Hot Ptah

It's Going to Take Some Time, recorded by the Carpenters composed by Carole King/Judi Stern

Chuck, where can one purchase this?

Horace Silver Rin Tin Tin Michael Steele

I just picked up the 2008 King Records release of Richard Davis with Junior Mance, "Blue Monk". It's a duet album, with the following exceptions: Richard Davis plays solo bass on "Summertime" and "Dear Old Stockholm". Junior Mance plays solo piano on Ellington's "A Single Petal of a Rose." Richard Davis' arco bass solo piece here, "Summertime", is one of the few recorded performances by anyone which made me literally shout out loud during my first listen. There have been few, if any, recorded arco bass solos like it, ever. I have been puzzled as to why many of Richard Davis' recordings over the years have not really captured the magic I have heard him create in live performance. This "Summertime" does, for sure. It is shorter, and arranged quite differently, than his duet with Elvin Jones on "Summertime" on "Heavy Sounds". It makes just as much, or more, of an impact, to me. It is good to hear that a 79 year old (I guess he was 77 at the time of this performance) is still at the top of his game.

Whitey Ford Ralph Terry Bill Stafford

Just send money. That's the sort of succinct message I like. How much would be necessary? I am genuinely curious.

I have a 2 LP set, on Douglas Records, dated 1976 on the cover, entitled "Jitterbug Waltz". It has the nine cuts listed by robviti above. On the record label, the fine print reads "Mfg. and Distr. by Casablanca Records". The inner sleeve of each album features a Casablanca advertisement for its soundtrack album for the film, "The Deep". Is this the Casablanca 2 LP release you are referring to, Jim Sangrey, in your Post 21, which I now notice was written in 2004? Or is there a better one?

A member of my alma mater's fundraising office explained it this way to me: It is not difficult to get alumni to give us millions of dollars when the football team had a good season. It's a lot more difficult to get alumni to give us money because the chemistry labs on campus are good.

Sam Rivers Dave Holland Barry Altschul

It's not in the first rank of McLean albums, in my opinion. With that trio, and its track record of fine albums before that one, the addition of a giant on saxophone should have been a more memorable event, I think.

The difference is, jazz fusion is more than a myth...and I have the hearing loss to prove it.

Bev, I don't know about accountants, but the law schools in the United States have for decades been a refuge for college graduates with degrees in the humanities and arts, who did not know what to do next, and wanted a paying job when they were all done. Whether those people have an overall enriching effect on society when they come out of law school, I am not sure.

That description of the ill qualified university teacher is not confined to those who teach music, or the arts!

I second "The Loadstar" on Horo.

The incident of Cecil Taylor flunking out his jazz history class at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, has become so legendary that I have not been able to find anyone who knows positively what happened there. I have read and heard several different versions. The version in print in the UW student newspaper for years was that he required all of the non-music majors to compose a worthy jazz composition, which they could not do, so they all got Fs. I have also heard one or more variations on the idea that he flunked out the class for not attending a Miles Davis concert on campus, or for not turning in their ticket stubs for the concert. I have read that some of the students actually attended the concert but had not kept their ticket stubs and still got Fs. The flunking incident has developed into a Rashomon situation. I spent a day with a well known music professor from Madison about five years ago. He teaches a class in big band music, in addition to his performance classes. He was the guest speaker at our Kansas City alumni club annual dinner. I took him to the jazz sites in Kansas City (such as the Reno Club, now a surface parking lot), to the jazz museum at 18th and Vine, and to the best used record stores, which he really enjoyed. I asked him about Cecil Taylor. He said that he had been in the room when Cecil Taylor was fired. He said that it happened because Cecil was very abrupt, dismissive, positively rude to the Chairman of the Music Department. He said that the Chairman, in front of all of the tenured music faculty, asked Cecil about flunking his class, not in a challenging way, but to get more information about it, because the faculty did not know why Cecil had flunked them. (My guest said that he still does not know). With all of the rest of the tenured faculty looking on, Cecil told the Chairman to shut up, basically. Cecil refused to discuss it, when asked to do so by the Chairman of the Department. My guest repeated what Cecil's tone of voice and facial expressions were during this meeting. So Cecil was fired for that. My guest said that it was really a shame, because if Cecil had just answered the questions with a moderate degree of civility, just about any explanation would have been accepted.

I haven't read that, but I'll add it to my want list, sounds like a winner. One song that sticks in my head is "Latona" from John Patton's Let 'Em Roll album, the riff to that song sounds like something either The Allman Brothers or Santana would be playing a few years later. Shawn, check your Private Messages on this.

