sgcim

To tell you the truth, I didn't listen much to her later stuff. I just remembered that it didn't sound like her early stuff, which I loved, so I didn't pursue it. I remember when I did the gigs with her first producer, he didn't think too highly of her later stuff, and claimed, "I got all her good stuff!". I'll have to listen to her later stuff sometime.

Watered down? WTF? Sounds like classic JS and ON (using his hippest chords) playing a classic Elmer Bernstein movie theme to me. Sounds like something Lester Bangs would say...

Definitely read the biography! There's one hilarious exchange between her and her producer (HB) where he asks her if she's been cutting school to come to the studio sessions!! She sounded great on "Poverty Train", but the band (supposedly the Wrecking Crew!) had trouble following her, just like the NY studio musicians did on her first album. You can really hear it at the end, when they just keep holding that chord under her; they sound like they don't know what the hell to play (I've been there!). She needed her own band with a lot of rehearsal, because she had this habit of doing tons of tempo changes, and unless it's conducted or rehearsed a lot, I'd love to hear the full version of "Wedding Bell Blues", although it sounds like the band was playing it too slow.

I don't know if you read her biography, but the producer of her first album (HB) describes the train wreck that resulted when they let LN play the piano with the studio musicians on the first try at recording it. She would rush the tempos, then all of a sudden slow down, then stop, etc... It was literally impossible for the best studio musicians in NY to follow her. It was a complete disaster, and she wound up breaking into tears trying to get through any of the songs. HB decided the only way they were going to be able to record the album was if she didn't play piano and just sang, so they hired a studio pianist to come in and play for her, and she just sang her songs, She was extremely upset during the whole experience. She was still in HS when she recorded it, so she didn't have much experience playing with other musicians.She didn't get a good reaction when she performed at the Monterey Pop Festival on her own, so she probably needed the help of a more experienced musician until she got a little older. As far as the subject of comparing her versions of her songs to other performers' versions, I've learned to never bring that up with Laura Nyro fanatics. One time my brother-in-law's sister had an argument over that with her husband, and I didn't think their marriage was going to survive their differences on the subject. I will say that Streisand's version of "Stony End" nauseates me, and that David Clayton Thomas' (BS&T) versions of "AWID" and "He's a Runner" are great, as are The Fifth Dimension's versions of "SSP and "WBB, but I can't listen to anything by Three Dog Night.

Growing up, my two sisters and I had a kind of peripheral relation to Laura Nyro's extended family. Her cousins went to the same schools we went to, and my sister was friends with one of them. Their father owned a candy store in our neighborhood, and my sister was accused of 'borrowing' some candy from the store without paying for it in JHS! My sisters loved her music, and went to all of her concerts in NYC. Then I played on a record with Nyro's bass player, Sunshine. My older sister and her husband were selling their house in VT, and Laura Nyro came over to look at it. Then they moved to MA, and Nyro's manager rented a room in their new house. I did some gigs with Michael Amanti, and the pianist/MD was the producer of Nyro's first album. I hung with him, and he told me stories about LN, until he got sick of me asking questions about her, and had to excuse himself! He said she wrote all her great songs for her first two LPs, and never wrote anything as good afterwards. He made a ton of money off those two albums. I played in a band with Aaron Sachs, a well-known sax/clarinet player, and it turned out that he lived in the apt next door to the Nyro family in The Bronx, and his son (who wrote the song "I Love Rock & Roll, Put Another Nickel In the Juke Box...) was close friends with LN. AS was good friends with Nyro's father who was a trumpet player.

No way. You can give Nash all the awards you want to, but that won't give him Woods' natural embouchure. The Hustler ain't the Hustler without that Woods sound. They both played with Charlie Shoemake, and as good as Nash is, he's no replacement for Woods.

Very sad to hear. Compared to Doc, he was a refreshing, subversive presence on the Tonight Show. When I heard the Miles album he made without knowing who it was, I thought, ",Hey, I've been wrong about Miles all these years...". RIP, Mr. Sheldon...

Mobley never really got the attention he deserved. David Rosenthal (Hard Bop) and Owens (Bebop) only mentioned his name in listing personnel of a record.

Yeah, but they'd have to find someone to dig up Phil Woods, and I don't do that type of work anymore.

