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sgcim
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Posts posted by sgcim
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4 hours ago, AllenLowe said:
just spotted this. Mr. Ursini was my first and last saxophone teacher, during a few of my high school years. Great man, incredible saxophonist (and clarinetist, too) -
Wow! Did you grow up on Lawnguyland? Leo taught HS there somewhere. I was thinking about him the other day. We had a session once, and Leo said he was glad I didn't comp 4/4 rhythm like Freddie Green. I told him I only comp like that on a big band when we're doing Basie-type charts. We were playing small group bop stuff.
So then he told me about a small group gig he led in a big hotel in NYC, and the guitarist would comp 4/4 rhythm on every tune. Leo started yelling at the guy for playing that way, but the guy wouldn't stop. Leo let him have it again, and the guy packed up and walked off the gig!
I asked Leo who it was, but he said he was a very heavy, well known guitarist, and he couldn't tell me, because the guy was still around. Now I'll never know.
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3 hours ago, Brad said:
Is enrollment in Express Scripts voluntary. I was under the impression it wasn’t.
I got it through my union, so maybe it's part of various union's plans.
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The screenplay was written by the same guy who wrote the bio on Tubbs, "The Long Shadow of the Little Giant", Simon Spillet.
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11 hours ago, Dan Gould said:
Yeah the USPS SUCKS.
Both packages departed Jacksonville FL about 5 pm Saturday night. Normal result would by Tampa no more than 24 hours later, then on to Plant City and my front porch the next day.
Instead, "in transit, arriving late".
The same thing recently happened to me. The package was way delayed to begin with, and then they said it was shipped to the post office in the town I live in in NY.
The next thing I knew it got shipped to Jersey City the same night that it was in my post office! I called them up and they said some BS about how it's got to follow an algorithm, and it would be sent BACK to my post office SIX days later! I told them it would take me an hour and change to drive to Jersey City, but they told me I had to wait for it to be delivered. I wouldn't mind if it were just some CD or something like that, but this was a medical package from Express Scripts. My union medical plan pushes ES for some reason, and who wants to go to a drug store in a pandemic when you can get it delivered to your home.
This was the last straw, I'm never using ES again.
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An older friend of mine has gotten so spooked by COVID-19, he called me up a few months ago to tell me he just made up his will to give me all of his vinyl collection. It's packed with original Blue Note records. Maybe they'll be worth something. I never would've believed it.
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Serious teenage crush on her as a kid. I won't get graphic. Loved the Avengers theme by Laurie Johnson (a close friend of Bernard Herrmann, a serious Anglophile), and figured it out and played it on the guitar. Was annoyed at her replacement, Linda Thorson for a while, but got used to her after a while. Quirky stories by the prolific Brian Clements
When they brought back the Avengers with Joanna Lumley, all that was left was the music score, which had an excellent polyrhythmic drummer playing on it.I don't know who it was, Randy Jones?
DR was also in "The Hospital", written by Paddy Chayefsky, with Geo. C Scott, where she played the hippie daughter of an insane doctor, who murdered a bunch of patients in a NYC hospital.
Then she played the daughter of Vincent Price in"Theater of Blood", a very witty horror flick where she helped her dad, VP, murder a bunch of theater critics, because they panned her father's performances in the theater. The murders were all taken from Skakespeare's plays. RIP, Mrs. Peel...
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HeyJoeyousosmartwhownasecondworldwar?
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I filled it out, and had to write-in Eddie Costa, because they left him out of their 'survey'. How dare they!
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Al Kooper claims he got the melody for FT from a lick in a Barney Kessel guitar solo. He said it was an idea that BK played on the last chord of a tune. I could hear BK doing it on a minor 9th chord.
I was pretty young when I first heard it on my sister's stereo, and it acted like a gateway drug to jazz (along with that CM song). I copied it, and taught it to my friends in my little kiddie rock band, and we'd jam on it for hours. The original studio version is pretty lame, solo-wise, so I think that's what AK meant when he made that vomit comment, but I think they realized how lame the flute solo was, and they did a live version that put the flute through an echoplex that made the flute solo sound much more effective. Shades of Don Ellis!
That whole scene with Kooper, Katz and Colomby forming BS&T, and then Katz and Colomby forming a mutiny that led to Kooper quitting the band was something I was completely unaware of at the time, and a good resource on it is Steve Katz' autobiography, which presents the other side of the Kooper BS&T split. Kooper and Katz still hat each other's guts up to this very day!
