JSngry

Harold Budd Roswell Rudd Clinton Judd

When did he make the move to the lower bridge?

And Bobby Darrin. And Nino/April. And Bee-Gees first hits. And a Beatles 45. And a 45 of "Substitute". Probably an accountant's wet nightmare, I'll bet. You get an old Atco inner sleeve and look at the shit that's on it, its almost like, if we put all of this out on Atlantic, we could never again sell blackmusicrecords with ANY credibilitywhatsoever. Maintain cred, get some hits, have massive writeoffs (whiteoffs!), yeah, Atco. All that and Elvin LaFaro too. God do i love America! Seriously.

magining Elvin with Basie Jaws and LMFAO with happy. Jeeeeeesus, do that mashup in your head, holy shit!

Winston Hill Sir Walter Raleigh Pariament-Funkadelic

How many more Atco records was Elvin ever on? And please don't tell me he was on some Nino Temple & April Stevenson record. Just wondering...jazz on Atco, beboppy jazz, Who else besides Betty Carter & this? And the BC side was not hardcore. So other than a White Guy Plays Broadway Jazz thene, how did this get made for Atco? With Elvin LaFaro? And on some cuts, a piano=less quartet? And Barbara Long?What the hell made all THAT happen? To be honest, I had never heard of this Geller record until two weeks ago, and then totally by accident. Georgie Poodles has put it out on CD, so...it's available.

Yeah, YouTube poster factually erratic, Elvis dead-on right. It's a nifty record, not a "great " one, more like a funner than usual day at the office because Thad and Hank brought their kid brother to work again, and you know how that kid freshens the air everywhere he goes. And LaFaro, never really "loved" him, but this is a guy who chose his way with no flaming malice towards that which which brung him.

LaFaro sounds damn near Mingusian Or Ray Browny. Plus Elvin, always.

Road show. Not concert tours, road shows. I mean, those freaking 3 Deaf Tenors things draw the peoples in droves. Not looking for a drove. Or too much of a drive for that matter, have car will drive, but c'mon, I've made my pilgrimages, by and large. Somebody gotta be rich enough, crazy enough, and need that much of a tax break to do a Road show, American Music, I got spurs that jingo jungle jingle. "Culture" and culture don't know each other these days. Sombodies gotta start pimping, because lord knows people respond to that. We're not talking opera-glass Lincolns either, just a nice hat and suit, don't get greedy.

Yeah, it's out there. But there is so much MORE of so much OTHER stuff out there. Dallas is not a Musical Epicenter, but it is a Major Metropolitan Area with an Emerging World Class Orchestra. I have no problem hearing Brahms & Mozart & All That, which is wonderful. Our band is doing Mahler regularly & is gradually shifting the paradigm more towards late 19th/Early 20th Centuries (crrrrrrrrreeeeeeeaaaaaakkkkkk) but my point is not that it's not being done, it's that it's being done too infrequently in too few places, and yes, I'm just bitching, but I am also buying tickets and making "more of that, please" phone calls about good modern stuff when it happens, but there is the old Catch 22 at work, people come to see what they know and they know what they come to see. I'd not want to live in London, I'd not mind spending a summer or something there, but you know, there is an audience for more modern music of all types here. A small one, but it's real. But getting people out of the house is a bitch, and things are so spread out here and people so disinclined to cross zip and area codes...it's our own fault, really, but still, saying "it's out there" is hardly a remediation of the issue. I don't know what is, but that's not. Just not enough pimping going on.

Which spelled backwards gets us Do Re Mmi...but that leaves us J, and what will bring us back to J? Or to Sorrento, for that matter?

Sound investment!

Tom Browne?

