sgcim

Santana even played his solo on "Black Magic Woman". Great melodic conception. RIP , Mr. Green.

Great one on "OON" by Fats.

Yeah, they are, with some subs Wes added.

I found out the hard way that just because you know the changes to the contrafact, that doesn't mean you know the changes to the original it's based on. Some keyboard player called "How High The Moon" on a gig, and I figured I wouldn't have any trouble with it, because "Ornithology" is called way more often than HHTM, and I knew Ornithology backwards and forwards. But when we played HHTM, I kept screwing up the end of the A section of HHTM, because it's different than Ornithology. Since the keyboard player was a guy I never knew or worked with before, I figured he was playing the 'square' changes, and not the 'hip' Bird changes that everyone else plays. When I got home, I looked up the changes to HHTM, and saw the difference between the the two tunes. I was alone at the time, so I had to self flagellate instead of ordering my harem of nubiles to punish me for my both my mistake, and my unjust condemnation of said piano player, in order to satisfy my Opus Dei requirements.

I got the Johnny Smith Mosaic for only $32 on ebay, but of course it was minus the booklet, and one CD (which I have on vinyl).

My recently ex GF was an ex-jazz flute player, but only took the flute out when she was really high. She was playing the Trane "Ballads" album, and took off out of nowhere, and came back with her flute and was jamming on "Lush Life" (a song she could very strongly relate to...), unleashing a wave of pentetonic scales on the recording. Another time, we drove upstate to a party where a bunch of us were jamming outside so loud, that they had to call the police on us. We all just sat there afterwards, smoking ganja and staring at our silent instruments, until she got up, and started to take command of the drum set. She started lecturing us on Elvin Jones, and how we weren't worth schlitz unless we were hip to Elvin. The birthday boy called me the next day, and said the drummer (who was in one of David Byrne's bands) asked him for my GF's number.

I live in Queens, NY, the epicenter of the epicenter, with the most deaths in NY, and things are much better, but as CT said, "For the time being, anyway"... I wait till about 11pm to go grocery shopping, and even though there are just a handful of people out at that time, they're too lax in social distancing and mask wearing.

Just as an example of what happens when forums split into FB groups, one guy did this with another forum I visit, and he turned the place into a dictatorship! You found yourself banned if you made one statement the leader didn't agree with. One real life friend of mine told me that a friend of his joined the group, and tried to log in one day, and found he had a lifetime ban from the FB group, and he didn't even know what he said that got him banned! My friend said the guy who was banned was shattered by being banned, because he wanted to stay in the group. I wouldn't touch said FB group with a ten foot pole, and I never wanted to join FB to begin with, but I was doing some research on a particular artist, and the person I was emailing about that artist refused to communicate any other way except by FB. I use FB as little as is humanly possible.

There have been a bunch of documentaries on McCarthy and Roy Cohn lately. "Tailgunner Joe" (his air force service was a lot of BS) apparently just used the Red Scare to advance his political career, and couldn't understand it when people held his legal actions against him. After ruining hundreds of lives, he'd put his arm around the shoulder of the opposing attorney and say, "let;s go out and get a drink, buddy", as if it all was just business as usual. He drank his way to an early death. We have Roy Cohn to thank for training his young protege to attack people if they get in your way.

Lousy sadists.

"Naming names" could also have a later, "rebound effect in Hollywood. The once prolific David Raksin was scoring films for the top studios in Hollyweird, but after McCarthy was finally taken down, Raksin was only assigned B movies. In interviews, he would attribute it to the radical, dissonant nature of his music, but in reality, his naming names, provided just a temporary push for his career. Once he was denounced as a 'fink' the days of "Laura" and "Separate Tables", gave way to working for less mainstream directors like Curtis Harrington ("Night Tide"), John Cassavetes and Tom Gries. This was followed by the end of the road, TV movies, a 'one way ticket to Palookaville'. A similar fate was shared by Honegger, whose perceived Nazi collaboration, doomed him to Classical music's version of Palookaville.

