JSngry

I'll advocate for Michael forever, but as for who was smarter about what the whole game was, I gotta go with Prince. Michael played an incredibly intricate and deep game of checkers, but Price played chess. That was an opportunity undoubtedly afforded him by chronology, but it was an opportunity in no way squandered, and one more than fully maximized. imo, of course. James Brown, of course, invented wood, rocks, eater, and most of fire. Louis Armstrong did not invent air, but he did define it, so...close enough. And about Michael, I was telling my daughter this evening, Michael Jackson came up in a world, deep inside a world, that really no longer exists. Michael Jackson saw and learned more before he was 10 than most people do in an entire life.And he not only saw it, he carried it with him all his life. So Michael knew in a way that this kid from Minneapolis could not know. But Prince learned it in his own way, and carried it in his own way, and, really, knew in a way that Michael could never really get a full grip on that the game is to be won on your own terms or else it is not won at all. RIP Prince.

The Flying Red Horse Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines The Seattle Pilots!

This is one of records that should make all kinds of "Best Of The Year" lists. Again - this is one of the better Sonny Rollins records, period. I got the new Henry Threadgill in Wednesday, and have not been able to get to it because this freakin' thing is still in the player...what did Miles tell Trane, just take it out of your mouth, yeah, just take it out of the player. But...not happening yet, go figure that. I mean, jesus, the "Disco Monk" on here...the record is on thing, but live, here, it's just a monster, a monster of sound and playing and flow and holy shit, Sonny Rollins playing Disco Fucking Monk like it was the greatest thing ever, and it may not be, no, definitely not the greatest thing ever, not even in the same gravitational field as the greatest thing ever, but the place that was created for and occupied by it for this brief moment, yeah, that is. Sonny Rollins, y'all, one of my few living heroes, still, and still, and whether or not he is my hero has nothing to do with the greatness on display here. Here he is, y'all, if this ain't it, then there is no it, and good luck navigating that.

Totally random and unsupported guess of Frank Wess on #3?

Ok, here's a guy who is at once fully immersed in the event and simultaneously wholly outside it, omni-commenting in every available space, macro and micro. He can love it and mock it at the same time becuase he knows all of it, the interior, the exterior, the meanings at all their layers, it's the height of arrogance, it's the height of humility, it's total jive, it's totally brilliant, it's referencing Black Music as Symbol and fully aware of Symbol As Meaning and Silence as both Symbol AND Meaning, social, racial, every kind of way, signifyin', if you will. Like a motherfucker. What this specific happening has to do with "music" is very little, but what it has do do with Prince is enormous. The guy was crazy mad DEEP. https://youtu.be/lHaFj7gOWh4 I mean, poor Michael, Michael had seriosuly deep skills, but Micheal did not meditate on things the way Prince did. Even if he had an inkling, Michael did not, for whatever reasons, embrace the conflicts of The Meanings In The Face Of The Realities for the purpose of getting in front of them, not like Prince did. Michael, on this stage, was contributing and tributing and loving, but Prince was loving it and fucking with it, from the inside and from the outside. Yeah, Prince.

Agreed in principle, but I've heard speculation that he had ongoing foot/heel trouble that caused ongoing intense pain. Very plausible scenario, and very unfortunate if that's how it happened. He'd not be the first, and he won't be the last. But as far as being a "wild guy" or any of that, no. The guy was a pussyhound to be sure, but he was also a Jehovah's Witness(?) and got married and settled down. No drugs, no alcohol, just work and sex...not at all a bad gig for anybody. Prince is the encyclopedia...so many times there are so many little details, minutiae in either the actual music or the mix or the EQ, anything having to do with the overall sound of the record, that just make me say WHOA!, this is a guy who knows exactly what he's doing about as much and as exactly as it can be known, and then fucks with it. My encyclopedia growing up was World Book, the one with all the multiple layered overlapping colored transparencies and stuff like that. Brittanica had the data, but World Book had the grip. When I got older, yeah, sure, you need data. But until then, you gotta go before you grow. For a kid with curiosity, a thing like that is a never-ending source of fascinated digging deeper. That's what the best Prince Music is, you can just keep digging into the layers of it and finding things. Data AND grip. And for the record, the Purple Rain music, although a brilliant synthesis of so many things, is probably my least favorite era of Prince. He's consciously referencing so many things and doing it brilliantly, but the goal is also to make a place/statement in and about Pop Culture. I like the guy best when he's getting his quirk on. When that happened, hey, Life 'O' The Party indeed.

