JSngry

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.

Also coming up - a Japan-only, (mostly?) crowdsource funded collection of Brasilified remixes.

Exactly. Inside moving out. You can't say that about, for instance, Archie Shepp. Archie had some licks, was a helluva blues palyer (still is, if he's still playing...) and was not unconversant with playing changes, but by no stretch of the imagination could you say that he was a fluent bopper. No way. And it didn't matter, he had other things going on that were more important to him at the time. But Archie Shepp was not starting from the inside the same way that Dolphy, Rivers, Hill, etc. were, which is why he could never have made an Out To Lunch type (although in its own way, Live In San Francicso sorta-kinda comes close, but...not really) record, just as Dolphy could never have made a Magic Of Juju type record. "Could never have made" not in the sense of being incapable of, but rather in the sense of direction not headed that way. Dolphy was referencing Gazelloni while Shepp was pointing out Rufus & Hambone. In the end, it does all come together. But only in the end. At the time we're looking at, there were plenty of guys coming at it like Archie, and there were plenty of guys coming at it like Eric. Actually, maybe, for a quick minute, less guys coming at it like Eric, becuase the immediacy of the times led plenty of people to think that there wasn't time for all that, we gotta get it done now. But over the long haul, skills win out over urgency, at least in terms of survival. Ideally, you have and maintain both, but... So, yeah, I don't think that BN 'avant-garde" is any more or less "real" or anything else than "anybody else's" "avant-garde". It's all honest music. To return to the original topic...I'll not get into "overrated" becuase that's a tough call for me to make for reasons that Clifford gave earlier, but I will talk about "underappreciated", ok? And for me, the prime BN example of that is Some Other Stuff. Sure we all love Evolution because JackieLee & LeeJackie, but hello Wayne, hello crazy-ass genius Newarkian frontline, hello speaking the same language and not just reading off the same page, hello Herbie Hancock going there (although, for me, the best part of Evolution is Bobby, Bobby in those days was pretty damn open - and with skills out almost everybody's ass, although geez, what I wouldn't have given to hear Walt Dickerson afforded the Lion special attention). Both good, but one is a "cult classic" and the other...hell, you could always find an LP of Evolution if you looked, it hung in there a good long while. Some Other Stuff...where is the love, and where is the cult status? Like the song says, that's for me!

We're talking about starting fom the inside and moving outward. Not everybody did that.

Have you heard Eric with Roy Porter (or, even, with Chico Hamilton early on)? Sam held a gig with T-Bone Walker (and reveals it pretty strongly on that 1961 Tadd Dameron BN cut). Andrew's Warwick album? Yes, they were all very "inside" at one point. They started playing bebop, the same as most everybody else their age!

Hill, Dolphy, and Rivers were all coming from the inside going out, not just in terms of energy, but in terms of background and training. Even Cecil had such a strong formal conception going, his was "energy music" as a result of the execution of some very definite structures. Compare that to the "New Thing" players, very few of them had the degree of "formality" in their background that the BN guys of the time did. So it was going to be a different music, at least if it was going to be honest music, which I think - in all cases - that it was. "Last ditch" seems kind of backwards to me in terms of them opening the label up for the already running streams to flow in different directions. You don't dig a ditch for a river, a river goes where it wants to go, the question is, are you going to swim, drown, or just move to higher/drier ground. Classical tonality/primal blues...no need to abandon either ship upon the identification of the other. You also gotta look at the label being sold when it was. After the Liberty deal, things changed a lot. You got the two Eddie Gale sides, but...different label, already, almost immediately. Even the Andrew Hill records were different. Wayne...was Wayne. Schizophrenia followed by Super Nova...hello Duke Pearson! but that was a different type of Avant-Garde, already. There's really no such thing as "the" Avant-Garde except in marketing...it's really a state of mind, not any one "style". Ok, if you look at it like must be either/or, then, ok, that's one thing. But music doesn't really work like that. Time doesn't work like that, ya' know? Lots of things happen in the same time/space, and different speeds existing in the same space are inevitable. Hell, I'll even say that they're desireable. If everything is moving at the same speed, how can you sense motion?

