sgcim

Paul Johnson: Brief Lives

He probably did play it. He's listed as the only guitarist in the film score in the book, "Jazz in Film", and Kessel, could play any type of pop music (he was considered to be part of the Wrecking Crew). I was amazed to find out he also played guitar on the David Raksin Western film "Will Penny", when I bought the soundtrack album. I always found it ironic that the first jazz guitar I bought was a used Gibson Barney Kessel Custom (because I wanted to sound like my hero), but Kessel barely used it when he played jazz. He preferred the sound of his ES-350 with CC pickups to the Humbuckers that came with the Gibson Barney Kessel model. In the end, I was better off with the BK model, because it was a much more versatile guitar that I could use on the R&B gigs I did with Melba Moore and Sister Sledge, and still a serviceable jazz guitar, though nowhere as good as the ES-350. Kessel hated the BK model, but it was a very popular guitar, and he received a percentage of every sale.

Yeah, BK was always a very spontaneous player, and he wails on that record. Some people accused him of sloppiness (like on that "Feelin' Free" album), but while that may be true in some cases, he makes up for it with the feeling he put into everything he played. His opinions could be kind of weird, I remember a DB interview where he started putting down musicians who were changing their names to Islamic names. He also had these creepy video lessons where he had some pretty corporate-sounding ideas abut how to achieve success in the music biz.

Wow! I didn't know there was enough material from the 69 band to fill 26 discs. It will always be my fave grouping of the band, and I'm definitely going to check it out. It was a perfect balance of composition, improvisation, song forms, lead vocalist, tasty, light drumming, ensemble writing, and melodic strength. I always thought that Ian McDonald was the most talented (compositionally) guy behind the band, because he wrote "ITTTW", and the "mirrors" section of 21st Century Schizoid Man", but he didn't do schlitz after that band (maybe some things on "In The Wake of Poseidon"). I wrote a big band arr. of ITTTW over the pandemic. Someone else has done a big band arr. of 21st Cent. Schizoid Man, so I'm not going to do something that's already been done. I posted my theory about Ian McDonald on Greg Lake's website, and he got very pissed off at me. He still claimed that everybody in the band had equal input on the writing, and practically told me to go piss off.

I first discovered BK on a great record my father had, "Great Guitars of Jazz" on Verve. Barney was featured, along with Tal, Oscar Moore, Wes, Howard Roberts and Herb Ellis. My father loved Wes, but the other guys, he wasn't crazy about. He used to call Tal, Tad Farlow, Barney, Barney Kessler. Anyway, he found a guy playing the schist out of a guitar in amusic store, and he got him to give me guitar lessons at about the age of 12 or so, and he was a real Kessel freak. He loaned me a bunch of Kessel albums, which I taped on my Sony Sound on Sound reel to reel tape deck. I could slow the tapes down to 1 and 7/8 speed, and sit around for hours trying to copy Tal and Barney.. I worshiped the ground my teacher walked on. He had Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People", and he probably brainwashed me to like him. One day he brought in the BK album "Guitarra", and raved about the way BK bent his strings while playing with an Italian organ trio, so I raved about it, too.That's my album suggestion.

This article pretty much explains it: According to a tally by the Washington Post, 13 states — Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin — on Tuesday reported record numbers of patients hospitalized with coronavirus. With the exception of New Mexico and Wisconsin, all of those states have been won by President Trump.

Another film he really showed his tremendous range in was "The Offense (1973), where he played a detective interrogating a suspected sex offender. Probably his most serious role as far as zero comedic content was involved.

