7/4

May 2, 2005 ROCK REVIEW With Egos Set Aside and Blues on Its Mind, Cream Reunites By JON PARELES, NYCTimes LONDON, May 2 - Cream was a crisp, tautly rehearsed band on Monday night in its first full-length concert since 1968. Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Baker on drums sounded as if they had every song mapped out from introductory riff to precise finish. Their voices were strong; their musicianship was impeccable. Their set list even had a few surprises. Cream was back at the Royal Albert Hall, where it had played the final concert of its two-year career on Nov. 26, 1968. Between then and now, Cream's only reunion was to play three songs when it was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Monday's concert was the first of four sold-out shows being filmed for the inevitable DVD; plans beyond that have not been announced. Scalpers were getting $1,000 a ticket. "Thanks for waiting all these years," Mr. Clapton said onstage. "We didn't go very long. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune cut us off in our prime." Mr. Baker spoke up: "This is our prime, what do you mean?" Yet the neatness and order of the music were precisely what made Cream's first return engagement underwhelming. It wasn't unity that made Cream one of the great 1960's rock bands. It was the same friction - of personalities, methods and ambitions - that would soon tear the band apart. From July 1966 to November 1968, Cream came up with songs that were an unlikely blend of Anglicized blues, eccentric pop structures, psychedelic surrealism, melancholia and comic relief. Along with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream would define both power-trio rock and the potential of jam bands. In its most incendiary 1960's shows, Cream played like three simultaneous soloists, relentlessly competitive and brilliantly volatile. Back then, Mr. Clapton didn't need Robert Johnson's hellhound on his trail; he had Mr. Baker and Mr. Bruce snapping at his heels, goading him with bass countermelodies and bursts of polyrhythm. It was the brashness of youth in sync with the experimental spirit of the era. Cream played with reckless intensity, as if sure that all the risks would pay off; most often, they did. Since Cream broke up, Mr. Clapton has had million-selling albums, Grammy Awards and regular arena tours; his music has grown more temperate. Mr. Bruce followed his musicianly impulses, starting other rock trios (including one in 1994 with Mr. Baker) while also delving into jazz and various fusions. Mr. Baker joined Mr. Clapton's short-lived supergroup, Blind Faith, and went on to build West Africa's first modern recording studio in Nigeria, to farm olives in Tuscany and to run a club in Denver. Mr. Clapton, at 60 the youngest member of Cream, was the most reluctant to reunite the group, and on Monday night, the reunited Cream deferred to him. Lately, his albums have circled back to the blues he has loved since the beginning of his career, and Cream's concert set leaned toward blues. There were borrowed ones, like "I'm So Glad," "Rollin' and Tumblin'," "Spoonful" and "Outside Woman Blues" along with Cream's own blues, like "Politician," and a Clapton showcase that's not part of the Cream discography, "Stormy Monday Blues." When Mr. Clapton took a guitar solo, he played the kind of long-lined, melodic leads, moving from symmetrical phrases to wailing peaks, that he unfolds with his own bands, while Mr. Bruce and Mr. Baker carefully nailed down the riff and the beat. They didn't challenge him much. Mr. Baker had some rambunctious moments, dropping sly snare-drum rolls into "Sitting on Top of the World" and "Stormy Monday Blues." With his band mates offstage, he took a five-minute drum solo during "Toad" that was considerably shorter than the live recording from 1968. He also talk-sang the most unexpected song in the set, "Pressed Rat and Warthog," about shopkeepers with a peculiar inventory, then joked afterward about stocking Cream T-shirts and memorabilia. There were stretches in "Sweet Wine" and "Sunshine of Your Love" where Cream started to hint at its old improvisatory free-for-all. But those passages were brief, quickly heading back to the song. "Crossroads," which Cream once turned into a psychedelic fireball, returned as straightforward blues-rock: not bad, but not revelatory. The other side of Cream's repertory - Mr. Bruce's songs, like "White Room," "N.S.U." and "Deserted Cities of the Heart" - has aged differently. They, too, had a blues feeling, but more in their despondent lyrics then in their music, which stretched pop structures. Nearly four decades later, the songs have grown even more telling, as the mishaps of youth have given way to the irrevocable losses and regrets of maturity. Mr. Bruce sings them no less clearly now, but with far more poignancy. As Mr. Baker rolled mallets across his tom-toms, Mr. Clapton played slow swells of guitar and Mr. Bruce rose to the melody's falsetto peaks, "We're Going Wrong" - written on the way to Cream's 1968 breakup - was lambent in its sorrow. Perhaps Cream's caution reflected first-night jitters about living up to decades of anticipation. In a set that lasted less than two hours, there was ample room for songs to expand if the chemistry was right. With any luck, Cream was just getting reignited.

Yikes!

Why?

say cheese...

I'm watching the Today show and it turns out it's hoax. Sounded jivey for a while...

really now...

Moo.

Kenny Gee!

Happy Jazz. :rsmile:

This is like trying to sell new age music in the Funny Rat thread...come on guys, check out Steven Halpern. You can do yoga to it.

