robviti

for the money, i don't think you can do better than the Logitech Z-2300. It lists for $150, but you can get it online for under $90. cnet editors rate it "spectacular" (9.0 out of 10), and users give it an 8.3. i have had it for a few months and i like it a lot.

imo, a "ghost band" began when the leader was alive, then continued under someone else's leadership after his death. also, these kinds of bands tend to play the same arrangements from the "old days." the mingus big band and the mingus jazz orchestra were both created after mingus's death. they play new arrangements of his original compositions. finally, i think the mbb features some of the best performers playing incredibly vital music, and is one of the most consistently entertaining outfits in jazz today. long live the mmb!

Zoot Sims' Party (Choice CRS 1006) Zoot Sims (ts, ss) Jimmy Rowles (p) Bob Cranshaw (el-b) Mickey Roker (d) Recorded at MacDonald's Studio, Seacliff, New York on April 20, 1974 Fred Restless Caravan Dream Dancing I'm Getting Sentimental Over You The Very Thought Of You ** also issued on Candid CHCD 71006 entitled "Getting Sentimental" with two additional tracks

Loyalty - Professional Responsibility - Integrity Raymond Chandler said it quite well for me. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and other characters embodied Hemingway's post-World War I ideal of heroism. This code of behavior helps guide me through tough times, and there's hell to pay when I stray from it. "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around. Bad for every detective, everywhere." - Sam Spade

pm'd you on the ford's hot brass.

Here's a chance to celebrate the birth of a true jazz great while he's still with us. Von Freeman is 85 years young today, and he has thankfully received renewed interest in his artistry over the past few years with a series of solid recordings on the Premonition label. I was introduced to Vonski as a teen by my brother who owned the 1972 date Doin' It Right Now on Atlantic. Unfortunately, I was too young or whatever to appreciate his talent. I've had the pleasure of seeing him perform a few times, and even got to talk to him at one of his shows. A gracious man with a memorable handshake. Anyway, if you haven't taken the time to listen to his recordings, I encourage you to do so . And if you''re lucky enough to be in Chicago and have the chance to see him live, don't hesitate. Btw, there's several new copies of Doin' It Right Now for sale at Amazon marketplace for less than $7. The date includes Sam Jones, Jimmy Cobb, and the incomparable "young" John Young. Get it! Happy Birthday Vonski!

pm'd you about the Rava-Fresu.

all i got was a rock.

as a long-time joni fan, these versions did little or nothing for me. the originals are just too good. oh, and let me be the first(?) on the board to comment on herbie's performance at the pre-festival concert in chicago last august: HE SUCKED ASS!! sorry, but you just had to be there.

check out their website, www.theengines.net. there are sound clips for the new release and tentative dates for a december tour.

i agree, if the cd isn't damaged, that is.

imo, this is a better way to spend $600,000 and, it's german!

I'm looking for these two releases on the Improvising Artists label: Sam Rivers/Dave Holland, Vols. 1&2, especially the first volume. I'd really appreciate it if someone could hook me up with this fine music, and I'd be more than happy to reciprocate.

it was the happiest day of my life.

uh, ain't this political? :huh:

somethin' 'bout a sammich.

yeah. but who's going to vouch for you?

from wicked-pee-dia: Frick and Frack were two Swiss skaters who came to the U.S. and joined the original Ice Follies show as comedy ice skaters. "Frick" was Werner Groebli, born April 21, 1915, in Basel, Switzerland. "Frack" was Hansreudi (Hans) R. Mauch, May 4, 1919, in Basel, Switzerland. Frick and Frack were known for skating in Alpine Lederhosen and performing eccentric tricks on ice, including the "cantilever spread-eagle," created by Groebli, and Mauch's "rubber legs" twisting and bending his legs while skating in a spread eagle position. sorry, but i gotta wonder about a guy who wants to name cats after a couple of male skaters.

i don't think it's charity when i buy a cd directly from the artist when i could have got it online for less. i don't think it's charity when i buy cds from the only local jazz store left, knowing i'll pay a few dollars more. i don't think it's charity when i contribute to the public radio station that plays jazz, knowing i don't have to and that most other people don't. i don't think it's charity at all. i think it's support.

and the winners are: max (roach) viti and sonny (rollins) viti! i originally named max "zoot" 'cause i like the name a lot. whenever i wanted his attention, however, i kept wanting to say "max." i dunno, he just looks more like a max. btw, max is mostly black, but has white whiskers, white paws, and a white chin that continues down to his chest in a "v." very dapper looking. sonny is all grey with beautiful gold eyes. i hadn't really thought of the physical resemblance, but the real newk does have a similar coiffure. pictures will follow when i get hold of a digital camera, for those who might be interested.

