JSngry

whoa.... that's a group that has potential to do some serious damage (in the best sense of the word). Sure wish I could be there!

Or maybe just not a fan. Not everybody is, you know... I remain one myself, but...the guy lives in a fucking cocoon and his work reflects that. It's to his credit that he often enough continues to find some universal truths in there, but I can easily see why some people just don't give a shit anymore.

I'd buy this in a second, just for the Inez material.

I can't take any of this particularly seriously. I mean, Woody Allen gets a fawning article from a New York journalistic outlet. Somebody wake me up when that doesn't happen in some for or fashion, ok?

Under-hyped as a singer/musician, definitely. Over-hyped as a "personality", I think, and not necessarily his fault. But you got a big mass of people who have a Pavlovian reflex to SinatraSounds that is way out of proportion to people who actually listen to the music. Witness the number of truly lame Sinatra "clones" on the current "lounge" scene. I'm not talking "big names" like Connick, etc, just local guys who sound like raw shit and still get the gigs and draw the crowds. The whole Rat Pack booze & broads thing...Sinatra was a genuinely complicated man, not some idiot who lived large just to live large, ya'know? That shit is ugly, and not at reflective of the totality of what Sinatra "was" (there was definitely The Beast, but there was also The Beauty...). But all you gotta do is look the look, cop the "attitude", & play the tunes, and a lot of people will go there with you, because they think that's all there is to go to. And they're so wrong about that... Of course, such is the nature of any celebrity, but hey.... we all take our stands, and this is a place where I'll take mine. Sinatra was too great an artist to not raise a voice every once in a while, ya' know?

I would say Bird & Sonny Murray, but we already got Jimmy Lyons & Sonny Murray, so why bother with finding some dead guy and bringing him back to life, as well as taking some living guy and then transporting them both back more than 45 years in time (as opposed to 45 years in BTUs)? Too much math for R&B!

No fair. You peeked.

It was at a Camelot, yeah. Camelot also was source to beaucoup ECM LP cutouts too, when WB purged them.

1992. LTB won a Discman at a convention & brought it home. I was furious, having raged against the Devil Digital for almost a decade. Did and A/B with the LP of an Aretha Cd she bought on the way home, the LP clearly has superior sound. She heard it, I heard it, and that was that. The thing sat there for a few weeks. But I started noticing shit in cutout bins, then bonus cuts (the long box BNs Paul mentioned above aroused me no end when I noticed that there was new stuff on them and they were cutouts!) & stuff in used stores, and the real pisser was when the only real choice for in-store purchase was between casette & CD...bought tapes up until then, but finally said fuck it, let's move on. All things told, though, digital came along too soon relative to its quality..way too much of those early CDs, reissue & new material alike, don't sound particularly good, sometimes really sucking. But here we are anyway.

The more things change...

Guitar, yeah. Voice? I'm with you.

Aorry, missed this the first time around...those are two heavy, heavy albums, I think.

I'd recommend both the Porter & the Simpkins, for different reasons. Porter's for the "biography", Simpkins' for the "vibe". Other than those two, just listen to the records...

Do you have the original Attica Blues on impulse!

I think a poll is in order: Which snot do you find more disgusting: Elderly HispanicElderly JewElderly African-AmericanCoked-up ArabCrackhead NegroTeenage Trailer Trash SlutHomosexual Puerto RicanDrunken IrishAll of the AboveNone of the Above, snot is not an issue for mrSome of one, part of another (i,e. Elderly Drunken Trailer Trash)Something other than the above (please specify)

There's all just inanimate instruments. None of them makes any kind of sound whatsoever unless/until somebody makes them do so.

Sorry, but Sir Patrick is nowhere credited on the LP, not even in fine print on the label. Didn't check the dead wax area, though...

I don't know the name myself, but I'm not exactly an "astronomy buff" by any stretch of the imagination... It'll be interesting to see what he's credited for on this album!

Will check the LP when I get home to confirm, but I have no awareness of any performers on the album besides the MJQ themselves.

Space is the one to get if you only get one, imo. One of the more unique MJQ albums, and plenty good music from start to finish.

http://www.tuffcity.com/html/HipHop.asp?SearchBy=Key&AvailOpt=&Keyword1=+&ShowFormat=CDVY&KeyWord=+&ReleaseAlbumList=550 Have not found it, not even in BlogLand.

Damn... Re: Ring-A-Ding-Ding...there was a bootleg out of the session tapes for that album, and if anybody has any doubts about the seriousness of Sinatra's musicianship, this session should eradicate them. The guy really gets inside the arrangements, listens to them, figures out where to be in (or out) how to shade relative to the ensemble, everything. And then once he's got it figured out - BAM it all comes together. The electricity of Sinatra looking for his zone and then finding it is tangible on these session tapes. In a better world than thisone, whoever controls the "product" and who ever consumes it will get to stuff like this, study it, and learn. I'm like Chuck - I have a lot of BIG problems with Sinatra as an "icon" of anything, but all that hype aside, there is some truly remarkable singing to be heard if/when one can get past all the hype.

Not to quibble, but that arrangement is really just an adaptation of Nelson Riddle's original chart, to accommodate a traditional big-band instrumentation. And...I think the Capitol version of Skin (as I'm told the certain of the "Mr. Sinatra" types like to refer to it) is really one of the high points of 20th Century Popular Music, especially Sinatra's vocal. But yeah, 60s Sinatra really found that swing pocket a lot more firmly than the earlier work, imo. Most of that Strangers In The Night album just grooves in a way that vocalists of Sinatra's era & background could muster. The giuy knew where it needed to go.