sgcim

Happy Birthday to one of the last living greats!

Right on LW; it's what makes jazz, jazz, or jazz oriented.

Sounds great, but the article said online not onsite, so it will be accessible to everyone. They would have to contact the estates of the artists involved and work out some type of deal with them, so don't hold your breath waiting.

Probably drove him into photography. RIP, Mr Laird.

Yeah, he came much later, but I lump all of those guys into one big group.

He had been using that line for ages before he used it to publicly disgrace and humiliate me. He just saw me with my head down, and spontaneously used it on me. I was working at a big theater in NY as part of the house band, along with such greats as Charlie Fowlkes, George Barrow, Steve Small, Jimmy Knepper, etc... The shows would always have three acts we'd have to play for- a comedian, an opener, and then the star. I did so many of those shows, I can't remember who the star was- Eddie Fisher, Sandler and Young, Mitzi Gaynor, Sister Sledge, Connie Francis, Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Melba Moore, Michael Amante, etc...? It's all a big blur.

I did his show for a week, and I got tired of hearing the same jokes, so brought a book to read while I was in the pit. He saw me reading and he said to the audience, "I tell ya I get no respect, even the guitar player isn't listening to me anymore- he's reading a book!" It was a huge theater, and the whole place was laughing at me. The contractor motioned me to put the book away. He was not happy.

My favorite one is on The Mothers of Invention album "Live at the Fillmore East 1971, On "Little House I Used To Live In", there's a lightening fast transition to a short drum solo, and Zappa exclaims, "Ainsleydunbar",condensing a four syllable name into one syllable in the space of a quick quarter note. I don't know what he did when Dunbar left the group, but I can't imagine that song without "Ainsleydubar" in it.

Pat astounded Berklee teachers by transcribing and playing the entire Wes Montgomery album "Smokin' at the Half Note" when he auditioned for the college, so Wes' ideas are strongly implanted in his brain. I hear some Kenny Burrell ideas in his playing, from the albums that KB made in the 70s, like Asphalt Canyon Suite. He acknowledged to Jon Raney that his father Jimmy Raney was also an influence on his playing. That would also link him with grant Green, who was also Raney influenced. I thought I had a Volker K. LP, but it turned out to be Rune Gustaffson!

Yeah, he lacks a lot of those affectations that people like Mark Murphy bring to the music. Like Bobby Hackett once said, "Just play the melody!"

Kenton was always obsessed with being the hippest of the hip. Then he wound up with Graettinger, and he gradually realized there was a limit to hipness, when the records stopped selling, and the concert halls started emptying.

I've used "Second Hand Songs".

That's the only Kenton record i have!

He seemed to write on the "Hey I'm a hip cat lookin' for a snooty little cutie" level in general, but "Daddy" was a swinging tune we used to do. He co-wrote this for Julie London, which seems more imaginative: I think he must have been responsible for the cringe-worthy lyrics to Hefti's "Girl Talk"!

That's a nice one from the school of chromatically descending progression ("My Little Boat", "Early Autumn", "Lover" etc...) / initially happy, ultimately sad lyrics school of songwriting.

He might have just written the main title, and farmed the other part of the score to another writer. Who would trash LITW?

Wow! I was about to give up on it after hearing the Mercer and Lambert versions, but after that, it just kept getting better and better. That nauseating pronouncement of "It's the singer, not the song" is yet again found simplistic. It's the arrangement, It's the song, it's the singer, it's the accompanists, It's JBB! Of course Reeves and Wilson win out, but Mathis' version showed how expressive the bridge could actually be. Brooks 'came a long way from St Louis' on that one. Thanks! Yeah, I lost a lot of respect for Mundy after that phone call... My guitar teacher at the time said that ML had ghost writers working for him. He never wrote anything in that vein before or after, so who knows?

