JSngry

I almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.

I really do think that Amiri Baraka has significantly more to offer to "the conversation" than does some oil-field racist. Baraka has a starting point, and then some more places to go from it, none of which really end up in a call to Kill All The (pick your poison). The oil-field racists had that as only their staring point, mid-point, and final destination. Most of them, anyway. We're right to call bullshit on Baraka's anti-Semetic rhetoric, but we're wrong to do that and then just walk away without listening for/to the follow-up. This is a man who is far from being always right, but he's far from being always wrong either. At least in my mind. Of course, if we don't want to have a/the conversation, or if we don't want to have THAT conversation, if we just want to hold hands and weep at our collective failed humanity, then yeah, fuck him. But if not him, then it will be somebody else at other some time. It always is. And they're not always as multi-tiered as Amiri Baraka. Your fist fights, you conquered hate that way, eh? Or did you just shut up a loudmouth? Granted, that would be a triumph in and of itself, but it's a helluva loud world. Selective hearing is a survival skill, and actions do speak louder than words. I'll listen for actions, not so much to words, and proceed accordingly. Your mileage will vary, no doubt. Besides, my fists will almost always be overpowered (especially back home, where people still lift heavy loads and such all day every day). My brain, not nearly so much. Gotta play from strength, and, especially, live to fight another day with the best weapons I have. Which are most assuredly not my fists. More to the point, by the time I entered the real world, any able-bodied adult who would talk to like directly to somebody's face in a "general situation" would quite likely have a handful of hurt coming directly from the recipient. This is in no small part to people like Amiri Baraka and other "hateful" people. Like it or hate it, "militant rhetoric" does empower people, and being able to take down your own foe instead of having to look to somebody else to do it for you is not in and of itself a bad thing. And people who lift heavy loads and such all day every day recognize other people who lift heavy loads and such all day every day, if you know what I mean. I get the all-black Vans. Wear them for office work, to gigs with a tux, and for play. Versatility, comfort, and damn good support. Them skateboarders got a good thing going with these things. I'm on my third pair, and have no intentions to look elsewhere for a substitute. DAMN fine footwear.

Didn't mean that at all. I meant that having money, some real money, not just some spare change (in the pocket or in the bank), can go a long way towards erasing a generalized anger and the need to lash out in the hopes of hitting something. A lot of "your own kind" having the same thing can do the same thing, probably more so. Putting money back into your family, your community, etc. beats the hell out of feeling like you're basically there to be somebody else's cash-crop. Having your own economic "there" to which you can go (or at least feel like you have a chance of going) instead of somebody else's. OTOH, money can turn decent-enough people into vile, loathsome, dangerous creatures. And yeah, this holds true for everybody. Either way, it's a hell of an eraser, this money thing is. Too late, I learn this lesson for myself.

Been listening to your versions of the Brazil material, and yes, it is clearer than I've ever ehard it, but there's still the whatever-causes-it thing where the horn players sound like they're playing mutliphonics on every note, some kind of distortion that's affecting the overtones or something...I don't have the knowledge to accurately describe it. I'd love it if somewhere there was a copy of this tape that didn't have that. An earleir generation copy, if one exists. But still - this is the least "muddled" version of this material I've come across. Again, thanks for sharing!

I believe I said as much myself. And people who found out,...well, they found out. But we're talking perception, not reality. Which is not to say that the perception is not being used for all kinds of political manipulations. Of course it is. But by any measurement, the percentage of white ownership in the "black music" business has been, historically, disproportionately white (what percentage is/has been Jewish, I have no idea, not really keeping score. And anyway, good business sense, capitalizing on an opportunity, and making something happen, hell, that's a good thing, as is creating wealth for your family and not pissing it away on rims for a toaster ). Duke Peacock (didn't he used to work for NBC?) & Vee Jay, those are the exceptions, and really, who owns them now? People who had the wealth to purchase the assets, that's who. C'est la vie. Yeah, but Oprah just owns the color purple (and I think she co-owns it with Prince). White folks own the color BLUE! :g Chris Rock is a comedian above all, but as much quibbling over the specifics as you can do, the underlying truths are still there. Money and wealth are not the same thing.

That would be Howie-wie, wouldn't it?

Art is indeed a great teacher, just as money is a great eraser.

