's gonna be CJ Stroud against the Ravens next week. I like them both, but how can you not root for a guy whose mother and father helped build their own church, and the father was a football coach and a pastor who's now doing 40 years for carjacking, drug dealing etc...?

Great, we can pay 10K to stuff ourselves with pasta filled with carbs that will clog up our arteries, so we can have a cardiac event like he did. We'll probably wind up sharing the same hospital room with him, so he can tell us why his music is more creative than jazz, something he's claimed in many interviews Sign me up!

Love that layered harmony they used. Reminds me of Carole King's "Snow Queen". CK did her jazz-rock thing with The City. Karen had no problems with that fast 5. She should have had a drum battle with Dennis Elliot of If. He could really groove on those complex time signatures, too.

Here's a link to RMJ;s 99 corrections on Wikipedia's entry on ND: https://galacticramble.blogspot.com/2023/07/nikipedia.html#comment-form

BB always claimed that bebop was his greatest influence.

Thank God I've been spared the Sunday NYT for the last few weeks, while my Sunday visitor is out of the country. I'm also thankful they don't let you read it online unless you're a subscriber. I might have missed it, but was this the first year that they left out the category of music for their best books of 2023 issues in the Sunday Book Review?

I had a dream that I went to NJ and hung out with some Org. members and had a good hang. Strangely enough, there was no one that I knew from here. Maybe they were from another dimension Hey TTK, I got the new book on Nick Drake, Nick Drake A Life by Bruce Morton Jack. By interviewing everyone from ND's life he basically gives a day to day accounting of ND's existence from Cambridge to the end. He was a 6ft 2" dude, who was an athlete in school, and played the sax and piano. He started his own jazz band. then he discovered the steel string acoustic guitar and I think he tried to make it into a piano by using insane tunings that enabled him to play chords with seconds in them, but he never strummed like Joni Mitchell. He practiced up to 12 hours a day, and developed the technique of a virtuoso classical guitarist, but used all five fingers on his right hand to play a constant stream of arpeggiated 16th notes with a concept of 4 part S-A-T-B harmony and the MFer was able to sing at the same time as if he was doing nothing! Here's a BBC John Peel radio session he did with no accompaniment: There are 4 or 5 other tunes from the set also.. including the cello song, here played by a flute: He'd ignore his work at Cambridge, and spend his time practicing all day and night. listening to music on his headphones, and smoking a potent type of hash that may have eventually messed up his brain. I'm up to p.337 of this 500+ page bio. and he's fed up with sharing the bill with loud rock groups like Atomic Rooster, Genesis, etc... coming out there with only his acoustic guitar, and being largely ignored by rock fans. His first two albums aren't selling, and he did his last live performance, running off stage in the middle of a song. With no live performances, there won't be any more record sales. He's on the escalator to hell...

I'm deep into RMJ's latest book on Nick Drake, and even if you don't care for Drake's unusual style, it offers an excellent picture of the London Folk scene of the late 60s to early 70s. Joe Boyd is featured prominently throughout, including all of the artists involved in the Witchseason offshoot of Island Records. RMJ tracked down and interviewed over 200 musicians and Cambridge friends of one the least talkative subjects for a biography that ever lived. Somehow, he managed to get over 500 pages (including footnotes) on an artist who only lived to be 26 years old.

No drum machine= real music!

I never knew much about any musicians' life before the internet, but reading about MG , the cover of that album says it all. How could such a talented musician wind up with "his dying words, which were, "I got what I wanted ... I couldn't do it myself, so I made him do it."

This whole thing is flipping me out. I never knew MG was into stuff like this. Reading his Wiki entry, he did want to give up on R&B in 1961, and concentrate on jazz and standards. He played the drums and later keyboards and idolized Sinatra. His father was a cross-dressing minister who beat him for years. He transforms Shadow and Why Did I Choose You into his own songs based on Scott's evocative arrangements, and does some great layering of his voice on almost all of his different versions of the tunes. Amazing.

That's all Hollywood seems to be interested in anymore. It even supplied a Ken Russell moment, with the scene of the coke party towards the end.

i don't know where you find these things! I never heard MG interpret a standard like that. The Scott arrangement was pretty powerful, with hints of exotica in the winds that would bring a smile to the face of TTK. The other one with the overdubbed voices sounded like it was overdubbed by a DJ who knows nothing about counterlines. They didn't release the first version MG did in '67, because they claimed MG kept the orchestra waiting because he was doing drugs in the bathroom of the studio and wouldn't come out. When he did come out, they claimed he was slurring all his words, so they decide not to release it. Bobby Scott died when he was only 53, so I doubt he wrote ant memoirs, but there should be a bio written.

He seemed to be going through an Oscar Peterson phase back here. I listened to the rest of the record, and they play Fine and Dandy and Serenata off the metronome. I can understand Fine and Dandy, but Serenata? Who plays a tune like that fast, and without a drummer? He couldn't connect his lines like Oscar, and just winds up making Dick Garcia (the reason I wanted the album-I have every note he played as a sideman now) look good. I did a bunch of gigs with Ronnie Woellner, who used to be a trumpet player with him (until he had an accident and lost his front teeth) and also arranged or him. RW became a pianist himself, who played great changes. I was so busy trying to steal his changes that I didn't ask him about Bobby Scott. Scott wrote Taste of Honey and "He Ain't Heavy, he's MY Brother", and had a hit singing "For Sentimental Reasons", and then did a lot of sessions. I'll have to look him up on Wiki. BTW, a friend told me that Clint Strong (as if he didn't have enough problems) suffered a stroke earlier this year. Did you hear anything about that?

Thanks, but someone read my message on another form, and put up a copy on You Tube.

Interested in any form it's available in, cassette tape, burned CD, vinyl. I don't think it ever made it to CD. Forget above post- the world's leading authority on jazz guitar, Dave Gould, put it on YT!

RIP, great grooving drummer.

Sad news to hear. I used to love The Smothers Brothers Show until CBS took it off the air. Great musical guests, too. RIP, Tommy...

Coryell's autobiography ended with him in a very depressed state, probably because he felt responsible for Emily Remler's (who he lived with) OD death.. They were both junkies at that time. The luthier who made one of LC's jazz guitars, said LC was a very complicated guy. Although he admitted he was not a mainstream jazz player until the late 70s, I still enjoyed his modal playing before that. I saw him live once wen he did a park concert with Vic Juris that was interrupted by rain.

It probably never existed in the first place. Just the deranged delusions of another schizophrenic cat owner...

They never stop! Every day they're correlating two completely unrelated things. Now cats causing a brain disease! LOL!

Sounds like it should be a pisser. I'll check the Libraries first. Thanks! Jones also came out with a Donald Fagen bio in 2022. He's getting like that other guy who wrote the Nick Drake bio- just churnin' them out!