sgcim

I just heard this Norwegian composer for the first time on WKCR yesterday, and enjoyed the short orchestral pieces they played of his. I had to leave the car before they announced the title of the piece. I guess it was some type of orchestral Suite. Anybody know what piece it was? On Wiki, they said that 4/5 of his work was destroyed in a fire in 1970, but they've been trying to put together what pieces they can by individual orchestra parts, transcriptions, etc... Which of his pieces was considered his greatest work? Was it lost in the fire, or reconstructed? I tried to get to his website, but wasn't allowed because I didn't have the right software. TIA

A band I was in on Lawnguyland used to play at the North Hills Country Club, where Whitey Ford was at a lot of the gigs, completely bombed out of his mind. I explained to him how I used to model my wind up and cross armed pitching style after him, and he just kinda looked at me with a glazed look in his eyes...

Wow! Very nice, but you've got to remember that the Monkees were a Hollywood recreation of a rock group, and they had studio guys, songwriters, and arrangers that were superb musicians. Gene Puerling's roommate in the Hi-Los was writing vocal arrangements for The Association ("Cherish") , Harry Nilsson was writing songs for them, so who knows who was involved in this arrangement... Nesmith seemed to be the only member of the Monkees that wasn't just about show biz. He opened up his own recording studio, and recorded some pretty hip people there. Judee Sill's last album was recorded there, but she OD'd before they could add any string or orchestral tracks to it,( or mastering), so it was essentially just a demo tape. They got Jim O'Rourke to do some work on it, but I don't think it was what JS would've wanted done.

Yeah, it's 12 bars, but I hear that B natural in the 4th bar as leading to the ii chord, Cm7, which he plays instead of the IV chord Eb7, then he plays the standard blues changes. In the second chorus he does what Jim said, uses the tritone sub E7 to get to the IV chord. In any event, I'm glad he passed his civil service exam...

I thought it was from some obscure album from the 60s,.but it just came out this year! My bad.

Wow! Very nice, but you've got to remember that the Monkees were a Hollywood recreation of a rock group, and they had studio guys, songwriters, and arrangers that were superb musicians. Gene Puerling's roommate in the Hi-Los was writing vocal arrangements for The Association ("Cherish") , Harry Nilsson was writing songs for them, so who knows who was involved in this arrangement...

Hi Holger! One reason it sounds weird is because he's not playing off the blues form like all the other solos on the tune. It's some type of weird little section of turnarounds they added for the piano. He does use some Monkish descending runs, but it sounds weird because he keeps playing the flat two note (the third of the VI7 chord in the turnaround) when we expect to hear some type of blues progression.

I remember buying DM's baseball card, and it said he was a jazz organist. I wonder who the guitarist was? Probably that guy from Motown. DM, well he can play a mean chromatic scale...Marty Kallao on guitar.

Yeah, Billy Crystal was a big jazz fan.

RIP. I played Hair with Billy Butler, and he raved about Galt's writing for GM's New Pulse Band.

YES!

One guy I knew used to say that every time he saw her, she had that magic quality that made you feel she was singing only to you. My Brother-In-Law was friends with Billy Crystal in high school, and they both convinced the student government and faculty to hire Nancy Wilson to sing at their high school Prom! RIP.

I heard last night from one of the musicians I was playing a gig with that John Mosca, the trombonist who was the leader of the VV Big Band, and its longest member, is leaving the VV big band. Anyone know anything about this?

Yeah, Barry's approach to solo guitar playing was very unique. They put out a few books of his solo arrangements. He studied with George Russell before GR went off the wall with his LCC,

I searched for that LP for many years, before it was finally re-issued. It offered another too rare opportunity to hear the great jazz studio guitarist of the 50s, Barry Galbraith featured as a soloist, rather than the countless studio sessions he played back then, which would offer at best, one chorus or less of his swinging, linear style. Galbraith only recorded one album as a leader, "Guitar and the Wind", on which he used Osie Johnson and Milt Hinton, and Eddie Costa rather than Hank Jones. This could've been because it was one of those small group sessions of that time that featured arrangements (Billy Byers and Al Cohn), and Costa was a legendary sight reader of fast, intricate arrangements. Galbraith's LP also featured Urbie Green, and the wonderful, slightly out of tune flute of Bobby Jaspar, playing such rarities as Raksin's "Love is for the Very Young" (probably the first jazz recording of it), and Osie Johnson's, "Ya Gotta Have Rhythm". Galbraith's playing career was cut short by a painful nerve disease that left him unable to play the guitar on the same level that he did in the 50s.

Very sad to hear. He used to be a regular guest on Radio Unnameable with Bob Fass on WBAI, playing unaccompanied improvisational clarinet into the night. With his passing, NY just goes from bad to worse. RIP.