He used to joke that he had been at the same school as Tony Blair. "I delivered milk to Fettes when I was a milkman", he'd explain. He had a brilliant wife, Michelline, who was well-versed in philosophy. She had a premonition about the French stage play, "Art". She advised Connery to buy the foreign rights to it. He did so, and it earned him a fortune. My fave film of his was "MWWBK"

Netflix has a great, IMHO, film/limited series based on the Walter Tevis novel, "The Queen's Gambit". Tevis was the author of the novel "The Hustler" that was the source of the movie starring Paul Newman, Geo. C Scott, Jackie Gleason and Piper Laurie. Tevis also wrote "The Man Who Fell To Earth", also made into a film starring David Bowie. The "Queen;s Gambit" deals with a female chess prodigy in the 1960s, and uses some very interesting source music, notably Gabor Szabo's "Somewhere I Belong" and Nancy Wilson singing "Teach Me Tonight". In the European scenes, Georgie Fame is also heard, and Donovan's Bert's Blues (Bert Jansch) is played, featuring a jazz harpsichord solo(!), and "Comin' Home Baby" is played (uncredited). Some other obscure pop music is featured, including a video of Shocking Blue playing "I'm Your Venus" featuring the beautiful and mysterious Mariska Veres. The obscure singer Gillian Hill, Martha and the Vandellas, a new song that sounds like an undiscovered Brian Wilson song, and Tandyn Almer's "Along Comes Mary" some swinging Tiijuana Brass tune, and the beautiful young actress Anya Taylor Joy stars. What the hell more do ya want?!!!

At age 78. He'd been suffering from cancer for a while. RIP.

Cool story, thanks!

Stevie Winwood was already known as a jazz musician even before he joined Spencer Davis. He played with Muff in a family traditional jazz band. Just to show what class and integrity SW had; when he was asked to perform in a Ray Charles Tribute concert in the UK as one of the lead acts, he told them he was nowhere near the level of artist that Ray Charles was, and that he would feel out of place performing at the concert. RIP, Spencer Davis.

He's still got them. I don't think he has a list, but it was all at clubs in NY.

My father played the guitar during the Depression, and tried to hit it big as a songwriter. The furthest he got was entering a Tommy Dorsey song contest with a song he wrote called "This Love of Ours", which he and my aunt gave to Buddy Rich when he was playing with Dorsey at a Hotel in NY. The song later came out as a Sinatra hit called "This Love of Mine" with the melody changed enough so they couldn't sue them. There were three names on the song, Parker Sanicola and Sinatra, which was done because the lawyer my father consulted said it would be harder to sue three people rather than one or two. , He had a love for music that never waned until he had a stroke at 79, because his carotid artery was 99% clogged up. He stopped listening to music for the last 14 years of his life, although he seemed to like the CD I made and never released. Anyway, this seems to be a topic that holds a fascination here that never seems to be satisfied.. The MIA Teasing the Korean's father was much more accomplished than mine was, and probably had a fantastic collection. My father's was mainly guitar centered,but he had a thing for female vocalists like Cleo Laine,(he always said her voice was like a musical instrument), Sarah Vaughn, and Shirley Bassey(?). He never held anything against Sinatra, and had a few of his albums, but one album he bought that changed my life was the Verve album "The Great Guitars of Jazz". It had cuts by Kessel Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow, Wes, Howard Roberts and Oscar Moore. He also had "Piano and Pen", a Dick Katz LP that had Jimmy Raney on some cuts, and ,Chuck Wayne on the others. He also had a lot of Tony Mottola albums, but his favorites were Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. Every week he'd come back Friday with new albums. All the jazz albums had guitars on them, so I got to hear Gabor Szabo, Johnny Smith, Grant Green, Cal Green, Dennis Budimir, Rene Thomas, Kenny Burrell, Barry Galbraith, Lloyd Ellis ("The Fastest Guitarist in the World"), Gene Bertoncini, Mundell Lowe and Buudy Fite. My uncle was more of a pure jazz buff, and when we went over his house, I spent all my time going through his record collection, until I wa called for dinner.

I found the mp3 of the Jubilee concert with all four guitarists on the Old Radio Shows website. Garrison had the more polished technique of the four, although LP and IA had more exciting solos.At the end of the LP rendition of Honeysuckle Rose, there were four guitars playing in harmony, like LP's later double tracked recordings, but this was a live concert, so it had to be the four guitarists playing together.

