Hot Ptah

Chuck, thanks for telling us about this exciting release. If you don't mind my asking, is there any monetary compensation involved for writing the liner notes and co-producing such a set? I hope so. With you involved, I know that the liner notes will be excellent and the entire project will be very worthwhile.

I love Track #5. I think it is quite exciting and fascinating. Is is on the Tdzadik label?

Happy Birthday, Chuck!

No, I just think it is a difficult test. Maybe you could provide some hints?

Side Two of Steve Miller's first album, "Children of the Future", has some good blues performances on it. Boz Scaggs and Ben Sidran play on it. It is as good as many of the more heralded blues rock albums of the era. I wish that Steve Miller had stayed with that style. Within a few albums from that first one, I thought he was not nearly as good.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/Smash_your_head.jpg Smash Your Head Against the Wall. This is the debut solo album by John Entwhistle, the bassist for The Who.

You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw, by Spooky Tooth (an English rock band. This was a 1973 release).

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that my thoughts here are influenced by my own experience. A very intelligent niece of mine, an honors student, who lived far away, played trumpet in her middle school band. She was in the full band, the pep band, the marching band and the jazz stage band. Other relatives who heard her play said that she was remarkably good. She expressed great enthusiasm for playing the trumpet. For Christmas I got her a book of the sheet music of great jazz trumpet solos. I was going to next get her an anthology collection of the great jazz trumpeters and send it to her. Before I had decided on which jazz trumpeters CD anthology would be the best one, she contacted me. This is the first specific, personal direct communication I had ever had from her. She said that she hated the book of jazz trumpet solos and what in the world could I have been thinking of? I told her to mail it back to me and I would get her something else for Christmas. She did. I asked her for a list of CDs she would like to get as gifts. She sent a list of the most popular pop CDs of the year--the most shallow dance pop there is, the AM radio hits that the members of this forum would consider to be jokes. I got her two of those CDs and she was very happy.

I think that the original poster is a very nice guy with his heart in the right place. It is possible that he has opened up a new world for this ten year old boy, and that as the ten year old grows up, he will always think of this fondly. Reading this thread makes me wonder. Do the members here spend much time with kids? A ten year old is a 4th or 5th grader. What if a 4th or 5th grader looked out of a car window, saw an ornamental arch on an old preserved building, and said, "I like that." What if next, a kind, warm hearted uncle who is an architect mailed the kid several dvds about great architects and their designs, a coffee table book about great buildings from around the world, and some drafting tools. All because the kid said, "I like that" when he saw an arch out of a car window. What if next the kindly uncle went onto his professional architects online forum and told the story, and old architects from around the world made lists about additional dvds and books about different great architects, past and present, to mail to the 10 year old kid--getting into debates about whether the 10 year old should receive dvds about the architects of ancient Egypt, the designs of the Roman Empire, or 21st century skyscraper designers? I think that the original poster has planted the seeds, and the boy will either take what has been sent and start on a musical journey with a sense of wonder, or will feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable. I think that the boy's honest reaction will be the key. The app that no middle school kid ever loads onto his smartphone.

I think that it is very easy to overwhelm him. I would back off for a time. I think you have given him enough to last a 10 year old for a year. I say this as one who did overwhelm a niece, to the point where she rebelled and would not listen to jazz any more. It can be a delicate balance. If he comes back to you and says that he has played the albums to the point where he is tired of them and wishes he could hear more, then I would get some more. When I was 10, I had not purchased my first album yet. I didn't get any albums at all until I was 14.

I find Track #8, by Clifford Jordan, really interesting. I looked up this album and it seems to be an anomaly in Clifford Jordan's career, a successful soul jazz recording. One of his next studio albums, "Glass Bead Game", was about as far from soul jazz as you can get, for example. I also did not know that Clifford Jordan played piano, or had ever recorded on it. It sounds to me like he is playing Shorty Long's hit single, "Function at the Junction", on piano.

Yes, this is one of the more amazing BFTs ever. Now that I know who I have been listening to, I want to go back and listen with this Reveal in hand. That is a great story about Arthur Prysock in Newark!

Seriously? Then we're in bad shape. On an unrelated note - my wife played Monk in an assembly a couple of weeks ago at her infants school, as background music for a book she was reading (she can't be called self-indulgent as she claims to not like jazz).. the little twerps loved it, and were bobbing up and down to the drum & bass solo just what I was thinking. My impression is that you will get a much better reaction to playing jazz for infants or toddlers, than you would for college students these days. I am curious whether anyone else is regularly around a lot of American high school and college students today. To me, many of the comments in this thread reflect a longing for a reality which does not exist, a reality in which American college students would be open to hearing blues and jazz in class. I remember that shortly after I started teaching my university class, the Either Orchestra jazz group was going to appear in the student union auditorium. I remember researching the academic code of the university to see if there were any guidelines about professors fraternizing with students outside of class, as I wondered about my interactions with my students at the concert. I did not have to worry. Fewer than twenty students from the entire university showed up. None were from my class. The concert was moved from an auditorium to a small lunchroom, where we sat at three round tables to listen to the group. To me, that is a good illustration of the level of interest in jazz, or blues, among American university students today. Both are considered old folks music, for the over 50 years old crowd.

