sgcim

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!

You're right of course, but the idiots who are starting the fires aren't as conscientious as you are about charging their lithium batteries, and the headlines always mention E-bikes in conjunction with the fires. If I ever decide to buy an E-bike, I'll show your post to my co-op board. Thanks!

Yeah, they're a blast alright- thry're burning down NYC! I just got a notice from my co-op board saying that they're banned in my building!

I just read the personnel for "Daddy Long Legs" in the Meeker book. It's like a who's who of West Coast jazz of the 50s! That must have been Candoli and Bernhardt on the bone and trumpet solos, but Giuffre, Bob Cooper and Claude Williamson were there, too, plus Manne and all the usual suspects. I don't think you could ask for a more purely jazz score than that!

RIP to another Brazilian great. Always wrote simple melodies that cooked.

She was married to your boy, John B., which she described as a really miserable marriage. He must have been as big a jerk as his guitarist, Vic Flick described him as, to blow it with Birkin. RIP.

They're having a group listen to this at the NYPL, and then some 'expert' will tell us what they think we should have thought of it. No thanks!

I have a special attachment to it because "This Love of Mine" is on it, and there was a big family story involving it. My father was a guitarist (he left me a '35 D'Angelico) and songwriter back then, and they had a songwriting contest sponsored by Tommy Dorsey in NY, so he sends my aunt down to the hotel where the Dorsey band was playing to give them his best song, "This Love of Ours". She goes up to Buddy Rich (who was Dorsey's drummer back then) and gives it to him, and he said he'll give them the music. The next thing you know, "This Love of Mine" comes out with three names on it, Parker, Sanicola, and Sinatra. MY father went to a lawyer to see if he had a case , but the lawyer said they were too clever about how they changed it. I looked at it many decades after that, and the lawyer was right. They took the rhythm of the melody, and simply moved it up sequentially in pitch, so they were covered legally. Otherwise, the chord progression, most of the words, and the song structure were identical. As long as the melody is changed, you ain't got a case. My brother stupidly claimed on a You Tube video of the song that they stole it from our father, and Parker's son got on and started cursing him out saying, "you son of a bleeping bleep, how dare you claim my father stole that song from your father, etc... I grew up with a strong distrust of the music biz as a result of that, which I believe was well-founded.

It's a great book. Even Saul bellow agreed, in an essay I just read by him on it. I wonder what percent of people under 40 have read it. Somehow I don't think it's a large percentage. I should read Shadow and Act someday. I've read everything he wrote about Charlie Christian and loved it.

That's what she thought it was. She'll take one look at the first page, and throw it across the room. On your next evening walk, her father will be waiting for you with a baseball bat. As he chases you down the street, he'll be yelling at you, "Why are you exposing my daughter to great literature?! With Chat GBT we don't need anymore of that stuff. We can get Chat GBT to write her a story about a rapper who turns into an invisible man, and becomes rich and famous, not so black and so blue.

At one point the author was saying something about the Mccarthy hearings, and he referred to them as 'Commies'(!) I knew I was in for a rough ride... I spent a few hours listening to the studio album made for Barclay in Paris, Volume 1. We're listening to three different types of music when we're hearing Twardzic play. The first is the music of Bob Zeiff, which uses some phrases of jazz, but isn't in the song forms that jazz uses. Zeiff was a 20th Century music classical composer, who was constantly being turned down by people like Bethlehem records because his music was so weird. He was even supposed to write the music for some well known film, but got turned down for that, too. He was Twardzic's music teacher, and that's how his six songs from the studio album made for Barclay in Paris, Volume 1.got on there. When Baker was looking for a pianist to go on the European tour, he first asked the pianist he was using in the States, Russ Freeman, but Russ looked at Chet's eyes, and he could tell he was on narcotics, so he turned it down. Then he went to John Williams, a straight ahead player on the East Coast who played on some Jimmy Raney and Stan Getz, Zoot and Al albums. So Williams went to hear them play at a club, and Peter Littman was on drums, and he was terrible. Williams asked around about Littman, and everyone said he was a lost-cause junkie, so Williams said he'd only do the gig if Littman wasn't doing it. Chet said "Fine, use whatever drummer you want to use. A month went by, and he didn't hear from Chet, so figured it wasn't happening. Then he gets a call from Chet asking him to come to a rehearsal in Yonkers. When he gets there, Littman is setting up his set! Chet goes into his junkie's apology, but Williams drives back to Manhattan without even playing with them. Russ Freeman thinks Twardzik would be perfect for the job, and Chet hires him on the spot, but Twardzic says he doesn't want to play "My Funny Valentine" all night, and so Chet tells him to bring his own music, and Twardzic winds up bringing six Zieff songs, along with some of his own tunes.. Two bass players turn down the job, so Chet hires Jimmy Bond, a bass player from Philly, who just graduated Julliard Chet flies to Europe, and the rhythm section has to take a ship. So the second type of music is Twardzic's which is similar to Zieff's, but a little Monkish, without the banging. The third type of music they play are standards. I guess Twardzic's playing is similar to Monk's without the banging, but it's much more theoretical-based than Monk.

After using my brother's connections with Columbia University, I was able to take out "Bouncin' With Bartok" The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzic by Jack Chambers, and found it to contain a good picture of Boston's jazz scene in the 50s, with a great deal of info on Bob Zieff, the so called,'Underground Jazz Composer' The only info it gives on the life of Peter Littman after Chet Baker is that he was known to be working in a gas station. I've got to take off now, but I'll go more into the book when I get back. The thing is at least $100 on Amazon, and goes as high as $387.

Yea, last night I brought down one of my charts on a standard that not too many people play, and some of the dudes were wondering what it was. All my charts are meant to propel the improviser into the zone, if they have the means to get there, but the notes have to be there, too. I try to think of writing things that Eddie Costa would play off of; a cat who would go deep into the zone almost always, but the notes would still be there. The alto player was trying to get there, but he didn't quite make it. Then the trombone player, a Swiss cat, Amadis Dunkel, who almost always gets there, just exploded! The cat was playing things that I couldn't even imagine existed, and the room just shot up so high into the zone, I didn't think it was ever coming back. But then the trumpet player (who usually doesn't get the solos, but the regular guy wasn't there last night), just took off like a rocket! On both of those solos i was jumping up and down, yelling out "Yes!" over and over again. Surprisingly, the tenor player who almost always gets there, just couldn't get there note-wise ( maybe because it wasn't a tune he was familiar with), and was anti-climatic solo-wise. Still the band played the schist out of it, and I was in seventh heaven. The al to player came as close a s I ever heard him

Dude had serious chops. I've had thoughts about doing a chart on Sunday in NY, but hearing someone like Mel Torme corn it up just stops me from going over the line. The bridge is pretty weak, too. I did one on a tune in the same groove by John Williams, because there wasn't a weak note in it, but SINY just doesn't call out to me enough. Nero must have done something good with those chops, in a jazz vein. He was admired by Horowitz, Ray Charles, etc... RIP...

Next thing you'll be suggesting Hawaii 5-0 with the drum fill!

Yeah, not obscure enough...

It was said that Tandyn Almer had a hand in writing the title song. Was that true?