Buddy Collette was the West Coast equivalent of Clark Terry, in terms of breaking into the West Coast recording scene. In CT's being one of the first African American artists to work for the NBC Studio Orchestra, he opened up work for others, like the omni-present George Duvuvier, Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, etc... However, the West Coast was definitely more racist than the East Coast studio scene, with Collette usually the only black man in the band/group/orchestra. His name shows up on more jazz albums led by white musicians, other than Leroy Vinnegar's amazing spurt, and was a very underrated soloist. I saw Collette on the West Coast jazz TV show, "Club Date", and video taped it, and was blown away by his sound, ideas, and general musicality. It's probably one of my fave videos in my large collection.

Morricone always turned out interesting scores, whether he was writing for a low budget Giallo or a huge production Academy Award winner. Along Herrmann and Raksin, he was one of my faves At 90,he was still doing world tours conducting his film scores up till last year(!), and apologized on his web site for having to cancel last year's tour because of ill health! I was surprised to find that his 'serious',non-film music bore no relation to his film music. RIP, Maestro!

Here's the ORIGINAL Magnum PI Theme by Ian Freebairn-Smith:

IFS came to my attention when I found out he co-wrote the Nilsson tune "Wailing of the Willow". I did a search on him, and came up with an album by the Hi-Lo's that he did all the arrangements of folk songs, and did some amazing things with them. Then I found out he composed the original theme for the TV show "Magnum", which was a great, swinging piece, but they replaced it with a standard Mike Post funk/rock theme. Then I came up with a Four Freshman album he arranged, which didn't sound like a typical FF album. Some of his vocal arr. on that album were worthy of Gene Puerling. In 1963, he started the Singer's Inc. a group with accomplished composer/arrangers-Geo. Tipton,IFS, Perry Botkin, and two singers Jimmy Bryant (the guy who sang Tony's role in the motion picture version of West Side Story-for union scale, cause he was unemployed at the time!), and Sue Allen, a singer from the 40s and 50s. They only made one album accompanied by a small jazz group including Howard Roberts. There are only two cuts available on You Tube, which sound like light Hi-Lo type stuff, but the other tunes on the album are standards, and probably more interesting. Does anyone have this LP, or know anything about IFS that isn't in WIKI?

He sounds good on his tunes, but I could see where a classically trained musician might not be able to cut sitting in with someone like Joe Albany. Probably didn't know any tunes.

Amram did have a great interest in 'world music' (like Tony Scott), decades before the more recent fad, and liked to feature himself playing non-Western instruments from his journeys all over the world. Probably Gleason didn't think they fit in that well in a jazz situation. Amram was a special case, in that he never took the academic route that most classical composers took, so he had to make a living as a composer/multi-instrumentalist, and embrace other types of music other than jazz to make a living, and indulge in self-promotion to survive. Perhaps all these things gave my friend the impression DA was some sort of 'charlatan'. I worked regularly with George Barrow for a few years, and he never had anything but praise for Amram's playing and writing.

What a melodic gift he had, Emily, A Time For Love, The Shadow of Your Smile, just those three would make him qualified to be one of the greatest songwriters of the last half of the 20th Century. RIP, Johnny. In connection with MASH's theme song, the name Ian Freebairn- Smith came up a lot. It turned out that he was one of the vocalists on the original version of the theme, and also a composer/arranger in Hollywood that also did some Hi-Los, and Four Freshman arrangements, and led a similar type of group called The Singers Inc.

Yeah that's him.

Another fascinating show, David! It's sad that the NPR station in NY uses Kevin Whitehead as their 'Jazz Consultant' (who is currently plugging his new book on "Hollywood Movies and Jazz", which seems as vanilla as his regular radio segments) instead of you; people might understand what great jazz is, but they could care less bout that... I've spent the last week writing an arr. of a David Amram piece, and think that he was a great composer/jazz french horn player, but I mentioned his name to a friend once, and he thought of him as a 'charlatan' of sorts. Have you ever heard Amram characterized as such?

Gabor claimed Bad Benson ripped him off on his monster hit of Breezin'- we held a Kangaroo Court and sentenced him to having to play some awful Schoenberg piece. Harsh punishment no doubt, but it fits the crime.

