sgcim

I just heard Fable of Mabel, and that stands up to Blue Serge and Boston Blow-Up as another excellent SC album. He wrote a lot of the tunes on this one, and they're all good. There's even one that Madame Chaloff co-arranged, entitled "Dzot". You can hear the difference Richard Twardzik made in the group on the seven cuts that he plays on, and Johnny Williams was right, RT doesn't make the group swing as much as Russ Freeman does. Freeman also plays some excellent solos, as do Boots Musulli, Serge and Charlie Mariano. There was a rivalry between the musicians of Boston and NYC during the 50s, with the Boston musicians claiming that NYC musicians were thrust into the limelight before they were ready musically, because of all the media coverage, and I'm beginning to think they might have been right. There was never a lack of hype in NYC...

Snidero is the guy who I heard interviewed on WKCR, who throughout the interview claimed he had the one secret about jazz that no one knew about (sounded like clickbait). He finally revealed the secret, which was that jazz musicians work out their solos beforehand. He used as proof the Miles Davis Quintet albums alternate tracks he heard, and claimed that they all played the same basic solos as the tracks used on the albums themselves. I posted about this before, and someone disagreed with me by posting another interview with him, in which he said the same thing, but phrased it differently. As far as in tune alto players, your friend Phil Woods was incapable of playing OOT, unless he was dying of Emphysema on his last albums. Gene Quill,Jackie McLean and many other alto players can't make that same claim.

Wow! I didn't know she was so hardcore. I'm glad she got rewarded with her Band of Gold. She deserved it! Thanks or the info.

Yeah, but no one knew that when she went for her "Band of Gold". A bunch of the rockers were hip to jazz from the 60s Jesse Colin Young had an apt. across the street from the Vanguard. When he did "Ride the Wind," he had Victor Feldman playing vibes with him. Nick Drake played alto sax before he played the guitar. Judee Sill played upright bass with her jazz pianist husband, Bob Harris at clubs in North Hollywood. When they got married in Vegas, they had to play lounges there to afford the trip. Her piano solo on "Enchanted Flying Machines" was worthy of the couples' idol, Ray Charles, who Harris went on the road with for a few years.

James Taylor recently released an album of standards, and is using guys like Steve Gadd in his band. Stevie Winwood got sick of the whole rock scene, and is now performing kind of Latin Jazz tunes that are interesting. Randy Bachman has always been a champion of Lenny Breau, and has sung songs that are the equivalent of jazz bossa novas. Harry Nilsson realized his greatest ambition to put out an album of standards with Gordon Jenkins arrangements. Besides Joni Mitchell's band with Metheny and Jaco, she put out an album of standards backed by an orchestra where her grasp of that idiom was so different than her other stuff, I thought it was some singer from the 50s I'd never heard before. Freda Payne has released albums with big bands, where she sang standards convincingly.

I don't know if it's been mentioned before, but in the Twardzik book someone said his favorite trick in their quartet would be to play a long cadenza at the end of Body and Soul, and undo his belt somewhere in the middle of it, and he'd time his cadenza to end with his low Bb while his pants would drop down to his shoes. What a showman!

Yea, the great ensemble writing and tunes on Boston Blow-Up, plus the fine improvisations of Serge, Boots Mussulli, Herb Pomeroy, and Ray Santisi made Boston Blow-Up more enjoyable for me than Blue Serge. Maybe it was the fact that he was playing with all his buddies from Boston that made Serge play with more abandon than on Blue Serge, where he seemed to be playing more carefully than on Blow-Up and especially the wild Boston 1950 CD, where he was all over the horn. Like you said, one album leads to another, and I'm looking forward to checking out the Boots Musulli Quartet album, and Fable of Mabel LP. I finally found a copy of Serge's biography that I'm expecting to get today, and learn more about him than his rampage on the Four Brothers Band.

