JSngry

They would appear to have a real affinity for James Brown's mojo. I don't know how you can be so right being this wrong unless you had a damn good handle on what it was you were dealing with, at least inside yourself. You can if you feel it!

What I don't like is those Euro Musiporn Real Gone Jazz Box Sets of, like, 23 LPs on 4 CDs. This will be from Real Gone Music, which is not the same company. See here: http://www.discogs.com/label/219427-Real-Gone-Jazz and here: http://www.discogs.com/label/340569-Real-Gone-Music The Real Gone Music catalog can be perused here: http://shop.realgonemusic.com/collections/all

Here ya' go, vintage footage of the "classic"line up, just when the began to really hit their stride.

Moving this to Artists, and yes, RIP. That was a band...maybe you had to be there, I don't know, but I was, so I can't know any differently. At their peak, they defied the commercial and esthetic laws of popular music as much as anybody, and did it better than almost anybody, took it to such a high plane.

Preordered, in fact. That was a nutty band and In Bruno Carr I Trust. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AAU2R8C/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B01AAU2R8C&linkCode=as2&tag=thesecdis-20&linkId=TZOVHWQEOUUXRRYI

See ya' in December!

Wilma Rudolph Miss Rudolph Mudbone

Neither of those two Shepp sides have really stuck hard with me, but with The Cry Of My People is pretty good, and you do get a couple of Cal Massey pieces (below), always invaluable additions to anything they get included in. My reservations about it are with the recording, same as with Attica Blues (which has stuck hard) , some weird kind of claustrophobic compression-y thing going on, at least on the LPs. They were playing around with some kind of stereo/quad compatibility then (I think?), whatever it was, it actually sounds better on YouTube than it does on the turntable, so, hey, it's Opposite Day in Archie Shepp Land. As far as Grachan's extended soling, we do all have John Patton's Soul Connection, correct?

Gonna get this one sooner than later!

Been aware of these guys for decades, never really taken the plunge into the catalog. Just ordered Meet The Residents...what do those who really know the works suggest as worthy followup(s)?

The Flea Flea Free

Classical Discussion.

She was easily underestimated, I think. I began playing in "real" R & B bands right when she broke, and you know, she had a great voice and make some great records, but Gladys Knight, she wasn't, ya' know, and never mind Aretha. Laura Lee? Not even breathing the same air, ok? And then she went under for a while and finally came back with that Unforgettable album, and you know, that's a pretty strong album if you overlook the cheese factor, and you want to, you need to, overlook the cheese factor, because this isn't Keeny G necroraping Louis Armstrong, or Sinatra Tecnozombying a pop culture he helped invent and no longer knew even by scent, this is a daughter finally/"finally" coming to grips with her father, this is biophsych 101, so you need to overlook the cheese factor, but dammit..can you? Not that I've been able to, came real close once or twice, but...nope. However - then she seems to have just gone about the business of becoming a very good singer. Easier said than done, that's all I'm saying, and I think she did it. So, hey. You tell me - does this sound like a person who has any sense of self-ownership at all? Great dance record, but there's no "person" in there, at least not that I can here, and compared to her earlier hits, which were essentially shallow but real (enough), that's pretty damn dark. So where she ended up, forget about "great artistry" or anything, when I hear her later work, I her somebody who is fully aware of where they are, who they are, and why they are.

