JSngry

He's the one that's not Garry Moore!

Who likes the Betty White? EVERYBODY likes the Betty White!

I'll go out on a limb and say that Maynard's Color Him Wild is a masterpiece within its own world. If I'm only having one Maynard (and I more or less am), this is the one. As faar as Hadley's work goes, the first Mainstream album was...eh... but Iapetus...I continue to represent for Iapetus.

Cool, but do revisit Dizzy's scatting. Quite the thing, it is.

Huh? That's a bit like saying that there's not much reason to divide pre-bop alto playing from bebop alto playing,,,bebop was bebop, no matter what the "instrument". And some spoke it more completely than others. Really, check out Dizzy on that Salle-Pleyel big band date. That's nothing but pure bebop scat singing, and just as with bebop in general, there is a huge divide between it and what came before. Not a complete divide, but...there it is, Long before there was vocalese. No, I think that's wrong. I think it was the ability to hear/feel/sing bebop in general that allowed people who could scat bebop to sing the vocalese as well (or not) as they did. King Pleasure had a certain gift and appeal, but musically, he was nowhere near the musician that Jon Hendricks was. Same ting with Eddie Jefferson - beautiful soul, but his scatting was not particularly "literate". In both cases, these are guys who thought it would be a cool idea to put words to solos, so they went about learning the lines as best they could. Whereas with Hendricks and Lambert, they sound like people who were already capable of singing the lines, so putting words to them was like, hey, this is a potentially viable proposition. But if vocalese never existed, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that they would still be able to throw down like they did on "Airegin". I have no doubt about that whatsoever, because you don't get to that level of vocal skills by dealing with words put to instrumental solos. You just don't. You get to that level of vocal skill the same way you do with any other instrument - by dealing with the notes, the phrases, the inflections. Not the words. Now, having siad that, yeah, they both are not exactly fonts of limitless ideas. But I'll make the same wager that that would be the issue if neither of them ever sang a note in their lives. Bottom line - to sing bebop, you learn bebop. To sing vocalese, you learn words and then hope for the best.

Now that I think about it, the notion that vocalese led to bebop-based scatting strikes me as akin to suggesting that the invention of banana pudding is what led to people eating plain bananas.

How will that work, exactly?

Unless one has an incredibly photographic (audiographic?) memory, a solo would have to be recorded in order to put words to it, so that's an implicit afaic. But with this, I could not disagree more: The implication there is that nobody was vocally mimicking/undertaking bebop solos until somebody had the notion to put words to them, and...that does not compute. You had plenty of (attempted) bebop scatting before vocalese came along, even if most of it was not particularly good, Dizzy being the exception that proved the rule. Dizzy exemplified the old-school maxim that if you can sing it, you should be able to play it & if you can play it, you should be able to sing it. And to the best of my knowledge, Dizzy never did any vocalese. But he sure did plenty of bebop scatting. and why not? And why not others do the same, other than it's pretty damn hard to sing all the chromatics and extended, altered intervals found in the bebop language. The voice is not built to do that without the infliction of some external, directed, discipline. Couple the innate difficulty of the task with the path of significantly less resistance for a singer to just sing those damn songs, and you're down to a minute subsection of bebop-inclined musicians who would actually make the effort to sing with the same skills as an instrumentalist. But every old-school horn player worth a damn I've know can sing their lines, if not as "professionally" as they can play them. I'd wager that Jon Hendricks (and maybe Dave Lambert) was learning to sing Bird solos a long time before thinking about putting words to them. He was once a what, tenor player? So I've no doubt whatsoever that he was already scatting like that long before the vocalese thing came his way. It's unnatural to think otherwise, in my opinon. As far as Annie Ross goes, if I've ever heard her scat, even in a basic manner, it's not made an impression on me one way or the other. I really don't even consider the possibility. But she can do some vocalese, even if she sounds less at ease doing it as a single than she does in a group. In that regard, she's a good lead player in the section, not the jazz player.

All I can say is that if we miss this opportunity to save the space program, it will be the final shattering of the final dream.

Floyd Patterson Floyd The Barber Samuel Barber

Vocalese is simply singing a previously created melody as verbatim as possible. Scatting is simply vocally improvising. Other than that both involve the voice and both function in the "jazz" idiom, I don't see any meaningful similarities, although one huge difference is that somebody can be able to sing a vocalese piece really well and not be able to scat worth even half-a-damn. I think I'd put Annie Ross in that category, and no insult is meant at all. It's just two totally different disciplines with only partially overlapping skill sets.