The entire subject matter though is just not covered in an American university history survey class covering many years of history, which is what the initial poster said he was going to be teaching. No one would expect it to be, or want it to be, in my experience. I agree with that. I think that in an American history class in an American university, if you used maybe a 10-15 seconds snippet of music up to three times in a semester, at the beginning of class sessions while everyone was taking their seats, as a seque into your first sentence of your lecture, that might work. More than three 15 second pieces of music during the entire semester would be too much though, I think. Even if you used a 10-15 second snippet of music three different times during the semester, you would become known as the weirdo professor, most likely.

I am going to throw a lot of cold water on your plan. I started teaching a college course as an adjunct professor about 20 years ago, and still do so. I started out with ideas of how to make the course more interesting and how to teach it more creatively than it had been taught before. These efforts were resisted by the students and basically hated by the administration, which ordered me to go back to a standard syllabus. I was told that the students, and their parents, were paying for academic rigor and I was reducing the amount of academic content in the class with my new approaches. I think that your inclusion of music, and emphasis on music, in an American history class for undergraduates in any American university, will seem way outside of the mainstream, and not academically rigorous enough. I do not know what African history courses are like, as I have never taken one. I have the feeling that African history is more of an unknown field of study to most American undergraduates, so an inclusion of music will come across as just one more unusual feature of the hitherto unknown subject matter. But with American history, all American undergraduates have taken American history classes in elementary and high school, and have an ingrained vision of what they are like, and expect more of the same, but at a higher level of thought, in college. If you hit them with a musical emphasis, this will come across as very weird. I think your American history class with its music, will become a campus joke, and will get you into trouble with the powers that be. I would drop the whole idea, or at least run it by one of the more friendly members of the administration before using it. Also, I think that older people like us are very prone to underestimate the lack of feel which students ages 18-22 now have for any blues-based music. I am 56, and when I was in college I had heard a ton of blues based music in my life, just on the radio--we all did, as so much rock and pop was based on the blues. Not so in the past 10-20 years. A blues based pop song is unknown to many younger people now. So your students are likely to rebel because they hate the music, or at least have no familiarity with anything like it. I think your plan is the equivalent of this--if I had taken an undergraduate class in the history of Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries, and the class turned out to be largely devoted to listening to, and reading about, a lot of different plainchants and Gregorian chants. I would have personally rebelled against this, and may well have complained to my parents, and maybe even to the school administration. My parents would have complained to the school administration, that is for sure. Your students today will find blues music to be as exotic, strange, unwelcome, unlistenable, and outside their experience as learning about many different strains and types of chants from the 9th and 10th centuries. I would love to take your class now, if it was offered as adult education at a local college. I just don't think it is going to be appropriate for today's youth in an American university.

Well, I am stumped as to the rest of the songs. Is there any chance you could give us some subtle hints, Allan?

Richard told our jazz history class that he learned to play bass in the swing era, and that Jimmy Blanton was his favorite. He bought Jimmy Blanton's bass and owned it for many years. I am not sure if he has donated it to a school or museum by now. He talked about doing so at one time. He told our jazz history class that he played with the Mercer Ellington-led version of the Ellington Orchestra for about a year in the mid-1970s, just because he loves Ellington's music so much. That is where he met a very young Ricky Ford, and was impressed with him. Ricky played and recorded with Richard into the 2000s. Richard told our class that bebop came along after he had learned bass, and thought at the time, now he would have to learn bass all over again. One of his notable gigs in the 1940s was playing duets in a Calumet City, Illinois, strip club with Sun Ra. He said that Sun Ra would read thick philosophy books as he played piano for the strippers--the book was open on the piano and Sun Ra would read as he played. Richard said that he played in Sun Ra's big band for a year in the 1950s, when Sun Ra was starting out as a leader. I do not think Richard recorded with Sun Ra until the All Stars tour of the 1980s (Sun Ra, Lester Bowie, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Richard Davis, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jarvis). In December, 1981, Sun Ra and his Arkestra came to Merlin's, a music club in Madison, Wisconsin. I got the assignment to write about it for the University of Wisconsin student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal. I talked to Sun Ra's manager to get background information for the article. Sun Ra would not consent to an interview with me, that was out of the question. Richard Davis asked me to give Sun Ra his home phone number. I told his manager about it. The next day, Richard was excited and said that Sun Ra had called him and that they had talked for some time. Richard also told our class about his years as a member of Sarah Vaughan's backing trio. Roy Haynes was her drummer in those years. Richard was the most emotional about Eric Dolphy. He was a close friend and Richard thought very highly of him.