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Damn, my father used to have that album. It had a tune called "Cork 'n Bib, named after a jazz club that actually existed in Lawnguyland, where I grew up. I remember wanting to go there when I found out about it, but it was long closed by then. I worked a lot with the pianist on the Woody Herman album "East Meets West" and he used to be the house pianist at the Cork 'N Bib. He said Sonny Rollins played there and told the P-B &D to go home, and he played the whole gig there-solo!
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21 hours ago, AllenLowe said:
sorry, wasn't trying to be overly dramatic. I am doing very well, definitely in remission, but the whole experience was so hellish that it enforced a certain
sense of new urgency about getting certain things resolved -
Yeah, that can do it alright. I thought I was through after a serious case of DVT, so I made a CD of my own tunes. Then a specialist said it completely cleared up, and i didn't do anything with my CD.
Covid-19 had me so freaked out (I live in what WAS the epicenter of the epicenter), I churned out fifteen new big band charts. Then things got better, and I haven't even printed the parts out yet! We won't be able to play them till the new year anyway.
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Leonard Feather could be a real jerk...
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3 hours ago, JSngry said:
Not Hammond, it waa whoever was in charge of the Spoken Arts division of Columbia at the time. The deal was that as Spoken Arts performers, they would get a slightly smaller royalty, but have unlimited/unbilled studio time. Well HEY!
Those comedy On Vinyl podcasts are just incredibly rambling and repetitive, but there's so much good information in there. Proctor doesn't have memory problems at all, even if he does seem to have zero ability to filter or condense those memories.
Oh well!
The only other John who was a producer at Columbia that I can think of was John Simon, but he might have quit to produce the first BS&T album under the advice of Al Kooper.
If you compare the first and second BS&T albums, you can hear what a fine producer Simon was. The brass on the fast part of "God Bless the Child" is simply pitiful. Bobby Colomby must have had a tin ear.
4 hours ago, felser said:"How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all" might, also...
Yeah, that seems to describe someone we all know...
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19 hours ago, JSngry said:
Of course, none of this really matters as much as it does if the material is not geniusfunny to begin with, but I think that Don't Crush and Bozos are high-marks not just in terms of comedy/humor, but of recording, period. The whole "studio as an instrument" thing, they layering of the mixing is just phenomenally intricate, creative, and perfectly executed. And none of it digitally on graphs with waveforms and shit, all analog, when bounding tracks was hi-tech.To me, spicing seems like some sort of pact with the devil, I swear. And I grew up watching people kinda do it halfway good. Waveforms, hell, that's actually easy. But splicing is sorcery!
Guess I'll have to bite the bullet and make the shelf space for the single CDs. I really want to revisit the cadences of the speech(es). I did not know taht Proctor had such an extensive background in theater/musical theater pre-Firesign, but that makes sense, thinking about it. Comedy is rhythm, hell, everything is rhythm, so better understand the cadences, better understand the rhythm, better understand the life, better understand....etc.
Maybe it's no coincidence that the producer of DCTDHMTP, and ITWABOTB, was sound engineer Bill Driml (along w.The FST), known for the production of the 1968 Monk album, "Monk's Blues". He also did sound engineering on most of the other things FST did in the 70s, so he was probably considered important to their recorded work.
"Don't Crush That Dwarf" was also their first album to use 16 Track recording, so Driml probably helped out with that.J.W. Guercio is also listed as a producer on the record, but he just did a short segment on side two.The album is a production/comedy masterpiece that had sound engineering that was superior to their first two albums
Proctor also mentions that he did have musical training (he played the violin), and Austin is listed as playing guitar on one of their albums. Proctor can't recall the name of the producer at Columbia who saved them from being dropped by the record company (just calling him John?), but it must have been John Hammond he was thinking of, who along with Guercio, convinced Columbia to retain them.
"I Think We're all Bozos On This Bus" might prove to be their most prophetic utterance of all...
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19 hours ago, AllenLowe said:
and therein lies the rub - because of the historical projects I have been working on for 20 + years, my collection is organized like a step-by-step
study of all of American vernacular music from about 1900-1960. My long term goal, toward which I am making no progress, is to find an institution
that wants to preserve it and let me organized it for the purposes that I gathered it; for the short term I do want to sell off some of the excess. But there are parts
of this collection, as with Schildkraut et al, that are irreplaceable. On the other hand, if I die in the next year or two there will be no recourse and this thing will
likely just disappear.
