John L

I recently "found" a bit of Sonny Cox on the web. I had never heard him before. I downloaded it out of interest, not expecting much. I was quite surprised and impressed. His timing and phrasing are quite individual, and his blues roots are deep. I like him.

I don't see that anybody is denying that here Jim. The question is maybe more of a semantic one. While it is absolutely clear that African retentions are fundamental to the blues, people get still uptight with the idea that the blues itself "originated" in Africa. That is perhaps not without reason, as the extreme Afrocentric view would have you believe that influences from the New World had nothing to do with the formation of the blues. That is just as incorrect as denying the importance of African retentions.

The Dramatics were great, one of the greatest groups of the 70s. The run that they had on Stax was remarkable. RIP Ron Banks

Wow! Congratulations! This looks...BIG!

Take him or leave him, Neil Young is unique, very unique. I like him quite a bit in small doses a few times a year.

So this recording exists and you have heard it?

I'll take 1950, not because of specific recordings made that year, but because of WHO was on the scene in top form, or almost top form. It boggles the mind to contemplate, even more so if we go beyond jazz to blues, gospel, country, & R&B. And Chubby Checker had yet to take a dump on American music.

That's the sort of relationship I'm thinking of and trying to describe (no doubt very poorly!) between R&B and soul: For me it's mostly a matter of modern continuity. Yes! Soul music in the 60s was largely a fusion of R&B and gospel. It therefore contains strong elements of both. Of course, Gospel and R&B had profoundly influenced each other at earlier points in time, but had still developed on separate, but related, pathes. It is interesting that, by the late 60s, R&B (soul) and gospel had become musically almost identical. Gospel brought in the R&B elements from soul, and it became just as common for gospel artists to steal R&B songs and change the lyrics as visa versa.

I'm not sure of your exact definition of jump blues, but there were a number of artists who show quite strong continuity from that point of view: Ike Turner, Johnny Guitar Watson, Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Amos Milburn, I would say that their movement into "soul" in the 60s was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Early Rock and Roll of Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Chuck Berry, etc. was also, to a large degree, an evolution of "jump." James Brown came partly from that territory as well.

That was my question on an earlier thread. January would make it the very first Joe Henderson on record.

I spent so many beautiful nights in the front row of the Keystone Korner in the 70s with Dex. I would never miss him when he came to town.

Some of the white boys, especially the British crew, indeed did more than just popularize the blues, even though a lot of them started out doing little more than that. They developed it in new directions. I think that is more evident in the best of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin (as yes, James Gurley) than in the works of those more purely oriented to playing straight American (usually Chicago) blues. The latter group includes a number of highly accomplished instrumentalists, but few really new voices in the grand tradition. Stevie Ray was one (IMO). Maybe a case can be made for Winter as well. Mike Bloomfield, a great guitar player for sure, will still never be a BB King no matter how many times he outplayed him. And that is not because of race. As Dan, MG and others have indicated, blues rock was not the only thing going on in the 60s and 70s that was breathing new life into the blues. The gospel based sound of blue soul of people like Little Johnny Taylor, Aretha Franklin, Bobby Bland, Clarence Carter, Johnnie Taylor, O.V. Wright etc., etc. arguably had as much, if not more, to do with the future of the blues than did blues rock. Of course, their music was not entirely a black product either. The blue funk of James Brown et al arguably WAS the sound of the future, and it had quite a lot to do with the blues back then.

I agree that Johnny Winter is a real deal artist. He is tremendously talented and puts his whole heart and soul in everything that he does. That said, I have a personal problem that limits my enjoyment of his music. It just feels like too much, too fast, in your face all the time. I tend to like blues that gives you more time to catch your breath, that leaves space between call and response. I know that is just Johnny and the way he feels it. So I wouldn't necessarily want him to do it any other way. But I would usually rather listen to somebody else. I am also in a minority (I believe) in much preferring Winter's 70s-80s recordings over the "classic" 60s stuff. I think that his blues sensibilities deepened with time.

