The Magnificent Goldberg

Ramsey Lewis - More sounds of Christmas - Argo (stereo) (I like this one better than the one before) Bee Houston - Arhoolie MG

Sonny Criss Charlotte Crossley Malcolm X

Nah - Kenny G fans! MG

I liked this bit MG I liked this bit MG Actually, I only liked it once. MG

Not me, Guv. See your local lightly clad female and see if that works... MG

Several days of bright, dry weather forecast. Hm, we'll see. Cetainly correct for today. MG

Took me a long time to get round to the Scott, but when I got it, a bit over a year ago, I found it was one of her best. Noslen is very nice on it. MG

Eddie Laguna Ethel Waters Tony Aquaviva

Yes you can - people on this board can afford *everything* - it's a condition of entry! Oh some may pretend they can't, but when the last chance arrives they can, my friend, o they can... I know for a fact that one board member happily sold his body to get the $2 he needed to buy up some Earl Klugh LPs in a garage sale. And with the change he bought a broken hairdryer. He's gonna fix that up as soon as he can figure out how. And then, use the time he saves on towel drying to check out those Earl Klugh LPs. Call it Karma. MG

Yes - her parents were political exiles from Equatorial Guinea and she was born in Spain. She's absorbed Jazz, House, Flamenco and Pop music as well as the music her mum taught her from home and has put it together into a mainly flamenco-related music which is enormously powerful. She sings very emotionally; straight from the gut and real experience. Her records are some of the most exciting I've heard in years. MG PS Seeline can give you a good bit more on her - from a much deeper knowledge of the various Latin musics than I have. I only know how she makes me feel.

I don't understand what rock-based blues is. If you mean blues-based rock, I can understand it; but then I'd be interested to know which of the old-line blues bands were forced by Korner, the Stones, Cream, Mayall, Yardbirds etc to change some of the old formulas. MG

Humphrey Bogart Sir Humphrey Appleby Sir Nigel Hawthorne

The worrying thing is I haven't had a response (up until an hour ago, anyway) from Yahoo. MG

It's Welsh here. As ever. MG

Good grief! MG

It was Kenneth HORNE, not HOME Brush up on your English comedians of the fifties! MG It was Kenneth HORNE, not HOME Brush up on your English comedians of the fifties! MG Libby Morris Morris Minor Ford Prefect

Honestly, you can't do better than Organissimo's Christmas tunes for really good seasonal fare that lasts the whole year through. There's a download link somewhere here. MG

Sleeve notes aren't printed in very helpful (to the elderly) font and colour, but it looks like the painting is by Choco Diseno (with a tilde over the n). Although I bought this from an Amazon UK seller, this one came from Argentina and was manufactured by Warner Argentina. Struth! MG

Concha Buika & Chucho Valdes - El ultimo trago Phew! MG

Sorry folks! Someone has sent some spam, as if from me, to every contact in my e-mail address book. If you got any, please don't report me for spam - Yahoo might close me down MG

Have a good one! MG

What about Roy Milton? (Just the first name that popped into my mind.) MG And the second name that popped into my mind, was that of Chick Webb. MG

Took me a long time to write the same sort of thing. MG

But where do you draw the line? Do you really think that every blackface performer was a racist or was inspired by nothing but contempt? Even if there was only one blackface performer who was inspired by what he regarded as a love of black music (however condescending), doesn't that effectively obscure the line? And ultimately, why should we try to make the distinction? Was minstrelsy really so bad? It was America's first mass entertainment and arguably its first major contribution to world culture (both Britain and Japan were tremendously affected by it). And the end result is the same. I don't think that there is any need to draw a distinct line. Minstrelsy was a product of the time and, as you say, some people, black and white, with sincere love and respect for black American music practiced it as the accepted medium of the time. It is still the case that demeaning racial parody was at the core of minstrelsy. That is what makes it so unpleasant. On the other hand, when Mick Jagger, Van Morrison or Amy Winehouse sing in a heavily black influenced manner, they are doing it straight from the heart in a sincere manner. To the degree that some could perceive it as parody, the joke and laughter would be on them. As I wrote, I see that as a huge qualitative difference. I'm stating the obvious and John L has said it better and more succintly than I can but the Stones were heavily influenced by the Blues and this is evident in many of their songs (e.g. Little Red Rooster, use of harmonicas), particularly the early albums in the 60s, until the early 1970s. This does not mean slavish imitation or a form of minstrelcy. This was just part of their roots and it gave them a distinctive sound. The fact that they recorded blues influenced songs probably led many a person (including myself) to see out the Blues and discover why we liked the Stones and other similar groups: there was something inside of us. No, sorry, it wasn't "just part of their roots". I can't speak for Morrison or Winehouse, but Jagger and I came up at the same time - he's a few weeks older than me - and in the same place. We may have even frequented the same pubs and heard the same bands before he started sitting in at the Ealing R&B club in the period before the Stones were formed to take over the gig there. And one thing that all of us in that area knew - well, all of us who thought a bit about the music we loved, but understood very little, and I definitely include Jagger in that group; he was certainly not mindless about it - was that it was foreign, exotic, hip. What flowed from that was that there could be no authentic, English, version of the blues, or R&B or Soul (and there were elements of all of those kinds of music in what was going on in the Stones and the other bands around West London at the time). It was ridiculous - and could be hysterically funny, if done right - to try to sing the blues with an English accent; particularly a regional accent. But it was also impossible to sing those kinds of music in a style that related to English models of singing, even if an American accent was used (although that trick could, would and did work for English singers of other kinds of American music). So what singers had to do was a more or less slavish imitation; to borrow and put on a shirt of a different colour. "This is not me, it's me playing myself, as I'd like to be seen." There was, of course, nothing of parody in all this (except by accident). It was innocent of racist derogatory undertones, but also lacked deep understanding of the background out of which it had come, but was nonetheless wholly admiring. All of this is, as Allen said, NOT simple. MG

Pretty cheap, if you ask me. NYC $857 per sqft for 175 sqft Lon $4350 per sqft for 77 sqft And 3 years inflation since the London closet was on sale. MG