JSngry

I bet he was more excited about the return of Joe Albany.

If you think that's weird, you should see the entire movie.

I like how the band does Beatle Bows at the end!

She's baaaaacccckkkk....and maybe a little cleaned up. Can anybody cover for me? I got a ballgame to go to this evening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msU9ffzSAfA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA7ggOdw-BI&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geTO-ezljd8

Couldn't help it....

Pepitone was one of the first, maybe the first, to use a blow dryer (or "hair dryer" as it was called then, like it was the equivalent of a beauty shop tool) in the locker room, that much I remember. When he got traded to the Astros, that was a BIG deal.

Never knew him as a Yankee. I only knew him as a White Soc & a surprisingly frequently delivering Strat-O-Matic card. Got to be where I always wanted to be the White Sox, just to see what Moose would do. That, and he always seemed to be sweating in his baseball card photos, at least how I remember it. Those are all very fond remembrances, by the way.

T-Bone Walker - Very Rare Weird record...but plenty of Fathead, as well as a little Dizzy, Mulligan, Al Cohn, Herbie Mann, & Zoot Simms. And oh by the way - Charles Brown and/or James Booker and/or Warren Bernhardt on piano and/or organ. All that, and a big band on some tunes, strings on others, arranged by Dave Matthews, produced by Lieber & Stoller, Bone sounds like he's doing vocals in a booth with headphones listening to tracks. He'd be dead not too much later, if I understand correctly. Good intentions? Probably. Misplaced priorities? Seems to be. A two-record set's worth! And yet, it doesn't suck. It's just not very good. The road to hell, and all that... Weird record.

Sounds interesting. Monk is always good springy. Can't bounce off stuff if there's nothing to bounce off of, eh?

Bobby Bryant was a bold player in general! How is Swallow with the changes, his voice-leading & the shape of his lines? Pretty linear or more angular?

I hope they get all minimalist with their run production. But what are the chances?

Oh, they knew what they were doing all right, some fine musicianship there. The coke thing...well what heroin was to bebop, coke was to L.A. Pop. As far as who paid attention to them, it was mostly a musician thing, especially in those days when the fusioning thing was in the air (both fusion & Fusion). Wayne Shorter taking one of his greatest solos on a Steely Dan Record? Joni Mitchell coming out of left field with chords that said HUH?, and a lot of musicians who just a few years earlier looked down at "rock" were noticing that there was musically literate stuff on the charts and in the shelves now. A lot of people who were coming up as players during that time looked at bebop and said "I can never play that the way it needs to be played", looked at the free thing and said "I can't play that, period...nor do I really want to), but heard this L.A. stuff and said, "hey, there a future to be had, I can actually be encouraged to play well and make some decent money in the process". Rhythm section players in particular got this bug, because it really was their world. And off they went. That was then, of course. Everything's done with computers now.

Nah, I don't expect everybody to know anything..."L.A. Pop"...that sound (and those players) that kinda get dot-connected from Steely Dan to Toto to Quincy Jones Michael Jackson, etc. Rod Temperton (quite the talent, actually), that whole "slick-but/and-sharp grooving pop" of the day. Very "prominent" sound for a while, maybe the term has more meaning to people who played attention to what all the various players were up to during that time, I don't know. I've not not looked at music through the lens of who the players are since I was, like, 14-15 or so, once I learned that some of the same people were on a lot of records by a lot of different people, and how did that happen? Anyway, all these guys were kind of like a 2nd Generation Wrecking Crew, only the music was not Teenage Symphonies To God. It was more about getting/having gotten laid than wanting to get laid, if you know what I mean. Me, I'm ambivalent towards a whole lot of it, (Steely Dan, YES, Toto...uh...no?) but knowing now what I do about making and playing on high-quality pop records and how easy it is to NOT "get it right", much less get it EXACTLY right, I've come to appreciate what was being done, and why. I mean, you listen to Jeff Porcaro & Abe Laboriel hook up on that one tune up above, and the slink is definitely there. I like slink, and I like that. Some people will sneer and call it "slick", like slick is an intrinsically negative quality that is to be avoided at all costs (been there myself, done that, and...yawn). Slick is not a bad word in my book. Slick just means that you got enough in reserve to not sweat just for the sake of sweating, that you have options and aren't afraid to use them. As part of a well-balanced set of survival tools, there's definitely a place for slick.

Same guys still, eh? Glad to hear it! Continuity, not so much of that going around these days, lots of "projects", which is cool, but there's something about having a group stay together for years, even if it's not 24/7/365(6) that there's no substitute for.

Mid-80s Dallas jazz featuring (on most cuts) Henry Franklin, Marchel Ivery, Claude Johnson, Paul Guerrero and my long-time aider & abettor Ira Bassett. And a nice group of Claude Johnson originals. That cat wrote some good stuff.

The dry wit of Joe Maddon:

It's ear candy, and damn fine ear candy at that. Not the best ear candy, but better than much. Not everybody likes ear candy, I get that. But "crap" it is not, unless by "crap" you mean that it's something for which you have a visceral dislike, in which case, dog bites man, next? But if you can prove "crap" in any objective sense, as in poor performance (no...), lack of ingenuity in songwriting (no...quite clever, actually), amateur production (no....), then you're left with "crap" just meaning that you don't like it because it doesn't appeal to you. And maybe it's not supposed to. It's an L.A. Pop album. All the way, nothing but. And maybe it's not too shabby because Herbie actually wanted to do it, to make that kind of a record. Some people actually like making that type stuff. And oh well about that. And it's not an intellectual defect, although maybe failing to recognize a basic personality difference is... Sometimes it's fun to just go naked in the sun, get laid, chill out, and just be happy about being happy. Mindlessly, vacantly happy. Failure to do this at least once in a while makes a motherfucker get all weird and shit.

Just the right. I've got this really jakeleg homemade way of typing, and I always use the right Shift key to capitalize. so when I start and then stop to consider, sometimes the finger does not lift. Takes about 10 seconds or so, but then that little Great Gazzoo noise happens, and up it pops, that popup thing does. Try it at home, kids. fun for the whole family!