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Ken Dryden

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  3. Venus Jazz CD Sale

    in Offering and Looking For...

    Posted · Edited by Ken Dryden

    Eric Alexander: Just One Of Those Things (GMLP)

    Eddie Higgins:

    When Your Lover Has Gone

    Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (GMLP)

    Christmas Songs II (GMLP)

    Richard Wyands:

    Lady Of The Lavender Mist (MLP)

    On 3/24/2024 at 6:11 PM, Ken Dryden said:

    Eric Alexander: Just One Of Those Things (GMLP)

    Eddie Higgins:

     

    When Your Lover Has Gone

    Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (GMLP)

    Christmas Songs II (GMLP)

    Richard Wyands:

    Lady Of The Lavender Mist (MLP)

    Please add:

    Barney Wilen: Inside Nitty Gritty (MLP)

    Passione (MLP)

    Be Aware that some titles were licensed and reissued under diferent titles by Sunnyside, while I think Venus Jazz also licensed a few from Sunnyside.

    David Hazeltine had a great quip about Tetsuo Hara's penchant for nude covers on his Venus Jazz CDs. He met Hara with his wife and asked him if he planned to use her as a model in the future? Charles McPherson brought it up in an interview I did years ago and he was disgusted with the cover of his only Venus Jazz CD. Hara defends it as part of his artistic concept.

  5. The Age of Cultural Stagnation

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    3 hours ago, JSngry said:

    A bad movie with a diverse cast is worse than a bad movie with a homogenous cast? 

    They're both bad. A perfect example of a rotten remake, The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks. It was so over the top and vulgar that it just wasn't funny at all. The subtleness of the original British film with Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers was far superior. My wife walked out of the remake after 10-15 minutes due to the overflow of obscenities and by the time I had sat through the entire film I wished I had as well. Shaft didn't exactly have a diverse cast, but I remember enjoying the film when I saw it in college. It was as entertaining as a typical film starring a white guy as a detective.

    There was a terrible movie that I remember being released in the summer of 1977 when I was in grad school with nothing to do, a group of us made the mistake of going to see a supposed comedy, Between the Lines, labeled by one critic as "the American Graffiti of the 1970s." It was so lame that I started making remarks out loud from the audience and I was getting more laughs than the film. Finally, we all left after about 15, 20 minutes. We should have known it was going to be terrible, a group came out from the previous showing and everyone was scowling and one woman uttered, "God, what a waste!" 

    The Blade Runner sequel was absolutely dreadful, far too long with a story line that made no sense, the villain's character seemed to be particularly badly written. 

    Another example is the most recent CBS Star Trek series, I didn't even make it through the pilot, it was so bad. Glad that I missed the blowhard failure Stacy Abrams guesting as President of Earth in a later episode.

    Who is to blame, casting directors, producers, studios script writers?

     

     

  6. The Age of Cultural Stagnation

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    At this time in my life, I feel that far too much of "culture" emphasizes politicalization more than creativity. Movies often seem to focus on diversity for diversity's sake, instead of telling a good story, what we get are boring, often insipid remakes of old films or endless half-assed sequels. The same can be said of various sitcoms, dramas and talk shows on television. I don't care what race or sex a character is, it's up to writers to come up with an entertaining plot and script that will develop the characters. Likewise in many genres of music, there have been a lot of highly promoted posers that have had little to offer. I felt rock was steadily going downhill back in the 1970s, which is why i narrowed my listening to groups already in my collection. Yet in jazz there are always young, up and coming musicians of either sex and various nationalities who produce compelling music worth investigating.

  11. Ode to the Hep label

    in Re-issues

    Posted

    58 minutes ago, AllenLowe said:

    I like the label, but for a while, and maybe now, they were/are using CDRs and not informing anyone. When I sent an email complaining politely the guy who answered got pretty nasty.

    This seems to be trending with a number of UK jazz labels, including Acrobat and Sounds of Yesteryear. I don't like paying premium prices for CDRs and unlabeled ones at that. 

    This is definitely an unsavory business practice that will cross these labels off of my shopping list.

  12. Album covers with cats

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    4 hours ago, soulpope said:

    ab67616d0000b273e670dede19e7de24d0b4bd8c

    Jean-Luc Ponty „Fables“ (Atlantic)                                                                                         1985 ….

    My wife’s voice professor was accompanied by Ponty’s wife and was invited to stay in their home while she was in town. She got to meet the cat, but not Jean-Luc, who was on tour.

  13. BFT 240 Discussion Thread

    in Blindfold Test

    Posted

    On 3/11/2024 at 8:21 PM, mikeweil said:

    10 - Ken Dryden - Just-a-Sittin'and-a-Rockin'-very-slowly with a pipe organ - could this be Dick Hyman? I don't know any other pipists. I like this. Probably not Hyman? I dunno. Nice closer.

    Great idea for an annoversary BFT, and nice to be in both roles! Thanks to everybody.