I had heard Chaloff a long time ago, and discounted listening to him because of the usual things I don't like about bari players, ponderous low pitch that drives me nuts after I listen to it for too long, overuse of vibrato, no chops, etc... But when I was talking about Richard Twardzik to a friend, he recommended that I buy Chaloff's "Boston 1950". I just listened to it, and couldn't believe it; he was some type of genius on the instrument. Beautiful tone that was almost completely in the upper range of the instrument, great ideas, great chops, no overdone vibrato. I don't know how he did it. As much as I love Pepper Adams, Ronnie Cuber, Nick Brignola and others, I can't listen to them for extended periods of time (i.e. a quartet or trio album) because of the natural ponderous sound of the low pitched instrument. Chaloff seemed to realize this and found some way of overcoming this natural limitation of the instrument. Mulligan realized this, too, but IMHO, lacked the chops, and sound that Chaloff had. I don't know if he plays as well on his studio albums (Boston Blowup and Blue Serge) as he did live here, but I'll check them out. It could be that he had some physical aspect that helped his embouchure (i'e Phil Woods statement that, "I was just a natural") or maybe his famous mother had something to do with it (even though she taught piano), but i was blown away by this album. In the CD booklet, thanks is given to Chuck Nessa, so maybe he had something to do with it. 😁

I just bought this incredible CD, and they're playing off the changes to "Savoy" like you and Jim thought.

LOL! I give up. Can't be any good, Phil Woods plays bells and whistles on it...LOL!

Yeah, he might like PW, too...LOL!

Umm... Dryden?

Yeah, you've told me that story before, and it proves nothing Go ask Ken what he thinks of PW.

There's Phil Woods in there, too.

As said, Moody, Montrose, Fontana,Noto worked steady there, but then the band went on a strike because some of the artistes were using tapes instead of live music. Management stuck with the tapes, and that was another steady gig down the drain. I could tell a story or two about something that happened there, but we all know that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas....

Some tragic stuff. Thanks.

A woman that a friend of mine knows said she was doing a club date with Bill Evans, and the band was so bad, he started banging his head on the piano. Must have been a thing back then... BTW, I read something by someone who said that Davey Schildkraut stopped playing jazz professionally because he wanted to work as a civil servant. Previously, an alto player I used to work with said it was because he lost his wife in a car accident. Do you know which one was the real story?

Okay, playing percussively. I didn't mean it in a negative way; I love Monk.

Why couldn't it just be a play on words that Zieff told Chambers? Chambers uses the words bona fide correctly in the same paragraph. Maybe Chambers wrote it down to show Zeiff's weird sense of humor, and there was no error. Do you have something against Chambers? Did he do something bad to you in a past life?

I think that was just a joke on Zieff's part, because in the same paragraph, the writer says: "But if Zieff counted Twardzik among the outsiders, there were many others in the Boston arts community, including the bona fide bopsters, who counted him among the all-stars, and both sides had a good case."

I think my opinion of TB is colored by my traumatic exposure to his acting in the movie "The Oscar". I should probably go into therapy to deal with that...

He talked about the profound effect Billie Holiday had on him when he saw her in clubs. The guy stole my father's freaking song (This Love of Mine) and my father still NEVER said a bad word about him!!! My mother was one of those bobbysoxers. The guy was like part of my family.

I even liked Ol' Blue Eyes is Back, and there wasn't any swing or standards on it. He did sustain a consistent mood on that record. I don't know who found those songs for him, but he sang the hell out of them. And the arrangements as always were part of what made him so great.

Some story! I thought he was a great guy and all, but I'm beginning to get the impression that you had to see him live to really get the emotional impact of his singing. I never caught him live, so I've always preferred Sinatra, even though I never saw him live either. Torrie Zito was a great guy. At the St. Peter's service for my friend Lenny Sciniscalci, the great alto player/arranger, he was nice enough to gather a big band and play Lenny's arrangements for what seemed like hours. It felt like all of NYC was at his memorial service; they ran out of folding chairs, and we had to stand up!

Leonard Gaskin was a funny guy. I played with him in a band with his buddy Rudy Williams. They'd stop playing in the middle of a tune and start laughing their heads off talking about stuff from the past!