sgcim

Finally finished the excellent book GA Russell recommended. The author doesn't just list the films and TV shows, and the composers and personnel; he gives you a detailed synopsis of each film, an unflinching review of the film, background on the actors, directors and composers, and gives details about each scene in the film where the music is particularly effective, or in some cases, completely inappropriate. A good example of the latter is the scene from "Satan in High Heels" where the beautiful flute cue Mundell Lowe wrote was actually for the sexy lead actress stripping, and then going skinny-dipping in a lake! If I had known that when I wrote it up for clarinetist Joe Dixon, maybe i would've come up with a more 'sensual' interpretation.. An interesting pattern emerged in French films of the fifties and early sixties.Directors would hire jazz musicians with no background in film scoring to write scores for their films, and then chop them up, to the musicians' dismay. We have musicians like Barney Wilen, Art Blakey(!), Thelonious Monk, Martial Solal,, Charlie Rouse, and others, being hired to score films, and then finding out that the directors would chop up their music into just seconds of sound that were used in various scenes. In the US, even Dizzy Gillespie, Mal Waldron and others were hired for scores for films and/or TV shows. Duke Ellington also did TV show scores (besides the well-known film score to "Anatomy of a Murder") and Count Basie even did the theme song to a TV show. In the 60s, Lalo Schifrin emerges as the crime and spy jazz king, as he builds up to his complete domination of the field with the Mission Impossible theme. He attributes the success of the theme to the fact that using a 5/4 theme left people excited, because they didn't know when the next measure would start. I was just notified by the library that the second volume of Bang's Crime and Spy Jazz On Screen has come in, but due to the pandemic, they won't be open until Tuesday. This one deals with 1971 to the present.

I thought you lived in Brooklyn. Where is everybody going?

I. Mr. sgcim was recognized for the above project, which will bring a jazz guitar performance to the Queens Theatre in Flushing Meadow Corona Park Queens at 2:30pm on October 16, 2021. Admission is free, but you have to RSVP a ticket to the 2:30pm performance.

Looks like they didn't change their mind; Moderna is going to be approved at one half the dose of the first two shots. I'm going to be a mRNA Mutant!

The only difference according to that is the time after the last shot that they're given. In my case it was seven months after my second shot. They said that it was the same dose as the other two, although I read somewhere that Moderna originally planned to give half the dose of the first two as a booster. They must have changed their mind when the Delta variant came around.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/28/1041372956/dr-lonnie-smith-master-of-the-hammond-organ-dies-at-79

NY is a very corrupt place.The pianist in a big band I play in just gave me the address of a drug store that's giving them to people left and right. After the shot, they say, "Now you should buy all your drugs here from now on". They don't give a schist about age, but they did turn down some woman in her 30s! My friend who got the shot two weeks ago is about 60. This is the North Shore of Lawnguyland, where "Money talks", in a voice that rustled. Opening line of which great novel?

RIP, to a great organist. Hope my source is wrong.

Got my Moderna booster yesterday. Spent last night with the chills, aches, 102 fever, shaking. Feel better today, but fell asleep on the couch. a few hours ago. A friend of mine who got the Moderna two weeks ago from his doc said that the doc told him the side f/x get stronger after each shot, but they go away in about 24 hours. He said that your body starts making antibodies after only seven days, not 14 like the 18 year-old medical genius that gave me the shot in the drug store told me.

I was lucky enough to attend a concert at Carnegie Hall that featured Blacher's Variations on a Theme of Paganini. I enjoyed it greatly. I had come to hear William Walton's Second Symphony conducted by Andre Previn. Previn always programmed great modern music that was still tonal. Look for work by Arthur Honegger Howard Hanson's Second Symphony. William Walton Paul Hindemith Norman Della Joio Charles Koechlin Harold Shapero Bernard Herrmann's Symphony Shostakovich Miklos Rosza

I have multiple copies of four artists- Bernard Herrmann, Johnny Smith, Eddie Costa and Tal Farlow. With Costa, I have House of Blue Lights on LP. Then a friend of mine (and Eddie's) gave me a burnt copy of it. Then I bought the complete EC CD set Same with JS- I spent 40 years buying everything he did on vinyl. Then I bought the Mosaic set. Same with Tal- I paid $40 for a Tal LP in '72, the I spent another $20 when it first came out on CD. Then I spent another $20 on a special pressing of it that had some extra cuts on it. With Herrmann's Symphony, I bought it twice on vinyl, because the first copy was worn out. Then I bought the CD- all Unicorn, with him conducting.

