JSngry

Carl Maria von Weber William "Charcoal" Williams The Kingston Trio

whoa.... http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/2/28/4040560/mlb-tv-auto-renewal-policy I cried until I could cry no more. And then I cried some more. Because I am The Sensitive Motherfucker.

Bud Shank Kevin Bacon Ham Miller http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0588435/

A lot of people have played the instrument a lot of ways, but nobody has played the instrument like Lockjaw Davis. That's all-permeating joy for me, and this is more all-permeating than most.

Bill Evans deserves full credit for his many contributions to KOB, but the notion of "modality" in jazz (and Miles' music in particular, including his prior work with Gil Evans) was around before KOB, so although I'd not want to understate his importance to the outcome, I wouldn't want to overstate it, either. The whole thing was sort of a cumulation of a lot of people's ideas about thinking in terms of scales instead of chord progressions (all in the name of greater freedom, which is pretty ironic considering how now it's "common wisdom" to play over changes thinking in terms of scales, good luck finding anybody thinking melody or rhythm first...), and if Evans was the one to crystallize it all in one brilliant moment, I'd not want to say that he actually invented any of it, either. That's just not what I think happened. As far as Mehldau goes...how far does he go, exactly? Can't say that I've seen him there...but maybe I'm just not looking.

No problem. If that's the most confused I get on any one day, hey...good day!

D.D. Lewis e.e. cummings F.F. Bruce

Why "W"-shaped? Was it promoting something like Woolworth's? Serious question. I've seen those non-round type records before, especially when I was a kid, and if you don't put the needle in the right place, you got a BIG trouble!

Haven't had that problem, but...do you use Firefox? Did you just update to Version 19? I have on one computer but not the other, and on the one that I have, I don't get the usual (old?) HTML code/tag when quoting a post in a reply. It's just there in a different font and indentation, and I have to start typing below it. The first time it happened, I tripped out, WTF, where does the cursor need to be and why, but now, ok, so it shall be, onward, etc. But, yeah, something's afoot!

Harold Melvin Artie Malvin Molvin James

I'm certainly willing to listen & find out. I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to be like that 70s BN album, which to me sounds like Steroid Cocktail Music,,,just not for me at all...take away the Steroid Sensation and maybe it might be?

No love for Dawn Elliott?

People Who Would Comprise A Tenfold Increase The Ben Folds Five Huckleberry Finn

And other places with more immediate contextually relevancy. Which on the one hand sucks, because it's a drag to hear about how the young guys back in the day didn't really want to hear, say, Coleman Hawkins because he was "old-fashioned", but on the other hand, that's the cost of doing business with trying to form your own Now rather than stepping into somebody else's Present, and I think we've seen by now the cost of excessive reverence of The Ancestors' temporal deeds rather than of their eternal spirit. Life ain't always nice. but is it supposed to be? Always? Probably not, eh?

All I've heard is this one, early-70s Blue Note side, and...I really don't like it. Really don't. But the way you describe the RCA stuff sounds like something I might want to hear at least once. Does she sing on that stuff? Sounds like the type of thing where singing might give the piano playing a more full context?

Don't forget Herbie's Chicago mentor Chris Anderson, who probably was the filter for Herbie's interest in Farnon and Riddle (Herbie may even have said that in an interview; Anderson was drenched in the world of film and vocal scoring). In any case, Anderson's trio recordings for Jazzland and VeeJay need to be heard with that in mind as well as for their own lovely virtues. No doubt. And it's funny, when I first read Herbie saying that, I was like, "REALLY?", like, uh, sure Herbie, whatever, but then I started checking out Riddle, the ballads in particular, and there would be all the reharmonization passages on very familiar standards, things that went WAY out of the original chords, and, yeah, ok, I can hear it now, sure can. Farnon's taken me a little longer to get to, just because of availability, but from what I have heard, yeah, I can hear that too. And if Chris Anderson was into that, then I'd have no doubt that Herbie picked up it from him, because Herbie, especially young Herbie, seemed to be one of those guys who would pick up on anything and everything and tinker with it until he could fit it in, one of those type of guys.

