JSngry

So long as nobody's Vanilla Ice, it's all good.

I only know Tripping Olney by second-hand quotes (no way do I join the Twitterverse, at least not while I have what little of a life I have left ), but...HELL yeah!, I know what you mean!

A comfortable chair at a price you can afford, I hope!

To hear Shirley Horn sing a ballad with the Kenton band might not have worked in terms of dynamics, but in terms of tempo, you're talking a most provocative hypothetical!

I remember the 1995(?) NFC title game between the Cowboys & 49ers in SF, on a Sunday after a similarly lengthy rain. The field was a swamp, and the Cowboys went down 21-0 off of turnover in, like, the first 7 minutes or so, a hole out of from which there was no getting.

Olney basically says that it's hard to pitch in the bigs and that it gets really hot in Texas, but Darvish has good stuff. Who knew? Now that Darvish is old news the new name to start getting jizzed about is Gerardo Concepcion.

I think...I don't know what to think. It seems like a worthwhile risk, though. But like all risks...you don't know if it was a good one until it's too late to do anything about it. But hell, you read about his skill set & work ethic, and you look at his actual pitching, and you think that this guy is not like other Japanese pitchers who have come to America. El tiempo lo dira, no? I do like the way the organization is willing to invest in talent. I like that very much. Not sure if I'm going to like being one of those "moneywhipping" teams or not. Do not want to end up like that, no sir. But Yu for six years vs C.J Wilson for six, you're getting younger and at least as good raw talent, if not better. Sentimentality aside, it's a risk I'd take, especially with Them Maddux Boys in tow. I'd like Prince Fielder to come here as well...let's see what happens there.

Mobley upsets me in ways I don't understand.

Actually, Mario Rivera would have been a good choice, but he's dead now.

Sounds like there's a story here...let The Search For Rocky Boyd begin!

Funny, I was just coming back to edit out those comments about Reed & Daversa...revisiting the Jazz Compositions Of Dee Barton album as we speak, and, yeah, they are pretty good, with a little "interior drama" to their playing....they sound like "well-schooled" players who are hearing Jackie McLean & Freddie Hubbard's (then) more recent work and finding it impossible to resist...gotta wonder how that went over with Kenton himself..or if he even knew what the references were..not that it matters. That's the poignancy at work again, there was this whole other world of jazz and progress going on at the time, and it had next to nothing to do with the Kenton "world". Yet here these guys are, letting that other world into Kenton's, and it's like neither world is ever going to really intersect with the other, or really want to, yet...here it is. I gotta wonder what the vibe in that band was at that time, surviving mostly on dance gigs and clinics, very few "real world jazz gigs", if you know what I mean. You got all this other stuff going on around you, and you're digging it, but how often does your gig speak directly to that? And yet you like your gig. Weird place to be, I'd have to think... Agree about Barton's drumming too, it's from the gut, 100%. All things considered, I think him and Jerry McKenzie might be the archtypical "Kenton drummers", which is not the same as saying they were the "best drummers" the band ever had. That "Rainy Day" chart...yeah..played it many times...you know you're at the right tempo when you have to count eighth notes instead of quarters...if you can comfortably count the quarters, you're either a sleepwalking metronome or else you're playing it too fast.

Forgot about that thread, and yeah, Jack's word is good enough for me, although that he "used to show up in the audience for jazz gigs"...that's still rather nebulous, to put it mildly. Has anybody ever heard of anybody who actually heard him play? In person? It's like the guy's not even a "local legend", which is really weird... Not saying that he didn't exist, just that the proof as it exists is not exactly overwhelmingly positive...

Yeah, I know, But I'd like to see some fleshing out of whatever his reality was, just to be sure. It's like, the guy is alleged to have played with Miles (and didn't that really amount to just sitting in at a concert? Seems like I've heard a story along those lines, not sure) and made the one record, and then...nothing.

