The Magnificent Goldberg

Thanks Seeline - I wonder where I can get it over here? MG

Willie Banks & the Messengers - Heaven must be a beautiful place - Peacock orig Inez Andrews & the Andrewettes - The need of prayer - Songird (Vogue France) MG

Bloody 'ell! Another I have - the Pat Martino. I'll get my coat. MG

You were on a bit of a roll this morning, Andy, weren't you? Took me a long time to catch up. MG

MG

Terrific! MG

Nice story, HP. MG

MG

Gene Ammons - Woofing & tweeting - OJC The Violinaires - Groovin' with Jesus - Checker orig The Brooklyn All Stars - Walk tall - Jewel orig MG

Looks like the material they issued didn't make money. MG

Actually, although you can do a search through the Lord discography for recordings issued by, say, Impulse, this is not terribly helpful, because they come out in alphabetical order of artists (or sometimes random order - it's not something I try very often ). Not the ideal order to find out anything about the history of a fair-sized label like Impulse. Verve itself closed in about 1973 - I think the last new album on Verve was Jimmy Smith's "Portugese soul". Smith transferred to MGM. But there appear to have been sporadic releases in the eighties and nineties - mostly by subsidiaries of Polygram in France (Gitanes Jazz) and Japan. Teddy Edwards' albums of that period were released on Verve in Europe and Antilles (Island was also owned by Polygram in those days) in the US. I think the first "new" Verve release that was recorded for the American market, was Jimmy Smith's "Damn", in 1995. MG

Fantasy closed Prestige down after the issue of David Newman's "Scratch my back" (P10108). The label was reopened (for new albums - reissues had continued unabated) in 1995. Only two new albums were issued: PRCD11001 Funk Inc - Urban renewal PRCD11002 The Chartbusters - Mating call Riverside was never reopened; instead, Orrin Keepnews started new companies: Tuba - only three albums were made on this label; two by Johnny Lytle and one by Junior Mance. Milestone - acquired by Fantasy in about 1973. Landmark - I don't think this label lasted too long, but I don't have much of its output. Savoy - Savoy shut down its jazz/R&B side in the early sixties, though a few avant garde albums were made in the late sixties, but Gospel production continued until at least 2002. After Herman Lubinsky's death, the company was sold to Arista who started up the Savoy Jazz label, mostly for reissues, but one new album was made - "Home in the country" by Pee Wee Ellis. After Arista decided they didn't know how to market Gospel music, they sold that side of the business to Malaco (where it remains) and the secular side to Nippon Columbia, where it, too, remains. Contemporary seems to have closed for new albums in the sixties, though the firm kept going, I think. It reopened in the late seventies, under the guidance of John Koenig, and the start of the 14000 series. Sometime in the early eighties, it was acquired by Fantasy and continued to produce new material. Chess was sold to GRT in 1968, then to All Platinum, then to Sugar Hill (or All Platinum may have renamed itself), but continued to make jazz, Gospel & R&B records until the late seventies, at which point the only remaining artist - Jack McDuff - was transferred to Sugar Hill and the Chess labels died. Liberty continued to run Pacific Jazz until at least 1971 - the last one I know of was Groove Holmes & Ernie Watts' "Come together" 20171, recorded about 1971. Never revived. MG

Completely agree! His tenor solo on "Out of Nowhere" is Getz bossa-nova before Getz did it himself! Which album is that on? MG Fantasy 3-289 Cal Tjader - Tjader Goes Latin, reissued on Fantasy FCD-24730-2 Black Orchid Sorry 'bout that; I thought I put that on there! Thanks Al. MG

