sgcim

Very sad to hear. Jazz in the Movies has been my go to reference music book for decades, in fact I have to go to it right now to find out who played guitar in a Raksin film soundtrack I just heard. RIP, Mr. Meeker, your immortality is guaranteed.

Sad to hear. He was all over the place in the 60s, playing with jazz groups, and folk groups; he played on 191 records! He played on the first acoustic version of "The Sound of Silence by S&G I liked the songs he wrote for his son, but the strings sounded out of tune. I wonder why Spike fired his father for his soundtracks? Frank Strozier featured his songs on Late Night and March of the Siamese Children, and spoke very highly of him as a composer. I went to a jazz club once, and flipped out when I found the rhythm section for 'Long Night" was playing there; Chris Anderson, Bill, and Baby Sweets. Lee's wife was at the door, greeting people and taking the door in. When I told her that was my fave album, she started laughing, and told me to go up to the guys and tell them that. We got into a conversation about the record, and I told her I liked "The Man That Got Away" the most, and she seemed puzzled and asked me , "What about "How Little We Know"?" That was one of those moments where I felt like I had gotten it all wrong, and I listened to HLWK closer, and I heard what she meant. After that, I played HLWK on every gig that I could call it on, wrote a big band arr. of it, composed a contrafact on it, and transcribed all the solos on it. Since they played it in F, I assumed the bass played a low F on the E string as the pedal bass, but something always seemed a little unfocused, and overpowering about that. I listened to the record again, and realized Bill was playing the F an octave higher than that, and that made all the difference. Thanks for the music lesson Bill, and Rest in Peace, Brother.

RIP, but I can't say Iiked the way she sang.

Here's his son on bari back when he was at Oxford: http://www.elmvillagearts.co.uk/audio/oxford-university-big-band/isis-4.mp3

Probably Jim Parker might have had something to do with them, based on that great doc fent99 posted, but Betjeman's son became a highly skilled contemporary composer, studying with Stefan Wolpe. He has some of his pieces on You Tube:

Yes, Cornwall, because he wanted to die where he came from, with Archibald, his teddy bear lying on his chest. His son Paul, probably the only person in the UK that despised him, became a jazz tenor sax player, dropping out of Oxford to study jazz at the Berklee School of Music. He taught and was a professional musician for a while, and fell in with some good musicians who happened to be Mormons, and he became a Mormon (which really angered his Anglican father)and studied music history at Brigham Young University in Utah. He wound up in NYC as the head of the music dept. at Riverdale School, and marrying a woman who studied Anglican church music, so maybe he and his father got together again before his father died in 1984.

One thing I'll never understand is that he never recorded one of his best tunes, "I Can't Make It Anymore". Richie Havens did a version that was fine, but a little too fast for my taste, and McKendree Spring did a version that was perfection. There were a few other not so good recordings of it, but we'll never get to hear GL's versioon.

Dennis Elliot, the great jazz drummer for the UK band If, quit music entirely and became a sculptor. Rick Laird, bass player at Ronnie Scott;s and later for The Mahavishnu Orchestra did the same thing, but he became a photographer.

A doctoral student I was talking to recently said Duke listened to some of the Neo-Classical composers, and used some of their ideas in his music. Speaking of Delius, there was a good story about Duke, Delius and Percy Grainger. Grainger did a presentation at one of the music colleges he taught at (Julliard?), and he announced that he was going to present a concert of music by the greatest living composer, but Delius wasn't available, so he had to get the second greatest living composer, Duke Ellington. Duke and his band gave them a concert they'd never forget.

Only an Eddie Costa expert could solve that mystery! Thanks! I forgot that story JA told me about Dorsey and Hefti, what a riot! I just found out the other day that JA got the schist beat out of him every day by his ogre of a father when he was a kid. As he told the story, both fists were clenched. He said he'd pound the crap out of his father if he was still alive now.

I read his bio by A.N. Wilson, and found out that he had released four albums with him reciting his poetry accompanied by music composed by Jim Parker. I thought You Tube would never have anything like that, but they had at least three of his records. Initially posted this in the classical section, but it sounds anything but. It's much more musical than rap, and more fun than anything by the Beats:

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.