Hot Ptah

My wife enjoyed listening to hours every day of mainstream jazz on vinyl and CD, and went to over 100 jazz concerts with me, in the first 15 years of our marriage. She liked concerts by Sun Ra and by Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. She usually did not like to listen to avant garde jazz at home. Then about 10 years ago she announced that she liked only Bach, Mozart and a few other classical composers, would not listen to jazz or go to jazz concerts any more, and that was that. Since then, she has been cheerful about my jazz CD purchases, has asked for gift lists of jazz CDs for me for my birthday, and is fine with my jazz CD buying and listening as long as she doesn't have to hear it. I think that it could be worse, but it was more fun when we shared the music.

Strange enough for a country that is so young, compared to old Europe, having short memory. It's not a question of short memory. Most of the people here just don't like jazz when they hear it.

Why not in Kansas City, is the city of Count Basie and Bird, isn't it? It is, but that has very little impact on almost all of the residents of the city today--99 per cent of whom would not know a Basie or Bird tune if it was playing in the same room with them, and 95 per cent of whom could not pick a photo of Basie or Bird out if they were in a lineup of photos. The public and community radio stations in Kansas City have some jazz programming. One station carries Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz", which I still enjoy. The Kansas City public radio station has a regular, long time show devoted to "blues, soul, rhythm and blues, jumping jive and zydeco" (Chuck Haddix's Friday and Saturday Night Fish Fry, on 89.3 FM, which is a unique and excellent show by a host with a wealth of musical knowledge going back into the 1920s--hundreds of hours of it are available online at this point). There are other good shows. None of these have anything to do with Basie or Bird, or the Kansas City jazz tradition of the 1930s. I wrongly thought that Bird and Basie should have had an impact on tradition, something like what's happend in New Orleans, but actually they are complete different cases. It is a sad thing that they are not better known and appreciated here in Kansas City. I think that many people vaguely know their names, as they do pitcher Satchel Paige, another Kansas City historical figure, but the 1930s Kansas City jazz is not very popular here now. Very regrettable.

Why not in Kansas City, is the city of Count Basie and Bird, isn't it? It is, but that has very little impact on almost all of the residents of the city today--99 per cent of whom would not know a Basie or Bird tune if it was playing in the same room with them, and 95 per cent of whom could not pick a photo of Basie or Bird out if they were in a lineup of photos. The public and community radio stations in Kansas City have some jazz programming. One station carries Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz", which I still enjoy. The Kansas City public radio station has a regular, long time show devoted to "blues, soul, rhythm and blues, jumping jive and zydeco" (Chuck Haddix's Friday and Saturday Night Fish Fry, on 89.3 FM, which is a unique and excellent show by a host with a wealth of musical knowledge going back into the 1920s--hundreds of hours of it are available online at this point). There are other good shows. None of these have anything to do with Basie or Bird, or the Kansas City jazz tradition of the 1930s.

It is very common today in Kansas City for jazz musicians to sell their CDs at the gigs, both in the Blue Room jazz club in the American Jazz Museum, and at the national concert series at the Folly Theater. At the Blue Room either the musician or the club's director will announce from the stage that CDs are being sold at intermission. In the historic Folly Theater, a booth is often set up in the lobby for the sale of the artist's CDs at intermission and after the concert. Isn't it like that everywhere?

I have a tuner and listen to FM radio regularly. We have some good jazz and other music shows here in the Kansas City area on public radio and community radio. I had not thought that they were better than other places.

I don't know how far back you want to go, but Sun Ra LPs were always being sold from the stage at concerts, back in the mid-1970s and after that. Not many people wanted them. Now each one auctions off for about $300 on ebay.

Wayne Walker Joe Schmidt Dick "Night Train" Lane

Only a few people smell different smells depending on the differences in the music. Those are the same people who are said to have perfect pitch but actually have a cross-over in their senses, where they see notes in different colors or smell them in different smells as they play their instruments. For everyone else, it has been a common observation that the notes have a faintly metallic smell in a Listen-O-Matic environment, distinct and not unpleasant. For the few who smell different smells with different music, there is no reported professional literature specifically commenting on Parliament Funkadelic. The only article on the entire subject described a double blind test in which a Liberace album smelled like pink cotton candy to 69 per cent of the special participants, and like white cotton candy to the other 31 per cent.

Oh no, one of the absolute prerequsites of the Listen-O-Matic system is that all of the air in the listening space must be kept at 60 degrees or lower for an optimal listening experience! If the air is hot, you might as well be listening to completely untreated air!

You know, there's a much cheaper method for acquiring Listen-O-Matic air. Do what I do. Get yourself a 55 gallon metal drum. Preferably without any dents. Take it to your local Circuit City store, and walk into the speaker demo room. You must wait until all other occupants have left the room, whereupon you can open the lid, hoist the drum up in the air, and spin around, thereby filling it with Circuit City's Listen-O-Matic air. Cap lid on 55 gallon drum and depart Circuit City. Be careful not to be stopped by the guys in the red shirts. Once home, you can uncork your 55 gallon drum and let the Listen-O-Matic air fill your listening room. Of course, it will mingle with the normal air molecules in your room, causing about a 10-20% loss of quality, but in the long run you have saved most of the $1,999.95. Oh, THAT'S why all of those people are always sprinting out of Circuit City holding those big barrels over their heads!