Which raises the issue of "ownership", not just financially but mentally, spiritually, psychologically. When you are attracted to something that you yourself intuitively know that you can never have/own, how does that make you feel? Does it leave you humble and impressed and actually delighted, or does it leave you feeling threatened and make you a pissy little bitch about it? I mean, we all got things to own, but so does everybody else. so...just chill out with the metrics and the monetizations of life, time, music, PITCH for crying out loud, just handle your own business and be happy that somebody else is handling thier's. Don't be threatened that you are not the only badass in the room, be delighted that there are all these other badasses in the room with you, that's rarefied company, dude, be happy and do right with it. You want an example of a life fighting for ownership, against hostile takeovers, fully willing to make a good deal and almost obsessive about making a great one lest it turn into a sneak-attack surrender, that's Duke Ellington. and I think that still bothers some people.

Ok, 2008, so did not have the time/money to make that trip and book those hotels. We got a bigass country here, from sea to shining seal, and the length of the Mississippi, and did you know that Central Expressway (US75) runs from Minnestoa (iirc) all the way down to Galveston (iirc)? But hell, it takes all day just to drive across Texas, ok, and then you're still in Texas, which is not Tanglewood, so hooray for one thing one time in one place, but, no, more is needed, more times, more places, its a bigass country.

So that was him on "Walking In Rhythm", eh? I still hear that one, even in the grocery store. Not everybody can make that kind of connection. Just remember that there's a time to be alone and a time to be together. RIP, and excuse me if I dance a little on the cereal aisle the next time that song comes on.

Dude, when did this happen and how the hell was I supposed to get there? It's not a day trip, you know.

And I get that there will be those who aren't inclined to warmly embrace all that. It's the disdain for it as expressed in ways that go after it is a form of basic incompetence that I will not accept. It's like the folks who say they don't want to do 4/4 swing, ever, never. For some it's a sincere embrace of where they are in their lives, and yeah, that's right, they can do that and want to do it precisely because they dig what it is that they are choosing not to do. and then there's the people who you sense are really...uncomfortable with all sorts of the socio-physical things that are implied by a hard 4/4 swing thing, and they are happy to be able to let it fade away, they never really liked it in the first place, and now they have a means of fashionably denying it's vitality at all, whew, glad THAT'S over, it took long enough. Same thing with the Ellington criticisms...I know that Basie loved Duke, but Basie also never, EVER wanted his band to sound like that (a "reliable source" told me that when asked (in a casual conversation) about his opinion of Thad's band, Basie's answer was "eh....sounds too much like Duke"), but all that aside, surely Basie recognized that they were two different worlds, neither hostile to the other. I mean, there's ways to express not liking something personally that still recognize the validity of that other thing's existence. And then there's ways to just send the message that you wish this thing had never happened, how could it have, yuck, ARRRRGH, KILL IT!!! On a possible similar note, I had a conversation with this one friend of mine about section intonation, and he was like, well, Duke's thing, yeah, but Fela's horns, OH MY GOD!!!! And I'm like dude, wake up, pitch creates shapes, pitch creates colors, pitch creates dimension. As luck would have it, we were outside and there was a big gnarly oak tree close by. I pointed to the leaves and said, hey, those leaves, that's Duke's sound. That big gnarly-ass knot down here on the trunk, that thing that looks like it's a hole but isn't, that goes neither in nor out but just...around, yeah, that thing, that's Fela's horns sound. I got a nervous laugh that I took to mean that, not a horn section is not a tree, but your point is something I will think about eventually, and that was that, no hating, maybe some inadvertent hating nipped, close enough. But I hate it when people use pitch as a weapon against itself. Again, A-440 only has relevancy in music that is designed for A-400, and not all music is, not even. Quite apart from all that, though, I would love to encourage any music lover to have fun and take some time to listen to any and all music that has section work going on. Don't just hear the lead players, here the bottom, and especially the inside players, here the sound, not the lead. It's a wonderful thing to hear, really it is. Big band, string quartet, full orchestra, three horn front line, whatever. Blend, phrasing, dynamics, when a section plays as a section, it's a statement!

