sgcim

Rod was a big influence on me as a kid. I played in a kid's big band that was sponsored by the County, and led by a guy, who was a good friend of Rod's. He got the County to commission pieces by guys like Rod and Manny Albam for performances at County sponsored concerts. He wrote a great piece for the band called, "Babylon" which was similar to Tickle Toes. I wrote a tune based on the sax soli in it. He showed up for the concert with his blonde bombshell wife, and seemed to be having a great time, laughing his head off. He made a lot of money writing the theme song for Irish Spring soap. "42nd St" is as good as the other LPs, and it even features a short vocal by RL at the end, bellowing out, "About a quarter till Nine!!!" It comes out of nowhere, so it's pretty funny.

Thanks for the info! I'll stream it today.

I agree with your assessment of Lowe. Even when he was in his prime, he was no match for the many other guitarists on the scene back then, IMHO He was a good accompanist, and had a successful career as an arr./composer, but as a jazz improviser wasn't in the same league as Raney, Farlow, Billy Bean, Chuck Wayne, Herb Ellis, Dick Garcia, Rene Thomas, etc...IMHO.

Good, put me on Ignore, like I'm doing with you.

Strange film; Central Park in the 60s, before inflation ruined everything...

Phil Schaap is the only one I know that has a copy. It's on his website under Joe Dixon's name. He played it on the air when he interviewed Joe for his show. He even pronounced my name correctly. It's pretty expensive, or I would've bought a copy. Joe was ecstatic about my solo on it; he said to the group in the studio that it was the greatest jazz solo he ever heard. The piano player started yelling at Joe, saying that it wasn't that good! I used to have a copy, but I gave it to some commercial music library that was looking for instrumental music. There are a few of my compositions on it. Joe played my stuff beautifully.

A funny story about that LP, I transcribed "Lake In The Woods" from SIHH and the clarinetist Joe Dixon (T.Dorsey, Bunny Berrigan,, Stan Kenton sideman) fell in love with the tune, and wanted to put it on an album we were doing together, so I arranged it for him and a jazz quintet. He had to contact Mundell Lowe to get a release to record it, and ML's reaction to it was, "Why the hell do you want to record that lousy tune?" I freaked out, because I thought it was a beautiful waltz ballad (I listened to Satie a lot back then), and that began a lifetime of hate for ML. My guitar teacher said that ML used a ghost writer for a lot of his things. I have no proof that that was true, but that planted the seed in my mind that maybe he didn't really write that tune, and it was written by his ghost writer. Who knows, who cares?

This should tell you where he was at: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/bernard-stollman-the-esp-disk-story-by-clifford-allen.php I first heard the Fugs on an ESP sampler. RIP, BS.

Oh, come on, no one's mentioned Eric Dolphy's "God Bless The Child" on Bass Clarinet? Shame on youz!

I stumbled across this hilarious interview while searching for something else. It concerns the NYC Jazz Loft Project. You have to scroll down to ORAL HISTORIES, and then down to the Halls'. They seem to have forgotten most of what was happening there, and proceed to interview the interviewer! There are interviews with Brookmeyer, Dick Katz, Bill Crow , Ron Free, and some other people who thought of it as a special place, but the Halls seem very blase` and seem to think that those other people are 'idealizing' the loft. This is not the main Loft site: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/jazzloftproject/

Wow!! never knew that - always had a soft spot for The Left Banke - liked their "baroque" rock sound - "Walk Away Rene" one of my favourite tracks from the 60's Why the difference in surnames? He didn't think Lookofsky sounded American enough.

Back when they still had vinyl in libraries, I used to take out all of Stan's comedy records, and enjoyed them very much. RIP Mr. Freeberg.

This was my fave Left Banke song when I was a kiddie- note the arr. and the lydian melody

Michael Brown, songwriter and keyboard player for the rock band The Left Banke passed away last month at the age of 65. It turned out that he was the son of the violinist Harry Lookofsky, and Harry actually manged and produced the band when they had the hit records "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina". Harry owned a recording studio in NYC, and probably helped the band achieve their 'Baroque-Rock' sound that they became known for, but Michael wrote all the music, and played the harpsichord and piano on all their early records. Harry and Michael had some type of disagreement with the rest of the band, which led to Michael leaving the band and forming other bands that also did some interesting rock music.

For BH's 100th birthday, WKCR has been playing all BH on their jazz shows all week. Today and tomorrow, they'll be playing BH 24/7. They've played a lot of her early stuff with neanderthal rhythm sections, and she seemed to react to her rhythm section, causing her to sound much less nuanced then her later stuff. Then they played her later stuff with Tony Scott as her musical director, and he hired much hipper musicians like Kenny Burrell and others, and you can hear her genius as she reacts to the hipper changes and sings some incredible things.

