sgcim

People like Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vernon Duke, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and others were great, trained composers. Their songs came from full length musicals which contained full music scores for orchestra.. Did you know that Cole Porter wrote a Ballet that premiered in Paris the same night as Milhaud's "Creation of the World"? If jazz musicians stop playing songs that people still know from musicals and movies, how is the listener going to be able to understand the musicians' improvisations?

That won't do for my bachelor's tomb at all. Some nice things on Vocal Shades and Tones, though.

I played a musical where the bass player had his freaking phone out whenever he had any rests. The drummer and I would crack up whenever he missed cues and entrances because he was too busy looking at his stupid phone. After a few nights of this, he noticed we were making fun of him, because we were hysterical with laughter at all his mistakes. He never spoke to us again. Later, I found out that he had been fired because he couldn't handle Les Mis.

Although I liked some of the earlier Stones things, and I always thought CW was a good rock drummer, I never realized he had jazz chops until I was gigging with the late, great Keith Copeland. KC had done the tour with Stevie Wonder and the Stones, and he told us the story of the time that the two bands had a big jam session. He said that other than Charlie Watts, none of the Stones could play worth a damn, and he had developed a friendship with CW as a result of that tour. That was enough for me. RIP, Mr. Watts, you were a class act.

Very sad to hear. He had a fantastic career, and was quite a character. He played bass on Jimmy Raney's "Suite For Guitar Quintet", and with Warne Marsh, Konitz, Tristano, and even wrote a very good book on Tristano -"Jazz Visions of Lenny Tristano", which I enjoyed very much. He operated his own club The Bass Clef, and produced some great albums in his own loft. RIP, Mr. Ind.

Hugh McCracken and Eric Weissberg played guitar on "Circles".. Maybe he used them on Born to Win, too?

Yeah, I remember the film. I think George Segal plays a junkie. I always remembered that the score had a guitarist that sounded like Larry Coryell. Interesting funk-fusion type of thing.

That Nancy Steele is pure corn, corn vibrato, corn arrangements, corn rhythmic approach. Even Galbraith couldn't save that LP. BG did a lot of commercial dates, too. This is one of them.No relation to Russell's crew. There's another Nancy Steele album, but she's a brunette singing 'sophisticated songs' presumably written by her. The 'sophisticated' aspect is in reference to the 'risque' lyrics, but musically just a bunch of rubato non-songs with only triadic piano accompaniment. Painful stuff.

To the Chorus of Shocking Blues; "Venus" to Mr. anti-mask mandate Abbott! "He's got it Oh baby he's got it He's got COVID He's got COVID and now he's crying..."

If you mean brain problems,before.

Yeah, Wes was the man! When asked about what he thought of Benson, Pat Martino said, "He's a pretty good R&B guitar player".

cryptic,man, very cryptic...

I've got to comment on the A. Kaplan LP( "COAMCP") I used to gig with him, and saw the LP in a used record store and asked him about it. He said it wasn't any commercial BS. Everything on the album was the 'real thing'. Years later, I finally found a copy of Abel Ferrara's first movie "MS..45", and damned if it wasn't him playing tenor in the band that played at the Halloween Party at the end of the film. It's just a trio with the pianist playing a Fender Rhodes, playing left hand bass (talk about realism!), and on his solo he plays that out high register stuff that Gato Barbieri played!

Technique, and playing too much behind the beat, literally drove this guy nuts.

Not with everyone; one pro sax player I know thinks he was one of the worst sax players ever.

I don't think it hurt that Dex was chosen to star in "'Round Midnight". Could you imagine Stitt playing that role? He'd punch someone out before the first day's shoot was over. Look at the success of Chet Baker. I used to work with a drummer who had a #1 hit back in the disco era. He told me, "The music biz is 95% image, and 5% talent." Sure, they were both great, but ultimately image wins over talent. I don't care if it's jazz or pop, the equation still holds, only now it's probably 99.9% image, and 0.1% talent, especially in the pop field. I don't know about the jazz field...

Yeah, but we can't prosecute, because the suspect died 40 years ago.

