JSngry

Yeah, I've had a headache all day long...work has been a pain here as well, so this is constructive avoidance. Here's a thought - Eddie Gale on Liberty-Era Blue Note vs Alan Shorter on MGM-era Verve, Frances Wolff vs Esmond Edwards, the battle of the avant-garde trumpeters...what kind of pissing match was that? Who got there first, and who said, oh shit, they got X, I better go get Y to keep up? I'll see your Ghetto Music and raise you an Orgasm! HA - I got a Black Rhythm Happening! AAAAARGH, You got me there, CURSES! I jest, of course, becuase, well...it's funny to think about it in those terms. Most times a record's origins are somewhat obviously traceable, even if only by reverse engineering the known networking of all concerned. But those two guys, those two producers, those two lables, all in about the same timeframe...wow. The mind reels...I mean, ok Esmond Edwards surely knew Wayne & Alan both, but jeez, that does not explain Orgasm, much less Orgasm on Verve. The Eddie Gale BNs are perfectly logical presentations by comparison!

Would love to hear it!

That's tempting, even almost at that price...in some ways Fresh is still my favorite Lowe album, and this looks to be right in there with that. Maybe if I pick up a good wedding gig (file under be careful what you wish for) I can use some of the proceseeds to get this to wash the dirt off...

Especially unusual as post-Lion BNs. Wolff is credited as producer on Ghetto Music, with no producer being listed on Black Rhythm Happening (which is some more "Entertainment From Transamerica Corporation"). Wolff was doing mostly (but not only) the Lonnie Smith/Grant Green/Lou Donaldson-type stuff, but would likely have met/known Gale from Unit Structures...and he did take up with Ornette after Lion left. But I've heard it said more than once that his heart was in the organ band/neighborhood bar type stuff, that was he really was really feeling. Still, yeah, has Gale ever told the story of how he got that deal? Gotta be a story there. Lots of people on those two records, lots of people.

Black-note Transamerica? My label says United Artists (cover says Liberty, of course)...I've got some other things that say Transamerica, but this isn't one of them. Another variance, perhaps? That's interesting about the blue label NYIN, gotta be a story there, it and Love Call didn't hang on too long, relatively speaking...my Love Call is an old school Blue Note Liberty label, but the back cover says it all - "Blue Note Records - Entertainment From Transamerica Corporation". And it's a cutout!

Yeah, my Conquistador is a "black note" UA, finally found it used for four bucks. It stayed in print, just wasn't stocked nearly as readily, at least not in these parts. Most places I looked in would have Unit Structures, Silent Tongues, and, maybe, Looking Ahead. I think maybe they liked the cover better on Unit Structures. Can't blame them for that! Always seemed like when I was in the mood for Conquistador, it was not on the shelves, and when I wasn't, it was. Go figure. The key to what you say is "if you wanted to get your hands dirty"...not everything stayed in print, and not all rack-jobbers kept the same inventory. You had to hunt, as you know, in some unlikely places. Some "special orders" from a local mom and pop would take, like 24 hours, some would take 2-3 weeks, and some never came in at all. No way to predict it either, I special ordered that Bird Onyx LP from some car stereo place in Longview, Texas across the street from the liquor store where I worked one summer, they also "sold records" and had a sign, "Don't See It? We Can get It". I mean this place was about the size of a hot dog stand, and they got it in, like, overnight, less than 24 hours. What kind of a rack jobber that services hot dog stand-sized car stereo places in Longview, Tx is gonna have Onyx inventory on hand (in 1974!) to hot-shot over to the store? That one always WTF?-ed me, still does. Something like New York Is Now, I've only seen first pressings of that, and I got mine in a cutout bin, a remnant of the Liberty Purge. Don't know how or why, bookeeping manuver or actual optimistic sales projection (thre's an actual "business expense" angle to this that only somebody who's actually done it, like chuck, can fully appreciate), but Impulse! seemed to be good about not deleting catalog for a very long time. Also not sure if everything was re-ran equally, but again, investment in deep catalog can pay off in quantity and over time, or used to, if you have the resources to stay afloat long enough. As can getting your hands dirty.

