sgcim

Reading really helped me get through the Spring, when I was in the epicenter of the epicenter. these two books were long, tough reads, but that was what I needed to get my mind off of the fact that my doc said he lost twelve patients during that time period: Thomas Pynchon- Mason and Dixon David Foster Wallace (a much easier read) Infinite Jest.

I was just watching the DVD of Woods with Quincy's Big Band in Switzerland and Belgium. Woods is incredible on his two features, "Gypsy" and "The Midnight Sun Will Never Set". Julius Watkins plays some great out solos on his features, and Quentin Jackson does some great things with the plunger on his features. Also great rhythm section of Joe Harris and Buddy Catlett, but I don't know what Patty Brown and Les Spann were doing there.Also great solos by Budd Johnson, Clark Terry, Jimmy Cleveland, Jerome Richardson, Sahib Shihab, Benny Bailey, and Ake Persson. Great band!

Yup.

That's about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster

A Christmas tradition with me is to listen to Leonard Lopate's Gospel Christmas Show on the radio. As usual, he played the great African American artists of the past, MARION WILLIAMS (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) , Mahalia Jackson, Shirley Ceasar etc...

I dunno, but I turned that Netflix special off on him before I could find the vomit bags..

I didn't say that Haig wasn't a great pianist, just that I didn't like that limited harmonic style, and relative diatonic approach he had to improvisation back in the 40s.He was a virtuoso, who had a strong background in classical piano music, and could sight read anything. Still, I'd rather listen to Bud Powell, Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan than Haig. Bird loved Haig because he was a superb accompanist. I can understand those other things, but taking a dog and shaking it violently, and then calling it a faggot, well, that's just a bit too much...

Raney's alcoholism didn't kick in till the mid 50s, and his time spent as Haig's 'protege' was before that time period, so his comments about Haig telling him to cross the street, because of the presence of a Jewish person approaching was not affected by his later alcoholism.

I met him. He seemed very sane to me. He wrote an essay about being Haig's protege, until he found out Haig was an antisemitic nut!

Thanks! They spelled his name wrong (Kirsten), and listed it under Billy Higgins' name. Sounds good, from the excerpts. Better than David Foster.

I liked his playing after the 40s more than his 40s playing. Was Jimmy Raney a liar?

Where did that one come from? Is it available on CD? Oh, I just looked it up. It's the original title of "The Feeling is Mutual".

After reading "Death of a Bebop Wife", there's no aspect of Haig's personality I find positive. From locking her up in a room for two weeks until she read Mein Kampf, to forcing Jimmy Raney to cross the street with him if they encountered a Jewish person Haig knew, the guy was just a POS. And he did admit he pushed his wife down a flight of stairs to at least a few musicians. Hell, I didn't even like his playing with Bird.

His daughter improvised the melody to that Christmas tune when Greg Kurstin sent her the piano part, and then she put lyrics to it. Talented family, those Georges!

I looked it up on Wiki, and she is a theremin player, who is able to use that instrument to walk bass lines! They were married for a while, but then split up. He'[s definitely big in the 'biz' right now, but he's not as cornball as that David Foster dude, who had a special on Netflix that was so nauseating, I had to turn it off five minutes into it. Not that Kurstin doesn't do pop garbage too, but at least he tries to take it some different places than DF does in the group he has with Lowell George's daughter. Here's a cut from an xmas album they recently made:

Wow, thanks! That was back in 1993, when he was only 24 years old. He can sure hang in the idiom. Very versatile musician.

I was listening to NPR yesterday, and they played some Christmas rock and/or roll music that came out this year. One of the cuts was by an electro-pop group started back in 2006 called The Bird and the Bee, which recorded for Blue Note for a while. I was surprised by the harmonic content of the song, and the vocalist, Lowell George's daughter, was pretty interesting- that is both pretty AND interesting. However her stuff apart from the keyboard player, Kurstin, wasn't that interesting. I did some searching on Kurstin, and before he became a very busy pop producer and musician, he studied with Jaki Byard at The New School, and worked with people like Bobby Hutcherson, George Coleman and other jazz groups. Other than an album with Terri Lynne Carrington (the drummer), I couldn't find any other jazz albums he played on, Has anyone heard any jazz playing by Kurstin, or heard him on the TLC album "Jazz is a Spirit"? Anything worth listening to?

Terry Gross had a feature on the George Coleman album today by Kevin Whitehead. Danny Moore had a really fat sound and was burnin'!