Ray Charles, Hammersmith Odeon, 1961. John Lee Hooker at The Marquee (or the 100 Club) 1962. Jerry Lee Lewis, Boulogne Casino, then on board a cross-Channel ferry returning to Southend, 1963. Vera Zorina; the British premiere of Debussy's "Chansons de Bilitis", Palace Pier, Brighton, 1967. (There was also a very amusing Shostokovitz Nonet, also, I think, receiving its British premiere, at the gig, too.) Hank Crawford, David Newman & Calvin Newborn - Ronnie's, August 1982. Houston Person & Etta Jones - Blue Note, NY, May 1990 McCoy Tyner - St David's Hall, Cardiff, 1990 (I think). Jimmy Smith, some place in Bristol, mid-late 1990s. Cheikh Ndiguel Lo, Centre Culturelle Francaise, St Louis, Senegal, November 1997. Youssou Ndour - in front of Governor's residence, St Louis, November 1997. Alioune Mbaye Nder & Le Setsima Groupe, Jandeer nightclub, Dakar, Senegal, November 1997. Sekouba Bambino, Oumou Dioubate & Kandia Kouyate - Barbican Centre, London, 1999. Lonnie Smith & Ronnie Cuber - Brecon Jazz Festival, 2000. Ouza - Sunrise nightclub, Dakar, February 2001. MG

Yes, that's the one I have. I don't keep my OBI strips But I got it in an HMV branch in Tokyo in May 2002. You wouldn't have found a 1997 issue there so long afterwards MG

Me too - but see also the thread about reinstating the Rare Groove series. A good list in there. MG

I don't think there's any line at all. What is marketed as "smooth jazz" is in fact instrumental pop. Dunno. Tell me, was Gerald Allbright's "Live at Birdland West" marketed as Smooth Jazz or as Jazz? That sure as hell isn't instrumental pop and not by a very long chalk. MG

Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama - Oh Lord, stand by me - Specialty Harmonizing Four - Where he leads me - Gotham (Hob reissue) Mildred Clark & the Melodyaires - Lord help me to hold out - Savoy orig MG

Yes. I think I'll say that, had I not been handicapped by an extremely quiet laptop, I might have recognised two of them. I recognised the Blue Mitchell, but couldn't identify it, because I forgot I had some on LP and only looked at the CDs. That' my story and I'm sticking to it MG

Unusually, I'm not clear about what you're saying here, Steve. In particular, I don't know what you mean by "soft fusion" - I never listened to fusion anyway - could you give a couple of examples? All labels for genres of music are coined quite a long time after the music develops. Marketing men don't hang with musicians, do they? MG

I think it's quite difficult to say that the numerous Disco albums by David Newman, Sonny Criss, Blue Mitchell, Willis Jackson, Lou Donaldson, Lonnie Smith, Grover Washington Jr, Johnny "Hammond" Smith, Charles Earland, Joe Thomas, Houston Person, Stanley Turrentine (oh, I'm bored with listing them) were NOT jazz. It's easy to say that the best of these albums don't represent their best work (though some are pretty damn good) and that the worst of them are rubbish. But jazz can be rubbish, too, you know. I don't know - all the Smooth jazz I've heard (and known who was playing it) has been. But I've never (knowingly) heard Kenny G, for example. MG

Always appreciate subtlety, Jim! MG

Completely agree! His tenor solo on "Out of Nowhere" is Getz bossa-nova before Getz did it himself! Which album is that on? MG

Bobby Hutcherson - Total eclipse - BN DMM Bobby Hutcherson - At Montreux - BN orig MG

