johnblitweiler

The beginning and end of the CD are as good as I remember the concert was. Threadgill's alto playing has been getting rhythmically spacier over time, and the sound-space web he weaves with short phrases nowadays is really suspenseful.

I used to own the LP and the book - didn't feel the music very much. Somehow I thought Hanah-Jon Taylor was the saxist, not Light. The book was disappointing in that it had much more of Aye Aton's paintings than of Sun Ra's.

OK, Jeff, let's hear it.

On Off the Record and the Frémeaux Integrale the Oliver sides are complete. For more information I see my post 68. Except that I wish to heaven that unissued 1923 take of "Someday Sweetheart" had been discovered. Could it be the same arrangement that Oliver later recorded with the Plantation Orchestra, with Johnny Dodds added for that emotive clarinet solo?

His encouraging Americans' appreciation of blues was certainly valuable in the 1950s and '60s. I remember Bob Koester leading him to Chicago musicians to make those Vanguard albums in 1966. But this obituary makes Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, etc. appear important only because inferior musicians such as Bob Dylan, etc. sang their blues.

Yes, it's a most useful book, not only for discovering music, but also for the senses of values it communicates.

Marshal Matt Dillon Warne Marsh Fredrick March

(going from memory - I may change my mind after I see these again:) Greed (Stroheim) perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston) La Nuit du carrefour (1932 Renoir) - saw this without English subtitles, but Renoir followed the Maigret novel so closely that it was perfectly clear to me. LA Confidential - better than the Ellroy novel The Makioka Sisters (Ichikawa) - a breathtaking experience

You are so right. The Hall of Fame is diminished without him. It bugged me that Ron Santo, with somewhat inferior numbers, got in while Minoso didn't. Of course the 1940s-50s restriction, then quota on black players set Minoso back. Al Lopez apparently hated the Go-Go Sox. Minoso, who got along with everybody except racists, said in his autobiography that Lopez had him traded twice, once from Cleveland and once from Chicago (and Veeck overruled Lopez, brought him home in 1960). Pierce and Fox both had comparatively poor seasons the year Lopez's White Sox won the pennant. Somewhere I read that when Lopez was on the Hall of Fame selection committee, he rejected Fox several times. After Lopez was off that committee, Fox got in the Hall.

I'll have to spend a few days playing my AACM albums in order to pick favorites. But "Humility in the Light of the Creator" would surely be one of the three. Note that Kalaparusha's title should have two articles. A sloppy Delmark designer left the second "the" off the cover of the original LP release, and since then, the CD reissue and all Delmark publicity have mistitled both the album and the song. Joseph Jarman got the title right on one of his albums.

The Berlin-Stockholm concerts CD is from the same 1965 tour of Europe.

Steve Colson Ole Olsen Ole Kock Hansen

Again, I wrote about these aspects in "Jazz in the 21st Century," see http://www.goodbaitbooks.com/events.htm. In the 1970s already Ekkehard Jost wrote about an renaissance, or upheaval, in European jazz (including free improvisation) that finds European traditions equally relevant or far more relevant than American jazz traditions. For a long time I've been used to seeing audiences full of gray hairs or heads as bald as mine - usually in places where pre-free jazz idioms are played. What saddens me lately is the preponderance of us gray or bald heads at free/outside/AG (I really hate that term) concerts. OTOH a few young, white trad musicians play Bix-Whiteman and Morton and Waller pieces and a few young, white jitterbugs dance to their music at a couple of Chicago places.

nevertheless I won't attend Gilad Atzmon concerts

The former owner Jack Maher and his publisher Chuck Suber saved the magazine from extinction after Jack took over in the late 1960s. They saw jazz education was the coming thing. So they went after advertising from instrument manufacturers, encouraged articles about pop music, and eventually made Down Beat a profit for (so I'm told) the first time ever. But Jack was a jazz novice and made some dreadful editorial hires, at least in his first decade. He's worth a long separate story in himself. He was kind to me above the call of duty, for which I'm forever grateful, but sometimes he drove me nuts too.

56, but I merely add, divide, add, multiply, and subtract in that order.

On the other hand, at a gig here in Chicago in the '90s he threatened to kill one of his sidemen, a nice guy, too (Arthur Hoyle told that story).