WOW! Monday Michiru! How is she not a household name? What do people want? Everything is there, great vocalist, great tunes, great lyrics, great grooves, superb solos! You can't give them anymore than that. I guess she's doing okay considering she's 57, and has made over 200 recordings. The daughter of Toshiko and Charlie Mariano! Spanky Wilson, another 'how could I never have heard of her' vocalist. Sublime, and a great tune. Les McCann with Eddie Harris. Nice slow groove. Definitely possibilities... I've already done one Nascimento tune, the masterpiece with Turrentine and Deodato's genius string arr., and have been looking for others that are just as good, and so far "Miracle of the Fishes" is the closest yet. Thanks also for the hint on "Over the Weekend"; JBB is a huge fave of mine. I'll try to track it down. Thanks for all the great stuff! When I used to play with clarinetist Joe Dixon, I wrote out Lake in the woods from SIHH, and we recorded it. Joe had to get permission from Mundell Lowe to record it, and I was there when he phoned him up. Mundell said, "What that little POS?" I couldn't believe it. I guess he liked the faster, swing stuff more than that one, but everyone who's heard it, loved it. Phil Schaap has the only recording of it on his website for $25. A good singer I used to work with put lyrics to it, and wanted to record it too, but he was under the impression I composed it, and when he found out it was already revorded by ML, didn't want to record it because he'd have to pay ML. Thanks so much for the "Lonely Beat". I can't do anything better that SW did with it, but I'm gonna transcribe it. I love that type of stuff. Raksin has something like that for a noir film he did, but for some reason he didn't like it. The Waxman thing is also great, but it's probably been done by someone already, and you can't improve it anyway. I loved that Tenth Victim theme when I first saw the movie. Thanks for reminding me of it. The Kenyon Hopkins thing is nice. I'd have to internalize it a little more before I could think of what to do with it. Toss me a Scalpel would make another great transcription. There's really nothing I could add to a lot of these, because they've already been done so well, but some of them are too good to not transcribe them. Thanks! You've made up for your sabbatical.

Some great suggestions as usual. I was thinking about doing something from Arthur Lee (Love) , although Bachrach wrote that one, and BB put down Love's version for getting all the chords wrong!The orchestrator of "Forever Changes went on to form his own big band, which is phenomenal. I think we mentioned David Angel's band here once.Definitely an overlooked genius: Manfred Mann's albums are a great suggestion, because they had someone in the group who was a master at taking good tunes that had mediocre arrangements, and making great songs out of them. I'll have to do some research on Mike Vickers; he was probably the guy in the group responsible for that. After reading a book on modern British jazz, I always wanted to hear Septober Energy, but never got around to it. Thanks! The Westbrook album sounds great. I'll check out every cut.

Wild stuff! Thanks!

I started off the pandemic writing arrangements of all of my original tunes, then went on to obscure jazz standards and movie themes' that no one has done for big band, then standards that I had original harmonic/rhythmic ideas on, then standards that the greats (Puerling, among others) had great ideas on (that I could steal- you can't copyright arrangements), and now I've reached the point where I'm using tunes from other genres whose composers had jazz roots. So far I've hit up rock tunes from bands like The Association, Circus maximus, Nick Drake, Judee Sill (!), If, Manhattan Transfer, Steely Dan and Traffic. All these songs have great harmonic/melodic/rhythmic features to them that make them the equal of any other good tunes, and I also love them. Does anyone have any suggestions of NON- standard tunes that they think might work for big band?

Thanks for the link. He had a crazy career. He was a fine arranger, too. He wrote this fantastic overture for S & Y , that was giving me harmonic orgasms as I played it. The fourth night of the gig, he told us we weren't playing it anymore. I asked him why. He said those two cornball azzholes said it was too "Symphonic".(!) I still had some optimism back then about the music business, and I told him it was a great piece, and offered to beg S & Y to put it back in. He said something like, "Forget it, kid.You're gonna find out that most people have no idea what good music is about (or something to that effect). Boy was he right about that! Early education...

Speaking of "the indisputable leader of the band", one of my first big gigs when I was about 18 or 19 was playing at a big NY theater for Sandler & Young. Their MD was the guy who did Benny's voice in "Top Cat", Leo De Lyon (who knows what his real name was) , and he used to break me up doing Benny's voice on breaks. He could also whistle and sing Bach two-part Inventions! They brought in Bernie Glow to play lead trumpet, and Charlie Fowlkes was on bari. Some guy in the audience was a friend of Leo's, and he came up to him after the show and told him he saw him with his wife in Florida. Leo told him, "That wasn't my wife", but the guy kept insisting that he was putting his arms around her and all. Leo answered again, "I know, but that wasn't my wife". The guy looked at him like he couldn't believe it. I realized that my innocence was gone, and there was no turning back; I had just entered the world of show biz scandal!

Dupes of "Wide Range" were being passed around the bunch of musicians I work with, and Quill's sound on that recording was so rich and full that we're still not sure if it was Phil or Quill playing.

Great sound on that recording.Some of the JR records I've heard sounded out of tune, or poorly recorded. He must have sold his soul to Diablo to get that type of sound out of the band.