JSngry

No virgin, real or imagined, could sing the words "inside of me" like Ms. Day does on the bridge of this one: As for the rest of the words, it takes a real singer to have phrasing and timing this comfortable at this tempo. The older I get, the better Doris Day sounds, and I always liked her well enough.

My dad was from Illinois & we'd go visit his family every summer for a week or two. My uncle was a big Cubs fan but had to work during the day, so it became my responsibility to watch all the Cubs games on WGN(?...don't know if that made it all the way to Sterling or not, but they were on some area TV station) during the day and give him a report when he got home. Best summer job ever! (...and then the side trips to Kalamazzo to visit my aunt...that meant Tigers ball for a couple of days...pretty sure I saw the Tigers pull off a triple play on TV...for a kid in a day where the only accessible options were Astros & Cardinals, these windows into other worlds were a real treat!)

No question. I remember an article about him in the late, lamented SPORT magazine from 1965 or so with a photo of him making an ice cream cone catch of a line drive, flying through the air like Superman. The caption read (and I paraphrase to the best of my ability), "Santo says, 'I believe in diving at anything that comes anywhere near you. Sometimes you can catch it.'" As a pre-adolescent, I thought that was the correct way to think about everything, not just baseball. To some extent, I still do. Don't think I'd still remember it otherwise. Santo, Kessinger, Beckert, & Banks. Helluva infield.

Believe me, if there weren't neighbors in the line of fire, there'd be some squirrels running for cover right now, and hopefully not making it.

I prefer the Verve things to the Roulette b/c the Roulette years is where the Basie "formula" really begins taking hold and not letting go. Granted, the ensembles are tighter than the proverbial gnat's ass, and I do appreciate that, believe,me, but I get tired of the cumulative studio Roulette a lot quicker than I do the cumulative studio Verve (keeping it to the first go-round with that label). Mileages can, will, and should vary, of course.

But...I've already loaded the gun!

Yeah, don't think that Delta is at all legit. But Europe 1/Trema owns the recordings as per terms of the original broadcast agreement, or so we've been told. No reason to think otherwise.

If I'm keeping only one (and I'm not!), it's Joe's Our Thing. KD at his most openly expansively suppley knowing, both the playing and the composing. Some people will talk about the tone was gone by then and all this and all that, and maybe so if you want to get all puristy/trumpety about it, but the voice was stronger than ever. And that voice was speaking, telling stories like none other. Plus, if there's a meatier tune than "Escapade"....well, ok, there's not a meatier tune than "Escapade". You can only be as meaty a tune as "Escapade". Sing along at home, kids, it's fun!

I guess those who wanted to could make that argument about his offense, but what about his defense? Santo made some pretty nifty plays, so was Wrigley a "thrid base friendly" park?

Yes, patterns/disruption, tension/release, yin/yang, it's all really the same thing - complementary opposites and the ongoing wants/needs to proportion them in a "meaningful" way. "Meaningful"...that itself breaks down into two poles of extremes, from players who want it to be all about them to those whose only goal is to plea$e an audience, any audience, and from listeners who are insulted by anything that does not tickle their comfort zone to those who are insulted if it does. With that many variables, the only "right" thing is for the performer to do what they believe in for an audience who is receptive to hearing it. That's complicated enough right there, especially with everybody telling everybody what they should do at the expense of considering what they want to do. And there, there's another one of those complimentary opposite thingies. As they used to say (almost) on Chickenman, "THEY'RE EVERYWHERE, THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!!!"

And that's symptomatic of what, as it turns out, is Payton's real beef/point/whatever - that the whole notion of "jazz" has been co-opted to sell a "reality" that has absolutely nothing to do with what the music originally was/still is/should be, as per his perception, and that the more that "jazz" allows it to be tied to that reality, the more it loses its original reality, and the more its practitioners are returned to functioning within the "colonialist" social mentality which it originally confronted and ultimately defeated (although not nearly as much as he and others would like to believe,,,). It's not that he's wrong about any of that, I mean, the essence of it is something I believed then and now. It's just that he's making it from a point of reference that is terribly limited musically and historically, like he's figting a battle that has already been fought and won, and he's having to do so because he's accepted a version of reality that does not accept those who have already created the reality that he wants to get to. Again - as long as Nicholas Payton wants to position himself as The Great Awakener, Lester Bowie (to keep it in the trumpet family) renders him completely irrelevant. But the fool mentions damn near everybody except Lester Bowie (and company), as if they're somebodies and someplaces that he wants to avoid at all costs. Willful ignorance gets no sympathy from me, and this is definitely willful ignorance.

