sgcim

Jimmy Raney painted, he even named an album "In Three Degrees". The most fascinating story about a jazz musician who paints is Bob Bruno. He was born into a musical family, his father was a composer/trumpet player, who left the family to further his career as a composer (wound up writing for Disney). Bob had these weird nightmares as a kid (he was playing in bars since the age of Five!) that had very dissonant music and abstract figures and shapes. He tried to paint the dreams shapes and figures, but he never heard the music till he heard Albert Ayler for the first time. Here's hours of his art, with his music https://superdreamer.webs.com/temppaintii.htm

The host, Mitch (?), who usually plays fusion, had Mark Whitfield as a guest, and played a tape of a guitarist playing all alone with his bass tone control on eleven. It sounded terrible, but they seemed to be hinting that it was POSSIBLY a tape of Wes Montgomery practicing. It did not sound anything like Wes, but they were all excited about it for some reason. They started guessing that it was someone like Rodney Jones or George Benson (both more probable than Wes), but they had no idea who it was. I pulled up to where we were rehearsing, and I asked a sax player if he knew anything about it, and he said they were talking about playing some obscure Wes tape for their fund drive last week. Was anyone listening to this who knew what was going on?

Jack passed yesterday just before 8:00pm of kidney disease. RIP.

Dick's son sent me this great article on his father written by Allen Barnes: https://www.alanbarnesjazz.com/post/top-tenor

I heard an interview with him once in which he said that his first love in life was to be a jazz arranger. He even went to Berklee to study jazz arranging! Then a Black Day in July came along...

That was my fave Randy Weston album, but Randy hated it with a passion. I went through a Sebesky hate period, because of those Wes Montgomery records he 'sanitized', but then I got a chance to play some of his arrangements, and I realized he was a great arranger. RIP

Played the 1958 Paris Concert. Does it get better than this?

A sax player friend of mine who's in his 80s, saw Cannonball at Birdland, and after a set, he complimented Cannon on his playing. Cannon gave him a huge bear hug, lifting him off the floor!

Speaking of narrations, I once led a gig where I hired a sax player friend of mine who I had done a lot of gigs with, so I thought I knew what to expect. All of a sudden he calls "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" and grabs the mic. He then proceeded to recite Cannonball's speech verbatim. I felt like hiding behind an amp ,or pulling out his mic jack, before he made people start to throw bottles at him or something. It turned out to be a dream of his to do that on a gig, and I guess he figured that since i was a pretty loose leader, he could live out the dream on my gig. There was something about watching a white, nerdy looking guy make that speech which gave me the feeling that it wasn't going to be received too well, but thios was in the East Village, and I guess the people thought it was cool or something. It went over pretty well, and my friend was in some Nirvana-like state for the rest of the gig. He LIVED THE DREAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

RIP to a great man. I would've loved to seen what was going down when Tony Scott was his MD back in the 50s. It must have been a wild scene!

Could be. The guy seemed to take so much glee advertising it over the small club.

Yeah, and it was in the middle of the AIDS crisis. I wonder if the guy would've been fired today.

I never saw that one. Thanks for posting it, it was a riot! I was at Zinno once catching Jimmy Raney, and PS walked it with a young guy and the young guy's girlfriend. I was sitting at the bar, and the Hispanic bartender says to me in a very loud voice, "Hey man, do you know who that is? That's Paul Shaffer, man! He's gay, and he's a junkie! And he's got AIDS!" The guy was laughing his head off. I didn't know what to say. I have no idea if anything he said was true. I never knew he co-wrote "IRM". Maybe that bartender wasn't kidding around.

Yeah, he played a pathetic version of "Emily" that was embarrassing It sounded like he was stumbling through it playing folk-rock licks.

I wound up with a lot of Herbie Mann albums, even though I didn't care for his playing. He always used good guitarists, so that was why I bought them. Same thing with Red Norvo. I recently found out that Tal Farlow couldn't stand Red's playing either; he just played with him to get somewhere. When I met Tal, he and his friend would periodically joke to themselves saying, "It's 8:00pm in Las Vegas; Red's probably getting ready to start his first set." Then they'd laugh their heads off. I had no idea what that was about back then.

I always looked forward to Chris Elliot's appearances on Letterman. Letterman himself made one demand of Paul Shaffer when he hired him as MD of the show: "Listen Paul, you can play whatever you want to play on the show except that Jazz stuff. I can't stand that jazz stuff."

Still?

There's an album by Mat Matthews called "The Gentle Art of Love", and there's his album called "The Modern Art of Jazz" Which one do you mean?

Maybe white jazz critics will start to understand what white jazz musicians have had to go through.

They used to have great music for TV shows in the 70s using jazz composers like Oliver Nelson and the great West Coast jazz guys. Then the digital synth came around, and they threw all those guys out, and all you hear is synthesized junk.

Yeah! I played that arr. with the Latin section in the middle. Even that one's at 125.bpm, and it swung like mad. Great Danny Moore and Gato. Oliver could do no wrong!

Yeah, from the personnel on the Q record, I thought it was the same band as the one that was supposed to perform the jazz musical that Q wrote, with just a few subs for the people that bailed. After the disaster of the musical and the tour, I don't know why Q would try again; he was supposedly heavily in debt from it. The Q recording is so bad, that I can't listen to it again; besides the tempo and the playing being so bad, they swing like a freaking marching band, and the double time in the rhythm section is so bad, it sounded like it was going to be a train wreck, so I don't if it's the same chart as the Lockjaw one. It's a pleasure to hear the Lockjaw version again, which has great players on it, the piece being played at the intended tempo (Oliver Nelson made sure of that), and it swings like a mother. I just can't figure out how to tell the guy that he chose the worst version of it to copy, and the wrong tempo to play it at without without giving him the impression that I think he's an asshat. I could have him and the leader listen to the Lockjaw version, but to expect that from either of them might be asking a bit much of them.

Yeah, but Q said to the audience it was an original, and didn't mention ON, so he left the audience with the impression that it was HIS original! I've heard all the other versions, and IMHO none of them come close to BATAT. And that was Bill Evans playing the blues on that album.

A younger guy wrote an arr. of Stolen Moments for a big band I play in featuring me on guitar, and it felt uncomfortable due to the rushed sounding tempo. I asked him where he got it from, and he said he copied it from a Quincy Jones Live album called The Wide World of Quincy Jones. It was recorded with the 1961 band he had on the disastrous tour of Europe, and he introduces it as an original (without mentioning Oliver Nelson!) and kicks it off at about 132bpm. It features Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dixon, with Freddie playing one of Oliver nelson's ideas from the Blues and the Abstract Truth album, then they go into a double time section that swings like a rusty gate. I mentioned to the guy in the band that it was a much faster version that the one on BATAT, and he looked at me puzzled. He had never heard the BATAT album,(!) and had written the arr. on commission for a guitar player who wanted to record Stolen Moments. Here's the Q version (I stopped listening after Freddiie's solo: Another strike against Q...