Even Woods thought Musique Du Boise sucked. A sax player I know who had a friend who studied with Woods, said that his friend told Woods that MDB was great. Woods told him he thought the album sucked, because it never got off the page. It was that album that convinced PW to form his own working group, which lasted 40 years or so. As far as slick and mechanical, the first PW cut I heard was from "Phil Woods and His European Rhythm Machine. Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival", and IMHO, his playing was so raw and burning on Carla Bley's "Capriccio Cavaleshi" that it made me run out and buy the album. When my friends and I staggered to our feet, and joined the standing ovation Phil got for his solo on "You Must Remember Spring" at Carnegie Hall, where he was featured with Michel Legrand, I don't think that a person in the packed concert hall felt that his incredible, emotion-drenched performance was slick or mechanical, either. We looked at each other like we didn't know what hit us, and the only thing we were high on was the music. I bought the DVD PW made about his life, also titled "A Life in Eb", and had read Chan's book too, and i assumed the title was a tribute to Bird and Chan, but who knows? We'll consider your sentence, 'time served', now get outta my courtroom, and don't let me see you in here again on any charge concerning PW!

Yes, I read your editorial review online, and thought it odd that you made no announcement about the book here. I'm afraid you'll have to be detained with Kart and the rest, while we wait for your statement. We're considering Larry's last statement, and I can say that things look much better for his case...

I remember that story, and I replied back then that there is a difference in his playing documented on the Herbie Mann album, "Bebop Synthesis" in 1957. He became a more exciting, expressive player, compared to the laid back Bird imitator he was before. He was no Warne Marsh or Lee Konitz before that. Unlike them, he needed the virtuosity thing to realize his greatest strengths. That's just how he was, take it or leave it. It was part of his personality. The guy was first call player in NYC when that still meant a lot. He could be depended on to sight read fly sh-t, and then play a solo that would have the entire band speechless. Even Arron Sachs, a very laid back player, remarked that he was "just on a whole different level than everyone else", when I asked him about his experiences playing with him in rehearsal bands. One musician I grew up with absorbed his entire style from PW, and is still winning critic polls year after year today.I have only come across three sax players in the last 40+ years who detested Woods. One said he sounded too white. That was contradicted by Oliver Nelson, who described him as one of the few white players who broke that particular barrier. Another tenor player hated Woods. because he used to witness his drunken behavior in bars in the city. The final guy was another tenor player, who claimed he could tell that PW was a monstrous person (like Getz), just by his playing. He was astonished that I liked PW, because he claimed I was a good person by the way that I played! That's it. 40+ years of asking thousands of sax players I knew, they were the only ones who hated him. One guy, Chasey Dean, who even put Phil and his wife up in his house for a while when they came off the road with Charlie Barnet, turned sour on Woods when he realized he couldn't play like PW anymore, because he was too old, went on a rant that PW was a %^$ computer, and that Gene Quill played with more balls than PW. This was the same quality that had the entire Basie Band watching him play one night with open mouths, asking each other, "How does he do it?". Budd Johnson, Houston Person, Oliver Nelson, Johnny Griffin, and Benny Carter, loved and recorded with him. Your honor, what more evidence can I offer? The defense rests... Well, that's even later than fasstrack. Show me your $21.50 receipt, and you're exonerated!!! I put it at the years he started lugging an oxygen tank with him. Without his sound, it was over.

Well, since you and Larry have anted up, I guess you both are off the hook. I remember our old friend fasstrack had the same opinion, but he put the year at 1962. He better ante up too, or Phil is gonna give him HELL... Allen (or Alan) has been through enough, so I'm going to have to hold a seance, and see if Phil can cut him some slack. I'm glad Dan remembered that 'circus back in town' comment, that should be worth a hardcover...

Sad to hear. I enjoyed the Bros' big band records. RIP...

The discog is just listed, not elaborated on, so it's not half the book like many discogs, about ten pages. Ken Dryden could tell you more than I could. As for Larry, Alan and Jim, Phil will be waiting for them down below to argue about his later style for all eternity... That's sad to hear, but probably Phil had written it already by then. On the brighter side, that might mean the lousy records he did with Vic Juris were hopefully left out, too. That may not true in all cases. I paid a little more for the David Raksin bio, and got something like 400 pages more for the Kindle edition I chose. It might have been a choice between two different E-book versions, though.

This just came out on Cymbal Press, available in hardcover, paperback or Kindle. I don't know if you get more material if you order the kindle version, but it says 252 pages for the hardcover and paperback versions, and 337 pages for the kindle version. I don't know the equivalencies between print pages and kindle pages. I haven't made up my mind which medium I'm getting. It was written with the help of Ted Panken, but apparently PW finished it before he passed. Somehow, they manged to have a 'pull the plug party' in the hospital, with 50 people in attendance. It has an incredible discography of his work as a leader and sideman. Just looking at what they provided of the index, it looks like PW went out with a fully intact memory.