JSngry

Hello, hard-won victories. Hello, mommas don't let your babies grow old having to sell records/shit gigs to people who only want you to be one thing just in order to stay sort of alive until you have to make the next one(s). Hello, true personal dignity eats "art" for lunch - if it can ever get the damn food to the table. Hello, this isn't sometimes/maybe, this is always.

Blaine Nye Nellie Bly Joe Milazzo

Got this to hear the pianola/piano roll, and whoa...glad I did. Don't know too much at all about the things, but apparently Stravinsky was into them, and supervised the creation of the roll itself. It was not one of those "recording" rolls, which simply "recorded" a live performance, but was instead a form of transcription of the score onto the roll, no live playing required (although to be played, I guess there is a role - no pun intended - for somebody to control certain aspects of the playback). The results are immediately attention-getting, and, for me, fascinating. Not sure how it's accomplished, but the result is the piece being played significantly more percussively than any orchestral version I've heard, pretty damn intense. Couple that with the mono-timbre created by all parts being played on the same instrument, and the effect is pretty disorienting, in a good way. It really is a "new" way to hear a familiar piece. I know Conlon Nancarrow's work, and it's tempting to look at this as a precursor/inspiration/whatever, but I don't think it is. Nancarrow's work begins with a forced suspension of disbelief that you're hearing a piano being "played" live. This one doesn't force disbelief, if dares you to believe, and it's a dare pretty easily accepted, and to great end. Maybe, in the end, a novelty, or just a historical artifact. But for an immediate "shock value" that really, immediately, brings out the inherent "jazzy" and/or "primitive" impact that was so shocking at the time, it works wonderfully.

It's a public service, really.

Grapefruit are for lovers.

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Perhaps McLean's deepest/ultimate "quest" was to reconcile/resolve that?

Different decisions, different results, that's all I'm saying. Not just about drugs, but about "place". In fact, mostly about "place", geographic, occupational, and, yes, personal/self - I once was this, I will no longer be that, I will now be THIS. The "emotional springs of his music-making" have always seemed to me to be very much about that - who am I, where am I, why am I, and what am I doing with/about it. In that regard, nothing changed. What changed - as I hear it - was different answers to those questions brought about by the decision to answer them in a different way than before, to not look for new outcomes from the same answers. For that matter, we had different answers to those questions in the '50s that we did in the '60s. Not as dramatic of changes, but definitely a progression out of/away from NYC Junkie Jazzman. Aspirations not yet realized, but definitely in the mix, final break eventually made, and never really re-paired. "Quest" perhaps realized/ended, but plenty of meaningful life left. Don't know if we're going around in circles or not, but I'm not looking for an argument. There was a change, we both know it, we both hear it, you're less compelled to listen to it after it happened than me, nothing to argue, really.

More or less what I meant by this: Maybe he needed it. McLean made a lot of personal decisions along the way, and the whole "professional" thing was one of them. Him having never seemed one to make such decisions lightly or frivolously, I'll give him the respect (or if we want to be careless, "benefit of the doubt") to allow for him making this one too, and for having made it without carelessness or frivolity. "Professionalism" is a tricky thing anyway. Hodges could be drunk as fuck - and play like it too. Some of those live dates, he's pretty damn sloppy, and is getting by on reflex. But such reflexes! Lockjaw, geez, this guy worked in the office as an agent for crissakes. and by all accounts, was excruciatingly profession as straw boss of the Basie band. and was not above playing by rote, his rote, but still, sometimes you hear him coasting in that uniquely Jaws' way. But sometimes, holy shit, blood WILL be spilled. Sonny Stitt, geez, that guy was all kinds of a mess, yet there he was, always there, and always playing something that made the audience feel they got their money worth. The guy had more coast in him than North, Central, & South America combined, but when the mood struck him, knives out, teeth bared, we're on. Oscar Peterson...just not relevant to my lifestyle, but when I call him a professional, it's with the highest regards, because like it or not, he was doiing his thing, which was doing that thing. So my lack of usage for him is just because that thing does not particularly resonate with me.It's not with Oscar Peterson being safe, predictable, and professional. To be honest, there's nothing wrong with Oscar Peterson at all. He just doesn't reach me, period. Different strokes, etc. My point just being...there's more to a musician's life than making records and playing gigs. There's the same everyday responsibilities and pressures that most all of us have, food, clothing, shelter, family, self, etc. So if a player I respect decides to deal with all of that, hey, go ahead on and do that, handle your business, have a life you can live. Don't be another cliche. Be a professional at life, too, dig? I would just rather frame the evaluation in terms other that "professional", because that seems wholly irrelevant to the point of is somebody reaching me or not.