I think the question of the origins of Smooth Jazz has to be looked at within the context of what one might call “the jazz stream of black popular music”. In the thirties and early forties, the jazz stream of black popular music encompassed pretty well all contemporary jazz – swing. As Bebop developed, even though musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie wanted to be popular musicians as their predecessors had been, there were aesthetic pulls that drew them into places where (most of) the black public wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, go. And at the same time, much black popular music was going off into yet another different direction, which was eventually named R&B. But there were jazz musicians whose work remained such an integral part of black popular music that it is very difficult to draw a hard and fast line between them and R&B musicians and not have huge arguments about where to draw that line – arguments on which both sides will be right. (All discographers since Jepsen have included R&B records in jazz discographies because of this real difficulty.) The music those musicians were producing was eventually named Soul Jazz. Because Soul Jazz remained an integral part of popular black music, it partook of all the same trends. Indeed, it was often jazz musicians who started those trends: Ray Charles; James Brown; and George Benson are people who obviously had a foot in each camp and are all important for the development of R&B. So, most developments in Soul Jazz had their counterparts in, or were themselves the counterparts of, R&B developments. This is a development stream that is rather unlike that of what one might call the main stream of modern jazz. So we find in the late forties that R&B is a music that is very largely based on Swing but more heavily reliant on blues, in which the dominant expressions were those made by vocalists and tenor players: Joe Liggins; Roy Milton; Louis Jordan; Illinois Jacquet; Wild Bill Moore; Hal Singer and others. In the early fifties, Gospel music began to be incorporated into R&B – some of Clyde McPhatter’s work with Billy Ward & the Dominos was of this nature, as was that of Billy Wright, Prince of the Blues. But it was Ray Charles who made the biggest impact and brought those experiments into a style, which eventually was named Soul. And as that was happening, the organ was being incorporated into Soul Jazz; the tenor organ combo was developed by Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, particularly his use of Doc Bagby (who had been the A&R director for Gotham records, famous for its Gospel records on some – and possibly more than some – of which Bagby had played), and the organ trio by Wild Bill Davis. Organists such as Milt Buckner, Bill Doggett, Tommy Dean, Baby Face Willette, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Hank Marr and probably Sam Lazar began to develop their styles in this period, though Jimmy Smith later brought about a technical revolution in organ playing which has overshadowed these early developments, most of which weren’t recorded anyway. Following Smith, many more organists appeared and generally their styles were, much more than Smith’s, who was basically a Bebopper in his early days, heavily based in Gospel music. In the mid-sixties, following some precursor attempt in the New Orleans area, James Brown – with the assistance of, initially, Nat Jones, a musician who’d worked in Chicago big bands in the thirties, then, after Jones’ death, Pee Wee Ellis, a Rollins-influenced modernist – developed Funk. As with Ray Charles, there was a substantial element of jazz in Brown’s music and it wasn’t long before Brown himself was making jazz albums based on the new thing, and other musicians too. This is basically what is meant by Acid Jazz. The early seventies brought about Disco. There were clear social and economic reasons for this change. The organ rooms were disappearing as the better heeled residents of the ghetto managed to get out into suburbia, and as the black audience for the cinema was growing fast – the only part of the cinema audience that was growing at the time (it’s not clear whether this was caused by blaxploitation films or was the reason for them, but there was definitely a feedback loop) – and as organ rooms were hit by anti-drug measures. And with Disco, a club-owner didn’t need to hire a band – a DJ or two could keep people dancing through the night. And Disco was easy (for white people) to dance to; an important consideration out in the newly integrated suburbs. If Deodato’s “Prelude” wasn’t the first Disco album, it was the first to have what became the hallmark of the genre – lush orchestration, beautifully recorded in this case by Mr Van Gelder. And it wasn’t long before the lushness generally took over from any actual creative improvising (though there are some great exceptions). And it also was an extremely short time before the major labels took the music over. Smooth Soul, and Smooth Jazz, seem to me to have been a reaction against the mechanistic and formularistic tendencies of Disco. From being drowned in orchestras, singers wanted to be heard. There were no longer blues shouters like Jimmy Rushing who could sing in front of the Basie band, or Walter Brown or Joe Turner. They were singers like Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, Sade, Luther Vandross and George Benson. People who, to be frank, epitomised the tastes and aspirations of the new black suburbanites. And Benson was a leading figure of both the Smooth Soul and Smooth Jazz movements. And both of these movements – essentially one movement – were eased (or perhaps kicked) out of the ghetto by Rap and Hip Hop generally. But unlike all previous kinds of R&B, and probably helped a lot by “quiet storm” radio programming, there seems to have been no time when this music wasn’t deemed fit by the industry powers for crossover. And probably rightly so, because by that time, there was little appreciable difference between black and white suburbanites. The thing is, once music moves out into the suburbs, it can’t change because the suburbs are all about stability. Cities are all about dynamism and opportunities, and that’s where new music comes from. So we’ve had thirty years of this stuff. MG