    I thought his name would come up in this BFT but it isn’t Dick Hyman. 

  14. Eric Carmen, RIP

    in Artists

    Posted

    29 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

    I'm sure you recognize this lovely melody "A Stranger in Paradise."  But did you know that the original theme is from the Polovtsian Dance #2 by Borodin?

     

    I was thinking about this commercial when I saw this thread, even before opening it! That gives away my age bracket!

  18. Now reading...

    in Miscellaneous - Non-Political

    Posted

    On 3/9/2024 at 12:42 AM, GA Russell said:

    This is interesting.  The author believes that the story we all know regarding the deaths of Hitler and Eva Braun was the work product of Hugh Trevor-Roper (who in 1945 was a major assigned to Military Intelligence).  He says that there has never been physical evidence supporting the story.  The story is based upon the testimony of a few Germans who claimed to be eyewitnesses, but none of their testimonies match up.  In the summer of 1945, two German submarines arrived in Argentina, and surrendered to the Argentine navy.  The author believes that Hitler, Eva Braun, Martin Bormann and others were on one of the submarines.  Bormann, by the way, is portrayed to be a businessman who was much more savvy than I have seen him shown elsewhere.

    71n1FL1tLBL._SL1500_.jpg

    Martin Bormann's remains were identified several decades ago and I seriously doubt that Hitler could have kept his mouth shut if he had made it to Argentina. The Soviet Union found the partially cremated remains of Hilter and Braun and took them back to their homeland. 

    There is no telling how much stolen wealth made it out of Germany, I could see some of it turning up, much like the confiscated paintings have appeared when they are researched for provenance before being put up for aucition.

     

  19. BFT 240 Discussion Thread

    in Blindfold Test

    Posted

    5 hours ago, tkeith said:

    @Ken Dryden - Beginning to See The Light from a praise-and-worship setting?  Don't know who I'm listening to, but I assume this IS, in fact, recorded in a church.  

    This was a fun one! 

     

     

     

    The song was identified earlier in the thread. Hardly close to praise-and-worship, which in churches around here means boring, repetitious modern praise songs with banal melodies played by rock bands.That kind of music will get me out of a church pronto!

  21. Does Oscar Peterson get a bad rap?

    in Artists

    Posted

    Dave Brubeck told me once that he loved hearing Erroll Garner. Much like Oscar Peterson, he gets a bad rap.

    One guy I just couldn't get into was Jacques Loussier playing jazz treatments of Bach, his recordings felt mechanical to me and I have ong since disposed of his Telarc Jazz CDs.

  23. Blazing Saddles gets Trigger Warning. Thoughts?

    in Miscellaneous - Non-Political

    Posted · Edited by Ken Dryden

    Next up are trigger warnings for the Three Stooges shorts due to the excessive violence.

     

    11 hours ago, sgcim said:

    I remember when it first came out, they were all upset about the character Mongo's name, because they said it was making fun of mongoloid people. i wonder how                   Mongo Santamaria felt? Now they're doing this? I once got banned for a week from a music forum for jokingly using the name Commie Martyrs High School" from the Firesign Theater  Porgie Tirebiter album. I tried to tell the Moderator that it was from a comedy album, and not some political statement, but the jerk wouldn't listen to me!

    Now even public radio isn't going to play any Firesign Theater albums on the air? That stuff got me through high school!

    I was just reading a book on Donald Fagen, and he was being interviewed in some magazine about some radio station refusing to play the song "Janie Runaway" as the focus track for their Two Against Nature album promotion. The interviewer rightly asked him if it was due to decency or family values concern, but Fagen answered it was because the song had a sax solo, and the station had a policy of only playing songs with guitar solos! LOL!  This was in 2000, and Fagen said they didn't care about seedy lyrics at that time, in fact they loved it. The moral climate of the country was such that you could talk about screwing your grandmother, and they wouldn't mind it, as long as it had a guitar solo in it.

    So I think we can say that the moral/political climate of the country has radically changed since then.

     

     

    I remember having to edit an interview with a European jazz artist that I aired on my radio show because his answer to my query about how he discovered a vocalist unfamiliar to me who was on his new CD: "I was sitting on the toilet and I heard her on the radio in my daughter's bedroom." 

    I guess that I should of aired it without mentioning it to the PD and station manager.

  24. Don Was interview in Forbes: More Wayne Shorter recordings in the pipeline

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    The obvious solution to rejected performances is that the contract should specify that all of them are to be returned to the artist.

    Both Gerry Mulligan and Marian McPartland spoke to me about their digust with rejected material being issued years after they had recorded for a record label.

    As for the Tone Poets, I don't care, if the series is a moneymaker, they obviously should keep re-releasing the LPs.

    I've felt the same way about record store day LPs, I would rather have a CD, though they aren't always offered immediately in that format. There was a delay before the Sonny Clark RSD LP set was issued on CD and there was extra material.

     

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