JSngry

Don't follow the classical music buzz machine, but have noticed the good reviews on amazon and other places. All I can really speak for is how they affect me. Seems that the buzz machine is finding plenty of people who say they feel the same way, but...I dunno, I'm skeptical of hype in general, especially when it's in such a niche market as this. What I do like is that they're young, have hung together and seem to be in it for the long haul, and play with a sound that, to me, doesn't replicate other groups of the past. And they really get inside the music. What I don't know is if what I'm hearing is the result of not having a big enough sample size to really know that part about not sounding like other groups.

Would really appreciate somebody/anybody with a longer set of ears for string quartet sounds than my own to at least listen to the samples to see if there's anything "different" about this group's sound. To me, it seems that they speak with an exceptional clarity and individual/group balance. But I really don't have that much to go by, so...help? Well-informed historical perspective opinions much desired!

It was good entertainment.

Enrica leaves a trail... https://www.discogs.com/label/69894-Enrica https://www.discogs.com/Bennie-Green-Bennie-Green-Swings-The-Blues/master/511428 https://www.discogs.com/Bennie-Green-Bennie-Green-Swings-The-Blues/release/3603502 https://www.discogs.com/label/147752-Mount-Vernon-Music https://www.discogs.com/label/517819-Mount-Vernon-Music-Inc https://www.discogs.com/label/82439-Vernon-Records Enruca itself might have folded, but the parent company lived on for a while. I'll bet the owners just didn't like what they heard and gave the tapes bacl or something. Label owners Teddy McRae https://www.discogs.com/label/82439-Vernon-Records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_McRae and Eddie Wilcox https://www.discogs.com/artist/313122-Edwin-Wilcox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Wilcox Black musicians recording black music - and owning at least some of the labels!

Not at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/sports/baseball/bill-webb-dead-baseball-broadcaster.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&_r=0 The practical result of his direction during a game was to speed up some of the moments without action. “It was Webby time, which he loved,” Pete Macheska, who produced games at Fox with Webb, said in a phone interview. “In crunchtime, he’d just say he wants faces — tight shots of players and fans praying. You’d try to sell him on something else, like some sort of graphic, but you might as well forget it; you’ve got no shot. It was his ballgame, and he wasn’t listening to you.” I got so sick of that "anxious fan" shit, so....RIP.

RIP.

Dude, I've heard some really vicious dissing of Alice from players who still get upset by post-Quartet Trane, up to and including that she really didn't know what she was doing and the variant of that that she "played wrong changes"...it's ridiculous, really. No, she was not McCoy, and no, she was not as "mathematical" in her approach to harmony as McCoy was, but she certainly knew what she was doing, and it's hard for me to believe that Trane would let her play "wrong changes" in his band for as long as she was there. I mean, c'mon, this was not John & Yoko, not even. And I don't hate Yoko, far from it, but this was not just "concept", if you know what I mean, this was science, fact-based music, no "fantasy" or such involved. The whole harp thing, that was for real, they were both hearing that. Blissed out on acid, god, math, whatever, yeah, some people reduce it to that because that's all that fits inside their heads, but these were not frivolous people. Not frivolous. I'm not about to say that Alice was a "great artist of all time" or anything like that, but c'mon...

Not sure if it's still relevant to anybody, but at one time, pre-internet & w/o ready access to serious record stores, this was very special to me.

http://www.cedillerecords.org/albums/tribute-dover-quartet-plays-mozart

The way I've always heard it was that it was the "mountaintop" of his "free" playing, the one moment where all the "experimenting" came into a really solid, coherent, vision of clarity. Don't know what triggered it, and you know, it's a record, so maybe a few days before or after it was even more focused, but on this day, anyway, there it was. And not to dis Alice in any way (too many cheap and invalid shots taken at her, imo), but the simple duo of Trane & Rashid really flowed without disturbance or distraction...we always thing about "piano-less groups" in terms of trios or larger, but hey, here's one too. Same thing when Trane & Elvin did their duet moments. All of which just to say that if something like Om or Kulu Se Mama has people scratching their giggling heads thinking that Trane went nuts off into some kind of Expressionistic Acid Trip, well, to the extent that there's any truth in that, here's proof that there was some goal, some end in sight.

I can tell you what my favorite three bars of Coltrane are, the intro to this solo (atarts @ 2:15) But for sheer volume of information, I still go with Interstellar Space. It's not "free" playing, not really, it's cell-based developmental improvisation, overwhelmingly harmonic in its foundations. Nothing to do with "playing changes", but harmony goes far beyond that. I'll say -and with full caveats of imo - that Interstellar Space is the apex of harmony in improvisation. Nowhere to go with it after this except to the "higher vibrational planes" (or whatever he called it) of ayler and beyond, and hell, song form done, cellular structures on their way to being done, the random/collage/etc. paradigms of various allegoric and electronic musics (popular, vernacular, and "formal") weren't "rebellions" as much as they were logical evolutionary steps. Regressive reactionaryism is inevitable, but so it's its eventual futility, until as it becomes time to do it all over again. Hell, Coltrane himself was on the way by 1960...it took him another 5-6 years to catch up with himself!