Don't think that at all, but did think that "professional Jackie McLean I don't need" was a rather flip phrase with implications far beyond a mere relativization of enjoyment. I don't think that you were thinking along those lines, not at all, but...I mean, jeez, I don't need Oscar Peterson either, but the last complaint I would have against him is that he's "professional"...that's not a valid bitch against any working musician, not in my world. I mean, no matter with whatever else I might find not to my liking about anybody's work, being "professional" is not going to be one of them. Hell, that's the one thing I go to to find respect when all else fails, and it's not a complaint. So the choice of the word in your assessment seemed wrong-spirited to me, although I would be equally baffled and disappointed if it in fact was. It seems, perhaps, careless. But as far as Jackie's personal situation in the 60s....I know the picture that Spellman painted, but Jackie himself has made some perhaps low-profile statements (plural) that he really didn't get fully away from drugs and the related disturbances they bring until right around the time that he decided to take the Hartt gig, that that was when he cleaned up once and for all, and decided to pursue a normal economic life, which in turn became a rewarding life for him. Me myself, I have no problem with the earlier urgency being replaced by a more objective approach to his vocabulary, because that's where his life was, just as his voice from earlier times was informed by where his life was then. I think that in the earliest Steeplechases, you get the playing of a man just feeling his way back, and that in the recordings being discussed here, you get the sound of a man who has come back - as well as the sound of a man who has left some things behind quite willingly and knowingly. Does it rip one's guts out? Well, no, not usually. Does it need to? Again, no. Is it understandable that by not doing so we have less of an immediate visceral reaction? Of course it is. But is it correct to dismiss/dislike it on the grounds that it is "professional"? The unspoken corollary to that is that it's better when it's "unprofessional", and not unlike wishing that people would play more "sloppy" (like whoever the old R*B producer was who made the horn players untune so it would sound "blacker"), that's a slippery slope that leads to bad places for all involved.

Our uses for them are strictly esthetic...and militaristic, in times of direct combat. But mostly esthetic.

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Eat them?

Sugar Lips Rudolph Lipschitz That Guy With The Shit-Eatin' Grin http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/29166/origin-of-s-t-eating-grin

Joan Lunden Joan of Arc Circle

I don't think that Jackie McLean was "commercially successful" by any but the most alienated guidelines. He just lived and got his personal shit together enough to not be another stereotype.

High school biology!

As in, ok, you lived your live one way for a long time, not necessarily the way you wanted to, but, you know, and then finally a chance comes along to not be in a perpetual state of panic/uncertainty, you can live like a "normal person", or at least your best facsimile of one, and ok, probably coulda have happened some other way in some other time, but it didn't, so, why not? Indeed, why not. So you get away from the panic/uncertainty and maybe your "art" "loses" something. Big fucking deal, you're alive doing good work in another world, passing it on, and maybe not everybody who got off on your personal struggle being translated into music keeps buying your records. "Professional" Jackie McLean sounds like somebody who's no longer in a panic, so...thrills to be had elsewhere for those who are looking for that kind of thing. In the meantime, survival is boring once you start taking it for granted? Who gives a damn for losers? Jazz fans! But they don't love a winner, especially when he's thinner. Having said that...yeah, sure, later McLean does not, in generally, rip your balls off. And I have been relatively casual about acquiring the catalog. But I have acquired it, and I can't really say that my reaction to any of it has been some variant of, oh, Jackie's got his life together, fuck what that sounds like, gotta run, you understand, call me if you ever get fucked up again.. I'm just like, hey, J-Mac, glad you made it, nice to hear from you, Stay strong, ok? And then, later, RIP, much love and just as much thanks. Or are we saying that the only merit in McLean's playing has ever been the element of it that was driven by personal problems? If so, then he was fatally flawed as an artist and did us all a disservice by continuing to live and record. In that case, hey, fuck him, the selfish prick. Sometimes - sometimes - I think that "jazz fans" are jazz fans because they're too chickenshit to take the beating themselves.

Maybe he needed it.

OK, so this LP gets shit on a lot, and I get it ... it's of its time and parts are pretty awful. Still, I remember an interview with Jackie at the time this came out in Down Beat in which he's very frank about trying to aim for commercial airplay. So it is what it is.But I have to say, I always found this track quite emotionally affecting -- the narration is heartfelt, Jackie's horn sounds like Jackie's horn, and I even like the background vocals. Your mileage may vary (and probably does), but this track means something to me -- I'm not even quite sure what exactly it mean or why it gets to me, but I hear the poignancy and am glad to have been moved. Maybe it's partly a meta-thing: Like Jackie McLean reaching middle age and living in a culture with ears of stone and having to make a commercial record because America doesn't get it and won't reward the "real" Jackie McLean. But even on a fundamental musical level I dig this cut as is. Yeah, that cut got to me too. The rest of the record, I've tried for years to get traction on any sort of emotional tirade against evilness, and the best/only thing I can do is that's it's just not a very good record, period, that Jackie could have had a better record of that type made for him, it just didn't happen, didn't get the right people, the right direction, not evil, just bad. Also, put me in for Nature Boy. There's some tear-jerkers on that one.

Not really feeling the need for the Sal Salvador "fusion" dates, but other than that...not sure if I have the entire catalog on vainly, but do have most of, but it's used vinyl, in some cases well-used vinyl, so this will be an upgrade. And it's a fine, fine catalog.

Duchess Of Prunes Prunella Scales Scaletron Industries, Ltd

Peeling? An orange?

O.V. Wright Opie Taylor Apollo Creed

The local-est Sears actually does a fair amount of business, lots of "working people" of various demographics still come there for tool and clothes and such. Diehards, too. Hell, I put a Diehard in all my family's cars. But one store is not a national trend, no doubt. Is Sears still considered a leading window into consumer credit? I know for the longest, Sears would give you a credit card when nobody else would, lots of young families went there because of that. Anyway, I like used Sears for lawnmowers and such. Buy that little service plan, run it until it drops, take it back in, get a new one, no questions asked. Two for the price of one, really.