Hot Ptah

I find this Blindfold Test to be a very appealing, and extremely interesting, journey into areas I am not familiar with.

That is a really, really good album! It is worth getting for sure, MG! The opening cut has some excellent tenor sax soloing by Harold Ashby, among other good things about it.

Thinking again about your posts, Jim. It seems to me that you are saying that jazz and blues are basically museum pieces at this point, not connected with any contemporary experience. Am I correct, or have I misinterpreted you? I have thought about that myself. If jazz and blues have become a few older figures hanging in there and doing what they have always done, and some younger people recreating the music of the past through a high degree of skill gained from academic study, what do we really have here? I find it exciting when a new artist comes along who breaks out of those stereotypes and gives us something of more value.

Good points.

This is a very interesting post, and makes some very good points. I have known several jazz lovers who have gone so deeply into jazz, that they have almost no exposure to any other music. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of the people I have ever known who really love jazz and know jazz history in depth, have little or no contact with most other musical genres. That often leads to a very sure attitude in these jazz lovers that jazz is the superior music of all time in the whole world, and that all other genres of music are somehow inferior, in one way or the other. I think that this is fairly common. What is not so common is a jazz lover who knows jazz history and is deeply in love with jazz, who is also quite familiar with classical music, rock, blues, today's pop, today's country, any country music. I have not known many of those people.

I will be happy to do that. I can't stop playing this Blindfold Test in my car. It has become my soundtrack for long car rides.

I saw the Rolling Stones live in 2015 and they were fantastic. Keith Richard played great all evening. This could be a genuinely good album. It can be fun to make fun of the Rolling Stones and their ages, but they are playing and singing really well now.

Thank you for that offer. I found a CD on Amazon for a reasonable price, and have ordered that. So I will not need the discographies, assuming that they come with the CD.

Is Track 8 from this album?

It is really good to hear Charles Mingus' "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting." I did not know that it had been released on a two part 45 rpm single. It made me think, when I got into jazz in the 1970s, it would have been almost impossible for a jazz fan to not know that song. Mingus was so prominent in the jazz discussion. Now, as the decades have passed, I can imagine newer or younger listeners not being familiar with it. James Brown's "Superbad" also sounds so good. I saw him perform it live in the spring of 1981. I am not familiar with the rest of your test, but I am enjoying it and will listen repeatedly. I like the spoken word selections.

Your comments about Track 15 make me really want to get this Etta Jones Victor material. I love the off the wall lyrics and if there are more songs by her as strange as this, I have to have them. i have already ordered the Sam The Man Taylor album. This BFT is a real favorite of mine.

On my 2011 BFT #92, I included a January 6, 1944, recording of "Honeysuckle Rose" by Cootie Williams with Eddie Vinson and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, on which Bud Powell takes a bebop solo. This may be the first recording of pure bebop on an official studio release. So I understand what you mean about Vinson! That BFT #92 is also when I included a Camille Howard track. That was five years ago? It doesn't seem possible.

I would not have thought so. That is really interesting. That track from "African Cookbook" could not have been very widely known. Of course Bryant could have heard Weston play the composition in person .

Oh, I see!

Track 16, "Leave My Man Alone", is very familiar to me in its male counterpart song, "Leave My Woman Alone", by Ray Charles. I thought I heard Margie Hendricks of the Raelettes on this Track 16. So I did some online investigating. I learned something from this Blindfold Test. I did not know that the Raelettes recorded their own albums, without Ray. From what I have read online, they recorded several singles and some albums. "Leave My Man Alone" seems to be a single which did not chart, from what I can find. It's a great track! It may be my imagination but I think I hear Ray singing backup vocals, deep in the background. One thing I love about the Blindfold Tests of The Magnificent Goldberg is that he chooses vocal songs with detailed lyrics, which are sometimes a little bit unusual. The lyrics are not commonplace. On this Track 16, I love the detailed lyrics at the end about what the woman might do to the man--shoot him, stab him, scratch his eyes out, pull off his hairpiece, drop a torpedo on him. Likewise, I like the lyrics on Track 15, in which the woman sings about what the man has left her--his empty jugs of gin, mice in the kitchen, not just the usual things that might be stated. In a Blindfold Test from some years ago now, The Magnificent Goldberg used a track in which a woman singer mentioned a fast food restaurant, and then went on and on with a very extensive list of fast food restaurants, many more than you would expect in any song. I love unusual lyrics like that, and The Magnificent Goldberg is so good at finding them and presenting them to us.

It's yours.

She never sang "Insane Asylum" in any of the times I saw her live. She mostly sang material from her later albums on Alligator Records and the other labels she recorded on after leaving Chess.

I saw Koko Taylor live several times from 1981--2005. She was plenty scary live. I interviewed her backstage once for a school newspaper. She was performing in a small club. She was very pleasant and gracious to me. She asked me at the end of the interview if I had any requests for the second set. I mentioned "Wang Dang Doodle", and she smiled. (She sang it in the second set). Then I mentioned "Built For Comfort" and she did not look happy. She was in fact undeniably quite overweight, but I guess she did not have a sense of humor about it. The other thing I remember about that interview is that I couldn't get started for awhile because Koko and her band were having a heated argument. Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows had just broken up, and they were fervently arguing over whether the backing band would be able to call themselves The Mellow Fellows from then on, or if Big Twist would be able to call his new musicians The Mellow Fellows. Everyone had a very strong opinion about it, which they expressed with powerful enthusiasm--all of it based on no supporting information or facts.

By the way, this Blindfold Test is a playlist for my driving fun. It is a great car CD from start to finish.

Track #22 is Randy Weston's composition, "Congolese Children." As I played this track for the first time, I immediately heard a version in my head with vocals singing "Congolese children...." It is on Randy Weston's "African Cookbook." I am not familiar with this version. I have a lot of Randy Weston albums. This doesn't necessarily sound like Randy Weston playing.

I see that Jimmy Dawkins' version of Kenny Burrell's "Chitlins Con Carne" from his Delmark album "Blisterstring" has already been identified. I actually knew that one as I bought some Dawkins albums on Delmark at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago in the early 1990s. Ha ha ha! Track One is your theme song, "Goldberg Boogie." I find that truly humorous. On one of my Blindfold Tests I included "Unidentified Boogie Number 2" by Camille Howard, from the "Rock Me Daddy" reissue of her Specialty sides. It is labeled "Volume 1." I liked it and also picked up Volume 2 of her Specialty sides, titled "X-Temporaneous Boogie." That is the reissue which contains this track. Camille has a very identifiable sound, and I knew it was her. I just had to listen to my CDs until I found "Goldberg Boogie."

I pulled the trigger and bought the Coleman Hawkins set on August 25. It arrived around Labor Day. Now I see that about a week later, it is out of stock and apparently unavailable. If so, I feel very lucky to have decided for no particular reason to buy it a few weeks ago.

Thanks. You have May.

You have December! I have updated the first post to reflect these sign-ups.

You can have November, MG. June it is!