BruceH

I read that book when I was still living in Brookline, MA. I remember really liking it.

Huh?

One of the stranger album covers of all time.

BTW, a couple days ago I went back and read the first page of this thread, dated March 30th, 2005. People are now saying how damn cheap gas has gotten when it's gone down to where it was then! And in March 2005 people were screaming that it was up to $2.20! Of course, it actually makes sense that gas seems cheap now after spiking up to 4 bucks-plus for a while. And it seems like it went down awfully fast in the last few months...historically fast. Still...ironic, eh?

Youch!!!! That just don't seem right.

No, "Three Plus One Minus Zero" --a new rap group.

Indeed!

Well, it seems very clear to me that "swing" jazz surely had its own set of formulas, and these hardened over time. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that ONE of the reasons that the classic swing era (1935-1945) ended, aside from some very important economic and social reasons, was that people were increasingly bored with a commercial formula that seemed spent, and they just wanted to move on. One of the reasons jazz musicians invented bebop was their rebellion against a big band swing orthodoxy that had come to seem like a straightjacket. Of course, in forging bop, they simply created a new formula, one that soon enough would seem more and more, well, FORMULAIC (in the pejorative sense) and so hardbop came along, which was very refreshing at first but soon became it's own formula, and so on, iterating up to now. (Always keeping in mind, naturally, that bop never really appealed to the large audience that swing had, but rather to a smaller, "hipper" audience and to other musicians.) For myself, I've long found that I go through what I call "cycles" with some types of music. Periods of intense, almost constant listening (to swing, hardbop, whatever) then a saturation point is reached and I "give it a rest" for 6 months, a year, two years, whatever, during which I listen to other things for the most part. Then something causes my itch to listen to swing or hardbop to return, and I go back to the apogee of the listening cycle, often with an enriched appreciation. It's like crop rotation. Fields that were played out lie fallow for a while until they're fertile ground for listening again. Or something like that. Although I've noticed this board over the last few years giving me the increasing urge to listen to EVERYTHING at once. But never mind that. You get the idea.

Well sure! That's a lot of what being a long-time music aficionado is all about. The longer you listen, the bigger your ears get. Revisit something you haven't listened to in a while and all of a sudden you hear things in it that you didn't hear before. (Occasionally it works the other way, and something you once thought was great now seems shallow and limited. But sometimes you can even get past that, and appreciate its limitations for what they are, even glory in them.) To get a little more philosophical about it, you're constantly changing (and hopefully growing) as a human being. Therefore something you listen to now will not seem the same as it did years ago because you're not the same person.

Indeed, but much of this has to do with listening habits and past experiences. You, for example, have experience with "modern" big bands and color your opinions with that knowledge. On the other hand, many fans don't listen to that stuff as closely. One can listen to Kind of Blue from about 1000 directions and get different results - when does Cobb play sticks, and why. This sort of detail flies past folks without personal experience. There many levels of listening here. Indeed. I'm just saying that anybody who listens to anything with attentiveness long enough will begin to recognize the codification aspect of whatever language it is that is being listened to. Whatever "emotion" one then brings into the mix upon this recognition is probably going/likely to be more variable than the music itself. Myself, I think that "jaded" is an early phase, understandable, quite useful even, but one to be moved past if one is to be anything other than a dilettante or a thrill-seeker. Hey, I'm a proud dilettante!

Clans of the Alphane Moon.

The Man Who Japed (No, just kidding.)

Just for the hell of it, which of these famous Blue Note classics comes closest to being one you could do without? (I said "COMES CLOSEST" mind you! ) For me the winner is The Real McCoy. Glad I have it, and all, but I never did seem to listen to it very often.

Oh, it will, you can count on that.

So much so that it comes close to being the norm.

Do I detect a New England native? I've probably mentioned it before, but the Illinois Jacquet box was a patchy and disappointing set for me.

Tranemonk---don't neglect to check out some of the stuff from the height of the swing era: 1935-38. This is what made his fame.

I wish they'd gone the end-of-the-disc route.

They also made fun of them for being so small.

How to run a company?

Is he ever NOT doing "a Thing"?

But just think---it's like new!

Dipping into Alphabet Juice (by Roy Blount, Jr., my hero) again. "Sonicky" really should be adopted into the language.

A remarkably ugly cover---hey, but at least it's in stereo!

That's a big country!