Sections are not a monolithic thing, there is no one "right" sound. On the opposite end of duke's section, I've loved Goodman's (Toots Mondello, unsung hero!) & Miller's, the latter being a definitive example of a section that played "perfectly" in every way. Normally that would be uncomfortable to me, but they played perfectly with a personality, the way they played made that music sound like Miller wanted it to sound, and I appreciate that, and at times even enjoy it. So for me, it's not about wright v. wrong, it's about are you bringing the story of the music. And to not get that Duke's bands, especially his sax section, was very much doing that...I have to wonder where the disconnect is. "not liking it" and "not getting it" aren't the same thing. I like things that I don't get and I get things that I don't really like. And even that famous Dead Canadian Piano Player who I can get really viscerally dislike-y about, the only "hell" I could conceive him as being a soundtrack for would be my own private, personal one. Certainly not for the entirety of humanity of and for all time. I mean, c'mon.

If I'm going to give a dislike of the Ellington saxophone section, I'm going to need to get something of equal weight in return. There are those who can do that for me, but Jack Teagarden, badass that he was, ain't one of them.

Well, I can live without him too, if it comes to that.

I was also tempted to hit him, but he was the drummer and it wasn't my gig. But I soon ended up getting fired from that gig for bad behavior, which was sort of the intent behind the bad behavior. Now, that was a night when you'd have wanted to been there, trust me. But apart from that, ok, I'm heard people talk shit about that band being ragged, and let's face it, sometimes it was, and fair enough. But the sax section's intonation, specifically? Hellish? Never heard that before, all that color and it's just sloppy playing, no, no, hell no, neither my gut nor my head can allow for that, opinion is one thing, foundational principles of reality something else. I guess the point is that not everybody loves Ellington, but some people are really weird about it..

I figure that what it all means will be whatever they wrap it up with, which is why I hope it doesn't go on too long and they have to start getting really out there just to have a show. Right now, what I think it all means is about the basic divided soul that we probably have about self vs all and how fucked up either one of those gets when the inability of either to effectively check the other is removed. At least that's what I think. Being a work of commerce dstill in progress. it could land anywhere before it ends.

Are you guys aware of a group of jazz fans that hold the classic Ellington saxophone section (Hodges, Procope, Gonzalves, Hamilton, Carney) in low esteem, contempt, even, because of there alleged lack of intonation? Somebody told me a joke a few years ago about Jesus going into Hell to rescue everybody except the Ellington saxophone section because their intonation made them the perfect soundtrack for the new residents that would be coming in later today, and I was seriously all WFT? BITCH, who told you that one, and the linage of the joke was given to me, and a shockingly long and "respected" lineage it was (in terms of local attributions, but very well-worked/well-paid local players from a time when that kind of work could be had). I mean, I was stunned, never heard anything like that before, either as a joke or in the music, that band was loose as hell sometimes, but as far as pitch goes, this A-440 shit works in sounds for which it was designed, but there are no breaks in wave rates, that shit is infinite, life is not a piano (and for that matter, a piano is only as it's tuned) so....deal with that, haters. I've heard "out of tune" and I've heard "pitch with color" and really, not sure why somebody doesn't get that. Those guys played side by side most nights of most years and they all knew their instruments. Even allowing for off-night and drunk/high nights and all those nights, it sounded that way because they wanted it to sound that way, you gonna tell me that Harry Carney drove Duke all the fuck over America and didn't know how that music was supposed to sound? He's the bottom of the band, all the overtones build off of him, hey, if you talk to me about "intonation", talk to me about overtones and resonances and the choices within, don't talk to me about A-440 like it's the only way that A can exist, I reject that, reject it and rebuke it, and have god AND science on my side. And the guy who told me the joke kinda got indignant about it when I told him dude, that was one fucked joke, one thing led to another and he started going all birther and shit. I tell you, some people scare me with what they use to get to their special places, and I get really scared when they think I want to go there with them, what am I doing wrong?