oh, geez .... that would have been somethin' ..... if you take into account that Jaki Byard almost joined Trane ... Byard and Davis with Trane would have left quite a few behind. Richard told our jazz history class that he had previously been asked to join the Miles Davis Quintet, but that his wife at the time did not want him to travel. So he turned it down and concentrated on studio work in New York City instead. Then when John Coltrane asked him, he decided not to turn down another great opportunity. There is a recording of Richard with the Miles Davis Quintet in Portland, around 1966--he subbed for Ron Carter. I have seen it on possibly sketchy labels. I don't know if it has ever had an official release anywhere.

Regarding the question of whether Richard Davis played with Coltrane, he told our jazz history class that he felt a special loss when Coltrane passed away because he was going to become a full time member of Coltrane's group in the fall of 1967.

I am looking forward to this. I will need a disc.

I had an experience like that. I walked into a record store and heard the music playing over the store's sound system. I immediately thought, wow, what bass playing! Who IS that? Then Bobby Hutcherson's vibes came in with the characteristic sound of "Out To Lunch." So then I knew I had been listening to Richard Davis.

I know that Bev has gone on to installment 17, but there's plenty of interesting items left in #16. "Black Swan" was played during Ellington's 1969 European tour as an encore, and presumably as a chance for most of the brass and reed players to rest. The only issued version I'm aware of is from the Manchester concert that provides the bulk of the 70th Birthday Concert album. It's an interesting tune - Latin-rhythmed and utilizing an attractive, unusual chord progression. The Manchester version is played by a quintet - Ellington, Wild Bill Davis on organ, Norris Turney on flute, bassist Victor Gaskin, and Rufus Jones on drums. Everyone except Ellington gets solos; Turney's flute is particularly impressive, as is the drum solo - Jones concentrates on the cymbals and makes frequent references to the melody, a la Max Roach. "Black Swan" is a good one - I would have liked to hear a full-band version by Ellington. That version on "70th Birthday Concert" is relaxed and beautiful, and is a really different sound for Ellington.

Lonely Co Ed 1939 I have always liked this song, for the lyrics, which are so sad that they are funny, and for the way that Ivie Anderson delivers them--again, she presents the song as feeling so sorry for herself that it enters the realm of humor--whether intentional or unintentional, I am not sure. What adds to the humor for me is that the character is so detached from any life which could really be tragic. As a young student, the character's deep woes could disappear the next day if she got a date or went to a fun sorority party. "Frustration" is one of my favorite Harry Carney features by Ellington. Ellington presented it at concerts in the second half of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, but as far as I know, it didn't receive a studio recording until the 1956 Duke Ellington Presents... album on Bethlehem. There's a fabulous live version from the following year, from the Carrolltown, Pennsylvania All Star Road Band dance. "Frustration" is in the perfect baritone sax key, D flat. D flat is the lowest note on older baritone saxes, and Ellington makes good use of that lowest note. But Carney sounds fabulous in the high register, too. There are other baritone players (like Serge Chaloff) that I would rank above Carney in terms of improvisatory ability, but none whose sound I prefer over Carney's. In typical Ellington fashion, the piece's structure is unusual and logical at the same time. Some of the sections sound as if they contain an unusual number of measures, but when you count them - lo and behold; they're the usual eight-measure length. Bravo, Duke and Harry. Yes! A really good version does indeed appear on "All Star Road Band", which is such a vital, energized album.

Yes, I own it and generally I like it. The performance is very good. I must say that I find some of the newer Ducal compostions on it not quite as substantial as his earlier works (eg. The Great Paris Concert from '63, probably my favorite live performance by the Ellington band). I agree. It was a good concert (I wish I had been there!), but it's not among my favorite Ellington albums. The version of "Rockin' in Rhythm" is very hot, but not quite as good as the Paris version. Part of the difference, to my ears, is that Rufus Jones wasn't as good a drummer as Sam Woodyard. I listened to the 70th Birthday Concert album again recently, and I've got to say that this version of "Rockin' In Rhythm" went up in my estimation. It does indeed rival the 1963 Paris version. All right! You must be brilliant in your musical analysis, because you agreed with me!

No one has specifically mentioned his extended solo/duet (with Elvin Jones) on "Summertime", from the Impulse album "Heavy Sounds", under the names of Richard Davis and Elvin Jones. This is one of the memorable recorded bass performances.