Kinda rough sound on that, iirc, but the playing is at the same high quality.

But let's remember that there was a ongoing, sustainable circuit for live jazz after bebop, after the emphasis went away from dancing and vocals and all that good stuff. Blakey, Silver, Miles, Chico Hamilton, Coltrane, Cannonball, plenty folks, these were all road bands. They didn't just stay in New York, play Birdland/The Vanguard and hole up at Rudy's making records, they hit the road and went across a big portion of (mostly) urban America, where there enough of an audience to sustain their efforts up to anywhere from in between the mid-60s to the mid-70s, after which only the BIG stars could keep a road band. And let's not forget the organ groups. Let's definitely not forget the organ groups. Hell, I saw Kenny Burrell in a club in Houston in 1975. He had a road band - Richard Wyands, etc. No vocals, no dancing. But there were songs, and you could pat your foot and/or shake your ass. and there were people in the house, more than a few. OTOH, most of the big bands stayed alive by doing concerts and dances both. I once heard the Kenton band at a dance after hearing them 4-5 times in a concert setting, and it was amazing how different the experience was... No real point here other than that if "jazz" wants to be strictly an "art music", then its audience will not be found is "social music" environments and vice-versa, so adjust plans and expectations accordingly. Me, though, I always liked it when the music had a "middle ground" that managed to be enough of both at the same time so that there was a continuity from the most "far out" to the worst "sell out".

What's this about the SEC looking into the Miami stadium deal?

Oh yeah, one more thing, to keep it strictly on the trumpet tip after reading Payton's latest - the life (and music, if you care to separate them) of Lester Bowie makes the words (and music, if you care to get that harsh about it) of Nicholas Payton so much historically ignorant babble. Then again, pretty much everything emanating from the post-Wynton school of jazzthought reduces down to that. Great Black Music: From The Ancient To The Future gets narrowed down to Great Black American Music: From 1900-1969 (or in Payton's case, 1959). Fools, all of them, these post-Wynton "guardians of the heritage". They've been given a universe and they've decided to stay in one wing in one house, and to close it off. And then the arguments begin about who to let in and who to keep out, and, oh by the way, nobody really cares any more because everybody else is too busy living in the rest of the house in the rest of the universe. Can't nobody say that they didn't know about Great Black Music: From The Ancient To The Future. They just chose to not pay heed. Somebody slap these fools upside their collective heads. Please.

Change "songs" to "styles", or even "sounds", and I think you can apply this to most fans of all musics. Most people hit on one or two bags they did, and then spend the rest of their life hanging with them and not really feeling the need to go anywhere else. That's not intrinsically "bad" in and of itself, but it is the reality of audiences, and, really, not just in music.

I'll bet she's heard Bill play it more than once over the years. I know my wife has heard it more than once over the years..

Haven't heard that one.

America's got talent!

Ohhhh....that song grates on my nerves the same way the theme song from Cheers does...I really don't want to go to someplace where everybody knows my name, ya' know? And I don't want to live in a world where you get your simpleton muscle massaged by cloying melodies and voices to make you think you do... I can talk about Willie, because I saw him play, but Mickey was more or less a crippled drunk by the time I came to the game, and Duke was some guy with funny looking hair on the old baseball cards I kept finding in older kids' collections as they gave them away...not really something that stirs the feel-good pot, if you know what I mean. Willie, Sandy, & Brooks, now THAT I could talk about! This one here plies the same nostalgia for an era that was before mine and a place that was/is not my own, so I don't get too hot for it either, but it does have a nice melody and changes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6nhcuLuCqM My "baseball song" will always be "Bubbles Was Cheerleader" by Pat Williams (from the Shades Of Today album on Verve), which they used for years on Astros pre- & post-game show broadcasts, which I listened to religiously. Didn't even know what it was until just a year or two ago!