That is basically what I do, and I back up everthing twice. I accumulate stuff on my hard drive and one external drive for a little while. Then I transfer everthing new to two other external drives, and erase it from my hard drive. I actually haven't had an external drive fail on me yet, and I have been using them for 6 years or so (although upgrading to newer and larger ones). But I know that they will, and I am ready for it.

This is from Tom Lord's discography Don Byas And Slam Stewart : Don Byas (ts) Teddy Wilson (p-1) added, Slam Stewart (b) Indiana I Got Rhythm Candy (1) Bill Coleman's Quartet : Bill Coleman (tp) Billy Taylor (p) Matty Chapin (b) Specs Powell (d) Star Dust Krupa/Ventura Trio Or Charlie Ventura Trio : Charlie Ventura (ts) George Walters (p) Gene Krupa (d) Stompin’ at the Savoy Body and Soul Limehouse Blues Red Norvo And His Orchestra : Shorty Rogers (tp) Eddie Bert (tb) Aaron Sachs (cl) Flip Phillips (ts) Red Norvo (vib,xyl-2) Teddy Wilson (p) Remo Palmieri (g) Slam Stewart (b) Specs Powell (d) One, Two, Three In a Mellow Tone The Main I Love (2) Seven Come Eleven One Note Jive Ghost of a Chance Stuff Smith (vln) Billy Taylor (p) Ted Sturgis (b) Perdido Biugle Call Rag Desert Sands Teddy Wilson/Flip Phillips Quintet : Flip Phillips (ts) Teddy Wilson (p) Remo Palmieri (g) Slam Stewart (b) Specs Powell (d) Sweet and Lovely I Can’t Believe You’re in Love With Me

RIP

I am just the opposite. The Blue Note sessions are nice, although I rarely listen to them. Texas Twister is by far my favorite and most played Wilkerson, along with the sides with Ray, of course.

No shit. I guess the complaint is that the sound quality doesn't meet serious audiophile standards. I am happy that I can still really enjoy music that doesn't.

If you are using an external hard drive for the location of your database files (as I do), then I highly recommend making sure the drive is "awake" before opening iTunes. Just open Windows Explorer (or Finder) and browse to the drive real quick and access it, that will wake it up...then open iTunes. I've had a problem a couple times where I opened iTunes while the external hard drive was still asleep and it caused iTunes to freak out because it couldn't find the database files fast enough...so it thought the library was corrupt and tried to repair it. iTunes isn't patient enough for my particular hard drive to spin up. But since I discovered that, accessing the drive prior to opening iTunes has kept any problems from occurring. That scares me. I have my default iTunes music on an external drive. But I try to economize on its use, so as not to wear it out too fast. Therefore, I only hook it up every two weeks or so. In the mean time, I continue to use iTunes for new music. If my external drive is not hooked up, iTunes will revert back to the internal hard drive as the default drive. So far, iTunes has not "freaked out" or "tried to repair" anything in my library file. It's true that, with earlier versions of iTunes, sometimes it would make the shift to a new default drive permanent, forcing me to choose my external drive as the default repeatedly after not using it. But I have had no problems in the last few years like that. Am I doing something risky that I should be worried about?

I wish that iTunes would just store the artwork in the respective album folders. That would make moving things around to other external drives, backups, and what not much more straightforward. I don't even mess around with artwork in iTunes. I keep my artwork in a separate database.

I usually like hearing music in chronological order on box sets, but they clearly went overboard on this one when they programmed in all the long rehearsals instead of putting them at the end of the box, or leaving them out altogether. I wonder what Billie would have thought about the release of the rehearsals, private phone phone calls, etc? It is not as if they add much to her artistic legacy. Ironically, I started listening to Billie on Verve a lot less after I bought this box. Now, in the iTunes age, I have made playlists of what I like to hear.

So did this band (without Don Moore and Mildred Graves) still bill itself as the New York Art Quartet, or as the Roswell Rudd Quartet, like it is given for the side on America?

If a disc is not in the CDDB database, it takes submissions sent in by ... anyone who likes to spend his or her time doing things like that, in other words "kooks,"

Thanks. I somehow missed this one, and I am not somebody who would pass up any disc with Threadgill and Brown both on it.

Mal only needed a handful of notes to make magnificent music - a rare talent, for sure. I really miss him.