felser

With an endless muzak loop of Kenny G's "Songbird" playing over and over and over and over...

Funny you should mention that release. I've been meaning to start a thread on that date. It's a much later set, about five years later. Also a nice date, also not essential to my ears. I'd rate it higher than the Jordan date.

If it's the concert I'm thinking of from the 70's, it has an all-star lineup but is really very underwhelming artistically, much much less than the sum of its parts. grossly underrehearsed and not well thought out, like so many of the things from that period. There is a lot of gold from that era, but also a lot of dross. I heard this one again recently, and it sounded like dross then and sounds like dross now. Save your money. Make sure you have 'The Free Slave' by Brooks, from a couple of years before. That one, originally on Muse and reissued on CD on 32Jazz, is a gem.

Not that I disagree but I would maybe move the line up to the single that came out right before Help in I Feel Fine. Not quite as heavy as Ticket To Ride but its got that great rif and with the feedback at the beginning it was the kind of launching of making the recording studio their instrument. But is there really THAT much difference between "I Feel Fine" and "A Hard Day's Night?" or between "Help" and, say. "No Reply"? And aren't some Help songs like "Another Girl" and "The Night Before" really things that could have sounded OK on A Hard Day's Night and maybe even Meet The Beatles?

Coupla things. First, I believe that Chuck indicated this and almost all of the "intelligent" packages were developed under Fantasy's watch, and just were released by Concord after the transfer. Second, good luck hearing back from Concord on any of this. They've ignored several emails I've sent on related topics over the past couple of years. I am very thankful this set finally saw the light of day after many years, but don't expect much new. Maybe if the work was already done on the Miles sets in the past we'll see them, but I agree that the Miles/Rollins set, while very nice in and of itself, may not be a good harbinger of what is (not) to come.

You'll love the Prestige quartet stuff on Fearless Leader since you love the Atlantic stuff (I do too). Start with Fearless Leader, but get them all.

Typical Blue Note session of the period (mid-late 50's), no more, no less. What's not to like? To me, Jordan didn't really find his voice until his time with Mingus in the 60's.

Prestige sideman sessions (Mal Waldron, Red Garland, Gene Ammons etc.). The other two related boxes are his leader and co-leader sessions.

Findlay, Ohio (wherever that is).

Got mine in the mail today - it looks great, can't wait to hear it!

'cuz after all, he's not crazy, we're all crazy....

Despite fear of rousing the anti-nostalgia Nazi's, I wanted to share about this great box set I came across. Thee Midniters were considered by legend to be the premier 60's East L.A. Band, forerunners to Los Lobos. I have known of them for many years, but had never actually heard them. There had never been a CD collection worth getting on then. I have learned at this point to discount 60's rock obscure "legends" who I have not actually every heard on CD (burned many times in the past on this sort of thing by groups that had one great song and tons of cover-version filler), and they were primarily a covers band. But I couldn't pass up a new box set of their complete recordings, "Thee Complete Midniters - Songs of Love, Rhythm, and Psychedelia", a four CD set available for about $25 on Amazon Marketplace. And it's unbelievably good, far surpassing my expectations. Tremendous energy and chops, a spectacular vocalist (Willie Garcia has to be heard to be believed), excellent originals, and this may be THE greatest cover band in rock history (really). Their range of material was far-reaching, their taste nearly unfaltering. The box is a labor of love with replica fold-out mini-LP's, insightful liner notes, many pictures. Kudos to Microwerks records, who will make many friends but little money on this. Any other fans of this group? I'm a new one but a huge one. I'm also enjoying the new Rhino box set "Where The Action Is", 4 CD's with 101 songs of 1965-1968 L.A. rock, most of which are obscurities I've never heard. Even the items by the well-known groups are things you likely won't be familiar with, tying them into the sound of the project. Great fun, whatever the allocations of "art" or "nostalgia" for another time and place which bursted with seeming possibilities which have since vanished.

I've waited enough years to get this, need to go after it. Wanted to see if any board members have this CD and are willing to make it available to me, or have any leads on getting it at a reasonable price, before I plunk down the money being asked for on Amazon Marketplace. Sloan was a master at what he did, which happens to be a style I love. He wrote "Eve of Destruction", "Where Were You When I Needed You", "You Baby", "Secret Agent Man", "Things I Should Have Said", " "Another Day, Another Heartache", "Only When You're Lonely", and dozens (hundreds?) of other wonderful songs in the mid-60's. "Where Were You When I Needed You" and pretty much the entire first Grassroots album was actually written and performed by him and partner Steve Barri.

