Hot Ptah

I freely admit that this is a dumb idea for a thread. It's not a dumb idea--however, to some of us, the degree of exercise and physical fitness required for a time trial is a very foreign concept.

It would be fantastic if it means that many more of the never reissued Saturns are going to come out on CD. It would have the effect of depressing the market for $300 copies of these LPs on ebay.

JSngry, I respect your analysis. I don't feel the same way about Ella, and don't agree with you. But that is fine. It would be boring if everyone agreed with you. What I would love to read is an analysis from you, similar to what you did for David Murray's playing, on the playing of: David S. Ware Charles Gayle

I loved the moment when Paulie complains about how no one is coming to his aunt's wake, and he says, "I bought 500 prayer cards!" as if one of the worst aspects of everyone's neglect is that he wasted the money on extra prayer cards. I see it as an echo of two previous shows in which Paulie took out his anger on the Catholic Church and/or a particular priest by not donating as much money as expected to the Church. I didn't know whether it was meant to be significant or not, but Tony seems to make the decision to fly off to Vegas immediately after seeing Chris' widow breastfeeding her baby. It almost seemed to me that the sight of a breast compelled him to go somewhere where he could see a lot more of them. I wonder if in real life, if a Mafia boss was laying down on the floor of a major casino making a scene, laughing his head off, obviously very loaded, if the casino would do nothing, and if it would not become the subject of some media publicity. I mean, what if Gallo or Gotti had done it?

Some work places are not like that, though. My law firm isn't. It would be quite literally unbearable to have this group of people talking about my musical taste all the time. Trust me--no one would want to be the constant topic of ignorant conversation by a group of attorneys, paralegals and legal secretaries. There is something uniquely corrosive about legal people, something that sucks the soul out of you if you get too close. And I like most of these people! My wife has commented on the same thing, that law firm parties are like visiting a ring of hell. They can't help it.

I also work in a law firm and music, while not specifically forbidden in a written policy, would never be played here. A few people over the years have liked jazz, not many. One tried to convert others to jazz and was always met with awkward, embarassing silence and inappropriate comments. One of the clients talks often of his love of Duke Ellington and this is often cited as evidence of his unbelievably weird nature by people who work here. Best to keep it to yourself, in a law firm--and that applies not just to a love of jazz.

Chick Corea McCoy Tyner

Wow! Where do you work? I have never heard of anything remotely like that.

Is "Slacker" the film about non-traditional people in Austin, Texas? I know that there are two films with that title.

In my experience jazz played in an office is bound to generate negative, unknowing remarks. To be surprised or hurt by them is naive. On the other hand, if I overheard someone in an office playing traditional Scottish music, commercialized redneck country, or hard core thrash at a clearly audible volume, would I go up to them and say "oh, what good taste you have! I must compliment you on your non-traditional, and intriguing, music! How refreshing to hear it during the work day!"

Sun Ra Count Basie Benny Goodman Buddy Rich Woody Herman

at one time or another, i've owned, if not the complete ella catalog, certainly a majority of it (there were some out there/now sound pop records that i didn't own). it's just that, for my tastes, while ella is spot on in her own buoyant way, much of her material just doesn't connect with me beyond a (and this sounds worse than i mean it to) superficial level. that's due in no small part to the pristine clarity of her diction and delivery, something that's actually been seen as a double-edge in the circles i came up in. ps: i hope this isn't seen as "negative", because it's certainly not intended to be. I know what you mean about the pristine clarity of her diction and delivery. I have a good sized collection of pre-1945 acoustic rural blues, which tend to be dominated by less than perfect diction and a lot of raw emotion. I find a lot of emotion in Ella's singing too, although of a different flavor than Charlie Patton or Blind Willie Johnson, to be sure.

Top 3 reasons why this cover art was rejected: 3. The food is already out, yet the bag is still closed. 2. Is that bread, or styrofoam, or ceiling tile? ... and the #1 reason this cover art was rejected: 1. THREE napkins, but only ONE Oreo™ ??? Hey, the clock on the cover that was finally accepted has many hands! Scientific accuracy was not the priority with the cover art for this session!