The New York Times September 16, 2007 Sonny Rollins Strips for Action By BEN RATLIFF SONNY ROLLINS didn’t just influence other saxophone players. He produced a half-century of close listeners. The long, idiosyncratic tenor saxophone solos that he started developing around 50 years ago — bulging sacks of brilliant thematic improvisation, as well as slangy humor and quotations — became a genuine American rhetoric, delirious and ecstatic; audiences reoriented their imagination, and their sense of patience, around them. But his greatest work from the 1950s and ’60s trained many of them to want what he was later unwilling to give. Some would like him to play small rooms every once in a while, so they could hear his tone better; or to perform into a standing microphone, without a clip-on microphone on his horn; or with no amplification at all. Some want him to play fewer calypsos. Some want him to banish the electric bass from his stage. Perhaps the most abject hope has been that he simplify things and play again the way he often did in the late ’50s and ’60s, with only a bassist and drummer. These fantasy-league visions have never stopped, and he has never paid them much attention. So when Mr. Rollins, who turned 77 this month, announced this summer that he would play at Carnegie Hall on Sept. 18, and that for part of the concert he would play in a trio with the bassist Christian McBride and the drummer Roy Haynes, all those who watch jazz closely stepped back and took a deep breath. What’s so special about Sonny Rollins and trios? When Mr. Rollins decided not to hire a pianist while making the record “Way Out West” in March 1957, jazz shifted a little bit, if mostly in his direction. “What I got out of it,” he explained in an interview a few weeks ago, “was that, for better or for worse, I had an opportunity to play what was in my head. I was free.” The veteran tenor saxophonist Lew Tabackin was in his late 20s and living in Philadelphia when he first heard Mr. Rollins play in a trio. “It had a huge impact,” he said. “It set the basis for what I was trying to do as a young man. I had the greatest jazz experiences I ever had while listening to Sonny in a trio.” He quickly tried it himself, and leads a saxophone trio today. “You try to become part of the drum set, become part of the bass,” he said. Most of the tenor saxophonists who have followed Mr. Rollins in leading trios — that list would include Mr. Tabackin, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano, Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, David Murray and David S. Ware — have had to think long and hard about his example. Though only a small portion of his discography uses the saxophone-bass-drums format, it encompasses some of his very best records, and some of the best records in all of jazz. After “Way Out West” Mr. Rollins kept at it. In early November 1957 he played at the Village Vanguard in New York with the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Elvin Jones; some of the music was recorded and released as “A Night at the Village Vanguard.” In February 1958 he recorded “Freedom Suite” with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. He played lots of trio music after that until 1966, live mostly. Afterward he rarely returned to the form. Among those great trio recordings was one that has gone largely unheard: the three songs Mr. Rollins played during his first performance at Carnegie Hall, on Nov. 29, 1957, with Wendell Marshall on bass and Kenny Dennis on drums. The show was recorded by Carnegie Hall as part of a multiple-artists benefit concert; the tapes from that night, discovered at the Library of Congress in 2004, have already yielded the superb CD “Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall.” Next week’s concert at Carnegie Hall will take place nearly 50 years after the 1957 show. If all goes according to plan, he will play the same songs he played in 1957, record the concert and subsequently release both the 1957 and 2007 performances on a single CD, through his own label, Doxy. So the CD will contain the same three loose frameworks for improvising — “Sonnymoon for Two,” “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Moritat (Mack the Knife)” — performed 50 years apart. Mr. Rollins likes the symmetry of the idea, and the discovery of the old Carnegie Hall recording gave him a reason to revisit the trio format. (He admitted, though, that given his propensity for excessive self-criticism, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to listen to the 1957 tape just yet.) Outside of that he was not especially conscious of doing anything different then. As he put it, he was “always trying to experiment with some other ways of getting closer to my best performance expression.” “Playing by myself, and hearing all the instruments in my head, was not something unknown to me or unusual to me,” he explained. “I had always been a person that liked to practice by myself. I found great comfort and enjoyment in it. I was able to play for hours and hours alone, and I used to go to secluded places to practice.” Those places included the Williamsburg Bridge walkway in New York City, and the long solitary sessions helped him develop