sgcim

The collaboration betwixt The Singers Unlimited and The Boss Brass was the best thing I've ever heard in that bag. Gene Puerling meets Rob McConnell- that pretty much says it all...

RIP. From Magma to jazz to composition, he sounded like an orchestra with the loop pedals.

Gil Melle

I was just listening to that album, and i agree with everything you said about it. GB didn't keep his foot on the sustain pedal most of the time, like he did on most of his later recordings (my only complaint with GB). Maybe it was due to the fact that a fellow vibes player, GM, did the arr. on half the tunes, and may have had some input on GB's playing. Even though GB was a genius vibes player, I prefer listening to players who didn't lean on the sustain pedal, Bags, GM, Cal Tjader, Eddie Costa, etc... as much as GB did. GB talked about that session in his autobiography, coming down hard on Jim Hall for not letting him know beforehand that he couldn't make the session, and sending Joe Puma (who does a wonderful job) without letting him know. Burton also lets everyone else he played with have it; Getz (I don't know where to start!) Metheny (made little fixes in the studio on all his solos), MJQ( couldn't sightread), Coryell (stoned), Sam Brown (same as Coryell), and so on. Brookmeyer has a great solo on 'My Favorite Things', but he limits Woods to the clarinet(!) throughout. GB's solo interpretations are fantastic. He manages to sound like Bill Evans (his stated biggest influence) with four mallets! The best thing about the LP is that they took tunes from TSOM like 'Do Re MI, Climb Every Mountain, The title song, and made them into blowing vehicles in a very organic fashion; something only harmonic geniuses like GB and GM were capable of doing.

Eddie Costa seemed to have listened to him. I have the Sal Salvador Quintet/Quartets CD on Blue Note, and both Costa and 'Johnny' Williams play piano on it. On 'Get Happy' Williams comes up with a low, rumbling drone in the lower register that I could've sworn was Costa's. Costa's got a great thing on Get Happy where he plays it fast with those low octaves and best of all, in the parallel minor key!

Thanks!

Between hundreds of records by Star Wars Boy, and the classical guitarist, not to mention Johnny Williams the bass player, it's very difficult to do a search on the jazz pianist without having to wade through those other guys.

Yeah, I actually agree with JSngry on something, although I don't see Pass in a negative light. Pass was an incredible guitarist, who had different influences than a hard-core bopper like Raney was. Raney talks about how Bird used accents on the off-beats in his straight 8th notes, while the Swing conception was uneven 8th notes with accents on the beat..Barry Harris was quoted on Raney's 'Live in Tokyo LP as saying Raney was "the only guitarist who could do things like Yard did". Also, there's a big difference between the types of lines guys like Raney and Farlow played compared to Pass'. Raney's were more involved melodically than Pass'. Pass' lines tended to be much more straightforward, ordinary lines with less chromaticism than Raney's or Farlow's. Tal came out to see me when I was playing at a club, during the time that Pass was at the height of his popularity, and I mentioned to him when we went out for breakfast that as great as Pass was as a guitarist, I still preferred the Raney/Farlow school to the Pass and Herb Ellis style. Pass was more influenced by Django than Raney and Farlow were, which is why he was a better choice to team up with Oscar Peterson than they were.

I thought that earlier JP would be hipper with the time thing, but he was always like that. Although he played bop-type lines, he always used a Swing-era rhythmic conception. Jimmy Raney described JP like this: "He sounds like Charlie Parker, all straightened out". In Grad school, I wanted to loan my classical guitar teacher some solo jazz guitar records, to hear what he thought of them. He said, "Okay, but I refuse to listen to Joe Pass". Then he let loose a string of epithets to describe JP's Virtuoso albums that scared the hell out of me. I didn't loan him any records, but he fell in love with a Geo. Van Eps piece for solo guitar that I played at my recital. He ordered me to xerox a copy of it for him. I wrote an arr. of Stolen Moments for the school's Guitar Ensemble that he loved also, but when he ordered me to xerox all of that stuff for him, I pretended to forget to do it... I'm the only guitarist I know of who can play SM as a solo guitar piece with the exact ON original voicings. I've listened to all of them, and only one guy came close.

Heard this last night on the Fresh Sound two-fer, which also features Flute Suite. Each player is featured on a blues by A.K. Highlights- Nat Adderly, Seldon Powel, Eddie Costa doing a Monkish thing on his feature, an early Phil Woods, and Sahib Shihab. After the high note trumpet feature, there's a few seconds of the band's reaction to it!

I think Glasel used Garcia on a quartet LP' obviously not this one.

I love Raney, but that LP is all double tracks.

I just heard this last night, and was astounded by Schildkraut's playing on the whole LP. I had heard him on other records, and even ran into him once when we were playing wedding gigs in different rooms in Brooklyn, but I had no idea he could play like that. I like Handy, but the use of violin, flute and oboe with the trumpet and two saxes didn't knock me out. Schildkraut brought that record to a much higher level.