A lot of the dissatisfaction I've heard/still hear has not so much to do with playing as with business, the "ownership structure" of the music - clubs, agents, record labels, critics, etc. Not saying I agree with it, just that that's what I've heard. There's been a historic lack of any real "sense of ownership" of the music by its players, and that will inevitably lead to frustration into bitterness into...wherever. Take away the ethnic aspects, and it's classic ownership vs labor. But this is America, where taking away the ethnic aspect of things takes a literal act of Congress, and even then... And no, I do not accept the simplistic notion that "Jews/Whitey/Whoever Own Jazz" any more than I accept the notion that "Only Blacks Can Play Real Jazz". The true fact of the matter is that business will serve its own needs first, no matter who's running the show. People who have worked on the Southern Chitlin' Circuit, where this is a fair amount of up-front Black ownership structure, learn this lesson the good old-fashioned way. I still maintain that the lack of a general economic wholeness is the most damning, unresolved legacy of slavery, and it's the one that is probably impossible to fix at this point by anything other than time. That's got nothing to do with music per se, but a lot to do with a lot of people who have played the music over the years. Chris Rock's bit about "rich" vs "wealthy" rings true. Things are gradually changing, but...a legacy is still a legacy. To find fault with people who had opportunity, motivation, and good business sense is assbackwards, but so is not understanding the pissoffedness of people who reach for their own economic "there" and eventually find...somebody else's. And yes, things are changing, really so within the last 20 years or so. But we're talking about jazz here, and these days, when there's change in the word, jazz is usally the last one to know. And I know, I know, we're all poor, we all come from poor, we all worked our way up from nothing, we all know too many people who can't handle money, nobody gets rich on jazz blahblahblah. Whatever. I say the best way to rebut the bullshit is to deal with the legit. Easier said than done, but it's the only way. Chris Rock, for those who have been away for a while:

Jimmy Hamilton was one of those guys who had more under his hat than he generally let on.

That unison passage was Jimmy Hamilton's, or so it's been credited. My favorite version of it is when him & Paul G. play it on The Great Paris Concert. Nothing aginst Clark Terry, but two tenors playing that line is just RIGHT.

So if we hear someone say "let's lynch the nigger" we should meditate? Personally I'd rather say "fuck you" to the speaker and to anyone who defends his rights to say it--even if it leads to charges that I'm a silencer. I've been in that situation, actually, and more than once (the oil fields of East Texas in the 1970s, where I had a summer job for three years) were full of..."talkative" people). You respond according to the level of real danger. If it's some old fat drunk cracker who's blowing off impotent steam, you just roll your eyes and figure he'll be dead soon enough. If it's a younger guy who's just gotten riled up, you talk sense to him, at least as much as you can.. If you think it's real danger, you proceed accordingly, up to and including calling the police (and where I lived then, that was by no means a guarantee of anything good happening, but...you took your chances). And if you're lucky, you can get into a conversation where the real cause of the anger is coming from. Swear to god, I was working with a lady one time who told me point blank, "I don't like black people." "Oh really, why is that?" "they're so loud all the time. "Do you like loud white people?" "No, I don't". "Do you know any quiet black people?" "Yeah, a few." "Do you like them?" "Yeah, they're fine". "So it sounds like what you really don't like is loud people." looooonnnngggg pause "Yeah, I suppose you're right. I never thought of it that way before." I swear to god, it was that easy. I have no illusions about how long or how deep it went, but if you can leave a situation better than you found it, if you can plant even a seed of discombobulation into those ignunt racist heads, you've done about all you can do at any given moment, short of slitting their throats and killing their babies, which, I think we'll all agree, is not a particularly good idea. And I don't think that saying "fuck you" plants seeds of anything too much more than determination to keep on keepin' on, which in the case of gut-level (or otherwise) racists is also not a particularly good idea. Now, if you need to feel better, go buy some new shoes. I'm loving my new Vans. Better support and more comfort than shoes costing many times more.

That right there, that's what makes the good sense.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Reel-Reel-4-Track-Tape-7-1-2-IPS-Members-Stan-Kenton-Artistry-Rhythm-/330696420693?pt=Music_Other_Formats&hash=item4cff0aed55

Two questions: Who is/was Jack Kleinsinger, and why does he make me nervous?Why did Roy Haynes leave and Bernard Purdie return?Ok, that's really three questions. Sorry. Lee's a funny guy! I just picked up a collection of 1952 Kenton aircheck with Lee on the band, and Kenton is all leadery all over the place. He's announcing "My Lady" & calls Lee up and asks him about his wife, so Lee gives the basics, Kenton stays silent Lee gives a little more detail and finally breaks and says, "What does this have to do with anything?" Cracked me up.