LF screws up the last eight on the first video, but gets it right on the second video (or at least gets to the iii chord at the right time). Those pictures of HM are getting me excited , Aaron Sachs was a lucky man, until he woke up one morning, and both the piano and HM were gone!

One pianist I knew went to Berklee, and there was a Scientology office right down the street, and they were always trying to recruit musicians. He and his friends used to get drunk on Friday nights, and then go over to the Scientology office and tell them that they wanted to commit suicide. They'd give the suicidal guy a test, and the suicidal guy would rip up the test papers and run out of there laughing his head off.

I think everyone knows that Scientology only established itself as a "religion" so L.Ron wouldn't have to pay taxes. There were many jazz musicians who got involved in it, and as a previous poster said, it was sad to watch some of them living in poverty because they were giving what little money they made to the Org. One musician told me the sales pitch they gave was: "You can either spend tens of thousands of dollars going to a psychoanalyst, or you can just give us a thousand bucks, and get the same result." The Org was basically in a vicious fight with psychiatry to get people who had psych issues to come to them, rather than a shrink. One Org musician proudly showed me the letter he had written to some newspaper, backing the effort to close down mental hospitals. The Org probably helped some of the musicians I knew deal with issues that were not solely biological, but those who who had mental disorders of a purely biological nature just got worse. The last time I saw one musician like this, he was trying to stab another musician in the band with a fork (they had an argument about dynamics on the stand), and after he was disarmed, proceeded to have his head banged on the pavement repeatedly. As he was restrained by an off duty cop, he repeatedly defended his actions by exclaiming, "I had to defend my integrity!" The first time I met this musician was around the time that L. Ron had passed. His first comment was, "He's not dead; he's just away on research."

OMG! I just got this POS from Netflix by mail and couldn't believe it- it was like a two hour (almost) skit by SCTV! I was laughing at every scene- even the car accident was funny as hell. Best comedy I've seen in years.

Very sad to hear. I still listen to "Reflection" whenever I want to get into that spacey folk/jazz vibe. RIP John.

No, he bought that with his own money. Mario stopped making them after Sakashta was murdered, so there's not that many around anymore. I guess I'm just fixated on that one axe- the rest of his prices are probably cool.

I don't know about John's prices at Golden Age. I fell in love with a Beauregard MB there, and he said he wanted $9,800 for it. He wouldn't go down a buck on it, and he wouldn't take anything for a trade, to bring the price down a little. I even went out and bought another MB for 7K, and he wouldn't accept that for a partial trade. I was able to get my bread back on the MB I bought, but i gave up on the MB at GA.

They're all good guitars, but I hate Gretsch for jazz. Your best bet is to get to Guitars 'N Jazz in NJ. They have all those guitars, and you can play them before you buy. Here's the link: http://guitarsnjazz.com/ I don't know if they have lefties, but give them a call. What amp are you playing through?

from a coke-induced heart attack. His autopsy revealed that his arteries were completely clean.

I became very suspicious about this so-called CharlieBirdParker father-son team when I found this alto/tenor duo had posted these videos eight years ago. With a little research, I found that they had indeed pioneered the Jazz Karaoke Movement in Japan, after leaving everything behind in Alabama after the economic crisis left the father's genetic engineering firm (of which the son was an early experimental subject) bankrupt. This could account for the son's 'Children of the Damned' emotionless look and style of playing, as he was a result of a cross-cloning experiment using the DNA of Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. They hustled the Karaoke Jazz circuit in Japan for years, posing as US tourists searching for what they described as "the perfect sashimi". In reality, they confided to their arresting officers that they were actually searching for the perfect Japanese tail. The father and son team continued their typical Karaoke Jazz routine of playing tunes from the Real Book without realizing that they had to transpose the music for their respective horns, resulting in that distinctive sound of parallel fourths that has been known to stimulate Japanese women. Their hedonistic orgies with multiple partners became so notorious, that the great Japanese exploitation film director, Takashi Miike, made a bio-pic about them entitled "The Great American Karaoke Jazz Hustlers". As a result of the film's popularity, the Yakuza became aware of all the tail their Karaoke Jazz employees were losing, and the duo had their fingers broken in the back room of the well-known Karaoke Jazz Club, Sashimi Palace in Tokyo. Without the financial support of their many Karaoke jazz conquests, the father and son team turned to crime, and were soon arrested for running a prostitution ring in Osaka. They were eventually deported back to the US to serve the remainder of their sentences. Here's a performance of the notorious Father/Son Duo "CharlieBirdParker" performing their infamous version of Donna Lee. Notice that they save their female sex organ stimulating parallel fourths sequence for the out chorus, to induce a buildup to the eventual Japanese female orgasm it so reliably produces: