danasgoodstuff

I wasn't sure if you making a distinction in degree - he was simply more distinctive than most, a more readily identifiable sound, or a distinction in kind - that he had something more than just a distinctive voice, that his particular use of pitch alteration and other devices to put his own stink on the notes (to paraphrase Ray Charles) was indicative of some deeper difference in what he was doing.

He didn't say so in so many words, but I took Jim to be saying that Ammons had something more in play than just a distinctive voice...my apologies if he didn't mean that.

Gene Ammons certainly had a distinctive voice, but moreso than Clifford Jordan, Illinois Jacquet, Willis Jackson, Lockjaw Davis, Ben Webster, Ike Quebec, or any number of other players? Not so sure...

As much as I admire Henry as a composer, it's his alto sound that I like best.

I'll have to look for it.

Winning a big windfall might allow them to do that, for a little while.

More Three Sounds! Three Sounds More! I'll be checking that one out...

Long may you run.

's OK, I was having a hard time conveying my particular shade of ambivalence....

Yes. These were still early days for Bix, and most his greatest achievements were ahead of him. And the Wolverines were certainly a mixed bag. Like lots of jazz from the 1920s, listening to the Wolverine Orchestra requires sympathetic ears and a willingness to accept a certain amount of chaff along with the wheat. How is this a 'yes' to what I said? I know a bias towards modernism and progress has made people hear the Wolverines as less worthy than what came after...but I was trying to express my skepticism, both because '20s audiences may well have heard a different significance to what we now hear as quaint period artifacts, and because the further away we get the less important the shifts from the '20s to the '30s (and all the little steps inbetween) should be to us. Yes they mattered to audiences and musicians then, but so did their functional utility as a dance band and I guess I'm trying to find a way to respect what the music did in its original context and find an enduring quality that transcends that too. even fixating on Bix, I find nothing lacking in his playing here.

Just wanted to add that while Bix's post Wolverines output sounds to us now as more modern, usually because of the ensembles, and may have then too, that doesn't necessarily make it better...and the things that he did with them that he redid later are particularly interesting.

No shit, that's a hard one to even imagine - coulda been great, or a train wreck, or both...

Well, turns out I only have two Wolverines cuts I can find - Big Boy & Copenhagen - and that I need to reconsider Bix being the whole show and that the W's were that much weaker a band than Goldkette's and the smaller recording groups (Bix & his gang, Tram & the Tamatics). Who's to say that what we hear now as a period affect, the herky jerky rhythm so like early film, etc., wasn't a plus to the original audience, not just as dance music but signifying something else as well...Listening to more W's cuts on youtube, I thin I'll have to find this to buy. Til now I was content with my Time/Life 3 LP Bix collection. Thanks a lot!

No, I'm pretty sure there are people who hear Ben's 'vibrato that just won't stop even when the notes do' and nothing else - the're wrong, of course, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Jug's got his own 'voice', in pretty much every possible way; and that's pretty much certainly not going to appeal to everyone. Me, I'm pretty much always glad to hear him even if I only rarely go out of my way to do so.

I have some of this on anthology/compilation, so I'm re-listen and comment shortly. Bix pretty much is the show, IIRC.

I need to get that Turn It Over remix...but if resurrecting SS was all he'd done, really for Ask the Ages alone, then god bless him. And this is from someone who finds much of Laswell's other work (as a producer and as a player) just annoying.

Dana, there's a joke making the rounds in the Prairies. Maybe your family has told you. Knock, knock. Who's there? Juan. Juan who? Juan and Eight! No, I hadn't heard that yet - but I bet my brother in S'toon has!

The more I think about it, the more I want The Complete Atlantic/Fame Recordings of Tommy Cogbil and Roger Hawkins - but do I want only thinkgs where Cogbil plays bass or the ones where he plays guitar too? Interestingly, Rick Hall says the only reason Tommy played bass (instead of guitar, what he came to play) on Picket's "Land of a Thousand Dances" (IIRC) session because the other two bass players couldn't get it right! I'm guessing the other two were Jr. Lowe and Norman Putnam.

Thank you Rudy.

Reading a bio pf Harold Arlen, so I revisited this from Wanted: One Soul Singer.

I don't know how I missed this v. touching thread before. My dad's been gone 6 years and just this morning I was thinking what would he think about an NYR review of a book by Chomsky. All my best to you and yours.

NYT review: "and a curio titled “Blues in F (My Ding),” a home recording of Davis on piano, illustrating an idea for Mr. Shorter. "

And what was Bye Bye Blackbird before Miles did it, My Favorite Things before Trane, Just Friends before Bird?; how do People Who Listen to Jazz not get this?

and the two cuts Ike Q did with Grant Green doing bossa were good too (bonus tracks on Latin Bit which is more mambo or something else). Charlie Rouse's Bossa Nova Bachanal is less of a fav, but it's ok. The Zoot Sims bossa album is overarranged bandwagon hopping, but an interesting comparison to Getz nonetheless. The Hawkins is kinda oil and water, or is it oil and vinegar, inanycase hearing him sambasize I'm Looking Over a 4 Leaf Clover is amusing.