April 29, 2005 Percy Heath, Bassist of Modern Jazz Quartet, Dies at 81 By PETER KEEPNEWS, NYTimes Percy Heath, whose forceful and buoyant bass playing anchored the Modern Jazz Quartet for its entire four-decade existence, died yesterday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 81 and lived in Montauk, on Long Island. The cause of death was bone cancer, his family said. Mr. Heath recorded with most of the leading musicians in modern jazz, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. But from the early 1950's through the middle 1970's, most of his recording activity and all of his live performances were devoted to the group known to its fans around the world as the M. J .Q. He had been playing bass for only about four years when he became a charter member of the quartet, whose musical director was the pianist and composer John Lewis. "John told me, 'Percy, you don't know enough about what we're going to do, so you better get yourself lessons,' " Mr. Heath told the jazz critic Gary Giddins. "John's music was a challenge and I appreciated it." Mr. Heath proved to be a quick study, mastering Mr. Lewis's sophisticated compositions and arrangements and adding an unpretentious, bluesy sensibility of his own. He rarely took a solo, and his role in the quartet by its very nature drew less attention than the work of Mr. Lewis and the vibraphonist Milt Jackson. But his contributions were no less essential to the group's distinctive sound, or to its remarkable longevity and success. Percy Heath was born on April 30, 1923, in Wilmington, N.C., and grew up in Philadelphia. His father was an amateur clarinetist and his mother sang in a church choir. He and his two younger brothers all became interested in music early in life. All three Heath brothers went on to become professional musicians, and eventually they worked together. Mr. Heath took up the bass relatively late in life. His first instrument was the violin, which he studied as a child. During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps in Alabama, where he trained as a pilot; he was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. Mr. Heath began playing bass as a student at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia in 1946. Within a few months he was performing with local jazz bands and working as the house bassist at the Down Beat, a Philadelphia nightclub. He moved to New York City in 1947 with his brother Jimmy, a saxophonist and composer, and in 1950 they both joined Dizzy Gillespie's group. Not long after that, Mr. Heath and three other former Gillespie sidemen - Mr. Lewis, Mr. Jackson and the drummer Kenny Clarke - formed the Modern Jazz Quartet. The quartet stayed together from 1952 to 1974, with only one personnel change: Kenny Clarke left in 1955 and was replaced by Connie Kay. After the group disbanded temporarily, Mr. Heath began working with his brother Jimmy and his youngest brother, Albert, a drummer. The Heath Brothers specialized in a loose, freewheeling brand of jazz that was very different from the more dignified and restrained work of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Percy was also much more prominently in the spotlight; he even played the melody line on several numbers, often on a cello tuned like a bass, which he jokingly called a "baby bass." The Heath Brothers remained together until the Modern Jazz Quartet reunited in the early 1980's, and they continued to work together occasionally over the next two decades during the quartet's hiatuses. The group recorded albums for the Columbia, Concord, Antilles and Strata East labels. Percy Heath remained the backbone of the reunited Modern Jazz Quartet for the rest of its existence. He was briefly joined there by his brother Albert, who became the group's drummer after Kay died in 1994. But Percy finally decided he had had enough of the grueling life of a traveling musician. When he announced that he was through with touring, rather than replace him, the other members of the group decided to shut it down, quietly and without fanfare. The Modern Jazz Quartet never performed again. Jackson died in 1999, Lewis in 2001. In recent years Mr. Heath continued to perform occasionally with his brothers, but he spent most of his time at his house in Montauk, where he devoted himself to fishing. He carried a rod when touring with the Modern Jazz Quartet. "I made a living," he once said, "to go fishing." Mr. Heath's survivors include his wife, June; his sons Percy III, Jason and Stuart; and his two brothers. More than half a century after he first entered a recording studio, Mr. Heath - who by his own count had played on more than 300 records - did something he had never done before. In 2004, shortly before his 81st birthday, the small Daddy Jazz label released an album by Mr. Heath, "A Love Song." It was his first recording as a leader.

Margaret Davis on the Saturn list says that Phil Schaap anounced it on WKCR.

I knew it was crazy talk...

I saw that on the Sun Ra list, but I can't find anything in the news. Sad...

I wouldn't call it new age, this is ambient music. It's too sinister to be new age.

Did you at least awake refreshed? Cold Blue I googled and found it myself. Obviously no metal, but what IS it? Mood music? Bubbling electronica? Those write ups sound quite new-agey, and I don't know any of the artists involved, so... please enlighten me! Post classical minimalism, not jazz. Think of it as acoustic Eno.

Has it been mentioned that a certain Rat has purchased the entire Cold Blue catalog? (I'm sure it has. Just wanted to mention it again.) But he's a Rat, not a "not" rat.

mmmmmm...beer........

Cold Blue is a VERY apt title for this label. I think it would shock the "not" rat folks if they knew what Cold Blue sounded like and it was discussed here.

Wow! Way cool...

I love this group, I've been rounding out my Trio collection in recent weeks.