I bought a new pair of Vans today. Socks too.

Yeah, I thought it was some kind of new sports thing...Junior Basket Foot League, or something... Be sure to credit Gerald Wilson (and a little bit of Jimmy Hamilton) for that Perdido chart!

Yeah, as much as I'd like to think that a sport predicated on using bodies to move bodies in the service of the money and glory of victory would have its principled, built-in limits...real-world behavior in all walks of life kinda suggests that that's hoping against hope, at least when enough money and glory are at stake.

The original Revealtion LPs also say that the material was recorded by Peter Ind and rejected by Verve. so maybe the tapes were done on spec by Ind and reverted to him upon rejection? Maybe? Not? I don't know?

Lingua en cheekus, I'm sure.

The original Revelation liner notes say that Lennie had the tapes (gotten from Verve), thought the material was of no real value except for Warne's playing, which he considered the tapes to be one of the best documents extant.. So he edited it down to just the Warne solos. That's what the original Revelation liner notes say, anyway. As mentioned earier, there would be hopes that there is a lot more unedited material to be gotten to, in light of the number of tunes on the two Revelation LPs vs the number of full performances put out by Verve.

Sorry to hear about your friend. I'm 56, trying to get into good enough shape to start getting back into shape, and I hear news like this all the time. No guarantees, ever... Can you confirm to me (or deny, if need be) that Tom Browne at one point had some Lee Morgan/Freddie Hubbard-ish energy? I swear I heard that when his first Arista side hit. Underneath all the production, I swore I heard that other "thing" Was I wrong? Again, condolences on your loss.

So Baraka is fingering the Jewish Power Structure as the biggest impediment to self determination? Yeah, sure. Because it's "the" instead of "a" and it's "the biggest" or nothing at all Thanks for playing!. Believe me, at one time that particular sexual ideology was a very dominant one among African-American males I knew, It was one of those "under the carpet" (no pun intended, I swear) things that didn't get discussed until guards were let all the way down. And this was in the sexually "liberated" mid-70s! Those who admitted to it were subject to much heat from their peers, believe me. Millie Jackson spent a large portion on one cut of her live album addressing the issue, essentially asserting that it was time for that nonsense (the enthusiastic rejection of cunnilingus) to end! Then there's the (mostly Southern, I believe) folkloric belief that putting menstrual blood in a man's food is a way to keep him hooked. That's some old, old hoodoo shit right there. So you're already cunillinguating with a menstruating woman. Being fat and Jewish is just icing on that particular Freak Cake! And...I can see readers recoiling in horror as we go down this road... Yeah, but again for Jones, in the context of this poem and the experiences it speaks of, the girlfriend on whom he performs cunnilingus being "fat and Jewish" seems to be a bit more than icing on the cake. For one thing, it seems to matter to Postell, whose opinion certainly matters to Jones. For another, assuming that by "fat" Jones means that she was not conventionally all that attractive, it's a way of saying that her being Jewish somehow was a point in her favor with Jones at the time -- a sign of how far, from his latter-day "enlightened" perspective, he had been into demeaning his own identity. As he says: "I strode with them, played with them, thought myself/ one with them, and jews were talking through/ my mouth." I can see that. I can also see the whole thing from the perspective of where he's been relative to where he's going instead of the other way around, if indeed there is such a thing. After a while, I get off the horse, because that really is the only way to get off the merry-go-round.

You might want to hear Lucky Thompson's soprano work.

Believe me, at one time that particular sexual ideology was a very dominant one among African-American males I knew, It was one of those "under the carpet" (no pun intended, I swear) things that didn't get discussed until guards were let all the way down. And this was in the sexually "liberated" mid-70s! Those who admitted to it were subject to much heat from their peers, believe me. Millie Jackson spent a large portion on one cut of her live album addressing the issue, essentially asserting that it was time for that nonsense (the enthusiastic rejection of cunnilingus) to end! Then there's the (mostly Southern, I believe) folkloric belief that putting menstrual blood in a man's food is a way to keep him hooked. That's some old, old hoodoo shit right there. So you're already cunillinguating with a menstruating woman. Being fat and Jewish is just icing on that particular Freak Cake! And...I can see readers recoiling in horror as we go down this road...

Ok, your Parts 3,4, & 5 are the Brazil tapes, and in marginally better sound than I have them. It's till tough sledding, but the individual voices can be made out, roughly. Thanks for sharing this!