JSngry

My mom fixed a goose one year at my dad's request (I guess it was what his mom always fixed), and I remember it being very tasty, but also the greasiest damn thing ever...you could have gone swimming in the pools of grease that thing gave of. My wife will fix a duck on occasion, and that's all the grease out of one fowl she'll accept. I ask her to cook a goose just once, and she says you fix it, so....no goose for me. I guess what's good for the goose is not good for the gander? Traditionally, our family had both turkey and ham. I'm not too hung up about having turkey, though, so we've dropped it for Christmas. Ham too, this year. The last few years, we've been having beef tenderloin for the main meal, and sometimes duck on Christmas Eve, if we feel like doing all that work, and yes, by "we", I mean my wife. I do like ham though, but always, and not just at Christmas.

John Cage/Joan La Barbara - Singing Through -- Vocal Composations By John Cage Morton Feldman - Three Voices For Joan La Barbara Jimi Tenor & Abdissa Assefa - Itetu Arthur Prysock - Fly My Love Eric Salzman - Nude Paper Sermon Sonny Stitt - Deuces Wild Dick Van Dyke - Songs I Like By Dick Van Dyke

Wow...going to read that book..whole other world...

Interesting, thanks. And not just the recreation, the original creation, or any earlier choreography...did they Mingus it, and was there a Booker Ervin handy if so? Part of the music ed degree was taking a class in marching band routine creation. Had to buy marching score paper and learn the notation system for it. Don't know if that's still in use now or not...marching band routines have gotten so damn abstract and asymmetrical now...but could still be graphed on that paper, maybe with different notation? Is marching a form of dance?

The Joffrey performance looks to have been copped from Czech Public TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RykK0_ABgmQ Not sure about what, if anything.

Wilbur Wood Knuckles O'Toole Bill Doggett

The Insect Trust Bugz In The Attic The Toys

Started life as a tenor player, correct?

Let me put it this way...I once saw Mudcat Grant's trio open before a Cardinal game (quite accidental, all of it). Don't really remember it with any detail, but all things being equal (meaning no Lionel Hampton), I'd much rather go back in time to that Cardinal game to hear Mudcat than I would click on those links to hear this 45's samples. OTOH, all things are not equal, there IS Lionel Hampton, just as there is no publicly available time machine. "Take it, Hamp" b/w "Take It, Hamp".

My copy finally arrived...my gracious, this is some...weighty (indeed) music. I pray that I will someday be able phrase almost as effectively and efficiently (combined) as Henry Threadgill, not just in music, but in life, period. The more space you leave, the more significant what you finally do play needs to be, or else you're just going to sound out of the zone instead of in it. Smith, yes, he does this too, but Threadgill, in my hearing, is damn near...violent in his silences and their eventual breakings. Not necessarily violent as in malevolent, just...violent like a shock that you know is coming, just not when, and the more you know its coming, eventually, the less ready you are when it actually does. Seems like Jack is conspicuously returning to his Chicago/AACM roots as of late. Very glad that he is, but is there any specific motivation at play here? A superb record, flawlessly recorded to boot. Where TF is effective American distribution?

The Everly Brothers Andy Williams Alan Funt

Clyde McCoy Stanley Turrentine The McGuire Sisters

How is choreography notated/scored/whatever..or is there any formal system for so doing? This thing reminds me to remind myself to remember that the next time some glib buisiness seducer plays the line "hey, people hear with their eyes", it's a wonderfully grand truth that they are corrupting, not a clever lie that they are attempting to create into sustainment. I mean, shit, there are spots when you can hear the footsteps...is there a more primal percussion instrument than the human body?

Meeting this criterion, and only this criterion - the cut "Mr. Smoke" from Pat Williams' Capitol album Threshold, the soloist is Tom Scott. It benefits greatly from an opening passage that may or may not be scored/predetermined/whatever, but whatever, the effect is to move the arrangement along out of an ensemble passage into the solo spot in a most definite way, and then carry that new energy through to the arrangement's conclusion, dropping it off as perfectly as it picked it up.. Other than that, Pat Williams was a master at whatever it was he was doing then (if you only remember watching TV from the 80s on, you can be forgiven for thinking of it as "TV music", just like 20s jazz is "cartoon music" - understandable association, but an after the fact conclusion, not an correct chronological truth), and Tom Scott, on this solo, is in the same zone, improvising. I consider this a "great solo" because it serves the music at hand perfectly, and does so wholly from within. Whatever "weight" it may or may not have ultimately, that's another issue. But - if it's going to be the last solo of the last cut on an ambitious record (and "ambitious" means a lot of different things), then you'd want it to be a great solo, one that brings it all home triumphantly, and this one, in that sense, is.

whoa...

Wow, never recorded, ever? How does that happen/not happen? I've heard suggestions that the "riot" at the premier was at least as much based in outrage at the choreography as at the music. Sure would like to see the whole thing in the context of the "full" work.

