JSngry

Apparently, Gene Roland was a true "character"...he wrote for the band sporadically but for a long time. I like his soprano playing on Adventures In Blues too, sorta Lucky Thompson-y.

Yeah, Bennedetti was essentially promised for perpetuity, so, if you're ever gonna get right with god, now's the time (pun only slightly intended), looks like the end is near, or even closer.

Yeah, James P. Johnson was a musician of the highest order. You can't hear him too often.

Very believable. All that shit is believable, actually.

Wow, RIP. I started hitting them ca. 1975 or so, when they were stil, relativelyl a "new concept". I'd see Gjmere in the store from time to time, and he appeared to be an archetypal "loveable cranky" type. Joe, you're probably too young to recall this, Ken Hooker probably does. As time has passed, this has sort of faded from the HPB "narrative", but in the early days, Gjeere was a very aggressive 1st Amendment advocate. That was a driving force behind the original store, that if it was printed, no matter what it was, they would sell/re-sell it. And they meant it - they had a full section, and it was pretty full, dedicated to hardcore porn mags, Swedish Erotica type stuff, of both higher and lower grades. The section was clearly marked, but access was not regulated, because, you know, you have a right to look or not look, freedom as it was then understood. Well, in a few years, as the chain began to expand, some kind of an "executive decision" was made. IIRC, at fist, the section got moved to a separate room, by admission only. And then, they dropped it altogether. Gjemre stayed a vocal 1st Amendment long after that, but, just sayin, there was a time when you could walk out of the store with Jackie McLean and Vanessa Del Rio and get change back from your ten. these kids today, with everything free, they don't understand what value really means...

Back in the day, yeah. And the NW Highway store still is. But for the longest now, there's numerous locations across the Metroplex. Like, 15+ that I could drive to at any given moment in a little over an hour or less. When I was younger, I'd dedicate a day to making he rounds, and my kids and I would take "Half-Price Sundays", a different store each week. The deal was that If I found something, they could get something. Of course, when my daughter starred getting into Manga,, she'd usually get something whether I did or not.

Yeah, and I'd like to hear the actual soundtrack itself, if it still exists! Anybody seen "They Saved Hitler's Brain"? The opening minutes, obviously done years after the original film was in the can, have a free-jazzish Rhodes thing going on that is not in the least unpleasant. I've yet to find out who did THAT music.

I'd think it would have to be, one way or another. What's readily out there for these type bands? CDs, easily available from the usual suspects? I don't want the Encyclopedia Brittanica, but a World Book type set or two would not be unwelcome. I go back as far as the James Reese Europe military band, but his stuff with, what was it, the Castle Orchestra(?), I'd like to hear that and some other things of that time/place.

I think the time for bodeing has long passed.

RIP. He was one of those guys who did what they did and meant it. Fully conversant vernacular music, not spiritually lip-synced, genuinely spoken.

Yeah, I don't know if he was high when he did that one, but if he was, he wasn't too high. This is pretty nimble and non-opiodal: Whatsomehowever, as time passes, I'm like, oh wow, Russ Freeman. And since basically forever, Larry Bunker. Larry Bunker has been a consistently kicking drummer, never mind studio Larry Bunker, jazzdrummer Larry Bunker, always engaged and engaging. I heard some Chet Baker bootleg from the 70s that was like, the most junkie music I've ever heard. EVER. Some ballad, too damn slow for even Shirley Horn's good, and this cat was playing, like two notes ever half hour, if you know what I mean. It was compelling in all the wrong ways. And that's the problem I have with getting too deep into Chet Baker, like that docu-film, I was like, motherfucker, don't play that Junkie Symapthy Game with me, don't expect me to love you becuae you're all "tragic" and shit, FUCK THAT. And there's a lot of his records where that seems to be his game, all "fragile" and I'm supposed to be touched. Fuck that too. I've been around junkies, I've been "touched" by junkies, and no thanks, keep your habits to yourself, that's cool, no judgements here, but when they put that touch on you, hell no, that's MY business, and just fucking fuck off. The cat could play, for sure, and the Mulligan Quartet stuff is a world unto itself, but the cat lived and played loooong past that, and the records I like best of his are the ones where he's not playing that pity party junkie shit, like the dates with George Coleman. Solid playing, no games, and better to make a B+ record without all that manipulatory bullshit than try get fool people into giving it an A+ with it.