The guy that made the recent Bill Evans Doc said he tried to interview Eddie Gomez for the film, but Gomez wouldn't do it unless he was paid a few thousand bucks. The filmmaker told him, 'later'.

They should've had the bass play on his solo. That freaking conga creates a tonic pedal which gets in the way of Bird's chord subs. Bird Lives!!!!!!!

Lenny Lopate, after being fired from WNYC for supposed sexual harassment behavior, has resurfaced on WBAI, and is still doing great radio. He changed his theme music to something by a guy named Charlie Morrow, whom I'd never heard of before, but he sounds interesting. Here's a piece on him by Tim Page: http://charliemorrow.com/portrait.html Anyone hip to him?

The title of this thread was, of course, facetious. I saw the " Makaya McCraven Isn’t Interested in Saving Jazz " thread somewhere below, and tried to do a paraphrase of it, but I posted a thread on JG on another (rock-oriented) forum under a more generic title, and was surprised that the rockers showed a lot of interest in what JG was doing, and some had even caught him live at the steady jazz gig he's been doing in LA since the early 90s, and concerts he's done all over the US. My gateway drug to jazz was the UK jazz-rock band IF. My sister worked at the concession stand at the Fillmore East, and she was able to get me free tickets to any show I wanted to see. I was entranced by this new, underground band, Black Sabbath's, first LP, and had to see them on their first US tour. in 1970. They and another UK band called IF, were opening up for Rod Stewart. I was astonished to hear how bad Sabbath sounded live, and that their satanic sounding lead singer was just a little punk, who sounded like crap live. The other band, IF, featuring Dick Morrissey on tenor and Terry Smith on guitar, blew me away. They could actually play their instruments, and I felt like I was at some wild jazz jam session that I'd read about in books. And they were probably screwing the same groupies that the rock bands were. I walked out on Rod Stewart while he was singing some stupid song about Southern Comfort, and decided jazz was where it was at.

I guess I deserve and was expecting these answers, but as I said, somebody's gotta do it sooner or later, and it may as well be sooner... It's like getting a colonoscopy, you've got to get it done, so you might as well get it over with...

Goldblum just released his first jazz album, The Capitol Studio Sessions, recently, and while I don't hear anything special going on musically, he did say on NPR that he was interested in presenting jazz in a manner that would make it appealing to a wider audience. This includes using a large dose of his spontaneous humor, and playing simpler jazz that stresses the fun aspect of the music. He features the vocalists and trumpet player more than he does his own piano playing, so he doesn't seem to be on an ego trip... Is this going to be a good or a bad thing for jazz? What sayeth thou?

No, as I mentally survey my HS and college stage bands, I just come up with a very talented electric bass player with the physical traits you mention, who gave up all his talent and ambition when he became born again. The drummer in my first rock band had those traits, but as soon as he got out of Catholic school, descended into a pattern of degeneracy that could only come from receiving daily beatings by nuns for eight years.

Ultimately, the blame with any financial decisions with Evans career falls on Helen Keane. After becoming a junkie, he let her take over all his decisions concerning his playing career. She told him who to record with, what to record, where to play and probably tied his shoes for him. How else would you explain the record with Herbie Mann? OTOH, if not for HK, he would've wound up dead before the age of thirty. It was a miracle that he made it to the age of 50. She brought his music to a wider audience, even if she did get him crap record dates like this one, where it was decided that he make what was meant to be the epitome of an anonymous easy listening record. There's no mention of Evans trying to take his name off the record, or stopping the release of it (like he insisted on with the first Stan Getz record, and the first solo record), so he might have figured that it would never hit the jazz buying public, and would be marketed to the easy listening crowd. There's also a possibility that it was made during the period when Evans' hand was so swollen up from infected needles, that a friend of mine saw him play at a club in NYC with his left hand left on his lap for the entire gig.

Evans just wanted to get money for his next fix. He didn't even look at the music Gary McFarland gave him for the LP they made together. He just came in and sight read the whole thing. They have tapes of him practicing classical pieces when he was a kid. He'd play an entire piece sight reading, then turn the page (which you could hear) and sight read the next piece. And so on... Gunther Schuller said he was the only musician who could sight read Milton Babbitt's "All Set' with all the dynamics, out of the entire band, and we're talking about top readers like Hal McKusick, Art Farmer, etc... When he made that POS LP with Ogerman, he was probably completely junked up, and looking forward to spending the paycheck on some more. The whole session probably took less than an hour. IMHO, they were probably going out of their way to NOT provide a note's worth of interest, so they could sell it to the supermarket/elevator music people. I liked that arr. of JSM. I agree that they were trying to provide some interest there. The moral is, "stay away from drugs kids, m'kay?'