Me, I listen to what I want to listen to at any given time, and don't much worry about what proporton of the reason is "nostalgia" and what proportion is "quality" (surely both are involved in many ways, as are many other factors at other times, like "trendiness"). If I'm enjoying it, I'm enjoying it. It's my collection, my time, my enjoyment. Bit of a silly argument overall to me, and pretty elitist/snobby.

Yes, live at the East and clearly underrehearsed/underprepared.

Yes, but they're much easier to do now. You can easily assemble a master take of a track digitally using bits and pieces of things. My point was digital technology allows you to obsess to a whole new level. Most jazz records, however, still seem to get recorded pretty quickly. Except for Verve recordings where it takes ages to get Herbie Hancock/Sting/Peter Gabriel etc to phone in/e-mail/upload their parts. So many of them are on such a tight budget compared to the pop releases, due to the diminished sales expectations. There's a lot of jazz stuff from the 70's that, much as I like it, could have benefitted greatly from more preparation and more recording time. Muse, Strata-East, Tribe, Black Jazz a bunch of that stuff is wonderful but in places overly ragged clearly because of the rushed nature of the thing. Consider something like Mtume's 'Alkebu-Lan' or the Muse Clifford Jordan's, and how that is so much less than the sum of the parts seemingly should be. But with the underlying economics, I'm sure that's the best they could do, and I'm sure glad they did it. Chuck could probably speak to this phenomenon well.

Same here. Just got an e-mail that my order has shipped. Good news Me too!

Big time fan here, especially the mid-60's to 70's stuff, but I pretty much own almost all of it.

Agree, SF Sorrow is an underheard classic!

It's all of that. To exclude an important component of the 60s is just not possible. The Beatles were an important of what made the 60s; kids rebelling against their parents. Most parents hated rock 'n roll. You just can't say that to know the 60s you need to look elsewhere. You need to look at all of it. They were all parts of the reaction to the end of WWII. The end of the war brought the end to a tumultous age, perhaps dating back to the onset of the Depression. From 1945 through the 50s, that was a reaction against that tumult. The 60s were a reaction to the mind numbing wish for normalcy (cue Warren Harding) that our parents and the world sought after what happened in previous decades. There is a great book called the War of the World by Niall Ferguson which posits that there was no WWI or WWII but one continuous war from 1900 through the Korean War. Thus, the 50s were reaction to that upheaval and the 60s a reaction to the reaction. I don't disagree with either of these postings. I agree that you don't correct overstating the Beatles' impact by understating it. They were certainly a meaningful part of the picture, which would be otherwise incomplete. I just wanted to stress, as Allen did, that there were other parts of the picture as big or bigger which can't be seen through the Beatles. Even within popular music (Dylan). And you don't grasp the USA 60's without MLK, JFK/RFK, the USSR/Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam being clearly in focus front and center. And Beatles music doesn't begin to adequately address any of those in and of itself. It is part of the tapestry.

I read it back in the early 80's when it came out and really liked it, but that was a long time ago, so I can't say how it's aged.

Thank you Allen. To all, if you want to know about the Beatles, enjoy the books and CD's. If you want to know about the 60's, try reading Arthur Schlesinger's "Robert F. Kennedy and His Times", David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" or any number of other books. Try listening to early Bob Dylan, P.F. Sloan's "Eve of Destruction", Spanky and the Gang's "Give a Damn", the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" or any number of other songs. Hendrix's tweak of Dylan, "Let us stop talking falsely now, the hour's getting late", capture more of the 60's than the entire Beatles catalogue. For us in the US, the Beatles were an escape from the reality of the 60's, not an embodyment of them. "Beatlemania" was so intense largely to flee from the constant awareness of the twin horrors of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the JFK Assassination. "All You Need is Love" was a pleasant fairytale, a pipe dream, not an experiential reality even then. Things may have appeared different in England or in retrospect, but not here then. Especially if you were a teenage boy facing the draft.

Lon, guess it is clean and quiet compared to Philly, but it's the Philly-facing end of the busiest high-tech corridor in Pennsylvania (Route 202 corridor, goes from KOP on the northeast end to West Chester on the southwest end), huge mall, tons of traffic, lots of big drug companies, giant Lockheed-Martin defense contracting facilities, Vanguard world headquarters, Siemens Med division US headquarters (where I work). That being said, the residential neighborhoods are very quiet, great parks (Valley Forge, etc.), it has its charms. But much different than when we were kids back then.

Remember, the AAJ board refers to the Organissimo board as "wild and wooly"!

The book sounds "interesting", but this is a bizarre paragraph. There are many many songs which could make equal/greater claims of equal greater significance of the sea change of those times ("Gimme Shelter", for instance).