I'd like to be able to say that this is the record that has finally gotten my jazzed about Mozart, but it's not. It is, however, a fine document of how this group sounds and plays live, and I will say that it's a record that has helped me see why I should probably keep trying with Mozart, because when a band plays this well...it gets - and holds - your attention,. let me put it that way. And that's always been my problem with Mozart, it seldom gets, and has to to really hold, my attention. Very interested in what listeners with a deeper background think about this band, and these playings, especially. Both times I've heard them, it has been with very un-Mozart type repertoire.

Same here, hankfully. Traveling in the same box as Here's hoping that the world doesn't come unraveled before it gets here. And yes, Just Sold Out! ™ https://www.dustygroove.com/search.php?sf=Hank+Mobley+In+Holland+To+One+So+Sweet+Stay+That+Way

That's funny!

I don't know if it's my "favorite", that still might be Side 1 of Coltrane Plays The Blues...but it's the one I listen to most frequently for information.

Just stepping down. Hope he doesn't slip or lose his balance!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/arts/music/fred-weintraub-dead-bitter-end-nightclub-founder.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront He opened the Bitter End, at 147 Bleecker Street, in 1961. According to various accounts, the name was either suggested by its nocturnal appearance or recommended by his mentor, Tom Murray, who, for some reason, drew his inspiration from the nautical term for the rags that mark the last few feet of an anchor rope. The club had no liquor license, but served coffee-and-ice-cream confections with names like Frosty Freud and Zen Sundae. It fancied itself so far out, according to the menu, that a customer who ordered espresso was considered square. Mr. Weintraub’s office was typically al fresco: out front, for example, his foot perched on a bumper of a parked car. In 1965, Mr. Weintraub hired Paul Colby to manage the club. He fired Mr. Colby when he opened a bar next door called the Other End, and then sold the Bitter End to him in 1974. (Mr. Colby acquired the rights to the name a decade later. He died in 2014.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/business/joseph-rogers-died-waffle-house-co-founder.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront Famously open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the restaurants have been used by at least one Federal Emergency Management Agency official to help gauge the severity of natural disasters. W. Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator in the Obama administration, applied what he called “the Waffle House test.” If the local restaurant remained open after a hurricane, for example, it meant that power and water were very likely available.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/arts/bob-mankoff-to-step-down-as-cartoon-editor-of-the-new-yorker.html?_r=0

I hate to accept generalities as fact, but I can't think of anything offhand that contradicts this as far as today goes.

http://www.target.com/s/car+cd+player+ipod They're trying to try! Ohio Players!

It sounds like the guy took later-period Gil Evans as an inspiration for his scoring style, and that's more than ok by me. But then it also sounds like he gets his idea of pocket from...someplace different, that's all I feel like saying right now. And you know, pocket matters. Colors matter too, but pocket determines shape, and colors alone do not have a shape, they're light waves, right? Or in this case, sound waves. Either way, left alone, they have no shape until one is imposed on them. So yeah, pocket. And this pocket here, it sounds "funny" enough to me by itself, never mind it being imposed on Monkmusic. Truthfully, I think Lyle Mays "invented" this type of writing oLab 75...I called it "sneaker music" then, because I was there while that music was being made, and everybody wore sneakers, it was in no way dishonest or inappropriate, and to this day, I can enjoy an occasional listening to Lab 75. Lyle Mays wrote some really personal music for Big Band, very much of its time, place, and people. These were his sneakers made manifest, they became manifest as his and ours, and we all wore our own sneakers on our own feet. I will not say that John Beasley is not writing charts that are not of his time, place, and people, I'm just saying that if he's looking to create or discover or otherwise call attention to his time , place, and people with the music of Monk, he's not doing it in anyway that I can either discern or appreciate. That shit just sounds wrong, not the colors, but the shapes. Now, we all know that all kinds of shapes can fit together in all kinds of ways, but we also all know the old maxim of if it don't fit, don't force, the unspoken corollary of that being that forcing things into a fit - as opposed to letting the fit develop by a natural stretching, is not a fit at all, but rather an act of aggression, violence or some other predatory psychology at work. And when I hear this, and then when I see that guy in front of the band doing that weird pelvic wiggle,, A) no wonder that pocket ends up where it does, and B) don't do that to Monk, please. Monk was a dancer, not a humping Fabulous Furry Freak Brother. Wear your own damn sneakers, that's all.