JSngry

Who is "Rate Your Music"? That seems a little, uh, quriky.

I wouldn't say that it's "overrated" as much as I would that there's enough other Andrew Hill records (including post-BN) that make it a lower priority item for me. A few sleepers - Blue Black with Jimmy Vass, Chris White & Leroy Williams, Nefertitti with Richard Davis & Roger Blank, and Invitation, with Chris White & Art Lewis. They all have the "liquidity" of pulse that makes Hill's music speak its truest, imo.

Little Pixie on Disc 1...that's the kind of shit, all of it!, that would get you fired from a "regular" gig..."unleashed" indeed!

Starting the day off with this one, not even halfway through the first tune and am already having some serious "holy shit!" moments from the sheer energy coming out of the band. The feelings of being "unleashed" implicit in so many accounts of the bands early days have never been captured in fuller force than they are here, almost literally from the first note of the first tune...Jeryy Didgion playing a pretty spirited Phil Woods kind of thing, ok, but then teh band comes in with this ginormous Thad Mindfuck Chord that pins the walls back to themselves...between that and the Richard Davis/Mel Lewis BRING IT hookup, woo woo woo, what a little big band can do for you...

Carl Fontana Hanna Montana Idaho Joe

Nope, not seeing it.

History would love to erase Rick Holmes. Hell, there are times when I would like to erase Rick Holmes. But it is our duty as evolved creatures of the eternally ambivalent to not do that, because that would be a lie, and a lie destroys the ambivalence, and without ambivalence, what do you have left to play with? Besides, even though he's not always right, when he is right, he's right.

Lionel Hampton The Pruitts of Southampton Lloyd Sitkoff http://www.kntu.com/and-seldom-is-heard/

Well, this is always a Plan B...

Ok, here's one that has real meaning for me, but it's from my early teen years, so...hormones, small sample size, exaggerate reaction, etc. But the basic sense of a dream not only deferred, but denied, crushed, that carries over across life, and not just to matters of "the heart".

Gene Tierney Norris Turney Geezil Minerve

yep, put himself through law school driving a cab.

Music You All has a kind of "leftovers" feel to it, but The Price...is a great record, I think. It's all over the place stylistically, but that's very much the point, I think. I've found that there are cuts I will go to a lot more than others when sampling the album, but it's kinda like going to your favorite scenes from a movie. You can do that, or you can watch the whole move straight through. It works either way. Here's the two lead cuts, and check out Zawinul/Booker/McCurdy on both. This was populist music that gave as much as it took.

Our program notes are free. Nice young people in tuxes hand them out as you enter the hall, along with a how are you doing this evening? Enjoy the concert! The customer-facing staff in the Meyerson proper is overwhelmingly African-American, so I wonder if that's part of a community-inclusion deal that the Dallas City Council negotiated into the funding deal, or if it somehow became a job-tradition that's been handed down between family/friends, or just what. But yeah, the programs are free, and the people who hand them out (hell, the staff in general) are generally friendly people with no "stuffy waiter" pretense. You can count the number of those type of staff you encounter on pretty much one hand. If one is to be intimidated about "going to the symphony", the intimidation will not come from the customer experience itself. The DSO program notes were for years written by Laurie Shulman (ha!), and they were semi-encyclopedic affairs of both biographic and musical detail. Problem was, reading about a piece without having first heard it is useless (to me, anyway), so what is the alternative if not reading the notes while listening to the band play? I like to listen first, read later. They'd make great liner notes, but for program notes...too much for me. Ms. Shulman also is (or has been) the "go to" for pre-concert talks in all kinds of series all over the city, and she's the same way there, just detail after detail after micro-detail, but with no recorded examples to illustrate what she's going on about. If you already know the music at hand, you might benefit from this type of purely verbal presentation, but if not...perhaps not so much. It veers into the "dancing about architecture" zone after a while. She's an impressivley gushy lady,but her enthusiasm is only sometimes contagious, I'm afraid. But sometimes it is! Schulman has been a fixture on the scene, one might even call her an "institution", but she announced her "retirement" last year. This year, the job of providing the DSO program notes has gone to Rene Spencer Saller, and there could not be a more pronounced difference in styles. Ms. Saller is very much a member of the "just the facts" school of writing, although she does have an ear for what facts are relevant to the piece and about the composer. I LOL-ed when I read that line about Schumann and the Rhine, the drollness of it was marvellous, I thought. Something else about Saller - her writing background is as a feminist rock critic http://www.altweeklies.com/aan/rene-spencer-saller-music-criticism-without-the-testosterone/Article?oid=154251 But - she's out of St. Louis, a city which has a history of having a well-informed and highly discriminating classical/new music scene, and she writes about that as well: https://renespencersaller.wordpress.com/about/ So, a totally different voice, and to tell the truth, I prefer reading Ms. Saller's notes. They set the table rather than eat the food for you. About that high Romanticism, I know what you mean in a general sense, I think. The harmonies don't really do anything remarkable (except for when they mimic Beethoven), and there's an element of narcissism to it, I think, the way that even the most trivial element is fawned on as if, yes, getting back to the tonic from this dominant is soul-draining hard work, please weep both with me and for me, and I dunno man, I'm just not convinced that it needs to be all that, ya' know? OTOH, the element of narcissism could lend it self to some pretty gripping psychodrama if approached objectively, you know, don't engage it emotionally, engage it objectively, and all the weird OCD stuff in it, let that be OCD instead of "Art". See where that takes things. The Schumann thing last night was rife with opportunities to do that, the repetitions were obvious, the "offness" of them being there like that was not engaged, though. Now, what would a reading focusing on that sound like? Hell if I know. That's why I'm on the ides of the stage I'm on. But I'd sure be happy to entertain the notion of somebody on the other side trying, I would not feel that my trust had been violated.