Funky.

Record club editions! Fantastic! Do you know which record club they were made for? The "big three" I remember were Columbia, RCA, & Capitol. A little later, Record Club Of America (no obligation! EVER!). Come to think of it, Record Club Of America was where I got my first Trane record, Transition...funky ass pressing on the second side of it too, but that's ok, I only played Side 1 anyway. Would also like to know how many of those record club editions actually got ordered vs how many were pressed...that's an economic issue that has nothing to do with music...again, write-offs...

You'll be glad you did. Hemphill was a boss.

Never saw a purple/yellow. Interesting. Would like to know the numbers of each pressing, and whether any edition got more than one run. That's one that, if I saw it retail at all, it was one copy, and when it was gone, it was not restocked. What about Everywhere? Not sure, but I think I've only seen that one in black.red. Did either of these get the MCA gold-stamped on the cover treatment? I often wonder if they did the whole catlaog like that, kinda like one last fling/dump/whatever.

Again, sir, you are correct. I can only hope to someday have your keen, concisive grasp of the obvious. My mind gets too cluttered with all the follow-up scenarios & corollaries to be of much use to anybody, especially myself. Mentor me, Scott. Please mentor me. Show me how you do it.

Geez, you're right Scott. That's just how it works, exactly. A straight linear process, read the review, buy the record. Works evertime, simple as that. My bad, sorry. I always try to complicate things.

No, Jim does't say no, Jim says know. I've read the old magazines, checked the old album sleeves, read the old Schwans, and most entertainingly, lived in the old cuttout bins to see how it all played out. Let's not confuse "relevant in the press" with "relevant at the cash register". Ask the AG jazz musicians of the time - any of them, of any ilk - how many records they were selling and how many gigs they were getting. And then ask Ramsey Lewis or Gene Harris or Lou Donaldson the same question. Coltrane, outlier, and for pretty obvious reasons. Shepp, probably the same, but for different reasons. Anybody else, hey, remember that 3rd pressing of Three For Shepp? No? And let's not confuse Albert Lion recording Cecil Taylor with John Hammond recording Prince Lasha, Burton Greene, Sonny Murray, etc. For that matter, let's not confuse Albert Lion recording Cecil Taylor twice with Albert Lion recording The Three Sounds eighty bajillion times. And for sure, let's not confuse Compulsion with Grass Roots.

While we're at it...let's look at Contemporary. They did Cecil, the debuted Ornette, and they had a good set of Sonny Simmons with and without Prince Lasha. Was any of that simply driven by the hopes for a big payday? I'm cynical about a lot of things, but hell - Les Koenig recorded two albums of Vernon Duke's classical compositions (they are nothing like his pop sonmgs, btw) and released all those Andre Previn records. I'd never discount the advantages/motivations of tax-writeoffs, but when somebody loses money on something they believe in that they pretty much know is going to be a no-go sales-wise, hey. More power to them, for all of it.

I bought this stuff in the 70s, and the BN stuff was spotty. The Ornette Golden Circles were always there. The others, not there. Unit Structures, readily available. Conquistador, not so much. Complete Communion, always there. The other two, no way. Find the Schwann catalog where Liberty did a huge, ginormous, mass deleion of the new labels they had acuired over the last year or so. It's in 1967, I think. Chuck would know better than me. It will make you cry, although it explained the contents of the cutout bins for the next 5-6 years, which did not make me cry. UA culled even further in the 70s, but that Liberty purge....ouch. ESP kep[t showing up, though, somewhere. Bootlegs or not, I don't know. I've read the book aboutht he label, and still am not convinced one way or the other about Stollman. But I had no trouble buying the stuff in 1976 or so. It was there, most of it. Savoy - keep in mind that Savoy was in the process of becoming a pretty successful Gospel label and was still owned by Herman Lubinsky. "Tax write-off" explains many things...but he got the right guy to do it in Bill Dixon, that's for sure.