I listened to the Jubilee concert online that had Andre Previn playing with Barney Kessel, but I didn't hear Arv Garrison playing How High the Moon". Is there some recording of it? There was a very modernistic (for the time) arrangement of some band playing "Begin the Beguine" with the guitarist playing some interesting parts along with pizzicato strings. Was that Garrison?

Wow! He was an excellent player. Kind of the missing link between Django, Charlie Christian and the bop players that followed him. More melodically gifted than Chuck Wayne, a far superior player than Bill D'Arrango, stronger than Billy Bauer at that time, he definitely was one of the finest players of the 40s. Thanks for posting that.

It's hard to follow an artist all the way to the end. Towards the end, they usually go somewhere I don't like, lose what they used to have, or over- record and I know all their licks. If they die young, or quit after hitting some type of wall, it's easier to have most of what they did. One example of that is: Eddie Costa- dead at 31, but leaving behind an extensive discography as a studio musician. I think I have just about every jazz session he ever played on. He was just starting to add McCoy's bag to his playing when he died. Others that I have made a concerted effort to have a full discography of are: Tal Farlow- Every note he played up to 1960, and then he lost it. Joe Puma- I think I have most of it. Dick Garcia- All I lack are private tapes of him jamming with his family on Sundays that his nephew has, but aren't for sale... Ed Bickert- Just about all of his leader and sideman dates. Jimmy Raney- I even have stuff never released. Johnny Smith- all of it Lenny Breau- all of it.

Yeah, she's an incredibly talented singer/guitarist, but she changes the mood of most songs she covers into a weepy folk ballad.

EVH had been in poor health for quite a while. RIP, EVH

I Am Woman would've fit in great with this satire on the feminist movement on SCTV:

There was a certain year when they started referring to pop stars as "recording artists", no matter how worthy their music was; probably in the late 60s. I always wondered who and what was behind that. HR was an artist when she sang a great tune like "You and Me Against the World" (we used to do it with funk kicks, which used to make it into even higher art), but what do you call her when she sings a hokey song like "Delta Dawn"? Then again, I saw a live version of her doing it on YT, and the band was effectively funkifying it, hence lifting it up to the level of art, so I guess it goes on a case by case basis. And yet, Barry 'Manifold' was capable of creating good art when he wrote a song like "Could This Be the Magic", based on Chopin;s changes. Again, case by case.

Alright, I deleted my stupid post, but the last post gives the impression HR wrote "You and Me Against the World" ( an excellent song), even if the poster didn't intend to give that impression. It was written by Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams.

They don't use that cycle, they use the Ab major instead of Fminor.

Yeah, he's doing it on the solos, but I don't hear him doing it on the head. I look at subs like that as ascending in fourths, rather than descending in 5ths, because Major 7th chords don't really have a dominant function like Dominant 7th chords. You should write Maj7 chords using the "Maj7" designation or the triangle followed by a 7, because it can be easily confused with a Minor7th chord, even though you are using a capital "M". I can't stand reading charts that use M7 instead of m7, because I'm not sure what the arranger means. The fact that Lennie uses that chain of Maj7ths to get to Ab rather than F minor goes back to the way swing and Dixie players used to play the tune. It always freaks me out that a swing band I play with always starts that last part of the tune on the tonic rather than the relative minor like Bird did on Donna Lee. Lennie had strong ties to the Swing Era, so there are a lot of examples of him using things from the Swing era,- eg. those closed voicings he uses. The idea of using that type of sub is just an extension of a sub on a tune like "Autumn Leaves". In the key of G: Am7 D7 GMaj7 CMaj7 the Cmaj7 is an example of that kind of sub. Lennie is just extending it so it leads to the bII of AbMaj7. I just used that sub in my arr. for big band of a tune that stays on a Maj7 chord for two measures, to give more harmonic interest to the otherwise dull sound of a Maj7 chord for two measures at a slow tempo. Lee was playing great back then; it's too bad he changed his way of playing later on. Warne and Lennie sound great, too!