The Magnificent Goldberg

BIll Haley? Brenda Lee? The Coral and Brunswick subsidiaries did pretty well with Buddy Holly, Jackie Wilson, Young/Holt, and a great many of Decca's country records were big pop hits. I think Decca was still in touch. However, it seems that Decca, rather than RCA Victor and Capitol, both of which were also very big in the country market, was the victim of the post-war indies growth period; Imperial, Specialty, Chess and Atlantic were probably the villains, as far as Decca was concerned. RCA Victor was really only four big artists, as I remember; Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Neil Sedaka and Perry Como, who seems to have done well because his show seems to have been on TV every week (even over here). Capitol seem to have been able to make money out of pretty well anything. It's noticeable that, apart from Jackie Wilson, none of Decca's artists went on and on for years, whereas Presley, Cooke and Como all had very long periods as top sellers. As did Nat Cole, Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson and Peggy Lee. Capitol also knew how to make best selling albums, too, and I don't think Decca did. Nor did Decca get much in the way of big original cast/soundtrack albums. Well, you're probably right; they lost some people like Peggy Lee, but apart from her, I can't think anyone BIG went elsewhere. But maybe they were continually being outbid for really promising people by the other majors. MG

MG

OK, well I'll believe you - thousands wouldn't. He's another geezer I've never heard of. Personal discipline and responsibility is the right stuff. Propaganda for future slaveholders ain't. MG

You're right to remain unconvinced, it's not Johnny Guitar. Is Johnny Guitar well known? This guy is. MG

Nice one. MG

Nope, nope and nope, though the first two are in approximately the right area. MG

MG

Well, I was with you up until this line: So, are they coloring this strictly in response to the words, or are they coming from someplace else and then making the words serve that? In my view, there's no such place as someplace else; it's there in our minds - perhaps in a part of our mind we haven't visited lately. But our minds, well known or little known, are the only resource any of us has at our disposal. Not even our bodies are our own resource without our mind commanding it to do this that or the other. But we don't stand outside our minds because our minds are us and there ain't nothing else. No matter what religious or spiritual experiences we might believe we've had, it's in our minds that we've had them. So I take the view that what we bring to the party is only our own minds and that reaching out for the 'other' is simply a metaphor for reaching in to some notion or emotion we'd forgotten we'd always known about. It's gigantic, but not infinite. There's room to store - as it were in compressed archives - every moment of our lives, from having a shit to making love; up to a point. As one gets older, bits are deleted and later even removed from the deletions box. Also some of the chips get buggered. Oh well, those are things that happen. But what's in there is all our internal and external experience of life and that's where an artist might conceivably go in search of a new idea or feeling. But that's a decision the artist takes as part of pursuing his employment. But if the artist is his mind, that doesn't mean it's one thing only. The mind's a multiprocessor with different bits taking care of different aspects of the business of living all the time, so there's no real dichotomy between the mind's businesses as creative artist, wife, husband, parent, cook, chauffeur, cleaner etc etc etc. We can manage them all ie take decisions about them all; simultaneously if need be. Nothing wrong with management; personally, I'd guess that there's some part of our minds that measures stuff that's going on in order to inform other parts of what may or may not be possible at any particular time. And you can call it your Peter Drucker bit if you like, but it IS your friend. MG

Yes, yes and yes! The one with Prysock is the only Basie big band album I've got except for a cheapo compilation of old singles. If I could find a compilation of stuff from the thirties and forties with ONLY stuff no self-respecting jazz fan thinks is much good, I'd buy it in an instant, but no one would be fool enough to issue such a thing MG

Well, that's actually what I was saying at the beginning. Words were invented by societies already in the process of formation. So there must have been communication before words. MG

Wouldn't you include as 100% gravy the album he made with Arthur Prysock? MG

OK, what about two different words that sound the same in a language you DON'T speak? MG Oh, I like your second thoughts a LOT better than your first. An even better example is of a cafe or bar owner who can tell, just by observing body language, that someone just walking in is a troublemaker and can turf them out well before any trouble starts. That's why those people have an absolute legal right to refuse service. So even politicians know this. MG

MG

Mine says the same MG

No TRIVIAL problems. Plenty of real ones without giving myself ones I don't need. MG

