sgcim

Yeah, they have to get out of bed when their mommy wakes them, and go to the computer and record their 32nd youtube video hit. Hilarious stuff TTK!

Another West Coast studio player just passed, the guitarist Bill Pittman. He was 102 years old.

Martha's vocal nuances on Jimmy Mack still give my head a rush when the Vandellas come in on the second chorus. behind her. Ain't no hip-hop doin' that to me, No sir. RIP, L.D.

I played for a few years with CF in a theater gig. Very quiet man; he just drank a bottle every night, played poker, then did the gig.

Scary stuff, glad you're okay!

Ernie sounds fine on this album and the other one, but pretty weak on the "Presenting" "Checkmate" cut (a WITTCL contrafact). Everyone has off days, or it could be they didn't tune the piano. Whatever. I have a much higher opinion of him from listening to the other two LPs.

George Barrow told me Eric Dolphy told him he played OOT on the flute on purpose to imitate the sounds of the the African flutists he had heard. George knew Eric very well, and played baritone sax on "Blues and the Abstract Truth". Eric was a consummate musician, and proved he could do whatever the musical situation called for.

Not much. My Uncle had the original vinyl on Presenting Ernie Henry, and his out of tune playing on that LP made it unbearable. I'm not a stickler on OOT playing, but that one just turned me off to him. It could've been a bad reed, faulty horn or whatever. I'll check out other albums. I loaned Frank Strozier's Long Night to a sax player i worked with a lot, and he said FS played a little OOT. Strozier said he quit playing the sax because he couldn't find a good reed. Alto is a tough instrument to play in tune on.

I first heard of him as Steve Kuhn's alto sax and flute player way back on "Trance". Then I went with a keyboard player friend of his I was playing in a band with to see him with Mike Stern at Stern's 'club' 55 Grand St.and he knocked me out. I played a gig in a big band with him and then...

I just heard Nascienta Suite by Steve Slagle, and was completely blown away. I went to his website, and found he has a book out on composition and improvisation. Has anyone bought it/read it? Is it worth buying? Does he hip you to the ideas he uses in his playing? TIA

Do tell!

I did a search and came up with Mann and Hilliard, but Wikipedia said it was Schwartz. Does this mean that Wikipedia is wrong?! That means that everything I know is wrong!!!!!! Johnny Smith is the only instrumentalist I've ever heard play "By Myself". He plays it pretty up there. There must be others...

His son made one record on Muse! Check out the lineup: JONATHAN SCHWARTZ SINGS ARTHUR SCHWARTZ: Alone Together Jonathan Schwartz: vocals Harold Mabern: pianos Buser Williams: bass Ben Riley: drums Jack Wilkins: guitar Marvin Stamm: trumpet, flugelhorn The String Reunion

Add to that "Wee Small Hours" and "Then I'll Be Tired of You" and you've got quite a fantastic collection of standards. His son Jonathan used to sing them at clubs at one time. He's married to Zohra Lampert, the actress, who also does some singing, I think.

Also wrote Alone Together. Jonathan Schwartz, the well known rock DJ at WNEW in the 60s, and then jazz /Sinatra DJ at WNYC for decades is Arthur Schwartz' son. He played a lot of private tapes from his father, and was like a Phil Schaap of The Great American Songbook. In the great #Me Too Purge at WNYC, he got the boot, along with Lenny Lopate and John Hockenberry. I think you can still here him on Sirius Radio on "The Jonathan Show".

They're just envious of horn and string players.Sorry piano boys, you can't have everything.

Thanks for the link!

I know this is nothing new, but I'm reading "About Time", a recent bio of Stevie Winwood, and the author, Chuck Sullivan, is an accomplished record producer, recording engineer , and drummer. He has a large section on SW's years as a session player, and he raves about the creative, spontaneous things SW did as a sideman with Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Leon Russell,B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Lou Reed, Robert Palmer, etc., back in 1968-74., when recording technology was still very basic. "Today's recording tools, which basically allow for a cut and paste approach to forge a perfect pitch-corrected sound, can actually discourage imagination and inspiration.....Even the most basic home studio can now cut and paste audio, as well as pitch-correct vocals, resulting in 'perfect' albums that often have no individuality." I think that about says it all.... .

Before the pandemic, the "hipper than thou" made a decree that you can't play jazz standards in NYC clubs anymore. All you'd hear by the usual suspects were these modal originals with abstract, unmemorable attempts at melodies, with stacks of fourths as harmony, unrelated to any discernible home key. The decree stated that if you did play standards, they would have to be in complex time signatures like 11/8, 17/4, etc... A friend of mine played me a stream from Small's with a pianist playing "My Romance" as a ballad in 7/4. I asked him if he could count it out, and he said no. I asked him if he could feel the ONE, and he said no. I told him I thought it sucked, and asked him what he liked about it. He said it was different. Next week it would be something different. They're taking jazz, a difficult type of music for non-jazz musicians to listen to in the first place, and making it even more difficult to listen to, all because of this endless fetish they have with 'originality'. I can understand if they write contrafacts of a standard to avoid paying for the rights to play on the changes to a song they like, but they're too hip to do that now....

Snidero was being interviewed on one of the jazz shows on WKCR. Search their archives.

I made a proclamation on the melodic genius of "Joy Spring" on another forum, and was amazed to get a reply from a young self-proclaimed 'genius' from the UK that it was quite ordinary. The young 'artiste' released his first album recently, and I wasn't surprised to hear the record was the aural equivalent of a vomitorium.

That's probably no coincidence. Graettinger lived for a few years with the infamous Gail Madden, who along with Gerry Mulligan, were Ayn Rand fanatics. They would act out entire scenes from The Fountainhead during their month-long sojourn from NY to California, where Madden introduced Graettinger to Mulligan.

Yeah, in his autobiography,, Harvey Brooks said Miles told him to show up for three days at the studio, and they jammed for three days without any music, and the next thing you know, Teo edited it into Bitches Brew. HB said although he's listed on something like five MD albums, the only time he played with MD, Zawinul,etc... were just those three days. Then you have Jim Snidero saying in an interview on WKCR that the secret to jazz is that based on his study of alternate takes of Miles Davis' Coltrane period Quintet/Sextet albums, none of that stuff was improvised. Every take had the same solos (at least by Trane and Davis) that appeared on the records. Snidero claims that this is true of all the jazz records he and his contemporaries make today. No improvisation...

I just heard this said in an interview with a well known musician, who has won several DB Polls. In fact, he said it several times during the interview, but the 'genius ' interviewer didn't ask him to explain what he meant by it. What's your interpretation of his comment?

Gene Puerling! I should be thrown in jail for all the ideas I've stolen from that genius!