B. Clugston

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.

Fun blog post about the "insanity" of the hoffman forum: http://robertmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/insanity-of-steve-hoffman-forum.html

I thought Braxton was done with the GTM stuff, but then I noticed the dates (2003). He still performs GTM. The duos with Rhodes are actually from 2007. One more new release, a duo with Ben Opie: "In 2008, Anthony Braxton's music was celebrated in Pittsburgh with the "Braxton Plays Pittsburgh Plays Braxton" festival. One of the results of that festival is this double-CD session. Braxton is joined by saxophonist/clarinetist Ben Opie, playing extended performances on two works from Braxton's Ghost Trance Musics series. There are several lines blurred throughout: the division between composition and improvisation, and the differences between the two reed players. It's an intimate and exciting set of recordings." http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/braxtonopie

1200 CDs, about 200 LPs and 9 cassettes. Used to have more LPs until I purged most of my rock albums.

Barf.

Gyorgy Ligeti liked them.

Once saw Al Green playing percussion with Sun Ra on David Sanborn's Night Shift. I seem to recall Green was being a bit of a disrespectful ham--shrugging his shoulders a lot and changing percussion instruments. Speaking of Sanborn, he can sometimes turn up in avant garde settings. There's the Hemphill album with Tim Berne and he's sat in with John Zorn and Berne.

The hardest albums to track down that I own were the 8 CD box set Document: New Music From Russia-the 80s and the LP "New Vitality" by Vladimir Chekasin (both on Leo). I have one of 30 copies of a single made by singer-songwriter Natalie Rose LeBrecht. A few others I would probably have a hard time replacing would be The Ericle of Dolphi, one of the Sam River's Black Africas on Horo, Edward Vesala's Kullervo and Albert Ayler's Albert Smiles with Sonny.

Dave Brubeck and Bill Smith -- The Riddle