Tonight was one of those "glad to be alive and able to get out of the house" nights. It's one thing to not know what to expect, it's another to get knocked on your ass when what you hear is one punch to the gut after the other! The DSO was on tonight, in a zone, a single organism totally in sync with itself. Runnicles was a fascinating conductor visually. The opening Britten piece begins with slow-moving violins, and the way he conducted it was to basically just stand there and conduct the phrases themselves, no time, no metronome, no impassioned sweeping, just a visual stillness. On passages where the notes were, like, whole notes or longer, it was kind of unnerving, because...timing is a bitch, you know, microseconds, plus attack, dynamics, baseball is a game of inches, music is a game of units so small I doubt the can be fully accurately measured, at least not when it's humans collectively physically executing. Asking all these people to breathe as one, to have a single heartbeat, to rise and fall as one in the tiniest ways possible, that takes a deep trust by everybody involved, especially a conductor, because, you know, again, baseball, no matter how much the players succeed or fail, when it's a fail, it's ultimately on the manager. So yeah, trust. This guy trusted his band to fully know what time it was, and the trust was mutual. Same thing with blend, dynamics, pulse, everything musical, the guy would make some visual noise from time to time, but all in all, not all that much. And the band was there, all together...pretty damn moving to hear it go on all night like that. The only piece I had even half a reservation about was the Walton. I heard the math in the composition, the devices and such, more than I heard the music. Just a little bit more, though, and I'll chalk it up to being an incredibly demanding piece in terms of the need for a totally precise execution. On this one, it sounded like everybody involved was way past the "still feeling it out phase", but not quite yet in the "comfortably lived in" stage. The execution, though, was perfect, quite perfect, and certainly none the worse for it! Apart from that, though, jesus, what an evening. Do not know any of this music, and that's my loss. Britten, the sounds of the bows getting the notes out in that opening...hooks in, and no regrets for it. The Fantasia as performed this evening was one of the most soulful performances I've ever heard out of anybody, period. I had tears running, involuntary, not "crying", just...touched, deeply touched. And Runnicles held the silence after the last note for about 10 seconds before dropping his arm. 10 seconds is a loooong fucking time, ok, but it left time for the impact the at least begin to be processed. And it needed that time, at least for me, because,,,just because. Soulful, deeply, deeply soulful. And then, ok, show biz, gotta love it, after Runnicles took the Fantasia applause once, then twice, he took to the wings while the seating was reconfigured for the final Elgar thing,, not more than 5 minutes down time and suddenly this guy comes running back on to the stage, leaps on to the podium, doesn't wait more than a second, and BAM there's the downbeat and BAM off we go. Visceral music, and, yes, Chuck, some surprises in there, to be sure. Runnicles, by far and away the best Guest Conductor I've hear with the DSO this season, and I think the band was feeling him on all of it, because, and I say this with full consideration, they played their ass off tonight. I swear to god, it was like hearing Basie with Lockjaw or Sonny levitating, a zone is a zone is a zone, forget about what "kind" of music it is, when that zone hits, "kinds" of music don't matter. And this was a zone night, for sure for sure for sure. That Dover Quartet gig last year, that was a zone night. Tonight was a zone night. Runnicles and the DSO, they gave it up, all the way, fully, openly, and without "thought". It got good to 'em, and they went with it all the way, all in. This is what you want, not just out of music, but out of life. Trust rewarded, totally freed up. If it's true that there's no such thing as bad sex (which of course, isn't true), then it's equally true that not all good sex is great sex, and it's also true that not all great sex is great love. You gotta be ready for great love when it happens, but you can't make it happen. Great love is a gift of the moment (however long that moment may be, seconds or years) with which all concerned are blessed. Tonight was great love.

Scot Boras got Chris Davis 7 years for 161 mil. I'm thinking that I would want Scott Boras on my side even to buy stamps.

Henry V Vi Redd Sandra Voe

Peter Boyle Jeff Rense Wash

Another example of how she kept digging into herself to find something her own, no matter the idiom. Here she is in 1977, flush in the middle of her first wave of R&B success, playing the role of Nat's Baby Girl in a de facto Capitol Summit Meeting (Surrogates Allowed). I mean, her pitch and time are all "ok", but she is so not feeling any of "that" except as, maybe, oh this is my dad's bag, how funny it all is! From there to where she ended up, as a singer who showed some real understanding of what all "that" really was, and getting there from being a credible R & B hitmaker who could have played Rehab Love Me and gotten all Diva-ish about it, I say credit is due for both intent and result. From here: to here: She died young-ish, but I have to say that age worked in her favor musically, probably because she allowed it to. Opportunity rather than threat.

Tonight's DSO program: I don't know any of these works or composers other than as vaguely as you can "know" anything. Elgar, Enigma Variations first names Benjamin, William, Ralph, and Edward...that's about it. No idea what to expect out of tonight's gig. Looking forward to getting hit with something with no preformed expectations of anything. A very rare opportunity, that!

Oh, Hal Blaine was a one-man WMD. Coming from a different place, check out the pocket on this, that bass/drum hookup (likely Freddie Washington & Ollie Brown or Ricky Lawson)...not "flashy", but we're talking micro-milli-seconds here, at any given moment, one of them gets off, and PHLAAAAPPP, groove lost, pocket gone, just another softpop POS. But that never happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NC9OWQEeqc That sucker just will not populate on this board. I have no idea why. Point just being that there's a reason why stuff like that is so popular...you can get to people by feeling their rhythms and their shapes, get to them deep. It's a dangerous game, but those who play it well and do it with a clear conscience have my respect, if not always my love.

I confused this name with Alan Rachins, the guy who played Douglas Brackman on LA Law...turned it into "Alan Brackman" and then into "Alan Rickman"...one of those totally logical but totally incorrect brain farts about names that occur when you know a bunch of names but not that much about the people who have them. Anyway, RIP Alan Rickman, whose death will not be the determining factor in a possible LA Law reunion show, silver lining and all that, come back Susan Dey!

Well, for you, the odds would be much higher.

Not just Dion (although, yeah, him, always), but I still listen to all those 45-era pop records, not because they're all great songs/singers/etc. but because on so many of them, the backing track are saying something that's coming from a different place than the "intent" would want you to believe. Tones, pockets, accents, you can so often hear so many things going on behind what is otherwise a total POS record and LOL because, hey, THAT guy! THOSE guys! That choice was made and was not removed, WIN! But you don't hear that so much these days, there's less manual input on pop records these days, fewer differing minds in the mix, fewer potential outcomes. It is what it is.

As far as streaming goes, my Live 365 stations are all still going, the ones that haven't gone VIP, yet, which most of them have. But Contemporary Classical remains.