Hey Fer, I stumbled on to your Eddie Costa you tube collection. Some great stuff, but some of it wasn't EC. I think it was Don Abney(?) on the Lucky Thompson cuts, and Johnny Williams doing that great bass drone thing on the Sal Salvador version of 'Get Happy. Sounded like EC, anyway. Have you ever heard the version of 'Taking A Chance on Love' EC did with Oscar Pettiford on 'Discoveries? Is it worth getting? He did that tune with Tal and on the Live at Newport LP. One musician said that he was booked to play on a soundtrack that Q was scoring, and Q walked into the studio with no music! He just gave them some riffs and grooves to play, and that's how they did the entire score.

Make that Jack Kreisberg, and the album is 'One', which is excellent. The Cal Collins album is 'By Myself'.

Yeah, some great writing on that one! Those two guys, Aaron and Vinnie kept gigging into their 90s. I miss Aaron a lot. His solos were great works of art. I'll have to check out the Glasel album. Was Dick Garcia on that one?

George Van Eps put out a few solo guitar LPs, Soliloquy, My Guitar. Harry Leahey made one, but it's hard to find. Lenny Breau has two other than Cabin Fever, 5:00 Bells and Last Sessions. There's a CD called 'Legends' that has both Johnny Smith and Geo. Van Eps doing solo performances, but JS plays Spanish classical guitar pieces with a pick. Peter bernstein, Howard Alden and Jack Kreisman(?) have fairly recent solo guitar albums. Pasquale Grasso just put one out that is pretty scary. Bucky Pizzarelli made one a while ago. Kenny Poole made a great one before he passed. I think Cal Collins made one before he passed...

All those great SA Tonight Show episodes were erased...

I got this message yesterday, and ran home screaming like a little baby. I had just went through something like this with my Roku box. I was having trouble getting Roku, so I went to the Roku booklet, and did a search it recommended. I wound up on a Roku site with a beautiful looking operator who asked me if I wanted to chat about it. I explained my problem, and she asked me for my phone number associated with my Roku account. She said a Roku tech would call me back and walk me through the fix to my problem. A second later, the phone rang. It was the promised Roku tech! He led me through the process, and my Roku was magically fixed. He then told me it only cost me $499!!!!!!! He told me if I didn't pay, he'd undo the magic fix, so I paid. Then I looked up the company I paid, and it was some scammers located in New Dehli. I contacted my credit card company, and they told me to uninstall the files they loaded on my hard drive, and they'd take care of the charges. That's why I'm reluctant to do anything that asks me if I want to make changes to my computer, like Lipi suggested. You can't trust anyone...

I never thought of The Hustler as being a West Coast film, because it used all East Coast musicians on the soundtrack- Roswell Rudd, Phil Woods, Billy Bauer, Kenny Davern and Jimmy Cleveland- but it was filmed in both LA and NY. They probably recorded the music at Edison Studios in NYC. Hopkins used Woods on another film he scored, 'Lilith', which had some nice sax session things with Woods playing lead alto.

Who knows what goes on in the choices they make for film soundtracks. Maybe DR told them to play the melody like that, maybe a film executive told them to play it like that, maybe Cassavettes wanted it like that, maybe it was the musician's choice. All I know is that I have the original Dot recording of DR's music for that and other film music he wrote, and it sounded nothing like that. In the case of the Dot record, it was not from the film; it was Raksin's LP, so everything is exquisite. The New Wave II album has many versions of that, and the only one they used in the film was that horrific version where they got some opera singer to vocalise the melody! They played that twice- the recording studio scene, and the corny ending scene where Stella Stevens returns to Ghost (Bobby Darin) and the group when they're playing in that club. You can hear Uan Rasey doesn't use that schmaltzy vibrato on the Chinatown Theme (which I hear as Goldsmith's homage to the great DR). Sure, he does use some vibrato, but not that fast, tasteless vibrato he uses on TLB, which makes me feel like I'm playing a wedding gig with some fat, smelly trumpet player with a waxed moustache playing Peg of My Heart 100x in a row. That was a great segment of that anthology. The trumpet player/leader of the group stole some sacred voodoo melody, and arranged it for his jazz combo. When he performed it at the jazz club, the voodoo gods were not happy...

I just heard an interesting record called something like 'Jazz in the Movies: The New Wave Vol.2', where they had every cue from movies like The Hustler. You get to hear stuff that was cut from the movie for whatever reason, but is still some great music. In The Hustler, Kenyon Hopkins wrote some great cues featuring Phil Woods, proving why people like Oliver Nelson, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, Hopkins, Gary McFarland, and others, used PW whenever they were lucky enough to get him. There's other interesting stuff from European movies featuring writers like George Gruntz, Michel legrand, and some Eyetalian film composers I can't recall. The West Coast film music featured I found painful to listen to, because all the soloists who improvised or played melodies, played with this horrible, corny-assed vibrato that made me want to puke. I prefer film composers who managed to integrate jazz into the score, rather than just tell guys to play a tune and blow, because you can hear that on any jazz record Few film composers and jazz musicians were capable of handling something like that, but the soundtrack by Eddie Sauter to 'Mickey-One' used Stan Getz to great advantage.

Well said!

RIP, Coco.

Good to hear!