Musicology is an album that matters, imo. And comparing Hendrix to Prince is sorta like comparing a great, engaging novel to a great, engaging encyclopedia.

Anybody buy the 45 of "Kiss" and then get super WTF-ed by the B-side? There's a special place in heaven for people who constructively engaged their B-Sides.

It worked on my phone. Loved the cut, perfect example of how Prince didn't make cheap/disposable music...this thing is loose, casual, in no way "produced" to be "pop", but there's all these little details that are not there by accident...Prince never halfassed, he always made conscious choices about every aspect of his music. Here, it's having a basic but DEEP JB-ish groove going on, but with the JimmyNolanChunk hitting on this weird chord that's got some half-step-up things going on in it. That is enough of a WTF? as a coloristic choice, but then the guitar solo begins, and it's soon apparent that that rhythm guitar chord is really made from the mode that the guitar solo is going to use and BAM, just like that, a seemingly secondary quirk becomes a full explanation. Conscious and quite deliberate manipulation of the sonic hierarchy. Genius. The word "genius" get overused everywhere, and nowhere more than in popular music. But for me, true genius means not just having total command of your language(s), but also having the ability to use that language freely and inventively, to take it anywhere and bring it back at will, no idea that the skills can't execute, and no skills that the idea can't find. On those terms, I have no problem whatsoever view Prince through the prism of genius, which does not mean that everything he did was genius work, the guy had very real peaks and valleys. But remember, "genius" is not a synonym of "excellent". It's more a quality of character, of essential nature. The work of a genius, failed, triumphant, and in between. Besides, "Sexy M.F." and the original video that it came with are about as genius as anybody's gonna be in the world that Prince existed, everything he came into, everything he created there, and everything he left behind, visual, musical, all of it. Genius. http://www.videodetective.com/music/sexy-mf/721321

Avoid the disappointment and don't even think about it being a jazz biopic. Think about it as a contemporary blaxploitation flick with a lead character named "Miles Davis" that roughly incorporates some traits of the character's real-life namesake. It still might be a crappy film (or not) but at least you can judge it for what it really is, not what you think it's going to be.

Bugz In The Attic The Insect Trust Faith Hill (surely she's somebody's aunt?)

Geez, I think I might have that Shadow Vignettes flyer stashed away somewhere. Maybe even the Underground Festival as well...need to go digging some day. Vandy Harris, yes, all right! And Ka-Tetta Aton, on the scene.

Beltre. http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2016/4/20/11466888/mlb-video-rangers-adrian-beltre-elvis-andrus-staredown Kinsler. http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2016/4/18/11450290/ian-kinsler-dropped-pop-up-which-was-really-smart

OMG...his best stuff was true brilliance, his worse stuff wasn't, and everything in-between was none too shabby. The thing about him was that he could lull you into thinking that he wasn't gonna push it anymore and then out of nowhere, BIG time pushing it. Musicology was the last time that happened, but now the hope of another thing like that is lost...but who knows what all is in the can up there, who knows? This is a loss, really. RIP.

Grace Kelly plays bari in that band, right?

The Seekers The New Seekers Perpetual Optimist

Yeah, she can play. If it's just that it's bassoon that turns some people off, fine, I guess (seems silly to me, but different stokes, etc), but if there's any feelings that she can't play, that's just wrong. Same thing with Irene Aebi, really, her voice has just not been for me (although, again, starting to grow on me), but she's got the skills. As for the wife thing, this kind of music really doesn't generally lend itself to the Paul & Linda type thing.