I dunno 'bout you, but I pick out the front t-shirt from the wardrobe and, after the washing's dry, those go in the back, so I rotate through them accidentally. I always wear the same colour socks, shoes, trousers and knickers. I never accessorise; wouldn't know an accessor if it bit me on the bum. How to live a life without trivial problems MG

Yes, so he did. Where's the little picture of the geezer with a red face? MG

I pretty well agree with that, except for this: ""We" like to think of "words" as the ultimate expression, because they give a sense of measure," I think it's not because it gives a sense of measure but because we think IN words. Thinking in words probably isn't compulsory, because there was a time when words were still being developed by people who lived together in whatever groups and could already think, but we've been doing it for so long it's become habitual. And some of us can think in music, others can think in shapes etc and do it when they want or need to. But most of us can only think in words, I reckon. MG

Is that Shep Shepherd, who used to play bass with Bill Doggett? MG

Well, I'm glad. Thanks. MG

I dare say you're correct. You're a musician and you're SUPPOSED to get it. But I don't get it. What I get are relationships between musicians and audiences and some of the reasons why ordinary people who know no more than me about music go out to see/buy records to hear those musicians. To me, the art of great musicians is to be able to get a message out to the great majority of people in their communities who know next to nothing about what they're doing with the music (and probably don't really care about that either) but who know and like how it feels. Because it feels like they feel. And like they think. Now there's got to be a sense in which you can't join them, because you're educated to do something different. Or maybe sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. I don't know you from the inside any more than I know Gene Ammons from the inside. I only know me that way. MG

So it seems. We've got one completely right answer (11), one answer that identifies the leader correctly (8). one answer that identifies two of the personnel (2). This surprises me greatly. Apart from 1 & 9, every leader on this is an extremely well-known name and I feel sure most of you have heard, and probably got, many recordings of those people. Sure, I've tried to pick hard ones within these people's oeuvre. But I bet I get a chorus of 'Oh hell, I've got that one!' on the first of September MG

Yes. MG

All those guys working names were invented by, I think, J D Miller, before their first masters ever got to Nashboro; Lightnin' Slim, Slim Harpo, Lonesome Sundown and Lazy Lester. Great names but not true nicknames and meaningless within those guys' lives. MG

Very interesting. For me, meaning in music is a social meaning. Over breakfast I've been listening to Little Milton's 'Grits ain't groceries live'. Music is one of the ways societies express themselves; words are another. Different languages express different societies and the way they think. In English, we count in tens with two separate words, related to one and two, for eleven and twelve but clearly different from thirteen to nineteen. In French, they count in tens with six separate words, related to one to six for eleven to sixteen, which are different from seventeen to nineteen. In Mandinke (Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal), they count in tens. Eleven is the linguistic equivalent of one-teen. The Bambara, also in Mali, whose language is related to Mandinke, do too. But in Senegal, the Wolof... The Wolof THINK differently. They count in fives, with six to nine being the linguistic equivalent of one-five-teen. Frivolously, I wonder what the ancient Wolof were doing with their OTHER hand. But it ain't really frivolous; counting and the formulation of words that mean numbers is a completely basic part of the experience of every society in the world. But it's not necessarily a universal experience; if counting developed after the formation of separate societies (which is clear) then it must have done so as a matter of separate decisions by members of those societies, so it's theoretically possible for some societies to have decided not to go for this new-fangled avant-garde concept. And maybe some did. We don't know about them because they either died out or were taken over by another society that understood the world a bit better. But different languages do indicate different societies. English English and American English are very similar languages but not the same. So are the varieties of American English spoken in black and white areas. But it's hard for me, as an English person, to truly understand quite a lot of what a black singer means, or even to make out what the words are. Our languages are farther apart. Our audiences react differently to singers and musicians. And as for Jamaican singers... I can get the music they're making, however, at the same level as I can get that of Gene Ammons, Big Jay McNeely or Booker Ervin. The message is in the actual way those men play their tenor sexes. The first impact - with me - is in the SOUND they make this instrument make. The second is in the intensity of their playing, which is, to me, a way of saying their conviction, their seriousness. Third is the way they emphasise different elements of a phrase, which makes what they do truly become something like speech. Fourth the way these emphases make rhythm. Sorry, but I don't give a toss about the actual notes they play or their harmonies. That's counting and seems too basic a thing to express anything real that is a social fact. MG