sgcim

I took the dare! The sequel album has better arrangements than the first one, which was largely unison and octave writing with some interesting counter melodies, but the first one is my fave because everyone gets enough solo time to do their thing. ML had a tentet to work with in the second one, so he could use more harmony in the parts, but most of the tunes were under three minutes, so the players got one or two choruses at most, with ML getting the lion's share of the solo work. The first album had more high points, with outstanding solos by each player on their feature. Donald Byrd played a fine solo on his feature, Jimmy Cleveland played a smokin' high octave solo on his thing, Costa got a chance to do his great octaves and percussive thing, and of course, Tony Scott went into his Ben Webster bag for "Riff Blues" (Mike Hammer theme) and stole the entire show. Herbie Mann was just there, as usual. Mundy was much more bluesy on this one, and the rhythm section was fine. The second album had no real high points, other than Mundell's much more swinging solos than on the first album. Scott was replaced by a fine studio musician, who was never known for anything special as far as jazz improvisation was concerned. Byrd was replaced by CT, who played fine as usual, but never got enough time to really take off, as shown by his ending one short solo with a fantastic double time figure, as if to say, "This is what I could've been doing, but Camden wanted to cut the solo time, and I'm sticking this in to show you what you missed". Costa had his hands tied on this also, with no time to do his thing. They're both good albums, but I prefer the first one.

W What. there's a second one besides the one with Tony Scott, Eddie Costa, etc...?

The only name I recognize on the list is Frank D'Rone, a fine singer and guitarist from Chicago that Larry posted some clips of here. If his rendition of "Joey, Joey, Joey" is on either of the LPs, it's worth getting, IMHO.

Just started, "Rhythm Is My Beat" by Alfred Green- Freddie Green bio by his son Alfred. I thought it was going to be a fawning tale of the relationship of father and son, but AG has done all his homework, with tons of footnotes and excerpts of interviews he did with various family members, musicians and jazz writers. I'm up to the point where John Hammond 'discovers' FG at the local club where JH likes to get his rocks off watching nude 'mermaids' swimming around in a huge fish tank. JH is not spared critical review, as he takes apart the Basie Band to fit his perception of what the band should sound like, much to the consternation of both fired and retained band members. Lester Young and Billie Holiday's opinion of him is quoted in the book as a "Heartless meddler". Hammond took the nine piece Basie band from KC, and started adding instrumentation of five or six men, which caused the band to "slow down and made it sluggish", according to Buck Clayton, who claimed they "never had a bad night in KC". When Hammond first unveiled his 'discovery' in NYC at Roseland, the Basie Band was a huge flop.

That's a good way to think of it for the usual version in F, but if you've got a 'chick singer' who is intent on singing "The Boy From Ipanema" in her key, you've still got to find those third and fourth chords of the bridge in the new key. I used to do it by remembering that the third chord was going to be a minor seventh using the first chord's root, and the chord following that, the bVI7 of that third chord (which is the same thing as your method of going down a major 3rd) which then became the V7 of the next minor 7th chord, as you said. The weird thing is that you're on the ii chord when you've reached the fifth chord of the bridge, but it's going down a major third (or up a minor 6th), not to anything in the key like the V chord. If you've made it that far, then it's just a iii VI ii V turnaround and your journey is over. Where it really gets funny is when there's a male and female singer on the gig, and they start alternating A and B sections! The female decides she's going to come in on the bridge- IN HER KEY!! Then it's time for you to solo, in her key! Then the male singer wants to come in on the bridge back in the original key! There were never any rehearsals for these gigs, so it was every man/woman for themselves. I just remember laughing my head off and getting totally lost the first time that happened, but somehow we made it through without a train wreck..After that, I knew what to expect

They got it from Trane. Maybe they were trying to show they were hip to Trane.

Happy Birthday, Kenny! You were my first and strongest influence.

Just put it on pause, and copy it down like I did. I don't know if the counter-melody was meant to be from the blues scale of each particular key. Since ACJ has said that he was more influenced by Debussy and Villa Lobos, it's more likely just a descending 13th chromatic figure to the fifth and then a leap downwards leap to the ninth, followed by a minor third leap to the min.7th of the new chord; something Impressionistic composers might do. Analyzing the bridge from the standpoint of those three different keys was interesting, but too much info to memorize could lead to confusion on the gig. When the 'chick singer' on the gig would do it in a different key, I'd just start from the first chord of the bridge, and raise it up a half step, and proceed intervallically until it hit the iii7 chord of the home key, and the long journey would be over.

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.