sgcim

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...

What, me worry?

RIP. I don't know if it was Jaffe, but a friend of mine was telling me a story about a musician friend of his who read MAD a lot back in the 70s. One time they were talking together and his friend all of a sudden reached the conclusion that one of their writers wasn't funny anymore, and he had to tell him how to improve his writing in MAD- IN PERSON!!!!! He got on the subway and went right into their office, and asked to see the writer. They wouldn't let him in, and he started freaking out, so they had to call the cops, and they had to take him away to Bellvue! That was just the start of a long psychotic break, and he wound up starving himself to death because he refused to eat. My sister always liked to annoy me by telling me I looked like Alfred E. Newman. What, me worry?

"The World is What it is" by Patrick French

Sound's bland.

Dick's son got back to me about Miles Davis' thoughts on If. The comment he really made was much more profane, but TS probably cleaned it up for the interview . What he really said was, "You guys sound like a bunch of N-words.

It was nothing, really.😁 Although keeping TTK and Jim in line was quite a chore sometimes,,,😆

Two Emails sent to me by Dick Morrissey''s son: https://jazzjournal.co.uk/2022/12/07/terry-smith-what-we-played/ and also some files on the net of taping going on in The Bull's Head of people like Morrissey, Terry Smith and Tony Lee, another great UK player almost completely unknown in the US: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_4h4o5gAuTOTEdVdzJXSmI2M1E?resourcekey=0-4MrnTKWHVZYG3wTDWCtCTA

RIP, I also loved the stuff he did on Channel 13

I probably posted here about how Aaron Sachs gave me the record with that Tiny Kahn tune, and asked me to transcribe it, to see how close it was to "DL". I told him it had strong similarities, but it wasn't a ripoff. Phil Schaap had Aaron on his show, just to talk about the evolution of Donna Lee. When we used to play it on a gig, Aaron would say, "Let's play that line they wrote on Donna Lee." This fostered the impression that they might have started out with Tiny's tune, and then each player would subtract or add parts to it over time, until they arrived at what we now know as Donna Lee. Jazz was a more communal, jam session art back in Aaron's time, and everybody played with everyone else after their commercial gigs, and would come up with contrafacts in that manner. Those cats used to jam in The Bronx over Aaron's parent's house.

There was a tradition of the leader taking all the credit for any tunes a new sideman wrote if they wanted to play on their first album with the group. In his autobiography, Charles Fox talks about his career as a jazz pianist. He was playing for Dizzy's group, and it came time for them to make an album. Dizzy wanted to record a suite that Fox wrote, and Fox was overjoyed. Then Dizzy told Fox that he wanted credit for Fox' Suite. That was the end of Fox' career as a jazz musician...

But the general audience is whom I'm addressing. If it just sounds like a stream of notes with nothing they can relate them to, who's going to want to listen to it? They don't need to know the changes, just have something they can latch on to so it won't be so abstract to them, and they dismiss jazz as "just a bunch of notes".

That's why these horn players and guitarists that post themselves soloing over changes without a chordal instrument playing changes or playing the head while they're playing at some club, are just turning people off to the music, rather than offering something that at least some people might appreciate. They have a barely audible bass (on my JBLs), and drums as the only audible accompaniment, and people are supposed to hear the changes?

No matter what that You Tube User/ Nurse with a PHD (so he calls himself a "Doctor") John Campbell says, masks are the only things that offer some protection from infection.