There's plenty of "Post-Evans" pianists who have developed their own things and who can be - and probably are - influences on their own. Just as there are some pre-Evans & concurrent-with-Evans pianists about whom the same can be said. Just because a guy plays a cluster-voiced minor 9th chord or moves his lines in tight block chords with a little interior movement doesn't necessarily mean that he's genuflecting at the altar of Bill Evans, if you know what I mean. The citing of Mal Waldron by Mehldau was not ill-advised, nor would have been Hancock, Corea, Paul Bley/Keith Jarrett, Tristano (the REAL composer of "Watermelon Man"!!!), or even McCoy (seems like all anybody associates with McCoy these days is bangy-vampy quartal chords, but that's just wrong. Go back and listen to Inception & Reaching Fourth). Evans certainly was a man who crystallized a certain confluence of things that were "in the air" at a certain time, but he was not the only one feeling them, nor was he the only one to act on them, nor was his route the only feasible route to go forth from that particular juncture. And thinking of Miles - he was into Ahmad Jamal so much, and then he wanted Evans, and I think in both cases you gotta look at those affections from a harmonic standpoint, factor in Gil Evans, and realize that Miles was into a certain harmonic quality from the very beginning until the very end. Even when Miles was playing R&B-based pop music, the chords were always more than "basic" jazz chords. So I think it might be safe to consider the possibility that Miles got Evans in the bad to further Miles' own designs rather than to think that Miles hired Evans because Miles "needed" what Bill Evans was bringing because he couldn't get to it himself, or something like that. Hell, Gil was Evans enough for Miles, as time would show.

Wouldn't care to elaborate too much, no, but there's a tendency by some people (and they're everywhere, not just here) to look at "influences" and then turn that around into "hey, you'd never be who you are today without XYZ", which, yeah, ok, but really? It's like a clingy parent who expects to take crdit for their kid becoming an astronaut because the parent bought the kid model rockets. LOTS of kids build model rockets, and lots of kids learn a lot from their parents, but they got that astronaut gig because of who they became after learning how to build a model rocket, dig? Call it the fan equivalent of the Maury Wilson syndrome. Bill Evans had a voice, sure, and he created a niche, definitely. But a lot of people - a lot of people - heard it, dealt with it, and incorporated it into everything else they had heard and incorporated and then moved on. To that end, Mehldau's comments seem a little snarky, but so does everything about Mehldau. They also seem not unreasonable, either, becuase, seriously, sould you imagine Bill Evans playing with the Plugged Nickel band? Really? You can also ask if you can imagine the Plugged Nickel band playing the way they played w/o Bill Evans spending those six months in Miles' band, and the answer is probably not exactly like that, but there was enough other stuff happening before during and immediately after that they'd most likely have been in a place similar to where they were with or without Bill Evans. Which is not to say that Bill Evans was not "important", he was. But he was in no way the Great Father In The Sky to all that came after him in Miles' bands. That's just silly. You know who else Herbie claimed as influences? Robert Farnon & Nelson Riddle. So...yeah,

Johnny Edwards Andy Etchebarren Sarah

Elsie The Borden Cow Mister Ed Arnold Ziffel

UH-oh!

Don't know about all that, but I always thought that the Bill Evans influence on Herbie Hancock was but one of many, and that whatever common ground they had in Impressionism soon (very soon) split off into two distinct paths, Herbie's being the more exploratory harmonically. Hell, I even remember a review of a Miles gig ca. 1963 or so where the reviewer said that Herbie Hancock was becoming "jazz's first Impressionistic pianist" or some such. THAT was hyperbole, to put it mildly, but by the time Herbie started playing with Miles, he was playing stuff that Bill Evans would not have played, for whatever reason, and it just went on from there.I really can't imagine Bill Evans on, say, "Orbits", never mind "Black Comedy". Not that I need to, or that Bill Evans needed to. But this whole thing of "influence" turning into "ownership of voice" is something to which I can not subscribe...as is Down Beat these days.