My old buddy, Lenny Scinsgalli, a great alto player, and arranger, used to ghostwrite Tony Bennett charts for Torrie Zito. Torrie played piano at LS' memorial concert at St. Peter's, and led the big band. If you look at that youtube channel that TTK got the Les Baxter album from, the guy has some interesting stuff from Pete Rugolo and Manny Albam and others. If only somebody could detain Wynton somewhere for a few years, and get a Wynton impersonator to take over JALC. We could get the impersonator to program some Les Baxter, Nelson Riddle, Manny Albam, Eddie Sauter, Pete Rugolo, John Benson Brooks, Gary McFarland, George Handy, Kenyon Hopkins, George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre, Gil Evans, Rod Levitt, Alec Wilder, David Raksin, Claus Ogerman, David Angel, Gene Puerling, Oliver Nelson, Johnny Carisi, Lalo Schifrin, etc... By the time the real Wynton got back,, he'd have aged so much, that no one would recognize him anymore, and they;d think he was just some nut who had delusions that he was Wynton, and he'd just give up and go back to New Orleans, where he'd spend the rest of his days playing in Mardi Gras bands...

That's gotta be symbolic of something...

Very sad to hear. He was only 66 years old. I caught him live once with Larry Coryell. RIP, Vic.

I got in touch with Bob, and he's an email friend. He tells me lots of cool stories about smoking joints with Hendrix. One time Hendrix came into the studio to complain that BB's power trio was playing too loud at the recording studio they shared! By the time they made their second album, Jerry Jeff was out of the band, because BB wanted Circus Maximus to go in a more jazz direction, and JJ wanted to sing about Mr. Bojangles.I thought JJ was the leader of CM, but that's BB in the center of the photo, not JJ like I thought. On Wind, he got the guys in the band to just keep repeating a simple version of that riff that gets repeated over and over, and he did all that incredible piano playing, and even the 12-string guitar solo and vocals on another track. He had enough talent and drive to change the music scene, but he got totally screwed by the contract he signed, and they wouldn't let him release any records for a number of years. Wow, he never told me he hung out up there. He was in Texas when he formed CM with Jerry Jeff Walker, but previous to that he was in LA where he used to play piano duets with Zappa's keyboard player, and then he came to NYC and lived with Gil Evans for a while, He really got around back then.

Does anyone else find it amazing that Bob Bruno was playing piano with Noah Howard on the VV album, while ten years before that he was playing trumpet and trombone with a touring show band, then playing 'stringed' bass (while tripping on acid) for Ben Webster, then leading and playing guitar, keyboards and singing with the innovative rock band Circus Maximus (so-named because they were the house band at the Electric Circus), who were one of the first rock bands on the Vanguard label, and, took part in a multi-media concert with Morton Subotnik? He jammed with Jimi Hendrix and Larry Young at the recording studio where Hendrix recorded in NYC, and finally wound up playing solo piano for years in Washington DC in a club frequented by Presidents and members of Congress.

I bought that album and couldn't believe it. It was a Smooth Jazz album! You're taking a chance buying anything by Benson, his good jazz albums, IMHO can be counted on one hand.

If you go to the Jazz in the Movies website, the one name that will show up on almost every single film is "Emil Richards- Percussion". What an amazing career RIP.

Yeah, that ones good, listen to Moon Rays

I enjoyed Eddie's playing with Guraldi, but out of reverence for the deceased, please stay away from the solo guitar album he made. RIP

I would definitely agree with Newborn and Costa being much more interesting and artistically satisfying than Peterson's tendency to overdo his powerful chops. Costa, like Dick Katz, was also a much more imaginative comper than Peterson, who had a tendency to play over the soloist. It was interesting that Bill Evans' first album "Modern Jazz Conceptions" displayed a more percussive side to his playing, and that he and Costa were very close friends. Evans rarely returned to that type of playing. Newborn was able to demonstrate that virtuosity didn't have to include glibness, also. That creepy video of his last public performance was heartbreaking. There's no doubt that Evans admired earlier Peterson (Pre-Pablo), but the incident I described took place when Peterson seemed to go off the rails. Perhaps Evans was responding to this deterioration in his playing. To completely dismiss Oscar is,IMHO, a mistake. Though I like some of the tunes he did with the Ellis trio on a case by case basis, in the 60s, when he started playing with Thigpen or Durham, he became a force of nature. His bit as a sideman on "The Eternal Triangle" was also phenomenal.