I went so far as to get the first Kenton Mosaic. Rugolo was a formula writer, and his formulas are real easy to pick up not too far into it. He did some charts where the formula worked because it stayed within itself (I still have fond feelings for "Machito") but jesus, math is math and his is neither subtle nor particularly varied. I guess blatancy and surprise are different sides of the same coin, but that's a bad penny afaic, throw it in the fountain and wish that it never comes around again. Sure, he kind of took Kenton's core "ideas" and realized them in about the most commercially exploitable way possible, but even with the "Progressive Jazz" material, even he himself tried to move on (how successfully, you decide). And once the Innovations/Dance band schizophrenia finally wore off, no Kenton writer went back to that basic a formula. And then there's Gene Roland, a mixed bag if ever there was one, but Adventures In Blues, if you ever want to hear Basie As Frankenstein (and I mean that in a good way), then there's Gene Roland.

I bought three copies before I found one with clean enough vinyl to more fully hear the quiet. It was worth it, as far as it went. But yeah, it's a lot more quiet than you would expect, but that might well go back to the fact that it's essentially a transcription rather than a reimagining. Not that "reimaging" was even a thing in 1965, but the act itself certainly was.

Dick Two words - Richard Bock.

I saw her on Tavis Smiley and deduced that she's a product of our times.

It's a very mixed bag, esthetically. It's surprisingly quiet in places, and the band executes very nicely. On the down side, it's really not any kind of a reimaging, Kenton just took the original scores and orchestrated them for his band. That's legit, but not really anything "creative" in the generally understood sense. More troubling is the relaying from Kenton in the liner notes of his meeting with Maurice Ravel. He tells it like him and Ravel really bonded and had an intimate discussion about music. Years later, he told the story like it was a brief, casual, superficial meeting. To me, this goes towards the long-standing "suspicion" I've had about Stan Kenton the person that he was just not "right" in some way, seemed to eager to take/snatch/appropriate/etc/whatever. And I still feel that. Not saying he was evil or anything, just that he himself was a facilitator more than anything else, but was more than happy to pimp and be pimped as an originator. Grrrr4r.... That's why I finally made my peace with the whole thing by separating the person from the brand name. Stan Kenton vs "Stan Kenton". The everything pretty much fell into place, and the good stuff started feeling good as well as sounding good.

You can say Pretensions" or, instead, "ambitions", but either way, I look at it like Graettinger was everything that Kenton said he wanted to be. Where it maybe pivots from "ambition" to "pretention" is, like, not even Kenton himself could say with any certainty what it was, or if it was "good". I've made my peace with Kenton by repositioning him as a corporate brand name rather than an individual artist. And after doing that, I find all kinds of things that I really dig, as well as any number of things that are just....silly. I also have an aversion to "Pete Rugolo", just because. But the post-Graettinger library of "Stan Kenton" is full of individual delights, almost up to the end. Dee Barton, Bill Mathieu, Willie Maiden, those guys all wrote some great, idyosyncratic stuff for the band. And certainly, Bill Holman.

But believable does not auto-equate to true.

Certainly don't mean to imply that they're teeming with that kind of thing, but, you know, Dallas has not been without it's "arts aficionados", especially from, like, the 50s & 60s, and as we all do, they die and leave shit behind. So, it pays, often enough, to look. They also seem tp get buttloads of OG DGs, which are not without appeal, but...can't buy it all. But 4+-5 bucks for what would be multiple times that on a fresh CD, plus that minty fresh and clean German vinyl...even with some audible wrinkling...sometimes... One thing I see a lot of is opera box sets, some of them going back to the 5s0s. Those, I'd not mind having as objects, but realistically, when I go ahead and let that opera bug get its teeh fully into me, I think I'm going via DVD (and yeah, Berkshire can help me with that). If it's telling a story, I'd like to follow along on screen, with the music and the staging.

yes maybe not testicles, but scrotum, for sure.

I do know BRO, gotta be careful at that place, I only have so much money! What I look for (and often enough find) in the HP Classical are 10" lps, OG independent labels of all kinds of shit,, vanity pressings, just the whole gamut of stuff that either has not made CD, or only made CD in limited quantity. It's classical, it's LP, nobody wants this shit, so it's cheap. Take your phone with you, and you can do the cost/benefit analysis pretty quickly. Of course, your town is probably a lot different than ours.

People do favors, sometimes for a fee, sometimes in kind, sometimes just because.

I like to do the same thing with their classical LPs.

Ah, an edit, thanks. I think I noticed one more somewhere on the record, like a the end of a trumpet note that didn't make sense.