How would I know? I only met him once in my entire life, over 40 years ago! I'm glad PM helped you out. I'm just quoting what Gary Burton said about PM in GB's autobiography.

He knew what he wanted, and if he didn't get his way, he'd beat the crap out of you. He was a bully as a kid, and he stayed one all his life. He fired his whole band when they were recording "Forever Changes", and replaced them with the Wrecking Crew on a few tunes, until they begged him for another chance. When the band asked him where the money was from their first album, he showed them his new sports car, and said, "There it is", and drove off, laughing. The title of Forever Changes came from when he split up with his girlfriend, and she said, "Last night you told me you loved me forever!" So he answered her, "Well, forever changes! He turned down the chance to play at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, because he said it was too far away (They almost never left LA), and he didn't work for free (like all the other bands who played there agreed to do). He turned down the chance to play at Woodstock,, because he said it was too far away, and didn't pay enough. He fired the guitarist on "Four Sail", by telling him to meet him in the studio the next morning, and when the guitar player showed up, there was a sign on the door saying, "You're fired, *****! The guitarist, Jay Donnelan, still has no idea why he was fired. Confused? The guy was nuts!

You expect me to read 150 pages? I read Lee's biography a long time ago, so maybe you're right. Maybe it was his son that hooked him up with Chico. They were both products of mixed race marriages. Lee's real name was Arthur Porter.Taylor. I read about some connection they had when this book was published. Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book Of Love - The Authorized Biography of Arthur Lee (LIVRE SUR LA MU) Paperback –. It's only 336 pages.

Oh my God! One of the best that ever lived. I asked a virtuoso bass player: Who's the bass player that plays most in tune (something impossible to achieve according to Gunther Schuller)? He said it was Mraz. That's why he's on so many records. Irreplaceable...RIP

Man, you're a very strong person to get through all of that, Allen. Let's hope the worst is over. Horrible to hear about Peplowski. I don't know anything about that disease; is the prognosis good? He's the nicest guy, and greatest clarinet/sax player around. I used to give him rides to the gigs that we did together, and felt like it was an honor to do so. One time he walked up to me and said, "I like the way you play". It took me a few hours to process that!

Some guy online is a fanatic about the tune, and wanted me to write and perform an arr. of it, but he didn't want to pay me! I wrote one anyway, and didn't send him anything. There's a hell of a lot of info about Mancini's career, and i should have listed that song from Mike Hammer as "Riff Blues" instead of Riff Jazz. There's some good stuff on movies where jazz groups improvised on films, rather than write a score, sometimes with disastrous results. He said Miles Davis' music to Elevator to the Gallows sounds great alone, but when they put it to the movie, the music was completely inappropriate to the film (except for one scene) .As usual, Miles lied about the whole situation, according to the French director. Dizzy Reece did the same thing on "Nowhere to Go", using Tubby Hayes in his group, but it was done with written cues, so it went much better.

I just got that Crime and Spy Jazz book from the library the other day, and it's really exhaustive. The guy writes about music from TV shows that were cancelled after their premiere, or a few shows, and there's not even a recording of them! I don't know how he got to hear them. He's musically illiterate; to describe the flute melody to the Mission Impossible theme, he uses the numbers 3-3-3-2! I guess that's supposed to mean a triplet and a half note? a four note motif? He's got good taste, though. He was able to weed through all the recordings of "Riff Jazz" from Mike Hammer, and pick out Tony Scott's superb version as the best one. He wanders from the Crime and Spy music sometimes. For example, he singles out Alex North's theme for A Streetcar Named Desire as a good jazz theme (which it is), but there's no crime or spying going on in Streetcar that I know of... He finds interviews with some obscure interviews with writers like Kenyon Hopkins, and George Duning that are really interesting. It's kind of annoying that he brings up Raksin (which he spelled Raskin(!)), and the theme from Laura in the intro, but then never mentions him again! What about that wild theme for "The Big Combo" (1955)? He does say that he knows some people are going to be mad at him for leaving out things like that, and advises people to tell him about it, suggesting, "That's what second editions are for". Anyway, there's a ton of stuff about Nelson Riddle, Billy May "Johnny" Williams (yes, that one), and many others, so check it out, if that's your bag.