Funny, i went for years recoiling at the mere thought of her. But just within the last few months, the lightbulb, it is coming on. It is an acquired taste, and finally I am beginning to acquire it. I only hope that somebody shows up who will be able to tend to her current needs in a humane manner. With people, you never know what you're gonna get...

On CD, everything was jiggled around, but on LP, New York Is Now was mostly all about Ornette's "let's improvise on the tempo" trip and Love Call had the "swingers". As a result, the former has Elvin stepping all over his dick, out of his comfort zone, and the latter doesn't. Again, the CDs combine the material differently than the LPs, so the impression the create is a different one, perhaps, than the LPs. But the LP of Love Call...whooo-WHEEEE! As far as Elvin stepping on his dick on NYIN, I love it, becuase I love Elvin period, and you can learn a lot about what makes a guy really tick by observing what happens when he's trying to tick but isn't quite getting there. He's trying to variate those tempos, he's really trying, but poor guy, that's just not what he did, or who he was. And when not asked to do that "thing", geez, you can feel the rhythmical sigh of relief. Otherwise, I still can get angry about what the CD does to "We Now Interrupt For A Commercial"...that's not what that piece was. No matter what the reissue board of directors thought about it, they corrupted it in a most fundamental manner, so boo-hiss-BOOGERS on them for that. Besides, the inside photos on the NYIN cover were gorgeous, bright-colory affairs, and they have vanished in the CD incarnation. So my advise is to, if you really care enough to care enough, get those two on LPs, not for whatever sonic debate there might be to be had, but just to get the original presentational impacts. In this case, they are significantly different. But Ornette/Dewey/Haden/Blackwell...has that Trio Paris Concert thing ever been reissued, or did Ornette put the kibosh on that? All I have is a cassette dub that I'm afraid to play any more... That's one long stretch of pure zone right there, you can drop the needle anywhere on the four sides (or since it's a cassette, two sides, and FF/REW) and it all sounds the same, and I mean that in the best possible way. BN "avant garde"...that's a trick subject (and a subjective one too...). They were not ESP or even Impulse!, but they weren't trying to be, really. They weren't there for the guys who were "starting their journey on the other side", so to speak, so, no, that's not there. But - Unit Structures was an incredibly important record becuase it was the first real "presentation" of Cecil's cellular method of structuring his music, which he still uses today. Maybe that's not clear, or even relevant, today, but..just sayin'. You look at what he had released up until then, and whoa, quantum leap. The disagreements are only possible with the gift of retrospect. Conquistador is the Cecil Taylor Quiet Storm record, so I'm thankful for that as well, becuase me and my lady, you know, we like a little jazz between the sheets, if you know what I'm sayin'. Otherwise..how do you make a better Dialogue-type album than Dialogue? In terms of inputs &objectives relative to outcome, I don't see how you do? Now, sure, you could make different records, but with those people, why would you? Would you wnat to hear, say, an album of Joe Chambers material on ESP? Or Marion Brown on Blue Note? Or The All-Seeing Eye on Impulse!? Not really? Different portions of the spectrum, that's all. Terms like "avant-garde", "free jazz", etc./...useful, but only up to the point to where they clarify rather than distract. Bobby Hutcherson vs Karl Berger...two different people, two different stories, two different worlds, really, and each beautiful in their own way on their own terms. But - two different worlds existing in the same world. don't ask me to choose, becuase I won't! On, and Andrew Hill? POD has that "stillness" that comes from its planned "formatlity", so there is that (and a lot of people will go for that, it is not an unattractive quality, see Claude Thornhill), and Black Fire is of course a serious MF, but, for me, my turntable plays Andrew!!! more than any of them. Gilmore, Hutch, Davis, and Joe Chambers...it feels like a working band, although I doubt it was. The bobbing/weaving/push-pulling is about as organic as it ever got on an Andrew Hill record, and for that, I look at Gilmore with a gaze of perpetual grinning happiness.

I like that Horsey Sauce, but discovered Woeber's a while back and that was that.

I love the Ornette BN records with Dewey, JG, and Elvin. Not sure how "perfect" thay are, probably anything but, but that's love for ya'.

Francis Scott Key National Velvet Ann-Mari Thim

Let's hear it for stewardesses!

Bernie Taupin Bennie Maupin The New York Jets

John Poindexter My Little Pony Suede

As does, I think, how "country" Ornette's conception was/is at root.