Sorry, but I can't buy that even a little. There has never been a record executive in history that ran a multi-million dollar company that said "fuck money, I've got a legacy to build!" Alfred was no fool, and by the mid 60's it was pretty clear the direction Jazz had moved in. The Three Sounds comparison is trite at best. There were outliers, but AG was the main attraction. You might as well have refused to sign a Hair Metal band in the 80's while continuing to look for the next Jim Croce. Sorry, but that is all kinds of wrong. First - nobody's saying that anybody was saying "fuck money". Second - The Three Sounds kept Blue Note solvent, so they were anything but outliers. Third - no, the "main attraction", as you put it, was in "soul jazz" in general. That was what was selling records in real quantity. Coltrane was the outlier in terms of jazz sales, not The Three Sounds, or Ramsey Lewis. Even columbia's go-to guy Miles was losing sales with all those now-classic Second Quintet records. Fourth - both Lieberson & Lion were both open about selling records and building a legacy with stuff that doesn't sell well right away, if at all. This is no secret. It's the foundation of the conept of "deep catalog", of having your hits and having your items that might sell a relatively few copies a year, but keep selling those few copies for years on end. Finally (and again) - look at the direction of Blue Note catalog after Lion sold to Liberty.

That is a great record, and to think of it as Improvisation-Rooted 20th Century Classical Percussion Music is...if you need a label for it, that one's is as good as anything else, and better than most.

Wait - Lion when on a Free Jazz Spree because AG records were selling like hotcakes, better than Three Sounds & such? Hardly! Look at what BN became after Liberty took over - that was staying a relevant player in the market. Signing Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, & Don Cherry when they did wasn't some random attempt to grab market share - none of those guys had any then, really. Cecil wasn't working at all, Ornette hardly any, and Cherry was already beginning to live the life of a gypsy. Sure, they all had "names", but they did not sell records in any remarkable quantity. Does anybody really think that Lion was in the storeroom packing copies of Unit Structures thinking "yah baby, here comes the money NOW!!!" What it was, I think, was Lion recognizing that these were proven artists with something significant to say within the jazz tradition, and he wanted them documented on his label. Call it an ego move or a vanity move if you want, that's not necessarily wrong (either factually or "morally") best as I can tell, but Lion approached his label the same way Goddard Lieberson did at Columbia - one eye on moving the product, one eye on builing a meaningful cultural legacy, and quite often/generally using different artists for each end. Good thing he had two eyes!

Willis Jackson Todd Bridges Bayete

Look for Marshall Royal's autobiography. Helluva good read, and the "voice" in the book matches that of the horn damn near exactly.

Rusty Kuntz Inhabitants Of Orchestraville The Longines Symphonette

Ok, fianlly, maybe neither underrated, unknown, nor unloved, but far from universally acknowledged, much less acclaimed, but dammit, if that tenor sound does not get to you in some form or fashion...are you really there? Here's a proposition - somebody make a "best of" compilation of Jug's pre- & post-prison Prestige work and then let's play contrast and compare. Nothing will be setlled, but it would be one helluva damngood party.

Underrated? How about virtually unknown? How about almost unknown? How about both underrated, all but unknown, and all but unloved except by those who embrace the scourned? And finally(?) how about "I thought he only made records for Blue Note?!?!?!"