Wow! Thanks for posting that. Wayne Shorter raved about that passage in an interview he did once. I had the "Laura and Other Scores" LP by Raksin, and searched for the passage Wayne was talking about, but I didn't hear it. Wayne must have listened to this OST recording and heard it. Raksin's scores are chock full of short songs that have nothing to do with the main theme. You have to watch the entire film to find them. I would hear them, and tape them with my VCR to transcribe them. I thought about making an album of just Raksin's music, but they don't really lend themselves to jazz improvisation, unless you do something drastic to them, like change the tempos, change the time signatures, etc...They tried to do that on Getz' recording the B&TB theme with the Boston Pops, and it was a complete disaster, IMHO. During the pandemic's worst phase, I wrote jazz big band arr. of two of his pieces that worked out nicely, using MuseScore, but the jazz big bands I play in still seem hesitant about starting up again. The best one had planned to start playing again in January, but that never took place. I spoke with the leader a few days ago, and he seemed very worried about the delta variant, so the planned Sept. re-start might be in question, too. What type of an ensemble did you write your arr. of Laura for, or was it just for piano? The pianist I played with regularly pre-pandemic, worked up an arr. of B&TB I posted here, and has been working on one for "Forever Amber", which is really odd, considering that the film was a historical drama, featuring Raksin's neo-baroque bag!

Matthews was real flake. He used to leave amplifiers all over the NYC subway system. He was the judge at the annual NY Accordion Association Festival when I was a kid, and I was part of a jazz group with an accordion player friend of mine. . Before we started playing he yelled out, "Are you guys going to play a little Grand Funk Railroad for us!" He said something encouraging to me about being on the right road. I thought nothing of it, because I thought he was a drunk or something. I found out who he was years later, and flipped out. A musician friend of mine who was on the scene back in the 50s told me he got in trouble with the mob, because he fooled around with the wrong woman, and also accrued heavy gambling debts, he had to leave NY

All Italian and Jewish kids played the accordion back then.

Hey man, that Space Age Bachelor Tomb has some pretty heavy schlitz in it!

The dude was hip to jazz. There were a bunch of tenor players I knew that passed his touring gig around to each other. One guy who I was working with at the time told me about the first time he met Lou. The band was having breakfast with Lou early in the morning. The manager says to Lou, "Lou, here's our new tenor player!' Lou, seated in front of his breakfast extends his hand to my friend, and says "Hi welcome aboard"...and then falls asleep, with his face falling into his eggs!

I see it took me four days to finish the Steely Dan book, and I'll just share the jazz comments they made in interviews. Donald Fagen was fascinated by Red Garland's "Jazz Junction" album as a kid, and has spent his whole life trying to emulate it. He said he took three or four piano lessons, and spent a summer at Berklee. His mother was a big band singer. He said Wayne Shorter took three takes on his Aja solo, because he had a little trouble with the changes.Phil Woods' solo on Dr. Wu was a ONE TAKE solo. Both he and Becker described the history of the world as: 'The planet was formed. Then it cooled off. Then fire was discovered and the wheel invented.Then Bird appeared, and it was all downhill after that' 'Since the late 70's, people feel the center of the beat in a different place than where we feel it.We're trying to put it where Miles, Monk and Muddy Waters put it.' 'We just want musicians that have a jazz background, and can play R&B or understand what's good about that.' 'More musicians don't like jazz. Musicians went in a different direction. It's not that they're not interested-they actually dislike it- it's actually repulsive to them.to move away from triads.That's standard since the bebop era. You can still clear a room in downtown Manhattan by putting on a Charlie Parker record.' Fagen admired Mancini's "Dreamsville" and "A Profound Gass". The writer of the article said, 'Sometimes we need experts to teach us the art of making fine distinctions, and keeping valuable traditions alive'. There are other sections on jazz featuring Peter Erskine's tenure with the band, and the attitude of some of the jazz musicians they used, but that's the gist of it.

When I was still in my teens, I did a show with Jimmy Knepper, and I said to him, "Wow, I've got that TS album that you play on that sounds like a jam session. You sounded great on that." The album was "Free Blown Jazz". He remembered the record and asked me if I could bring it in the next night so he could tape it. Luckily the gig was for a full week, so I gave it to him the next night, and he returned it the night after that. Years later, we did a jazz festival gig together, and I asked him if he remembered me loaning him the album, and he said, "No".