sgcim

Some great stuff! Benny Carter w.strings and the Oscar Peterson Quartet. Never heard BC sound more bop-like. OP more restrained than his own recordings, Herb Ellis on top of things. Jimmy Rushing fine as usual. Bird live at the Royal Roost- great except annoying Symphony Sid, but at least Sid Gribetz is doing the live broadcasting instead of you-know-who....

RIP. The Bergman's were extraordinarily prolific, and just had that gift for coming up with lyrics that never seemed forced, or trite.

I'll never forget when he was on the Terry Gross show. He was in the middle of saying something, and she cut him off with her typical, "Well Howard Hesseman, it's been very nice having you on the show..." And HH yells out "What? You're just going to end the show like that? I wasn't finished!" She does that every show, because she's on schedule, but it was refreshing to hear someone finally call her out on the ridiculous, robotic way she ends a segment. RIP, HH

I still can't believe they didn't go for the FG on 4th down. You've got the ball on the 5 yard line and you're going to give up the ball without putting on some points? That late in the game? This isn't armchair, it's common sense.

"Mickey-One" had tons of outstanding Getz on a superb score by Eddie Sauter. I even taped the best parts of Getz' playing on my VCR,and then duped it on to disc. Some of it is as good as "Focus", and uses the same approach of Getz improvisation over Sauter's great writing. It took me a long time to find this one, but Perry Blackwell led an organ trio and sang in the 1964 film "Dead Ringer", in which she was featured several times in Bette Davis' cocktail lounge. "A Man Called Adam" had some of the best trumpet playing by Nat Adderly (ghosted by Sammy Davis Jr.) I've ever heard, and SDJ himself performs a beautiful ballad that was written by Benny Carter. Mingus was renowned for the Bass and Drum solo in his score for Cassavettes' "Shadows". Plas Johnson is strongly identified with The Pink Panther (1963) series of films. "The Gauntlet" opens up with a long, slow blues, with a screeching trumpet solo by Jon Faddis which is among the best playing he ever did. Art Pepper also joins in.

Comparing the great music that was recorded at Left Bank to some of the music at WGV, they would be lucky to have it.

One of the things I'll always regret is having to turn down Big Joe Turner's 'audition' gig at Tramps back in the 80s. I did a gig with Rudy Williams (Mingus' cousin) in the city, and he had Al Jabaz Williams on keyboard, and Charles "Honeyboy" Otis on drums and vocals. I still think "Honey Boy" was the greatest vocalist/drummer ever. Anyway "Honey Boy" really dug my playing, so he invited me down to do the gig at Tramps with Big Joe Turner. I couldn't make it, because da boss man on my steady gig threatened to fire me if I didn't make his gig, which was the same night. The Joe Turner gig turned out to be a complicated situation: the artist formerly known as Fasstrack wound up doing the gig that night on guitar, but a famous songwriter who was at the gig that night, didn't approve of him for some reason, and he didn't get the gig. The guy that got the gig was a music store owner on LI, who passed away a few years ago. Joe Turner passed away six months after that Tramps gig, and my steady gig went on for about ten years after that, so that was some consolation.

That's great to hear. I got an email from the Queens Library recently saying that he's doing a concert with a young winds player that they're streaming. It really surprised me- in a good way.

It is an unwritten law of Organissimo with some people- any jazz musician who is white is suspect.

Yeah, we read the book in JHS English class, and then I saw the movie It was the life story of David Wilkerson, the priest who converted Nicky Cruz, the leader of a tough Puerto -Rican gang in Williamsburg called the Mau Maus.

RIP, to one of the greatest actors who ever lived. I still cry at the end of, "To Sir With Love" when Lulu sings the title song. He was also great in "A Patch of Blue"...

Yeah, the film was a pisser. It was released on Something Weird in 2001, after being made in 1971 by Psychotronic "B" film director Willam Grefe` They didn't release it, because they didn't think it would be a commercial success. Grefe was was hired by the producer and flown to LA and then told by the producer, 'Oh, by the way, we don't have a screenplay(!). Every bit of dialogue was improvised, and real hippies, homeless alcoholics, Jesus Freaks, etc... just said whatever popped into their head. The plot is about a priest who's teaching at a private school who realizes he's not relating to his hippie students well enough, decides to drop in on a few of them who just cut his class to smoke pot. The students reward him for his concern by spiking his paper cup of coca cola with LSD. He has a trip which makes him lose his faith, and decides to leave the church. A big surprise was Mitch Mitchell (the drummer in The Jimi Hendrix Experience) singing a very hip bossa nova, and a nice jazzy/bluesy rock tune, both written by some guy named Abe Newman(?). BTW, Chubby was the bass player in Woody's band when they played The Ebony Concerto by Stravinsky. He has some great stories about it in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlHE2RAvvPE

I tried to put this in miscellaneous music, but one of my old posts keeps coming up for some reason. Anyway, we were watching a 1971 B movie called "The Psychedelic Priest, and in the opening credits I see Chubby Jackson's name. I figure they're going to have a jazz scene in the movie with Chubby playing bass, so we watch the whole movie, and there's only rock music (featuring Mitch Mitchell singing some nice bossa rock tunes), and no Chubby Jackson playing bass. Then I do a little research on the flick, and find out there was no screenplay to the film; it was all improvised. I then watch an interview with Chubby Jackson, and realize he played a hippie hating guy in a bar scene that was so funny, the 'actors' sitting at the bar are breaking up ;laughing their heads off at Chubby's improvised hate speech about the hippie priest in the bar! It was supposed to be a serious scene, but since there weren't any actors in the movie except the two leads, the extras at the bar couldn't hold in their laughter, and they filmed it that way The scene occurs at about one hour and two minutes plus some odd seconds into the movie. I found it on you tube and tried to cue it up to the bar scene:

A friend of mine's got the SA show where he had Tal Farlow and Eddie Costa on it, but it's only audio- as most people know, they used to re-use the tapes of the shows, and they wiped out countless great performances by many of the greats- as shown with that great Miles Davis Quintet performance. For some reason, Costa only plays vibes on the SA show episode.