I'd like to think so, but...where? Once the label got sold to Liberty, that changed everything, I think. Woody Shaw's demo session got lost for years, Cowell's Brilliant Circles, geez, that's a record that in a perfect world so should have been made for Blue Note, the only reason Booker Ervin's great The In-Between got released on BN was that Liberty moved him there from Pacific Jazz (not that that wasn't a good call on their part)...European labels were beginning to open up, but this was a time when imports were not exactly common. You look at the whole sustainable in-house tradtition thing, the guys who were primed to make that move ended up not being candidates of interest for the new label. How does Woody Shaw have to wait until he gets to California to make his "official" debut as a leader? I'm not talking about Blue Note ever being a "cutting edge" "avant-garde" label, that was not going to happen for reeasons already elucidated, but the way they liked to grow talent (and the music) from within pretty much hit a wall once Liberty took over. Wolff & Duke Pearson made a few moves, but...ya' know? When Jackie shows up again, it's on Steeplechase, he's back to playing bebop (more or less) and we get it here on Inner City. When Charles Tolliver & Stanley Cowell start appearing as leaders, it's on their own label, and if Atlantic was really interested (members don't get weary, but owners do, apparently)...Benny Maupin? At that time he coulda been Tyrone Washington with career instincts, one is left to wonder. Chick Corea for that matter (who did make it back to BN as a leader, but not that BN). Vortex, then Solid State...where was the notion of "building a family" and/or "passing the torch" in those labels? One would like to think that a lot of the original Strata-East output could have been Blue Note records if Blue Note had been a benevolent superpower ruled by benevolent supernatural forces instead of a simple business ran by two guys out of an office, one of whom simply ran out of gas and the other whom was not motivated to keep it going without missing a beat. it was a time when a lot of people were giving up and/or redirecting, and that includes labels. But hey, what happened happened for whatever reasons it happened. Same as it always does. The frailities of humans. Never bet against their manifestation.

Thinking this over this evening, I've had the thought that what might be a factor in the division that the BN "avant-garde" seems to precitpitate in some quarters is the very real presence of "20th Century Classical Music" in so much of it. Maybe this was a/the "real" "Third Stream" after all? Is "Third Stream", as a notion anyway, an inherent watering down, a weakening? Or is it simply how shit survives over the long haul? The 20th Century brought ready access to all kinds of musics in a way that had not existed before (and it seems primative compared to how we now have access to even more things even more readily). What was supposed to happen, "jazz" keep being "jazz", "classical" keep being "classical", and hey kids, look, smile, talk, but don't touch, definitely don't fuck, and for damn sure don't have no babies, and if you do, decide up front how they will be raised, becuase you can't have it both ways? And make no mistake, "both ways" are the only ways. 1+1=2, not a new 1. The twain shall meet, but they will be banished after they do? That, it seems to me, is not how it works in a healthy world. Paul Motian had it right afaic. The irony of the rejection by the neo-cons of the 70s "avant-garde" for being too "European" while taxidermitizing a portion of the 60s "avant-garde" that was in much of its basic vocabulary very "European" in the service of creating a fantasy "American Jazz" is not lost. Also not lost is my deep suspisicion of "energy" as being the final determinant/sustainable of pursuable quality. But still/yet, once the rawbluesfunkspiritjuju goes away, is what you have worth keeping? For me, no. But that "thing" comes in many forms, many spirits, many places, many vocabularies. Modern Man embraces them all and proceeds accordingly, tears be damned. And shed. Best as I can see, fusion leads to fission leads back to fusion, etc.Where one is at any given moment is ultimately irrelevant relative to what one chooses to do at any given moment. And then there's the infamous "trainwreck of avant-garde nothingness" still residing deep within the bowels of the label under discussion here. That it was not issued in its time supports the notion that "old Blue Note" was essentially a "progressive conservative" company in terms of music (and that the "post-Lion BN was definitely that - at best - in terms of running a business...and then again, what does it say about an enterprise that did what it did so well that one feels somehow cheated that they didn't do something other than what they did?), somebody who was all for letting the river expand its banks but also of building levees so as not to encourage wholesale flooding and subsequent eradication of the town they helped build, but it's ongoing supression (ok, "supression") and the reactionary characterization of it as something it is definitely not by someboody who really, really should know better (even allowing for superorily informed opinions and such)...ladies and gentlemen, this is a world gone wrong.