JSngry

Kal-El Jor-El Lara

Morpheus Hypnos George Draggos

Look for this set to pop up cheap from time to time... I picked it up a few years ago when the Telarc boxes were showing up frequently at bargain prices: Erroll Garner Telarc box Wow, I was unaware of this box..looks to me to be prime 60s material from Mercury/Phillips/London, right?

Il Divo Devo Laroy Duvo

I don't know anybody that plays "Spain" any more...late-70s kinda wore it out, especially after Al Jarreau had a semi-hit with it. Same thing with "La Fiesta"...at one time those were almost pop songs, audiences were hip enough to the fusion/crossover thing that if you had the chops and the gig, it worked as commercial material for general(ish) audiences. There were clubs around here (and probably everywhere) where that kind of jazz and the parallel R&B & Michael McDonald-era Doobies (and of course, Steely Dan) were all of a piece, good crowds every nght, people danced and listened, club made money, dealers made money, every damn body made money. And then it stopped. Oh well. The Chick tune that has kinda had legs around here in a very stealth way is "Humpty Dumpty". It seems like there's a small pocket of players who know/play it, but they span generations and are often independent of each other. Who knew?

Blame it on Kay Starr, and don't cry until you've waltzed a mile in her other shoes.

It wasn't all glamour and stardom either. Dues, dues were paid.

RIP

There's definitely fragmentation, somewhat along cultural lines...there's plenty of gigs where somebody will call "Falling Grace" and count it off with no problem, just as many other gigs where they don't.

"Bolivia" was already on its way in the mid/late 70s. I'm also encountering a lot of younger players who know a lot of Scofield tunes. They have me at a disadvantage there. Are we talking about professional players who come ut of the schools or "others". Seems like the school players all know the same tunes?

Did she study with Tristano?

Has Herbie ever gone on the record about this tune, it's origins, evolutions, etc. It almost sounds like a preliminary sketch for "Riot"?

Oooh...that could work...

The hyper-floridity, the continuous rolling and sweeping, has me wondering if the intent was to turn the piano back into the harp that it essentially is. To that end...Erroll Garner to Alice Coltrane?

I hope that somebody can get Bob Cranshaw to recall as much detail as possible about these "Untitled Original" things. How they started, how they evolved, how much was sonny, how much was Cherry, were they just jams that evolved or sketches that grew, etc. They're in some way the least "successful" things to be found here, but also the most interesting in terms of process, and not really like anything Sonny had done before or after, at least that's come to light. And, as with all of this music, there are technical things that sonny does, saxophonistic things, that are just mind boggling, most of which he would get looser with in the next year or two, but some, like the almost classical tone he gets in some spots, that I've never heard him do anywhere else. 50 years is a long time, and I get why RCA was kinda lost at what to do with all this, and I can see why Sonny would want to move on, but damn....this is one fascinating group, and to hear it all at once like this is really a revelation. An official release with some serious documentation and packaging would have been so freakin' awesome, to the point of being necessary, but...ain't no livin' in a perfect world.

I've been using this as my falling asleep music for a few nights now, and on one of the ballads, I began to wonder how much of an effect Garner's overall shaping of his ballads had on Don Patterson, or maybe even Red Garland. Or was that just a thing that was in the air?

Way cool, thanks for sharing that!

Stigmatization of source is a lot more prevalent now than it was a few generations ago. Used to be, people would play a popualr tune as jazz, and either find a way to make it work or else suck really hard trying. This was before Top 40 and "rock and roll" and the death of so-called "good music", like "I Got Rhythm" and any number of 50s scholck don't have pretty much the exact changes. Then with funk it became "there's no melody there, it's all vamp", and you know, these old standards, they're from the American Musical Theatre, these other things are just radio drivel, and, etcetra. I swear, I did a reharm on "Close to You, like, more than 30 years ago, just turned the changes all around, gave it a Mobley-esque whole tone bridge, totally new coat of paint, and I could not get anybody to play it without that condescending smirk of oh, the CARRRRR-penters. So one day I brought just the changes to a session and said let's blow on this, and heeeyyyy,m that's NICE, what is it? Ok, let's do it again and see. And the CRASH oh, the CARRRRR-penters. I get it, but...I don't really get it. fwiw, though, when you play a jazz (or jazz-ish) gig for/with a predominantly African-American audience/band, there's a lot less elf-consciousness about repertoire than there is playing for/with an Anglo-American audience/band. For all the horror stories you can tell about "Smooth Jazz", a negligence of the contemporary popular repertoire is not one of them, although quite often the results are. Ain't what you play, etc.

Most Perfect Sending-A-Message Blue Note Cover Ever. Mileages vary, of course. But this music on this label in 1980, yeah, there it is.

Can anybody place "Untitled Original A" as a Don Cherry piece? I swear I've heard that thing more than a few times...

Took me a few years to really unlock this one to get inside it, but, as with most things Ellington, worth the investment. As far as ex posto facto releases go, the ESP series of Bud Powell Birdland broadcasts is worthy of inclusion in most any collection. and as much as I love Vernell Fournier, the early Ahmad Jamal trio records with Ray Crawford & Israel Crosby are seriously da' bomb, as yesterday's kids used to say. The absence f a drum set and the various ways that is handled make for some very provocative and imaginative results.

Yeah, I think it was ABC (?) did that one...I remember watching it...it was about Louis in Chicago getting in trouble with gangsters. I found it pretty laughable as far as the acting went, but then again, I'm no Ben Vereen fan. and there were all these pop-ins of historical figures that were there just to put the names in the story. But still, Louis as running with the mob, enough of an "outside the box" story then to still have some basic entertainment value. I'd like to see Keven Hart in the role, because I thinks he has a very good grasp of "the mask" that an African-American entertainer wears in order to achieve a broader crossover success. Whether he give a damn about playing Louis Armstrong is another matter entirely.

I assure you that the "impression" I get from Oscar Peterson is not at all "cultured", it's quite visceral and violent, actually. A type of anger/rage/whatever is stirred in me that no cultured person would dare admit to, much less display. Saying this with a guaranteed 100% absence of irony too. Of course, perhaps a mark of culture is not allowing that people can have a visceral negative reaction to music the same way they can have a visceral positive one, but sorry, having one and not allowing for having the other is not cultured, it's an emotional imbalance.

Couple of Stevie tunes, "Just The Way You Are", maybe "Saving all My Love For You"...enough jazz folks play lounge gigs that they would know the tunes, it's more a question of would they think of them as vehicles for jazz instead of just cheesy lounge songs.