It's almost a given that whatever the reality, the musicians who are coming up NOW, think that NOW is the time. The young mothers I play with in various bands, rarely say to me that the 70s, 80s or 90s must have been a great period in jazz. To them, everything is happening now, which is how it should be. Nothing is so repulsive to me as some of these young guys wearing garb of the 30s, and playing music of that period, as if Bird never happened, let alone Trane. Since I came up in the 70s, THAT was the time for me. It seemed like there was so much going on. Phil Woods just came back from Europe, and formed his own band with players like Bill Goodwin and Mike Melillo- guys who were hardly locked into the 50s. Tom Harrell was playing as a sideman all over the place, after just getting out of Pilgrim State. Bill Evans was playing at the VV, and Thad and Mel were still playing there. NYC actually supported jazz with the Jazz Interactions program, where we got to have free group lessons with cats like Howard McGhee, Attilla Zoller, and others of that period, rather than the Wynton Marsalis Worship Hour we're currently having at JALC. Ed Bickert and Don Thompson came to prominence as world class players, after being unknowns to anyone outside of Canada. Same with Lenny Breau. Jazz guitar started to have a rebirth, due to the rockers getting tired of pentatonic wanking, and songs with purely power chords and triads. Guitarists as diverse as Kenny Burrell, George Barnes, Bucky Pizzarelli, Sam Brown, Joe Puma, Chuck Wayne, Jim Hall, Jimmy Raney, and Tal Farlow were playing clubs and festivals, and recording as leaders. The public were actually excited by jazz, after the energy from 60s rock had begun to burn out. Sure, jazz was never going to be big as the pre-Beatles years, but the 70s can definitely seen as some type of jazz renaissance, at least in NY.

There's no doubt that Evans admired earlier Peterson (Pre-Pablo), but the incident I described took place when Peterson seemed to go off the rails. Perhaps Evans was responding to this deterioration in his playing. To completely dismiss Oscar is,IMHO, a mistake. Though I like some of the tunes he did with the Ellis trio on a case by case basis, in the 60s, when he started playing with Thigpen or Durham, he became a force of nature. His bit as a sideman on "The Eternal Triangle" was also phenomenal.

I loved the "Phoenix" LP on FD back in HS. He could really build his solos up to a.... uh, climax on some of those two chord Latin vamps. "Falsa Bahiana" was my fave tune. We went to hear him play live, and Stanley Clarke was on bass. We got a kick out of his Argentinian cowboy hat, and how he kept sticking his first finger up, and waving it around in a circle.He was like a creature from another planet to us HS kids.

It depends what era Peterson you're talking about. The trio with Ellis and Brown (and no drummer) was different than the trio in the 60s with Brown and Durham or Thigpen . Then, something went kerflooey when he and Joe Pass went to Pablo. I can't listen to that stuff. I remember as a kid, a child prodigy pianist friend of mine and I went shopping at the Farmer's Market, and there were a whole bunch of the Eddie Costa Trio LPs on Jubilee there selling for only a dollar, and we each bought one. My friend copied Costa's solos on the record, because they sounded like Peterson, slowed down. Yet, when I told him how much I loved Costa's playing on the record, he got all indignant, and said something like, "What? That little, puny pianist? He's nothing compared to Peterson!" I'd rather listen to Costa, any day... My friend was a child prodigy classical pianist with perfect pitch, who was playing Bach at the age of four, and it seems like Some classical pianists were floored by his technical ability. Others, like Bill Evans, were nauseated by Peterson. When Evans was on the same bill at a jazz festival as Peterson, he was overheard backstage saying something like,"Do I have to be subjected to listening to this?" I liked some of the stuff up to the Pablo stuff, but when he and Pass recorded for Pablo, it was like that show-offy JATP flag waving stuff; I can't take any of that.

I just tape over my old ones.

I just got Roku express Plus. I was on the Roku forums complaining that my old Roku couldn't get You Tube anymore. They emailed me after that, saying that they would sell me Roku Express Plus for only $15 plus shipping. It turned out You Tube changed their settings so the first generation Roku box I had couldn't pick it up anymore. They were the only ones you could hook up to a VCR and tape things off of Roku. I hooked up the new Roku Express Plus to my VCR, and I'm back in business.