himself as a long-form improviser capable of leading a band without another horn player. “When I was playing with Miles Davis” — who first hired Mr. Rollins in the late ’40s — “I remember we used to do a thing we’d call stroll, where we’d have the piano lay out so that just drums and bass played with the horn player,” he continued. The absence of the piano, a naturally dominating instrument, let Mr. Rollins assume a much different role in the band. “One horn player is almost compelled to follow the pianist,” he explained. “There are exceptions, but generally the pianist plays a more than equal role to the horn player.” Branford Marsalis, who has played a lot of saxophone trio music, said he thinks Mr. Rollins’s best bands were trios or other pianoless groups. “It’s really hard to find piano players with imagination,” he said. “A lot of piano players tend to go home and practice, then play what they practice, which has a certain preordained feeling. A guy like Sonny — really more than anybody in jazz — can’t really be around that kind of stuff. He can’t be locked in a box. When you think about the way he plays, it’s completely logical that he would play in trio. He’s such a stream-of-consciousness player. So he gets to set the harmony, he can make the chords be whatever they want to at any given time.” What made Mr. Rollins’s saxophone trio so special in 1957 wasn’t just the lack of a piano. (Gerry Mulligan had a quartet with no piano in 1951, but it made very meticulous music, with two horns, baritone saxophone and trumpet, creating contrapuntal harmony.) Nor was it the number three. (Nat King Cole’s group, with piano, guitar and bass, had been famous since 1940, and in the late ’40s Mr. Rollins himself used to lead a trio with piano and bass when he opened shows for Miles Davis.) It was those particular instruments. Without a chordal instrument (piano or guitar) or any other front-line player, the saxophonist in charge has more elastic possibilities. The absence of chords, which bind and determine the harmony, let the saxophonist play a greater range of ideas without fear of clashing. And though by the late ’50s the tenor saxophone was already linked to a kind of American masculine charisma — there had been Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon, all playing the role of threshers in the long grass — the tenor saxophone trio encouraged a new level of solitary stamina in jazz: developing a narrative across long stretches of time, ultimately being heroic. All of that requires an unusual amount of energy. Mr. Marsalis first tried trio playing in 1988, when the pianist in his quartet had his own record to promote. “I finished a solo,” he remembered, “and I realized, ‘O.K., what do we do now?’ ” Then Bob Hurst, the bassist, took a solo, “and I figured, I never did like that formatted thing where everyone plays a solo on every song,” he continued. “So then I said, damn, I have to play longer. It hit me immediately that the second player is a foil. And when the foil is gone, it’s just you.” Mr. Tabackin, interviewed a few weeks ago, was about to travel to Japan to play 15 gigs in 16 days with his trio. “It’s really physically demanding,” he said. (Mr. Tabackin is 10 years younger than Mr. Rollins.) “You have to cover a certain amount of space, almost physical space. It’s mainly the breathing thing that’s the problem. But if you play every night, it gets easier.” He paused. “I’m saying that now. In a few years I might have to change my mind.” Mr. Rollins, typically, is philosophical on the subject. He acknowledges that there can be more space to fill during trio performances. But he maintains that it’s up to him to decide how much to fill it. “Strange as it seems,” he said, “sometimes I’ve found it easier, less physical, to play with a trio. With other instruments, one would think, gee, I’ve got others to help support me, to take up some of the space, so I don’t have to play everything. “But actually it works to the reverse. On the occasions when I’ve done the old favorite of drums and bass, I end up less physically fatigued and more exhilarated.”

that's it! i'll name one "wynton" and the other one "loud-mouthed, narrow-minded, over-hyped hack." on second thought, i think the similarity will confuse them.

most people don't seem to have much trouble naming their children at birth. imo, pet names are little more than labels we humans use for convenience and sometimes for amusement. this is all of little interest or consequence to the animal. what does matter to me very much are the communications (most of it nonverbal) that exist between human and animal companions. those communications, along with the relationships between all three of us, will be heavily influenced by our individual personalities, i assure you. ^ ^ o o =o= (---)

Howdy folks, Today I adopted two male cats from the local shelter. It's been a year since my cat Nica died, and I decided it was time to open my heart and home again to some mouse-slappin' critters. As far as names go, I want to pick two jazz names that "go together," i.e. co-leaders, bandmates, etc. If you're interested, take part in my poll (results are non-binding). Feel free to offer other suggestions, serious or not.