Gene Puerling's wife gave North Texas University all his stuff, and they keep it in a special collection. I thought you were in remission; hope you're doing alright.
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51 minutes ago, JSngry said:
Found this recently, from 2016, and I gotta wonder if Proctor needs a partner to talk in an interveiw, becuase, how do I say this...the guy RAMBLES more than a little. Believe me, I find myself rambling more as I get older (and always kinds did anyway...) but this guy...he had one one hour block to get through the origins on the group and look wha that turned into...
Still, the work speaks for itself, and it's never boring (at least the first time told)...
No matter, I have heroes, and Firesign Is one of them...more than some musicians, actually. Vision out the ass, brilliantly executed.
One time, all four of them were on the David Susskind Show. I don't think they let Susskind say a word. They just improvised and free-associated for their entire segment- passing it back and forth at the speed of light. Susskind just sat there flabbergasted. I was literally pissing my pants!
Not a day goes by when I don't think of something of theirs' from the first three or four albums. Even when I was teaching, I'd strum my guitar, and lead the kids in a sing-a-long:
"This land has lots of houses,
This land has lots of mouses;
And pussycats to eat them when the sun goes down". The kids would sing along
When I made the absurd suggestion that we re-name the HS, Com*** Martyrs High School (I got banned from a forum for using that full name) , I just got a bunch of blank stares from my fellow educators...
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Thanks for the link! They have to be the easiest people in the world to interview. Ask them one question, and they go on for fifteen minutes.
They gave a good history of how they got together, and created some of the best humor albums of all time. It even explained the meaning of the title of "Don't Crush That Dwarf; Hand Me the Pliers".
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6 hours ago, Mark Stryker said:
Not sure if SGCIM is being facetious or not, but for anyone who hasn't read Benson's autobiography, the passage being referred to does not say Bird killed jazz. Benson is actually making the point that while Bird's innovations did not sit well originally with everyone, ultimately Bird's genius allowed the music to grow in beautiful directions.
Benson recalls a post-concert conversation with an audience member, an older gentleman, who says about Bird: "They said he was going to destroy jazz."
Then George follows up with: "On the way back to the hotel, I thought about what the man said, what the man felt, what the man believed, and you know what? He was right. Charlie Parker improvised in a sophisticated manner that wasn't appreciated by every jazz ear at the time. He broke the mold, but he broke it in a way that enabled those who study his work to put it together in a new, beautiful manner, with a whole new identity, an identity that brought us to where we are now. And I think we're in a pretty good place"
Yeah, smooth jazz like Breezin'
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On 8/28/2020 at 10:31 AM, jcam_44 said:
Louis DeJoy is a man who was appointed in May and never worked for the USPS. It has been a big thing in the news lately...
I wonder who's appointing all these people who know nothing about the depts. they're heading?
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Even though Bad Benson said Bird killed jazz, in Benson's autobiography,
Happy Birthday Bird!
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Look man, just sell me all your Dick Katz and Davey Schildkraut records/CDs I don't have, and we'll call it a day!
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6 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:
Peter King was a fine British jazz musician . Just pulled off the shelf the CD titled" Tippin' The Scales" by a group called Perfect Pitch. The front line has Dick Morrissey on tenor, and Peter King on alto. Will play it later today.
Great album!
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Very sad to hear. Loved his playing on The Quest, but I haven't heard it for many years, since I loaned it to my cousin, and he liked it so much, he didn't want to return the vinyl!
RIP, Mr. Persip...
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One of the greats. Loved his group with Dick Morrissey, Perfect Pitch.
Another great loss for jazz. RIP, Mr. King.
https://londonjazznews.com/2020/08/24/rip-peter-king-1940-2020/
RIP Leo Ursini
in Artists
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That must be that place on Main St. in Cold Spring Harbor/Huntington. It's like the Smalls of Lawnguyland; only a certain circle of players get to play there. I think you've got to show them some secret tattoo or something.
Leo was one of those super talented guys who could be kind of moody. Send me a transcript of your conversation with him, and I'll have my team of analysts tell you what you said that rubbed him the wrong way.