I've known that record since it was a Kenny Dorham side on Muse! But that's not proof that Rocky Boyd really existed. It's just proof that somebody made a record and that a man was placed on the cover to represent "Rocky Boyd". Has anybody ever actually spoken to him, or even heard him in the flesh? The mystery of Dupree Bolton has more or less been solved. Not that of Rocky Boyd!

Can anybody prove that Rocky Boyd really existed?

I'm old enough to have watched The Jetsons in prime time, so futuristic silliness is in my blood. Besides, I can now commute to work via my laptop. Who needs a helicopter on your back?!?!?!? Thing is - technology does change the world, and it does change outward behavior. Thinking that it doesn't is a fool's game. But it doesn't change basic human nature. Thinking that it does is the suckers game. It's the fools who rush to become the future, and it's the suckers who rush to prevent it. Somewhere in between, those who just be what they are when they are, that's where those who stick around usually end up being. Or something. Graettinger was a crazy genius, pure and simple, and the one does not negate the other. I take him at face value because there is so much value in that face. (Just wondering - was This Modern World his title or Kenton's? The individual titles are pretty,,,objective! Some Saxophones...A Trumpet...A Table...Some Chairs...) John - I've seen that Road Band disc, and have been tempted. I might go ahead and get it, because that band seems to have played well as a band. No great soloists (or even really good ones), but they played together with unity of purpose and spirit, and I like to hear that. This would be the earliest recording of Barton's "Here's That Rainy Day" chart, right? God, that's a beautiful piece of writing...

I've seen it all (1 hr) , and it's pretty much all like this- summarizing the band's tour in early '68 and showing the various venues where they played. It's not so much a biography about Kenton (in fact, not at all really), but more about the band and the ends to which the whole organization goes to play it's music - in clubs, churches, prisons, anywhere really. One of the problems is that there are no full pieces, only segments. In that sense it is disappointing. The band ran the film at school clincs for a while, but it soon became outdated. I cannot watch it without being immediately transported back to 1968 and where I was and who I was at the time. It just evokes a whole era for me. Very much of its time. I like the sound of that, and would like to see it. One question - why are there two basses in the band on video? Was a new guy getting broken in, or did Kenton try two basses for a while?

I've been seriously revisiting Kenton lately, based on the recent "monster" thread, and am finding that the stuff I already liked, I liked that much more. Conversely, the creepy stuff sounds even more creepier. And most of it has the creepy factor to one extent or another (such as, why, on the otherwise often-brilliant Contemporary Concepts, is there next to no freaking bass? I mean, you're making an album of a band and charts that swing like crazy and you don't want to make sure that the bass is adequately recorded? CREEPY. Or, what, do you intentionally dampen the bass in some perverse way to hide from the swing? CREEPIER STILL!!!) Anyway... WWII had its impact, Vietnam had its, and lord only knows what impact our various desert storms are having (I think I can tell, but it's too damn ugly and too damn current to be objective about it...). Wars fuck with people, no way around it. But I think Kenton would have been fucked up no matter the time/place. He just seems like that type of guy. Awkward, neurotic, and always ready to ingratiate through imposing. Case in point, his "program note" to a simple-ass swinging Shorty Rogers chart - "The impact and sensation derived from feeling a powerful beat will never be dulled, nor should it be ignored." In how many ways is that fucked up? More than I can count, that's for sure... Whatever. I can go off on all that all day long, but that's not what this thread was put here for, to go off on how "Stan Kenton" the figure is ultimately Not A Good Thing, no matter how many Good Things bear his name. This thread is here because I really like the music in this clip, and the way the music gets played. The whole thing has an "exile" quality to it, a fire that for once springs from the gut rather than the head, and it's not at all creepy. And although Stan Kenton Plays The Jazz Compositions Of Dee Barton is in no way the "masterpiece" that Moms Mobley claimed it to be in the monster thread, it too has this same quality and is all the more appealing because of it. There's something about how this edition of KentonMusic screams from The Valley that makes it infinitely more...real that other editions' Pontificating From the Mountaintop. especially since that mountaintop is usually, at the end of the day, just a Hollywood prop, albeit it often a very well-made and well-considered one.

