JSngry

The Miller civilian band could indeed swing quite nicely when it was called for..I was fortunate enough to have been exposed fairly ealy on to a 5-LP "deluxe" edition of Miller airshots that RCA put out sometimes in the 1950s...a real eye/ear-opener as to how that band really played...and as far as sax sections go, in their own way, quite possibly the best ever (Ellington's were too, but that's a wholly different world than Miller's. For one thing, the notion of swinging when it's called for is...weird once you get to EllingtonLand..). Those sets still turn up in used shops, not regularly, but often enough to where it won't hurt to keep an eye out for them. "Mandatory listening" for anybody who wants to study the whole Big Band Era beyond the basics, I think. The repertoire and interpretation is not always anything like what you'd expect from "Glenn Miller".

Yeah, the key word there is "survived"...and I suppose I should have said "not so much in America"... But... Those type instruments are not suited for the "type" of music that jazz became once it even began to become "jazz"... they're built more for "folk" scales, not chromatic, which means no passing tones or key changes without extremely deft finger manipulation...octave changes are limited to what you can overblow off a fundamental, which on those type things is not a, uh...delicate thing to do...I mean, you can do it, it's just not a "natural" thing to do...the old Baroue flutes have open hole systems not unlike a fife, but between them and recorders, who would even think to begin playing jazz on something like that? But that's fifes and other "homemade"-type flutes. As far as "regular" (i.e. - Boehm-fingering system) flutes go...I think an interesting thing to do would be to look at the availability of flutes and flute instructors in the larger African-American communities in late-19th early-20th Century America. New Orleans in particular had ready availability of "military band" instruments and instructors, so there should have been flutes available as well as instruction, But... If I was to make a halfway educated guess, I'd say it comes down to volume, projection, timbre, and overall "character" of the instrument. Between the parade/social bands & the parlor ensembles of the bordellos, not a lot of room for what the flute was then thought to be able to do in the "jazz sounds" of the time. I'm sure somebody could have (and maybe did...) lock themselves up in a room for a few years and come out as fluent on a flute of some sort as Bechet was on clarinet and soprano, but...that was not a "typical characteristic" of the "typical musician" of the time. The emphasis was usually on getting good enough to get some work first, and then you have the Catch 22 about flute in those days..you could learn it and then there's no gigs, and there's no gigs because nobody's learned it good enough to convince anybody that there should be. I suppose there would have been more interest in the instrument "back east and up north", where the work was more "formal" in nature, but even there...you would need instruments that can be heard in a loud-ish, non-amplified environment. One clarinet in thoise type situations can make more "noise" than can one flute. So once again, no work, no impetus to learn the axe. "Latin" musics, otoh, were different in harmonic & timbral impetuses than were "jazz" musics. The object there was to ride on top of the beat and the sound as a lead voice, not to be part of an ensemble. so what made the instrument "difficult" for jazz works in Latin musics...and also, how often did you see flutes in brass-centric Latin bands until amplification became more sophisticated? For that matter, when did you see flutes in jazz until amplification became more sophisticated? It's just not one of those instruments that can be all things to all people in all situations...

Now there's a guy who lived a life! RIP and..may the journey continue to continue.

Here's a Laws album I forgot about...this is the type of thing that tends to make for a lack of ambivalence, if you know what I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlUURBYRng Me, I enjoy it very much, maybe just for the "principle" of it, but hey... the degree of separation from this and Sketches of Spain is not all that much... or Bitches Brew, for that matter.

I wonder how the routing for that gig will be...whether they'll have a day free before or after...

It's spread beyond that already (a typical O-boardism ), but I believe the thrust of the original thread was players for whom flute was their primary instrument?