I would not call it a horrible piece of music, although I could easily call it a massive piece of temptation. Again, I come back to interpretation, particularly for pieces such as this that have the ability to "go wrong" built into them. What I remember is that when the DSO did the Leningrad recently, I went into it with two things in mind - the Bernstein Columbia version (which I guess is a "famous" one?) & the fact that the conductor for the night was a literally last-minute sub, younger than van Zweeden, yet somebody who was studying him very closely during his rehearsals. In both cases, the concern was "what's gonna happen here"? I had found the Bernstein reading to be hard, agressive, almost(?) a piece of Cold War Propaganda that hit the "message" first and foremost. Not particularly something I felt moved by, except in the sense of those animal shelter tv donation ads where, AWWWWWW, damn that's sad, what other reaction are you allowed to have without feeling like a total louse? Van Zweeden I knew to be a real stickler for, as the one critic calls it, "micromanaging", with the end result is that there are arcs all the way through his performances, long arcs, and when climaxes occur, they occur within themselves because of themselves, organically, not tacked on to themselves as advertising, neon or otherwise. I wrote earlier in this thread about watching Canellakis that night to see if the orchestra and/or the piece would ever get away from her, and implicit in that was that this was a piece where Van Zweeden-ish micro-managing of detail could easily be left behind for Pavlovian Passion Signification, just ramp it on up there and "move" everybody with the "tragedy". Once the orchestra starts doing that, how would the conductor stop it? But that did not happen, Canellakis was brilliant in not letting it happen, and I heard a piece delivered with a whole helluva lot of care, thought, and nuance, with the result that the music was not overplayed/overstated, which to me, gave it a lot more meaning (instead of "meaning"). What's the difference? Minutiae, no doubt, starting crescendos earlier and building them more slowly, tempos allowed to breathe more deeply, ensemble balances set to let the whole orchestra be heard equally while the arcs are building, just little things like that. Probably. Hell, I might enjoy attending rehearsals more than concerts?!?!?!?! Those differences are essentially musical, but are also, unavoidably, perhaps, socio-political. We're talking about music made to commemorate an event that is now more than a few generations in the past, so the need probably should shift from shouting it out to deafen all interference to letting one contemplate, like, we don't need to be reminded of the horror itself, let's now think about what that horror MEANS. To do this in a really "understanding" way, perhaps it takes a new generation, one for whom the specific events speak as one among many, not a Single Fixed Point Of Outrage & Tragedy. WWII is over, The Cold War is over, which does not meant that shit did not happen or that it loses its weight, but at some point...at what point, do people shift from open wound to scab, and then from scab to scar, and then from scar to just....something you live with, it happened, it left a scar, but we must now move on? And then, how do you interpret this piece, this music, this conductor? Whatever the answers, I seriously doubt that they will arrive all at once, in one single package that the whole world gets on the same day and opens in unison.

http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/doris-roberts-star-everybody-loves-raymond-dies-90-n557981

I'm not at all put off by Borca, she's a serious player. Nowhere near as deep as Lyons, but hell, that"s one of the shorter of the short lists. But even if I was, hey, I get past Irene Aebi to get to Steve Lacy, right? And Aebi is growing on me, slowly, yes, but still. Some people just seem to come from places that seem more...needless than they really are. Yet within the company they krep, there the are, and there they remain, obviously not needless THERE.

You don't bring guns to a weenie roast, at least not until after the kids go to sleep!

If you don't have it already, take the money you save and spend it on that Ayler Records Lyons box set. More meat there than you can grill between now and Labor Day, trust me.

y'all get the chicks to play with flowers and then all the dudes blow shit up and then everybody has a weenie roast over what's left? dude, are you sure you don't live in East Texas?

Ok, small sample size, but getting less small...I find that Shostakovich in general needs to be handled "just so" in order to not sound slight and/or over-obvious. It seems that the less nuanced the interpretation is, the less "value" the content has for me. There's a recent-y Martha Whatshername live thing on DG that pissed me off so much I couldn't finish it, just poundpoundpound blatantblatantblatant, and the crowd went wild etc, but jeezus, no more of that for me, ever. Yet I have a 1967 broadcast of Symphony 11 with the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky that is one of the most sublime things I've ever heard. Goosebumps, chills, etc, like the flu only fun. Objectively, I don't know that there's that much difference between the compositions on the two records other than the obvious 500 lb. gorilla ones, maybe just enough to make that much of a difference, but I'm more inclined to think that this is a composer whose music is best revealed under only the best of interpretations, and to that end, all of the Columbia Bernstein readings of Shostakovich symphonies I have are really crying out for wholesale replacement now that I've heard what can really be gotten out of them, or at least some of them. I also know it's sort of an accepted truth that a great composer's music will reveal at least some of its greatness under almost any interpretation, but no, I don't believe that to be universally true, and Your Honor, I'd like to enter The Music Of Dimitry Shostakovich as People's Exhibit A.

Yay!