JSngry

I've often heard people (especially musicians) complain that Toshiko "over-writes". When I gave a Monday Michiru record to a friend to check out, he came back with, yeah, it's really interesting, but it sure is busy...oh well, she comes by it honestly! I felt that way myself about Toshiko until getting into Monday (who apparently felt the draft when trying to get an American record deal while positing her music as "soul" (lower case l), uh-uh, soul is a black word, "they" said, and you are not black...end of discussion, apparently), how there were so many influences in the mix, but not any real imitations, and then I got to wondering if I would hear Toshikio's writing the same way if I stopped hearing what I though it was "supposed" to sound like. I'm not going to say that a light bulb went off all at once, but the "greyness" did get a lot lighter. She's not black, she's not male, and she's not American, nor did she grow up in America...the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why anybody expert her to sound like she was/had/etc.And yet, she found a real, unique "jazz voice", and maybe, just ramble-thinking here, maybe that's why that West Coast band was the perfect vehicle for her writing, none(?) of them hit the "jazz trifecta" of at once being American Black Males, although a lot of them did have extensive studio experience, which otoneh, yeah, personality usually not desired, but ototherh, interpretational capacity very much a job prerequisite, so....right band, right writer, I have every confidence that that music sounds EXACTLY the way it was supposed to sound, so...not Tohshiko's fault if I can't hear it. I get it more a lot more now than I did then, that's for sure, although, as fine a musician as Lew Tabackin is (especially on flute), it's never a question of if I will become unable to engage further in his train of thought, but when. As far as that pertains to Warne, wasn't it at the Warne/Tabackin date that Warne supposedly got vocal with Tabackin about Tabackin playing "wrong" because he played "black"? Something like that? Maybe Tabackin was taken aback(in) thinking that it was racist, but no, not that at all. By all accounts, Warne had the highest integrity about having a truly individual voice, and appears to have been very...extreme (I suppose some might call it a "fetish" ) about what that meant. Both him and Lee...they loved Bird, they loved "Black Jazz", but they loved it so much as to not feel right about claiming the flavor/core voice of it for something they could appropriate. That takes guts, then, especially. Me, I get it, but I'm not hardcore about it, because this is still a racist society, it's also a more fully segregated one than it ever has been (and with the accordingly mixed (pun intended) results). But if you want to talk about people of an earlier American time, "fetishizing originality"...that's a loaded phrase too often used without understanding - by any person/ideology - just how deep the concept of "original" can go. Cheap talk, cheap understanding, just cheap, period. I'm tired of cheapness. Inexpensive, I like. Cheapness...that's the road to extinction, with any number of stops at any number of degrees of volunteered slavery along the way.

I have no real use for Mark Turner (other than a Generic Modern Mainstream Jazz Ear Candy), and was surprised, to say the least, when all the buzz about him being so influenced by Warne came out. Who knew? So, let's trace Marsh to Ted Brwon to Lenny Popkin to, who's that guy that made the totally gonzo free record, Richard Tabenick. And let's trace Bird to Stitt to Phil Woods to Richie Cole to...god that's where I kind of stop. There's no diminution of "talent", or, for each individual's taste, "enjoyment", but geez if "originality" can be fetishized (and it certainly can), then what about the fetishization of "tradition", of doing/liking something because it fits one's own comfort zone of what )fill in the blank type of music) "should sound like". That's as good a way as any to try to freeze time, which I think physics tell us is just not possible. And again, on an individual level, that's fine. But reality's a bitch, and no matter how long you try and postpone its reckoning,...whoop there it is.

So, what, now we're fetishizing talent?

27.15% of the annual goal.

That's because the point(s) were about/directed at players, not fans. I believe an objective reading/rereading of the post will show that. With apologies to Chuck - sigh.

Nick Martinez is now a Ham Fighter

Based on this, he's a GREAT storyteller!!!!

So, let's assume that PAtricia Farr was a fan who wanted to make airshots of big band remotes. How easy was it to come by that kind of gear back then, and how expensive was it? Did you have to be an "insider" or could you order one from Sears or something like that? I guewss there's always the possibility that she held jam sessions at her house and recorded them for her own pleasure, who knows?

"Single Petal Of A Rose" was first heard (by me, anyway) as performed by Ben Webster on impulse!'s The Definite Jazz Scene Volume 1. Seemed to be a leftover from the See You At The Fair album. The liner notes say :The next offering is indeed an unexpected treat. Back in 1959 Duke Ellington composed and recorded a suite especially for the Queen of England - only one pressing was made and it was presented to Her Highness by Ellington. Called The Queen Elizabeth Suite, it included six short compositions...and so on. That was more or less the last I heard of it, believe there was mention of it in the autobiography, but it certainly never seemed like anything that would ever surface...until it did! I bought the Pablo album within the first week of release, and could tell from the first notes that it was going to be a permanent favorite. I still remember that John McDonough gave it a 3.5 star review in DB and compared it to Henry Mancini in not necessarily positive terms. That was when I started to keep an eye on John McDonough as somebody whose head was not always screwed on totally straight.