Anybody got a good recommendation for a DVD of this actually being danced? Have reached a momentary saturation point of just hearing it, would now like to see what it was written to accompany.

Not sure of his personal chronology, but Lucky had one of the most unique sounds on the instrument ever, totally devoid of metal and reed both, just pure voice. Nothing but beautiful. Those Groove Merchant sides...lost gems, I think. His tenor sound was like that too, but the smaller instrument means less room for casual variance, and geez, Lucky Thompson on soprano...no other sound like it.

So, is it just the one session that's of "questionable" audio quality?

Thanks to all who have listened. There will be more things coming, will post here when they're up. Hope that they will be of interest. As for what to call it, the overall group direction...temporarily going with Compositional Improvisations From The Aftermath Of Jazz...that's about as accurate, geeky, and non-narrative-setting as I can get, especially with the geeky part. But...it is accurate. Looking to improvise, always, but also, always, looking for the composition. Also, a reminder that everything is - and will be - downloadable, free. Help yourself to what you want, guilt-free. I did the math and if we're going to make any money at all off of this band (unlikely), it's going to be from playing live. And if we're not going to make any money (hello, cashing the reality check), hell, we all got cell phones, right? If we got nothing else, we got cell phones. This is also keeping with the improvisational element - not looking for "permanent" versions of these works (can't stress that enough), simply looking to keep the dissemination of this music fluid, relevant, local in origin, and universal-ish in availability. Again, we all got cell phones. Not saying that we don't want to make money from this music, if that opportunity comes into focus, hell yeah, we'll make that money. But right now, this is the model. Might stay that way forever, might not. But the goal is - and will always be - to keep making the music as long as it's there and to keep having it heard for as long as it's being made. Ok, thanks again. Somebody's at the door.

I stopped "deifying" him a long time ago...he's a flawed-hero to me (the only kind to have, imo), and the love I have for him is based as much in his willingness to prioritize as he saw fit, not as was "demanded" of him by fans/commerce/"art"/etc, as it is that at any given moment (up until the last year or so) he could let you in on a world that is just...insanely brilliant, genius, really. Is that ultimately selfish on his part? Could be, but whose life is it anyway, as they say? We see so many people who either go crazy, or numb, or dead, or some combination of all that, from trying to "keep up" instead of just keeping it together, by any means necessary. He made his choice, by all appearances it seems to have worked for him, 40 years, no sabbatical/retirement, so Sonny Rollins for the Keeping Yourself Together On Your Own Terms win. Deify him? Far from it. I don't know that I'm in the mood for any kind of a "deity" these days, that always requires some kind of middleman, be it a pastor or Orrin Keepnews or George Wein or Down Beat Record Mr. Concert Spotlite or some/any other schmuck charged with Provisioning Those Deliverables. So please, no Deities. But love him now and, likely forever, warts and all? Oh hell yeah!

Thanks! This trio makes it easy to want to stay back, they really do.

Then again, who isn't? I mean, that's good as far as it goes, but...I think that's too easy. I mean, look at his playing all through the 1960s, there's live shots aplenty, and although I hear a lot of things on any given gig, "fear" is not one of them. What I do hear, though, it that working for Sonny Rollins in the 50s and especially in the 60s, was one weird ass gig. There are stories aplenty of Sonny being, shall we say, a "not nice" person to work for/with. And he's on record of saying that in the 50s, during his worse period of addiction, that he did some things that he remains deeply ashamed of (and knowing what junkies can do, who knows what that entails...and really, who cares?) When he retired this last time, he really was looking to quit playing altogether, went to India, not to see the Maharishi for a weekend, but to study yoga, figured that would be his new life, a yoga instructor. Stayed several months, I believe. Came back home yadaydayada, there the "famous" picture of a happy healthy Sonny mowing his yard, peace at last, serenity through yardwork, we've all been there, at least some of us have, and I will personally vouch for the therapeutic value of it. Point of all this just being taht I think that Mr. Rollins reached a point inside himself where he decided that he needed to play the saxophone, but he did not want to become the weirdass nastyfuck that he knew he could become if he jut went along unfiltered. I think he decided, rightly or wrongly, that in order to have both, he was going to ahve to do things differently this time, and that meant staying in the practice room and not going out into the Big World with hot dangerous bands and making records like his life depended on it, because by this point he knew that they didn't. He's been back 40+years now, and if you're interested enough to go looking, there's still those times when he's freakin' inter-dimensionally supra-genius. And only in the last decade or so,maybe not even that, has he appeared to have even the faintest interest in living in Perfect Sonny Rollins World. To you it might be motivated by fear, to him it might just be him finding what works best for him to have his own peace of his own mind. I'm not at all troubled by his decision, and I'm not really troubled by people not digging whatever it is they think they hear out of him over the last 40 years. But it does kind of bug me that when somebody like Jackie McLean or Sonny, or whoever decides to put the preservation of their own sanity ahead of their "art" that fanpeople scoff and feel betrayed. They don't owe "us" anything.