Laws, eh? hmmm...that's tricky...I like his work on CTI for his playing, really some exquisite work there, but in classic CTI "surroundings", which is not to everybody's liking, to put it mildly... Ok, try these - on CTI: Afro Classic & In the Beginning, & a two-fer on Collectibles, The Laws of Jazz/Flute By-Laws. The latter is pre-CTI Atlantic work & features a quartet session w/Chick Corea & Richard Davis. The thing about Laws is that he's not a particularly "emotional" player. He's one of those guys that approaches music as a very stringent discipline (he's a Texas African-American Jehovah's Witness Jazz Musician, a layering of societal "sub-sets" that boggles the mind if you can imagine all it entails...maybe you gotta be "here" to fully grasp it, I dunno, but I'm sure there's "equivalents" elsewhere in the world, I'm just saying that his is not a frivolous approach to anything in life...), which you have to do to achieve his level of facility. But in contrast to his tenor playing (which is wonderfully funky when you can hear it, usually on Mongo's old Columbia sides, hardly the best place to hear anybody...although he's on one Blue Note, the bonus cuts on that Solomon Ilori thing...flute & tenor there, and he plays marvelously, so add that to the list too!), his flute playing is very, very precise and, to many, "buttoned down" emotionally. But to me...I can hear the love of music - and everything "pure and true", it's kind of Bach-like in that regard - in how well he plays, and he certainly does not play rote exercises that reflect any sort of robotic type learn-it-play-it-don't-vary-it-lest-you-mess-it-up mentality. so I'm good with him, at least sometimes. A lot of his records are just too slick and too perfect for me, but...I guess that's how it goes. I'd not rank him a "primal force" or anything like that, just one bodacious musician who I respect the hell out of and who can improvise at a far higher level than many who are more blatantly "emotional" in their approach - when that's what he wants to do. The rest of it...not to my inking, but still, I gotta respect it and him.

Really?!?!?!?!? That's a Saturday...now I find myself in the awkward position of hoping I don't get a gig...

Anne O. Rexic Ann Coulter Annie Sprinkle

Also reissued on Inner City after Sullivan got the tapes back.

There's some good tunes there, not all of them hits, potentially fertile ground for fertile minds. Could go either way. Also worth considering - anytime any jazz "group" does a "tribute" to Gershwin, Rogers, Kern, Porter, etc., they've paid tribute to a non-jazz artist. No biggie, but I'm thinking that for that lineup, some Stevie Wonder is more relevant (or at least as relevant) to their creative mechanisms as is, say, Cole Porter. Could go either way. (p.s. - to have gigs already booked in 2011...waht a pleasure that must be!)

Yeah, that's the same shot I had, only mine was pulled over to the left so you could see the truck with the graffiti all over it & a full-frontal of the "767". Seeing all those window ACs is a real hoot for somebody who lives in a part of the country where central air became standardized about 40-50 years ago.

I don't think you'll have any complaints about either...Sullivan is a fine player. Genesis has the bonus of having Sonny Fortune on board, fwiw.

Hubert Laws...who interestingly enough played a lot of tenor w/Mongo Santamaria, then all but stopped playing anything but flute & became a virtuoso of the highest order (and a fine improviser when he wanted to be, which was not nearly often enough for my tastes, but oh well about that...) Just a hunch here...flutes, fifes, etc. of the wooden varieties are/were common in certain African cultures/musics, and as such survived into the Cuban/Caribbean/South American portion of the Diaspora. Not so in America...in New Orleans, where brass bands were the order of the day, who needed a flute? And in the bordellos...you can't really make a flute whine and moan like you can a clarinet now, can you... For that matter, the inclusion of the saxophone as a "standard" instrument in jazz was anything but a foregone conclusion...

I have a <100K shot ready to upload, but I keep getting this: Upload Skipped (Error406) Please advise?

Are they including all the Japan-only albums?

I don't get that review. Did the guy start crying because he had a good conversation with some teenagers? What's up with that?

"That's God. He just thinks he's Buddy Rich."

In this economy, people need that much of a lead time to start saving...

Yeah, I got that. I just don't know why they used that as a prelude to their contortionist act. They look and sound really, really dumb. I was about to click out of it until it got to the good part. And then...I stayed!

I'm sure he had difficulty with the "concept". But not with the "techniques". I mean, if you play the tenor long enough and/or well enough in a certain "environment", you figure out how to make the horn do certain things, as well as what those things can get across message-wise. Griffin knew those things quite well, as did/does Shepp.

Potato salad?

You are sticking your tongue out to get the salt off!