I do have some of their work, LPs as well as CDs, but it just scratches the surface. Their Columbia box LP of the Bartok Quartets was my first exposure to both them and those quartets. I get that there's other ways to go about those quartets, but still, helluva ride anyway. Also have a later reading of the Beethoven late quartets that's a bit sloppy, but very soulful. And a few Elliot Carter things, which have been superceded, for me, by the Arditti, but...there's so much music from them, and I've gotten a late start. The bucket for my musical bucket list will never get full.

Where? It's PD, and I found it streaming on a Roku channel. Nice enough print, and no commercials. But it's also here: https://archive.org/details/ThePay-Off Why? Why not? Because it's there? Because I liked the sound of the description? Because I needed to kill a little over an hour before getting out of be this morning? It's certainly dated and/or "of it's time"but still entertaining. Pre-Code, so there's some moral nuance in the script. Crime does not pay, but it still has its beneficiaries at film's end. the main character is an anti-hero,the leader of a jewelry-heisting gang who doesn't believe in gunplay, much to the consternation of the crew he leads. He takes in a young couple and wants to keep them out of the racket, but his # 2 guy has other ideas. The gang leader is actually very sympathetic all the way through, a less suavecito Alexander Monday of sorts, and definitely on the wrong side of the law. And the acting is...interesting, some of the actors were coming from silent movies, and their body/facial language shows that. And this Lowell Sherman guy was apparntly an popular figure in his time, acting and directing both. Is it worth looking for? Hmmmm....probably not actively/aggressively, but if you stumble across it, and have about 70 minutes to spare, yeah, have a look.

I wish I knew the music better, so as to be able to say more than just RIP. In time, hopefully.

Hope there's more on tap, that was great!

I really liked that Devorah Day record, whatever happened to her, and can the stories be told in public?

yep

Ok, that makes sense, didn't look at the Uptown S&H.

I like hard copies, if only because that as long ass there's electricity and my hardware works, I have control over what I can get to when I want to get to it. That's true of personal digital storage as well, but if shit ever goes all Gilligan, i think a turntable will be more easily Flintstoned that a hard drive. And frankly, if all I had was the LPs I now have, I could cover most of the stuff I want to cover, at least in broad terms.

I think that the "jazz tradition" is whatever "jazz musicians" make it to be and/or turn it into. Nobody played like Warne before Warne, and everybody who has tried since (including Ted Brown, whom I like quite a bit, and Lenny Popkin, whom I can like or not like) can't NOT sound like Warne. Never mind Mark Turner, self-confessedly influenced heavily by Warne, I don't get that guy too much at all, mostly because I don't hear what he got from Warne except all of the surface and none of the depth. I think it's cheapening to his genius, hell, to the notion of "genius" in general, to base its claim, in part or in whole, on whether he did or did not stay inside the "jazz tradition". What is or is not the "jazz tradition" and who can or cannot lay claim to it, and by what means they can or can not do so, is a....regressive though process which inevitably shrinks souls rather than grows them. For that matter, some of the masterful and stale music I know lies firmly inside the "jazz tradition". At some point, inbreeding no longer works. It would be different if we've not had more than a century of records, but we do. We have more people with more information than ever, and the circle jerk of masterful imitation/recreation under the guise of "tradition" is masturbatory, not procreative. If that means we don't really need "jazz" any more, fine. It's genius we best hope we never run out of, because masturbation, individually or collective, creates contact/connection without consequence. Mimicry is just as much of a dead end as is the alchemy of arbitrary "originality". In one case, you get a towel, the other a mule. Dead ends, both. Hello genetics! Having said that...if the real lesson of Warne's genius is that staying true to yourself over the long haul is what gets you there, then yes, definitely, and and if you want to say that doing that is something that the "mainstream" of the socio-economic ways of the world have regressed from indifferent to outright hostile rapidly becoming homicidal, then, yeah, no argument here. But if you want to think that the lesson of Warne's genius is just that if you keep playing/digging into tunes, you'll get there, then no. No way in hell, although hell might be where you do get. Then again, if there's a hell below, we're all gonna go and/or heaven is a place on earth. Curtis Mayfield or Belinda Carlise. I'll take Warne.

Always used to confuse Rock Island with Rock Falls, but we only went through Rock Island when driving from Sterling to Davenport. My Dad had an aunt in Davenport. Gotta marvel at places you can/could get heroin and the people who made that happen. How the hell do you get a bepbop band booked into Rock Falls (AAAARGH...Rock ISLAND, see?), I don't recall it ever having hip appeal? Oh now, wait - Amazon's pre-order price is $5 more than Uptown's preorder price? Why?

French price has gone up 2 Euro, Americe price is holding steady.

The Amazon DL price is $56.49. The physical product, though, is $199.97, three times as much!

23% of the way there, and the year's not even one week old yet!