Three figures, eh? Whoa... If money was the object, then fail. If the dignity of getting a miscredited record pulled from the market was the object, win. Either way, though, three figures? Damn...

Well, no, not really. The band played great, and soloist Abduraimov was a bitch and a half. But Gaffigan...I don't know. Too much "clean"-ness for my taste, or more to the point, clean-ness to no real purpose other than itself. Then again, this was not a presentation geared towards what I'm "looking for", and lord knows, that's hardly the point of any of this, is it. But I'm not at all a fan of Copland, and the Tchaikovsky has been whored out for so long by so many that if I say that the entire thing sounds like insincere, and actually almost effective, damage control for that horrid opening, well, that's how I hear it. The Adams piece that opened the evening was actually pretty interesting, but it segued into Quiet City w/o a pause, and whatever interest had been building (and there was some) slowly dissipated into Coplandia. I'm not into "Copland", so that didn't really do anything for me. Although, in both pieces, trumpeter Ryan Anthony was gorgeous, as he consistently is. I can honestly say that hearing him on a regular basis has really opened my ears up to what "classical trumpet" is "about" more than anybody has, ever (and I say that as somebody who came up in the environs of UNT/NTSU, where the classical trumpet program was totally badass). Ryan Anthony, thank you. Which leaves the Schumann, which is also where I was looking for some character out of Gaffigan, and felt felt let down. This orchestra has proven that it can do pretty damn near anything that is demanded of it, not always without some struggle, but ask and they reach down and give. So... There's an obsessive quality to this piece, it kind of OCDs about repeating shit (in it's own way there's a minimalist quality about it, at least at root, maybe?), and it seemed to me that Gaffigan wanted to pretty that up rather than bring it out. Tempos seemed a little too brisk, pulse a little too steady, dynamics a little under-confronted, I don't know...but nothing really "stuck" for me. Maybe it's all on me, that, but then again, I left the house wanting to be persuaded. Didn't happen. Here's the whole thing in a nutshell - the most entertaining portion of the evening for me was reading the program notes about the Schumann, which contained this delightful little gem: But less than a year after he led triumphant performances of the revised symphony, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine where he was rescued by fisherman. So, I'm needing to smell some fish or something here and all I got was a postcard saying Greetings From Sunny Lake Rhine!!! No fish, no river, no fisherman pulling some crazy motherfucker out of the river. Just sayin'.

One can only hope...over the last few years, I've seen too many people who were done before they were dead. Yuck.

Actually, I think Pete threatened legal action to get it withdrawn, or something like that. Whatever he did, it worked.

LaVoris Pace https://www.linkedin.com/in/lavoris-pace-82431610 Lavoris Henry https://www.linkedin.com/in/lavoris-henry-36809952 Lavoris L. Holloway http://www.totalgrace.org/pastor_lavoris_holloway.htm (sorry for just making a list, but just being able to was surprise enough for me, actually)

And it was at one point reissued under Chick Corea's name as Bliss!, so don't buy the same record twice thinking you'll have bought two records once each.

Thanks. Looks like I have him on several Kenton records. Guess I never looked at the personnel that closely.

Gaye Bykers On Acid Jack Tripper Klumcee

So there are 76 versions of Getz/Gilberto, then, correct? Frankly, I figured there was a lot more than that!

Always nice to be able to put a face to the name...

Still looking for a good opera opportunity here. Sounds like you've got good options, Bev. Enjoy! DSO tonight: If not for the Schumann, I could be convinced to stay home this evening. But it should be fun enough.