I still remain ambivalent (at the very best) about "Stan Kenton" as a "figure", but...this clip of a documentary from 1968(?) is kind of poignant...the once King Of The Future-As-Now was by then reduced to a nearly-forgotten figure whose records ranged from loopy to droopy, and whose orchestra of stars had more or less become a bunch of (relative) kids from "jazz education" backgrounds, when the movement was still in its embryonic phase. But these kids believed in something...maybe not "Progressive" or "Innovations" or "Artistry In Artistry"...but it sure sounds like they believed in there being a Stan Kenton Orchestra and in them being it, no matter how jacked the records were and no matter how fallen their Fallen Star of a leader had become. "Kenton's music" was always (ok, mostly) based on a neurotic insecure grandiosity, but here the band adds something more basic, more universally human- anger. Anger at what, who knows? Anger at maybe being dedicated to a cause that nobody really cared about any more, at being a band of brothers in a world always its own, but a world now isolated from the same world it once at least hyped its way into being a part of (and occasionally actually belonged). But whatever, this is KentonMusic that is not creepy at all. Dee Barton's writing is, as usual, device-driven, but with as much emphasis on "driven" as on "device", which was not always the case with Kenton's writers. I fully believe what he is saying, even if it ultimately lands towards the bottom of my own Necessity Hierarchy (and maybe that's what all this brand of anger is about...the realization somewhere inside that that's where it's all going to end up. Maybe?) But there are moments here (and on Kenton's all-Barton album, and even on the earlier "Turtle Talk" from the outstanding Adventures In Jazz album)) where Barton & the Kenton band do things that would not be out of place on the Charles Tolliver Music Inc. big band albums, usually based on whole-tone devices. Again with the devices. There are time when Barton's writing resembles Gerald Wilson's, but I'd be willing to allow for the possibility that for Dee Barton, born in Mississippi and getting on the Kenton band straight out of North Texas, writing his Contemporary KentonMusic and having it resemble Gerald Wilson might have been an Unavoidable Cultural Overlap. Anyway, this is a really good synergy of band, writing, attitude, time, and place. Apparently this is part of a documentary that had one local showing on L.A. TV and has not been released since. I might like to see the whole thing, if it's about the band and not it's leader....

Lou Donaldson Mel Brown Little Feat

Dude, I just see a guy who digs architecture (and L.A. in general, the Watts Towers were in there ans some shit I ain't never heard of, like that motel-looking thing, was it really a motel?) talking about it with enthusiasm. More than that, I don't think it's anything to get all 99%-ish about, unless it's strictly 1%-ish to dig (or even have) architecture and such. And I really don't think it is. Shit, just let people be people, and let the lines cross where they cross, especially since most of them got no business being there in the first place.

If it all seems mainstream, it's because it is mainstream now. Hippies changed the world, but they got rich. Hip-hoppers/Rappers changed the world, and they got rich too. People get rich, and sometimes even maintain their integrity and personality after doing so. Look at Dizzy Dean! If you'd rather that all angry righteous rappers stay poor (or if they start out middle class, get poor) so they can "legitimately" always be angry and righteous, uh...I don't think that's a good thing to want, myself.

I'm not sure that "angry young man" and/or "hip hop nation" and/or all the other "rap stereotypes" perpetrated by marketeers, marketeed, friends, and foes of the whole thing precludes an ability of those involved to grasp, study, and appreciate things beyond the realm of "thug life" and/or "rage at social injustice". Or even the study of drafting. I did not take it at all to be "thug life", attempted or otherwise. That's pretty much mainstream conversational style these days, for a lot of people in a lot of places.

Bernice Tune: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Heritage-Silver-Tongue-Houston/dp/0890152829/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1 B'Nois King Beyonce

Condolences on your loss.