I am scratching my head about all of the reservations and negative comments about Ella here. It goes to show that informed people have different opinions and tastes, which is fine, and how it should be. I love virtually all of the Ella I have heard, live and on album, find her singing often very moving, feel a deep emotional content in almost everything that she has recorded, love her Christmas album without reservation, and love her scat singing--and I like not very much scat singing in general. What is it that some of you don't hear, or respond to? There is a human wellspring of emotion in her work that I can definitely feel, which some others here obviously don't. My emotional vibe must be tuned to the same frequency as Ella's, and it must be a fairly rare one. Again, there is nothing negative about that--I believe that well informed people of good faith may have very different opinions about artists, and that this makes things interesting.

I remember that film. It was his first wild comedy in several years, at that time. Thanks for all of the memories about Liberace and Jerry Lewis!

Here is the rejected cover art for Eric Dolphy's "In For Lunch":

Did Liberace provide his views on Betty Carter and Woody Herman? No, but he did provide his views on Barbra Streisand. Not very positive. As I recall, she opened for Lee (so his friends called him) the first time she played Vegas and stubbornly resisted his suggestion that she replace the schmatte (his word) she was wearing onstage with something more flattering and suitable. Also, I got to meet and observe Liberace's young sidekick Scott Thorsen, who was being paid a visit by his adoptive parents and young half-siblings. Hard-core Orange County, Ca., folk. That was weird. What did they know or suspect, if anything? Among the exhibits at the Liberace Museum in Vegas was a full-sized grand piano that some prison inmate fan of Liberace had fashioned out of toothpicks. Liberace was a smart, sly dude, it seemed to me, though I guess not smart enough when it came to balancing his sex life against his health. I think on the same visit to Vegas, I interviewed Jerry Lewis. That was fairly alarming. Alarming because of Lewis' views on Woody Herman and Betty Carter, or for some other reason?

No, I don't.

I especially like "Long Yellow Road" and "Farewell" among the big band albums. I like her Maybeck piano recital album a lot.

I have thought about this some more and have more than the ordinary doubts that the posted story is even remotely true. Having lived with, and been the caretaker for, a seriously disabled adult child of ours who is incontinent, it is inconceivable to me that anyone would live with another's feces around their living space on a regular basis. It is quite difficult enough when a person whom you dearly love accidentally leaves a deposit once in a while. I don't think that any sane person could live with it as much as the author did, especially when it came from a person he was not related to, and did not love. Any sane person would simply move away, despite any financial consequences, in my opinion.

Did Liberace provide his views on Betty Carter and Woody Herman?

While I have defended Ella here, I am not unaware of the unevenness of some of her recordings. I find her late 1960s album entitled "Ella", produced by popster Richard Perry, to be one of the more unbelievable efforts by any major jazz artist. On this album, she takes on the Beatles' "Savoy Truffle" and Randy Newman's caustic (and intentionally racist) "Yellow Man", singing the odd lyrics of the former and the deliberately offensive lyrics of the latter as if she is running through a Gershwin song. Some of the album is more bland than bad, such as her rendition of "The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game". I also think that many of her Pablo albums were not that thrilling, and that it could be said that she was overrecorded in those days--especially as Norman Granz did not do much in the way of notable projects for her in those years. Still, when I saw her live in 1979, she knocked everyone's socks off. By the time of a 1983 concert, her command of the upper register had noticeably diminished, but she was still a great artist, in my humble opinion. I love her "Ella Sings Gershwin" album from the early 1950s, with just Ellis Larkins at the piano backing her. I find those renditions to be quite moving.

May you continue to grace us with your excellent posts for decades to come!

Wow, I thought my college roommates were bad, but this goes so far beyond anything I could even imagine! I had one dorm roommate with a medical condition which made him stink horribly even if he bathed and used deodorant, but he was apologetic about it and not that bad a guy. I had some others with varying degrees of mental illness--such as the guy who did not speak to anyone for six weeks, then suddenly tackled the Christmas tree in our dorm floor common room and punched it violently, many times, until he was pulled away. A third roommate loved to blindly fling things out of our tenth floor dorm window into a common courtyard for high rise dorm buildings (this was the backside of Sellery A, facing Ogg, in the Southeast Dorms at the University of Wisconsin). He did this without looking to see if anyone was below. He couldn't tell where the items would end up, in any event. On a different front, he also loved to bring up large chunks of icy snow up the elevators to the tenth floor and drop them on the bicycles stored in common racks below, crushing whichever bicycles he hit. I remember that when the snow finally melted in the spring, the debris he had flung out of the tenth floor window became visible on the muddy ground--most notably a vinyl record of Jefferson Airplane's "Crown of Creation" (without its cover). Still, those guys are nothing compared to this story.

I will now remove my foot from my mouth.