The Disco Sucks movement as I remember it was started by all the white hard rock fans, who felt as if their rock faves weren't being played on the air anymore, because everyone was jumping on the disco bandwagon (even Ethel Merman!) to sell records. TTK showed us Jack Jones disco foray. At least songs like "Last Dance" by Donna Summers had a harmonic structure that you could blow on, and use hip subs and funk hits on their arrangements. I used to look forward to playing tunes like that and Barry Manifold's "Could This Be the Magic". We had a drummer who was into Tony Williams, a Trane tenor player who was on the road with Gerry Mulligan and Lou Rawls, and a hip keyboard player who worked out his own ray Charles-type arrangements on all those disco tunes (he played left hand bass, so I had to follow him) so we turned them into hip jazz-fusion tunes, and the lead vocalist had big ears so he could sing right through all of the stuff we did behind him. "Hot Stuff" was another hip arr. we did, where we'd sub D13,Db13 C13 for the A chord. Like Holland and Dozier said, "We just put a bow tie on the funk". As Dan said, "It's the NYT that truly sucks". They revise history every freaking week. Unfortunately, all those talented songwriters like Dozier and Holland have now been replaced by techno-dweebs that couldn't write a decent song if a gun was pointed at their heads.

RIP. I always liked listening to him announce a game. Now we're left with Al Michaelsh. I don't know if heesh too cheap to get implantsh, or he getsh washted before a game, but shomeone should take the mic away from him if he hash to shay a word with the letter esh in it.

During my two year Judee Sill obsession, I did a lot of research on her and her jazz pianist husband, Bob Harris. I wound up correcting a lot of the mistakes they made on both of them.

She's certainly come a long way from her days as a law professor and feminist theorist! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_A._MacKinnon

I'm sure someone has mentioned this before, but is it a coincidence that Donald Byrd wrote a tune named "Omicron" that was recorded on a Paul Chambers LP as well as a Donald Byrd album? Even worse, could this have anything to do with Mark Stryker's accusations of Byrd selling out in the book he wrote about Jazz From Detroit"?

or maybe not; 90 replies for a kenny g thread and 13 replies for a new book on BE?

Yea, Joe still misses playing with Bill every day- even 40 years later!

Yeah, towards the end, Helen, Laurie and even Joe La Barbera would carry him to the stand, and then to the ER. There's ten pages on Ronnie Scott's, and actors such as Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman and John Mesurier attended, as well as numerous local musicians. During one of the gigs, a man who was a friend of Evans' came up to the stage and asked Evans if he could tape the gig with his reel-to-reel tape recorder. He promised Evans it would be just for his personal use, and never see the light of day. The recorder was set up on the table in front of the piano, and JLB thinks three mics were used; for the bass, drums and piano. JLB said the sound was decent, but unfortunately, the piano was out of tune. The fellow promised it was just for his personal use, and would never see light of day. It was later released on Dreyfus Jazz- "Letter To Evan" July 21, 1980. Another album was released on the same label, recorded August 2, 1980, called Turn Out The Stars.

Yeah, towards the end, Helen, Laurie and even Joe La Barbera would carry him to the stand, and then to the ER. There's ten pages on Ronnie Scott's, and actors such as Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman and John Mesurier attended, as well as numerous local musicians.

Finally finished this book, and as you can probably guess, it's not the 'feel-good' book of the year, but it is covered with Joe La Barbera's never ending love for Evans' music, and how thankful he was to be a part of it for the two years they played, and practically lived together. JLB tells his and Evans' stories very simply, and though he had one of his former drum students turned writer help him (Charles Levin), it's pretty clear that JLB had the final say in the editing of the book. It should be pointed out that other than the short period of time in the last two years of his life when the influence of coke addiction caused BE to rush tempos, BE's time was perfect on all of his non-bootleg albums. The problem was, there were 26 albums (mostly bootleg) recorded in the two year period this book covers, and you have to make the judgement on rushing yourself, or use JLB's judgement if you want. When I saw the trio play at the VV for the last time, I didn't enjoy BE's rhythmic/harmonic displacements, but that was 40-years ago, and maybe someday I'll listen to the bootleg album of that night. I play with a pianist who has based his style and BUILT on BE's playing since the age of eleven (he's 67 now) and I love every note he plays, so chances are I wasn't ready for BE's displacements when they first came out. There's a lot of interesting info on BE and JLB that was new to me, and that's another plus the book offers. Joe Puma, one of my fave players, turned out to be the person that recommended JLB for the group, and one of BE's closest friends. They used to go to Yonkers Raceway together, to bet on the horses. It turned out that Puma had suffered a stroke that affected his left arm, forcing him to make his own guitar at Jimmy D'Aq'isto's shop that would work for his disability. One of the central questions JLB brings up over and over again is whether BE wanted to die. He weighs the evidence, and concludes that BE did not fear death; he felt that he was happy to accept death as the price he had to pay for living the way that he chose to live. If death was the price that he had to pay for succeeding in bringing great music to the world, he would pay that price if he had to. He could have seen a doctor sooner, and perhaps lived longer, but he chose to keep shooting dope, because he felt that quitting would have been impossible at that point in his life. BE's friend Gene Lees described BE's life as one long suicide, and one could look at it in that way, but it was more accurately described as Evans' saying, which is constantly brought up again and again,"I follow my code, and am at peace with myself" ( meaning willing to die).

https://rhythmforsale.com/