B. Clugston

Lord Dufferin's Letters From High Latitudes is about a journey to Iceland, Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen. Full of dry humour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_High_Latitudes

Just as a matter of interest (to me at least), why has Dogon A.D. never had a proper, official release? I assume that it has to do with complications in obtaining rights from the Hemphill estate. I know that Tim Berne was planning to release it on his label, but gave up. Berne had it up as a download for a while on his site. It is a classic! Maybe the fact Freedom issued it at one point complicated the rights.

I wish they would make a good movie.

I’m glad to see a Dogon A.D. reissue in the works. That’s a great album. How about more Bill Dixon? Would love to see Considerations 1 & 2 reissued in some format. Would also like to see the rest of Ornette Coleman’s 1962 Town Hall concert released, but I suspect that would involve a lot of lawyers plus finding out which cupboard or under which mattress Ornette stashed the reel.

One of my favourites too. The official explanation for the short playing time is because "the recording was cut at 160 lines per inch (instead of the usual 210 to 260 lines per square inch) making the grooves wider and deeper and allowing for more area between the grooves for bass frequencies." Some people suspect it was originally intended as a 10 inch.

Considering the volcanic tempers involved, it's lucky they got 27 minutes on tape.

Obviously you'd never heard of John Wetton? He was easily the equal of both Howe and Palmer in terms of musical talent! I certainly knew who he was from King Crimson, Roxy Music, etc., but wasn't as big a fan of his as I was of the others.

I remember that spring day in 1982 oh so well. I spied a new album with a Roger Dean cover in the record shop. Steve Howe! Carl Palmer! John Wetton! Geoff Downes. A supergroup. But for some reason, I held off on buying the record. Which was a good thing, for a few days later I saw the video and couldn’t believe talent like Steve Howe and Carl Palmer was wasted on such AOR dreck.

John Lawton has a great voice, but his talent was wasted in that group.

Avoid the Braxton Coventry Concert. The full concert was released on Leo and is readily available. The Westwind is an unauthorized ripoff. You can get the real Coventry here: http://www.leorecords.com/?m=select&id=CD_LR_204/205

McGarrity is second from right in the second row of this photo. Looks like it might be the same guy.

Thank you!!!

I really enjoyed the first 4 or 5 editions of the Penguin Guide, but stopped buying them as later editions became so poorly edited and the reviews were less informative.

According to http://www.restructures.net/BraxDisco/BraxDisco.htm, there's a few recordings with Braxton on contra-alto clarinet, but not alto clarinet. However, J.D. Parran plays one quite prominently on Tentet (New York) 1996 (aka Composition 193). I'd recommend Bluiett's The Clarinet Family, featuring the leader on alto clarinet and seven other clarinet players. Eloe Omoe also plays one on a Sun Ra record, either Pathways To Unknown Worlds or Friendly Love.

Ritchie Blackmore on Grand Funk: "America is so vast that I think people buy records mainly of groups they've seen, and I imagine that they must have seen Grand Funk all over America, they buy their records. At the same time though, I have never met one person who likes Grand Funk." http://www.thehighwaystar.com/interviews/blackmore/rb1973xxxx.html

Way to go Mark! :tup

Anthony Braxton played one for a while. Lots of examples on his recordings from 1995 to 2005. I believe it got stolen from his luggage while flying to Europe.

Here's Merlin on youtube. In Italian:

Interesting. Does Mr. Merlin turn up anywhere else? I'd like to read what else he has to say, because what he wrote about Miles' use of "coded phrases" to guide and transition the band was totally spot on. I've seen his discographical work in a lot of liner notes. Some of it appears at the end of Miles Beyond. He's Italian. He's got an incredible grasp of the minutiae of Davis' electric period--for example, he finds little snippets here and there in songs such as "Maiysha" that were first played by Davis back in the 1950s. I do find some of his song titling confusing and I prefer Pete Losin for that.

I stopped reading Running the Voodoo Down on page 2, where Freeman claims Sonny Fortune is on saxophone on Dark Magus. Apparently it gets worse: http://www.miles-beyond.com/freemanerrors.htm I do recommend the Tingen book. The 73-75 band tends to get ignored (the On the Corner box had very little documentation/interviews and no track analysis compared to previous sets), but Tingen interviewed almost everyone in the band. Mtume and Reggie Lucas, in particular, have some very interesting things to say. Chambers' book is pretty clueless on this period. He knocks Miles Davis In Concert, but so mangles the details it's as if he only listened to it once. I'm pretty sure Enrico Merlin isn't a pseudonym.

Just checked it out. Nice site, Allen!

Steve Lacy's Blinks appears to have two tracks missing from the previous 2-CD release. It looks like this release will only contain the quintet tracks.

Bob James. Well, he did do an ESP album.

There was this thread about the box: Otherwise most FMP talk went on in the Funny Rat thread.

1993 -- Soft Machine, The Peel Sessions.