These "at the source" solutions are only a Band-aid on the real problem, which is that the air coming out of your furnace lacks acoustic sensitivity. Each molecule of air in your home is impeding your listening experience. You must treat the air at the furnace, filters and ducts (before it reaches the vents into your living space) to give the air the full "Listen-O-Matic" sensitivity treatment. Only then can it be said that you have really "heard" music for the first time. Each note seems to cling to each "Listen-O-Matic" treated molecule of air, and hang suspended for a moment around you, becoming a nearly tangible object. Some listeners claim that they can "taste" each note of music playing in the air of a "Listen-O-Matic" treated room. It is more common that listeners say that they can "smell" each note, or feel that they can reach out and grab each note out of the air in a "Listen-O-Matic" treated room. If you see a crowd of people grabbing and swatting at the air when music is playing, you know that they are experiencing the benefits of "Listen-O-Matic" treated air. This patented process can be installed in your home, office or other living space for a suggested retail price of $1,999.95. If you are a music lover, it will be the best $1,999.95 you ever spent! Just think, you spend that much on CDs in a month--do yourself a favor and substitute the "Listen-O-Matic" treated air system for one month instead!

The shooting with a handgun part is probably a sexual image of a same sex nature. Otherwise, it sounds very much like the parties we had in college in Madison, Wisconsin around 1974.

I listened to jazz the most this year. Probably 500 different artists, none of them a great many times.

It's a great album, very much worth picking up. Scofield plays well and fits in well with McShann. It was early in Scofield's career, and his playing on the album is not much different from what I heard him play live with Gary Burton at that time.

That's very funny. Some of the Dead's spacier recordings from the 1966--72 period could sound like what you said. I also once won a very early Phillip Glass album by correctly identifying the Paul Winter Consort as the group that the members of Oregon were in, before they started Oregon. The Phillip Glass album was not all that interesting. It was from long before he became well known.

Jay McShann did not make any disco albums. In the mid to late 1970s he recorded several great albums for Sackville, and two for Columbia--Last of the Blue Devils and The Big Apple Bash. All are wonderful, swinging jazz. Another album which should not be missed is "The Man From Muskogee", with Claude "Fiddler" Williams.

I have the two 2-CD sets in the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces reissue series, The Duke's Men: The Small Groups Vol. 1 (reissued in 1991) and The Duke's Men: Volume 2 (1938-39) (reissued in 1993). Comparing the song listings in the CD booklets with the song listings on the Mosaic website for the new box, all of the songs on these two earlier CD sets are to be found on this new Mosaic box set, except for two songs--the first two songs on Vol.1 of the 1991 reissue-Rex Stewart's "Stingaree" and "Baby Ain'tcha Satisfied". Those two songs were recorded in 1934, and the Mosaic box set starts in 1936. There is at least one Rex Stewart CD out there with those two songs on it. The Mosaic box has several songs which are not on the two Columbia reissues, and many alternate takes not on the Columbia reissues.

In 1973 I won a set of Acoustic Research speakers from a record store. Since I could not afford a stereo in those student days, but desperately wanted one, that was like winning $1 million would be for me now. I won by being the first one to mail in to a music store, the ten correct answers in a summer long contest. The music store sponsored the contest on a local FM radio station. The station played a complete rock album every night at midnight. Ten times that summer, in the middle of the Album of the Night, they played one extra cut unannounced, which was by the same artist but did not appear on the announced album of the night. You had to listen every night, identify the ten times that the extra cut was played, and list the ten artists and extra cuts on a postcard. I remember that one of them was: When Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" was played, the song "New Morning" was inserted in the middle. They were like that, not terribly difficult, but you had to listen every night and know all 90 albums played all summer long. Radio shows were not stored on websites back then! It was all real time work. Also, there were no online sources to check out the song titles of the albums. You had to either own the album or go to a store and scour the bins to study the album covers. The tenth such extra cut was played on the last night of the contest. I wrote the tenth one down and went to the post office a few minutes after the last album of the night ended. A kindly after-hours postal worker suggested that I mail the postcard by some method which I don't remember, for an extra fee, which documented the time mailed, and got it to the music store fast. The music store owner told me that as a result, my card was delivered a few hours ahead of another person who had all ten correct. It was truly a momentous occasion for me. I had enough saved up to buy a turntable and receiver to go with my free speakers. Naturally I bought them from the same music store that gave me the speakers, so it was a good deal for them too. With my first decent stereo, my music addiction went to another level, as did my parents' lack of mental health.

We are all in your debt for recording Jay McShann at least 30 times. Maybe everyone else on the board knows you--are you the man behind Sackville Records?

Jay McShann certainly had a jump-blues aspect, and a feel good aspect, to his playing. However, when he wanted to, he was a monster on piano. His album "Kansas City Hustle" is one of the best recorded examples of it. I saw a concert in Kansas City in the mid-1980s, in which Marian McPartland played duets with him. She was a lot younger and more nimble of hand then. They were trading eights. She tried to play some fast stuff with a lot of technique, and he just blew her away in exchange after exchange. Oscar Peterson would have had trouble keeping up with him that night.

Jay McShann passed away today at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City. One of the best things about my move to Kansas City is that I got to see Jay McShann live many times, in trio, small combo and big band contexts. He was a severely underrated pianist. He had chops a-plenty when he wanted to display them. He played with great blues feeling, swung as hard as anyone ever has, and created happiness and warmth when he performed. He was always very good, and often great, in concert. Even last year he was quite good, at close to age 90. Obviously he will be missed. He may not be the last link to the great era of Kansas City jazz, but he was perhaps the most notable survivor of that era still performing at a high level. I don't know how much musicians really care about this, but I have thought for years that it was unconscionable that he was not in the Down Beat Hall of Fame.

Johnny Copeland's "Copeland Special", with soloists George Adams and Hamiet Bluiett--because I once played it repeatedly on Christmas day, many years ago. The look of the LP's cover and the sound of the music just reek of Christmas to me, whenever I see or hear them.

Jimmy Heath Percy Heath Tootie Heath