Well, things like that take time... I didn't know you were on this forum, great article! I look forward to reading "There's a Mingus Among Us". As someone who was writing for DB, John, what do you think were the reasons for DB going from a great jazz magazine back then, to what it is today? In part I wrote about this in my article on 21st-Century Jazz, see http://www.goodbaitbooks.com/events.htm- also relevant is Hot Ptah's link to http://thejazzline.c...ar-music-genre/ More directly to your question about Down Beat: In the 1970s originals like Mingus, Ornette, the Art Ensemble, Braxton, Blakey, HInes, Eldridge, Pepper, Stitt, Elvin Jones, Gil Evans, Breuker, Bailey, Sarah, Ella, Cecil Taylor, on and on and on were very active. It was interesting to read and write about them. Precious few similarly original artists are active today - plenty of wonderful musicians, probably, but not as colorful. One reason Down Beat doesn't interest me so much any more is that there's a lack of interest in the history of jazz among present Down Beat editors. Sometimes you get the idea that any idiom that originated before LPs were invented simply did not ever exist. The family that owns Down Beat are printing company heirs, not basically jazz people, which has affected their editorial hires. BTW to my knowledge, this magazine about an originally African-American art form has had just one black editor in the 50+ years I've been reading it. (And Down Beat editors sure do come and go.)

1971 to 2015 = it took 44 years

Love it - and yes, that arrangement is an old favorite. Mrs. Hensel, who used to cut my hair when I was a boy in South Bend, was mother of Wes Hensel, Brown's 1st trumpeter.

Swiss Miss St. Pauli Girl Georgia Peach

Here's my review of Keepnews' book "The View From Within," which has some memoir material but no secrets, no intimacy at all: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/books/in-short-nonfiction-in-short-nonfiction.html I'm very grateful to him for the Riverside, Milestone, and Landmark sessions he supervised. But I wish a more careful person had produced the Fantasy reissues beginning in the 1970s, and I wish a more careful person had produced the Bluebird, Decca, and other reissue series Keepnews produced for CDs. Thanks for this, John. Was reading this thread thinking that those feeling sentimental for Keepnews had not read his book, which is mostly awful and evidence, were one curious, that Orrin's biggest fan was... certainly Orrin and not-- by all evidence to date-- the musicians his association with Bill Grauer first enabled him to work with. Yes, OK's name is on some swell records and I'm happy that, say, Johnny Griffin's varied Riverside dates exist but... sidenote: been going issue by issue (at the library) through "Kulchur" magazine and it's great to see you there! I've got a near complete run of Kulchur, which I read avidly at the time. Had a big educational effect. Quite a turn it gave me to meet John L. at the time and realize that he lived in the same neighborhood I did (Hyde Park in Chicago) and was a just year or so older than I was. I'd assumed from what I'd read that he was very mature, learned gentleman -- not that John wasn't learned, but I'd been thinking maybe, pipe and slippers, and an Irish Setter in front of a fireplace, kind of Whitney Ballet image. BTW, it was darn strange when Kulchur, originally a Black Mountain School offshoot by and large, underwent a near total conversion to the work and the viewpoints of Ted Berrigan's crowd -- this I assume because the magazine's bankroller, Lita Hornick, changed allegiances herself. I'm sure that the literary and personal politics involved have been written about somewhere, perhaps in the autobiography of LeRoi Jones' first wife, Hettie Cohen. IIRC Baraka told me that when Hornick got married she changed her allegiances.

Here's my review of Keepnews' book "The View From Within," which has some memoir material but no secrets, no intimacy at all: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/books/in-short-nonfiction-in-short-nonfiction.html I'm very grateful to him for the Riverside, Milestone, and Landmark sessions he supervised. But I wish a more careful person had produced the Fantasy reissues beginning in the 1970s, and I wish a more careful person had produced the Bluebird, Decca, and other reissue series Keepnews produced for CDs.

Roger Maris Errol Morris Bony Moronie

Re Monk's comping: He did not comp. Like Ellington and Basie, he was an orchestra pianist, he believed his accompaniment duty was to provide color and / or rhythmic kick. According to Frankie Dunlap, I believe it was, Ellington was Monk's favorite pianist.