I was wrong about the tune Arthur Lee recorded with Chico. It was "What's Your Story Morning Glory?" I think Ken reviewed that album: I always was fascinated with the observation that Frank Zappa made about the record business in the 60s, when you still had these 'old guys' running the labels, who were willing to take a chance on unusual music, just for the sake of, "hey, maybe it'll make a few bucks for us". As a result, you got people like Arthur Lee, whose music appealed to jazz musicians at the time, and who collaborated with Bryan McLean, a Musical Theater songwriter, whose "neighbor Frederick Loewe, of the songwriting team Lerner & Loewe, recognized him as a "melodic genius" at the age of three as he doodled on the piano. His early influences were Billie Holiday and George Gershwin" Another fascinating figure was the leader of the 60s band Circus Maximus, Bob Bruno, who is a multi-instrumentalist jazz musician and composer. He's still years ahead of his time. He'd be a fascinating person to interview for a radio program. https://www.soundclick.com/artist/default.cfm?bandID=837257&content=about

You've gotta LOVE the fact that he also included Arthur Lee of the rock band LOVE singing "Black Coffee" on one of his later albums. I think it was the last thing Lee recorded before he passed away from Leukemia. I got to see Lee perform the entirety of "Forever Changes" with excellent accompaniment by the band Baby Lemonade (plus trumpet and a string trio) before he passed. He rewarded Baby Lemonade by firing them for reasons that only a psycho like Lee could understand, as he did with everyone he ever worked with.

That's a good one, but the pianist is a Bill Evans freak, and I think Jerome should only get one tune because of his snooty attitude towards jazz.

I played in my HS Concert Band (Clarinet), so I was able to convince the band teacher to let me into the HS Stage Band.on guitar. It was a lot of fun, because I was the only one who could improvise in the band, so I got all the solos and played fills instead of comping (like I should have been doing). The band teacher was also the stage band teacher, and he was in the Army with Tadd Dameron, and showed me one of TD's tunes in TD's handwriting, that he wrote out for my teacher, who played the trombone. We played all of the standard 'cornball' charts, and I learned a lot about what I didn't want to play and write. I wanted to be creative, man! I even wrote my own chart for Monk's "Well You Needn't" for the band that we played at a concert. I was completely self taught in arranging, and it was a major PITA to transpose for all the instruments. I liked the weirdest sounding things back then, and had a section where the rhythm section dropped out, and I wrote the entire section using only the two Whole Tone scales. The teacher annoyed the hell out of me by writing "Mysterious and FUNKY!" on the horn parts for that section.I felt like he was trying to cornball up my great work of art! A friend of mine, who also didn't know what the hell he was doing, played a clarinet solo on it, and tried to sound like our hero, Eric Dolphy, but it sounded horrible, and i felt like I was in some type of Twilight Zone nightmare. Of course, the audience gave me a standing ovation, but i just wanted to kill the clarinet player, and get out of there. Then I saw an ad in the newspaper that got me very excited. Joe Dixon was putting together a band of the best HS players from the County, and forming a Neophonic Big Band. I auditioned, and got in, and we played only charts by his friends,, Rod Leavitt, Manny Albam, Johnny Carisi, and others. I was in heaven.

RIP, His Newport/NY Jazz festival was the first jazz concert i ever went to. My parents took me to see Sarah Vaughn, Kenny Burrell and herbie mann at the Felt Forum. My crazy father thought Sarah Vaughn was soused during her performance, because of the way she spoke!

It's funny, but I find myself more interested in listening to Chico's Quintet of the 50s lately, than anything else. Thanks for your many years of covering IMHO the best jazz has to offer, Ken.

We already axed "Yesterdays" and ATTYA from that concert I told you about, maybe we'll get rid of Up With the Lark, too, and forget about JK entirely!