I have not heard them all, but I have heard several of them. This is my favorite:

I think that over here it was the Iranian hostage crisis, which was when, 1979? That & the first "energy crisis" & the double digit interest rates that ensued. All of a sudden the ugly side of reality took center stage. Before then there was still an overall optimsim, although there was no longer the sense of inevitability about it that first accompanied that initial rush of the 1960s. It was obvious that in order to holding on to good feelings was going to take a bit of a fight, and that soon became blatant self-indulgence. Talk about the "swinging sixties", hell overall there was probably more overall "wildness" in the 70s than ever happened in the 60s, just because now thre wasn't anywhere you could go where you didn't find some people practicing the "if it feels good, do it" philosophy. But on the other side, there were a still a lot of optimistic things here. Especially racially. The 70s was when the old ways ended once and for all. Yeah, the revolution happend in the 50s & 60s, but the 70s was when the rubber hit the raod, so to spek, and we had to find out whether or not it was just a blip on the radar or the real deal. It ended up beoing the real deal, even if things never got as "color-blind" as hoped for (or needed), bu tthings had blown open to the point that to go back to a rigidly segregated society would prove to be impossible. And to get a real sense of that optimism, you could just listen to the black pop of the day - Stevie Wonder, EW&F, P-Funk, Rufus, lord, I could go on. This music was based on the assumption that it was a new day, and that as one of the later, more uplifting songs of the time said, "ain't no stoppin' us now". Inter-racial relations also took on this tone of optimism too, hardly unanimously, but far more widespread and opemnly than at any point in our nation's history, at least up to the election/inauguration of Obama. Race being such a key definer of American life (even today, although in a many regards in a much different, more nuanced way), this was a "big deal" culturally. Which, I think, goes a long way towards explaining "what happened" to at least some of the offshoots of "fusion" as the 70s wore on, notably to more poppy/funky/"commercial variants thereof. This was yet another "new frontier" of optimism and "blending" and the music reflected that in how R&B + Jazz had a bit of a family reunion, and how somebody like Larry Carlton could play with both Joni Mitchell & The Crusaders with equal aplomb, how George Duke could likewise make commercial R&B records and play with Frank Zappa, how many jazz musicians could relate to Stevie Wonder tunes, how so many white guys ended up as regular members in so many black bands nationally, regionally & locally, etc etc etc. I guess in the UK "class" would be the equivalent of "race" here? And I can't comment on that, nor can I claim full success for the American racial revolution. It was permanent but it is also incomplete. I'm just saying that a lot of conventional wisdom about fusion is that after its initial flash of brilliance that it devolved into either masturbational chopfests or bubbleheaded discodrivel, and although overall that is not a wholly misinformed notion, the reality, as it always is, is much more complex. a movement towards "pop" is often enough based in "populism" as it is in "commercialism", and in many cases, what was going on in American fusion as the 70s progressed, was indeed based on populist impulses, just as was some of the music of Woody Shaw & many other nowadays so-called "spiritual" jazz artists of the 70s, where the attempt was to bring "the movement" to "the people", meaning that we're gonna try to get to you whether than waiting for you to come to us. It was far from a perfect time, but damn, it wa a grand time, a time when people still dreamed (even if those dreams now involved fighting to get over a hump instead of the hump just magically flattening out out of it's own sense of decency...). I sense there might be a coming back to that today, but it's still very embryonic, perhaps, so we'll see. Ther could certainly be worse things to have happen. Great post. One small anecdote of what Jim is talking about. I remember a bunch of us decided to watch the late 1960s counterculture film classic, "Easy Rider", when it was shown in a small theater near campus in 1975. We all remarked afterwards how it had significantly lost its impact because we were all living far more of the lifestyle every week (and especially weekend) than the hippies in the film.

Chuck Nessa, Would you have any interest in recording this artist for Nessa Records? He seems to be criminally underrecorded, especially recently.

Thanks, Larry. I have to think about getting "It's About Time!" at the used Amazon price. The video is great. I have not been able to find any recent recordings by Willie Pickens, although I have read that his live performances are at a high level. I had hoped that someone might know of recordings from the past few years.

I'm still a little fuzzy on where people think these 2 genres started (pre-Mahavishnu). There were a lot of experimental albums coming out in 1967 on both sides of the Atlantic. Can it be traced back pre-1967? Have you read Stuart Nicholson's book, "Jazz-Rock"? He has an entire chapter on that very subject. I trace it back to 1956, Sun Ra's "India" on his "Supersonic Jazz" album.

I have really liked what I have heard from Willie Pickens on recordings. What are your recommendations for this artist?

Boris the Spider Lilly Silas Stingy