So, if Irene hurts New York City, will that be grounds for sending troops into the atmosphere to look for weapons of mass destruction? And will We As A Nation not rest until this "Irene" is hunted down at its source and brought to justice in front of the entire world? I knew they'd find a way to save the space program!

Sorry dude, you lose me there. I don't know what that means. I'd know Hendicks' voice (and "voice") anywhere. If this is a subjective matter, fine. Otherwise, HUH? No...what they're doing here is pure scat singing, singing a solo in an instrumental vocabulary with no lyrics in mind. Vocalese doesn't enter into it at all. For a predecessor, look no further than Dizzy, especially on that Salle-Pleyel big band date where him & Kenny Hagood go back and forth. Dizzy, like Hendricks & Lambert, can actually sing the vocabulary, make the changes, shade the accents, get the phrasing in the pocket. Hagood, fine as he is as a balladeer, is basically clueless as to what to do. As are most singers who try to scat. Truth be told, they both remind me in concept of Benny Green at least as often as not.

That's what most instrumentalists (the overwhelming majority, actually) do too. But most vocalists don't have the skills to do it this fluently. Would that they did, or at least that they'd recognize that they don't and either stop trying or else go to the skills store and get some. As for the whole vocalese thing in general, I'm less interested as time goes on. But this clip ain't about vocalese, it's about scatting, and how most of the nonsense that passes for scatting is either some degree of inept and/or quite basic. What Hendricks and Lambert are doing here makes neither concession or excuses about dealing with the tempo and the idiom. Whatever Walter Johnson told Connee Boswell about female dogs preaching on their hind legs is really not relevant to that, although it certainly is a clever tale of Old World fascinations of and with both gender and species. But these days, women regularly preach (and quite well), and dogs now routinely walk on their hind legs, at least if they want to do the laundry or work a chainsaw. And you know they do.

Oh yes, absolutely. That was never in doubt!

Not when OGANDO! (and I'm keeping it like that just because the truly electrifying impact of his first half hasn't worn off yet) & the rest of the Rangers' starters (save for C.J. Wilson) look like they're lost their zip and/or location. If there's a second wind to be had (and there's no reason to believe that there shouldn't be), they need to get it ASAFP. But yeah, you can't throw chum up to that lineup of sharks and not expect to get eaten alive. And eaten alive we got.

There's free software available to convert a FLAC to an MP3, so you can have both formats at your disposal. In general, FLAC files do sound better, so I prefer them for material that I plan on making hard copies of. However, the Wolfgang MP3s I've got are not anything to get upset about either, I mean, no matter how good the source, stuff's only going to sound so good on an iPod. As far as how easy do they download...they download as easy as anything else. Wolfgang's got their own downloader, and it got sideways with my firewall once, but that was easily fixed. But that didn't have anything to do with the file format. For my FLAC player, I use Foobar http://www.foobar2000.org/ . For converting things to different formats, I use Efficient WMA MP3 Converter: http://www.wmamp3-converter.com/ Both are free, flexible, and really easy to use. I'm not stupid, but I can be pretty lazy, so when I tell you that these things are laugh out loud easy, believe it!

Freddy Freddie Fred. E.

Don Juan Don Quixote Don Francisco

The Cock Who Crows At Dawn Cock Of The Walk Little Red Rooster

...horse semen shots. http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/5176745/Women-flock-to-take-horse-semen-shots

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-semen-spill-idUSTRE77N4QY20110824 http://www.wkrn.com/story/15313584/ramp-to-i-65s-closed

You should, but only after you set it up in advance. Cold-calling Lou Donaldson is one thing (and a fine thing), but just showing up at somebody's house unannounced, that's kinda...lacking a critical degree of separation, if you know what I mean.

Certainly didn't mean to cause offense, it's just that Wayne has never seemed "old" to me. I keep thinking he's like 65 or something, not 78. Although now that I think about it, I've been thinking he's 65 for quite a while now....78 is almost 80, and 80 is old by any criteria. And....I cannot imagine an old Wayne Shorter, I just can't. And I won't, not until there's final, conclusive prrof. As for the image, it's kind of a joke, really, it's from a fantasy/sci-fi video game, and knowing how Wayne is all off into that realm, I found it humorously fitting. Again, no offense intended. What would be the coolest thing ever is a fantasy sci-fi video game about the quest to live forever, with music by Wayne Shorter (a lot of the Columbia albums would work just fine, that's kinda what they sound like anyway, but I'm talking original music). I would pay money for that game, and I don't even play video games anymore.