Yeah, it's just this bunch of raving Benson fanatics in some guitar discussion groups I belong to that insist that Benson is the living personification of Bird on the guitar, and ignoring the recordings of players like Raney and Farlow, who were actually present on 52nd St., and would spend every night they could hearing him live and incorporate all of his ideas into their playing. That is the core of my "Upsetment". As Jim said, only a recording of Schoenberg's "Op.24, Seranade for Septet and Baritone Voice" produced by Q. and featuring Bad Benson playing the guitar part would quell my upsetment. Here is an example of Johnny Smith playing it under Mitropoulos: He had to feed the nose....

It's when Benson's name gets linked with Bird that bugs me. There are a bunch of guitarists that think Benson was the greatest exponent of Bird on the guitar, but I don't hear it. Barry Harris has been quoted as saying that Jimmy Raney was the cat who played more like Bird than any other guitarist. Raney played with Al Haig, and he lived that music full-time 24/7 on 52nd Street. Then Benson comes along who was too young to even know who Bird was, and had never even heard him until he was a pro playing with McDuff. And then the "upsetment" intensifies when I read his jive autobiography, and he has the nerve to end the book agreeing with some jerk who says that "Bird destroyed jazz". Everything else is neither here nor there, but when he puts that garbage about the greatest jazz musician that ever lived, IMHO, it's extremely problematic. But don't worry, he's only about 80 now, he'll resurrect jazz from that nasty Yardbird jazz destroyer any day now................................................................................

Yeah, Benson tried to do it once, as he mentions in the book. He got together a great band, with amazing players. They did a gig somewhere or other, and no one showed up. Boom! That was the end of the band. Herbie keeps releasing jazz album after jazz album. I remember buying Benson's album with Joe Farrell, thinking, "How could this possibly be lame- Joe Farrell and George Benson. I used to catch Farrell playing with Sam Brown in the Village, and they'd blow their asses off for twenty minute-long solos. I put the record on, and couldn't believe it- smooth effing jazz- Joe Farrell! Not even one cut where they tried to play the type of stuff Farrell was playing with Sam Brown in the 70s. Duaneiac's interpretation of "destroyed jazz" is hardly what Benson and his admirer were talking about, (although I admire his imaginative, post-modern interpretation ), they were obviously talking about Bird's music not being as easy to dance to as the Swing music that was so popular. Then Benson saved 'jazz' by teaming up with Quincy and "Gave us The Night" "On Broadway", where we be "Breezin' through "This Masquerade" with "The Greatest Love of All"on the dance floor.. And it's not like he isn't a great player (the greatest in many people's eyes), but there's something subtle about his and Rodney Jones' rhythmic approach which funks more than it swings. His voice has such a great timbre, that when he's singing along with his lines, that it comes out as something greater than it would be if he were just playing guitar.

"I said, “You mean Bird?” He said, “That’s it!” “Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker.” “Yeah, that’s the name. Yardbird. They said he was going to destroy jazz.” 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." And we're supposed to believe that the "new, beautiful way" he presents it is better than the way Bird and his followers presented it? The slick, over-produced arrangements of smooth jazz he plays live and on all his albums? If you listen to the lines that he plays and sings, they're hack blues cliches that hundreds of mediocre organ trio guitarists play. When Pat Martino was asked what he thought of Benson as a jazz guitarist, he replied, "He's a pretty good R&B player". Benson's egotism allows him to say, "He was right", because he believes that the way HE puts Bird's ideas to use is better than the way Jackie McLean, Sonny Stitt , Sonny Rollins, Phil Woods, Cannonball Adderly, ad infinitum. because he appeals to the LCD and sells more records, whatever that means anymore. His legacy will be his square, effeminate rendition of "The Greatest Love of All", because he refuses to put out any jazz records, because they don't make a lot of money. If your read the whole book, he drops anything that won't draw large crowds and sell a lot of records. The man who destroyed jazz, meanwhile, has a legacy that shows no sign of ever fading.