sgcim

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.

Yeah, I loved hearing him in situations like that! He was probably the most adventurous sideman in the history of the art. Whether it was his incredible flute performances on "Stolen Moments" (Blues and the Abstract Truth), and "Django" (from Jazz Abstractions), both of which featured Bill Evans(!) comping for him, or on clarinet(!) on "Warm Canto" (from The Quest), or his work on bass clarinet and alto in the Mingus group, his solos brought a new type of power and expression to the mainstream idiom that had never been attempted before. As danasgoodstuff says above, his needless death in the 60s at such a young age was one of the worst tragedies jazz ever experienced. Eddie Costa's equally tragic death at about the same time period, was another major blow. I recently read he was hanging out at The Half Note with Ed Shaugnessy, listening to Al and Zoot, when he told ES he had to split to visit someone on the upper west side. Shaughnessy told him not to go, because there was a major storm outside, but EC said he had to meet this person. This conflicts somewhat with the story that he went to some jam session up there. The story said that he was driving a VW Bug, and was crushed to death because of the unusual way the car landed. He died immediately.

When I was a real little kid, I was a NY Yankee fan. I knew the whole line-up- Moose, Richardson,Kubek Boyer, Howard, Mantle, Maris,Tresh and Whitey Ford. I was aware of Linz as a utility infielder. One time my uncle Paul, who owned a liquor store in Brooklyn, took me and my cousin Raymond to a Yankee game. He said he had a special surprise for us at the end of the game. When the game was over, we went out to the parking lot, and there was Phil Linz waiting for us. Being a second baseman in Little League, it was a big deal to me. He acted very friendly, and gave me his autograph, which thrilled me to no end. Right next to us was Phil Rizzuto, wearing sunglasses, talking to a big crowd of people. It struck me as strange that my fave announcer had a big crowd of people, and Phil Linz had just me. I don't remember the harmonica incident, but looked it up, and came up with this: I remember Phil opened up a bunch of bars and restaurants, so maybe he met my uncle buying booze for one of his clubs. RIP, Phil... Another one of my Yankee heroes died recently, Whitey Ford. I used to see him when I was in the house band for a country club that Whitey was a member of. He imbibed a great deal when we were playing there, and you could hear that cackling laugh above the music that we were playing. I finally got up the courage to talk to him at the water fountain once, and I told him that I tried to copy his wind-up and overhand delivery when I was a kid. He just laughed his head off at me., because he was completely wasted. RIP, Whitey.

I don't know why it was done that way, but he whistled/played the flute throughout the entire documentary. Great lines, though.

I used to like him, but then I saw that documentary they made about him, and his sound was so small outside of the studio, he might as well have been whistling! It ruined me for ever listening to him again. His ideas are great, but I thought I was hearing things when he played in the doc. Maybe it was due to age. He's the complete opposite of his brother Abe, the clarinetist. Abe was such a great clarinetist, he could play with anyone.

I always loved Frank Strozier's flute solos on all of his albums. He kept the blues feeling intact and played great ideas, rather than just showing off his virtuosity. He also didn't play just jive licks like Mann and Humphrey. Bobby Jaspar got a nice sound, although a little out of tune, but always fine solos. Dick Morrissey played some great solos with If that were inspired by the great RRK.

He wasn't walking so well the last time I saw him live a few years back, but he was sounding beautiful. After hearing Grace Kelly, Randy Brecker, Brian Lynch and Vincent Herring all over their horns, Houston stumbled out on the stage, and made them all sound like techs with no soul. Like Prez said, "Yeah, but can you sing me a song?"

The greed rampant in NYC will bury itself.

I don't know if this has been posted before, but I never knew that Getz tried to make "Sweet Rain" with Steve Swallow and Roy Haynes, but it had to be canned, because Getz was all messed up again... He blamed it on Roy Haynes(!), whom Creed Taylor fired, and Swallow quit, so Creed Taylor hired Ron Carter and Grady Tate: This comes up at 51 minutes and change into the interview:

There are many stories of serialists disrupting tonalists' concerts in those years. Stockhausen used to terrorize concerts of non-serial music at that annual German festival. It continued in academia. A composition teacher I studied with at the university I attended, premiered a piece for orchestra at a school concert, and one of his fellow teachers (who I also studied with) started booing and cursing during the piece, because it wasn't serial. The latter teacher was an eclectic composer, and wrote some Rags for clarinet and piano. One time he was rehearsing the piano part to one of his Rags, when the former composer appeared at the door of his office, and yelled out, "Can you stop playing that garbage!", and then slammed the door as hard as he could!

I haven't heard it since college. I'll try to find it and let you know. Yeah, that one!