JSngry

oh yeah, re:PA KKK - played a gig in Uniontown w/a "mixed" band in 1981...this was in the days of hotel show bands...the gig was supposed to be for two weeks, but we were lucky to finish one...rumors & not-so-rumors were rampant that the Klan was about to "show up" if we weren't replaced ASAP...had the same experience w/the same band in Coer d'Alene, Idaho a few months later...not realizing that the whole Aryan Nation thing had just taken root there...it was still kinda "not known" then...but also in Coer d'Alene, got to hear a few minutes of a country band with an African-American steel player whose sound was one of the most haunting..."lonely" sounds I've ever heard (and was before we came into view of the actual band, when we saw him, we were all like, DAMN, no WONDER!) I think I've told this story before, sorry if I had

If by "contradiction" you me a devilishly intoxicating blend of ego, self-loathing, imagination, wishful thinking, and outright denial, then yeah. Pretty much!

Hell, there's days when it's new to me too ...sometimes I have to be reminded, and this thread is such an example. But people "of my age" who wanted to... stuff was out there, not as comprehensive &codified as it is now, but if you wanted to "explore" and you had access to a good record store (or if you knew where the "neighborhood" stores were..) there was exploration to be had. The whole "black string band" thing was something i was curious about, so I found a few LPs at Peaches (don't ask if you don't already know, because it's long over with, that whole thing), and it looked like something to check out, which it was, and so I did. But it never really took with me, just as "mountain music" didn't, at least until I met my wife's parents (she's from Boomer, WV, they were from WV & just across the river in Kentucky, and were both "rural" w/o being RURAL) and got to know the area and its people a little better. But even now, it's something I can only "feel" so much..but tell you what - one time my mother-in-law was reminiscing about her childhood (she does that a lot...), and she did an imitation of a tent evangelist she heard as a kid, and, unlike almost all of her other stories which she pretty much repeats by rote, this time she got into the moment and really captured a cadence and inflection in her speech that totally transported me out of where we were for the few seconds that she did it... so, yeah, if it connects, it connects, and if it only sometimes connects, that's real too, and if it never connects, well...that's real too. Connections or the lack thereof, that's just reality. It's all the attempts to manipulate, commercially and otherwise, them that raise my suspicion...misplaced trust, abused trust, false confidences...old as time itself, but...all the more reason to still be wary, eh?

Fair enough, I respect that, even if, as somebody for whom both neo-classical and most of post-Cream Eric Clapton provide little of anything pleasurable, I have a fundamentally different viewpoint myself. It does take all types, we are all pieces of the puzzle, none of us is the puzzle. Passion for one's beliefs w/o respect for others' equally passionate beliefs is just as futile as is no passion at all. We all like what we like, but by god, like it! When it comes to things like this, I like it when people are above all else true to what is inside of themselves, defend it passionately, and expect there to be equally passionate disagreement. After all friction not only holds the potential to destroy, it is what holds ultimately us together!

Me too! I like the music...I'm not remotely interested in any 'gittin' back to what's true' spirituality or whatever. Strikes me as packaging. We get similar things in British folk music - endless wrangles over what is and is not authentic. There's no doubt many parallels that neither one of us can really realize exist, due to having lived different lives in different cultures (and that's nothing but a fond-ish statement of the whole vive-le-difference thing!), but here in America, it's kinda hard to separate "the culture" from "the music" sometimes. Same was true in the early days of hip-hop, punk, anything "new" that "goes against the grain" in a not-just-commercial sense...and a lot of the "Americana culture" that I see is either based in a desire to retreat from the inevitable globalization of the 21st Century, or else it's a place of retreat to "stay true to one's roots" at the end of a hard day of being globalized...and to be hinest, I really don't know which is the prevalent impetus, or if there even is one. either way, me myself, I think it's kind of fallacious to think that you can remain "the same" in the face of inevitable change. OTOH, there is certainly comfort to be had in connection, and comfort at the primal level is not to be trifled with, so...I don't know. These are very much divided times in America, what with about half the country resolutely wanting to move ahead to a new way, and about half wanting anything but that, so...surely you can see the possibility for ambiguity here? Yeah, i know, at the end of the day, it's all about the music, just the music, but I guess I'm one of those type whose wiring maybe never really sees the end of one day without wondering what the next one will bring.

Now this makes sense to me, at least in theory....but the clip that seeline posted of the mall band reminded me of a Disney anamatronic diorama (or whatever it is they call those things, the one about the history of electricity sponsored by GE where the family goes through all the stages of electric evolution), and having had the Disney experience more than once (being a good middle-class American with kids who lived in Central Florida for a while...), that's not necessarily a, uh....ringing endorsement , although, Disney is not without its charms the first time, so...I can see it both ways, truthfully, and since I don't have nearly the personal investment in this type thing as I do other musics...I don't really care in any but a broad sense. Then again, I am not at all unsympathetic to why a group of contemporary African-Americans would be intrigued by the notion of exploring the sense of "otherness" that is still at the root of the so much of the "African-American experience"...no doubt there are emotions stirred that may or may not be "vocies from the past", but either way, there would be, I should think, a fertile mental/spiritual field to be plowed there. How this may or may not differ from what thier Anglo-American counterparts are doing at any given time is probably up to any given individual at any given moment.

Possible class angst aside, how does this not prove the point by trying to refute it? I mean, isn't that exactly what the artists in question here are doing in/with their own work? Me myself, being an American with a semi-rural background and all that, I'm of very mixed emotions about the whole "Americana" etc movement... on the one hand, it's always good to feel connected, but otoh, how connected how far back can you really get on any but a "spiritual" level, that is, at some point you're "connecting" to fill a need to know something you can never know other than by getting it third or fifth or hundredth hand, so what you're connecting to may or may not be anything other than a projection as to what you need the past to be for your own ends, which is all good, that's pretty much how people do with everything, but there's imagining and then there's imagination... Also ambiguous about what it is that all these urbanrural Americans are trying to "get back" to...don't expect any non-urbanrural Americans to feel that one, but at times it seems kinda like it's like the real world is just too fucked up, so the only way to save yourself is to run away back to the "roots", which would be good except that I don't know any tree that you can save by cutting off all the branches (you can keep a tree healthy - or make a weak one stronger - by prudent pruning, but you can't really save a sick one that way), which I guess is what troubles be (to the extent that I'm troubled) about the notion of "roots music...really what we're looking at is trunks and maybe primary branches...the real "roots" are so long ago and so far away, long before recorded time and/or recorded music that what they really are is anybody's guess... Into the mystic indeed, if that's how you want to roll it! (and of course (yaaaaaawnnnnn) this is just my opinionnnnnnnnnnnn

yeah, I've heard that. Good to have Gil back. And it doesn't surprise me that some reviewers would know Bobby Bland by name more than by output. These are the times in which we live...

Check out the chart on this one! http://www.youtube.c...h?v=QdpuEqEvEo4

Just remembered that he was at some jazz clinic I attended during my high school years, probably around 1973-74...what struck me most was that I wasn't used to seeing a guy who looked like him (i.e. - white, middle aged, dressed kind of "square"), acting like he acted, talking like he talked, and playing like he played. I thought it all a bit "interesting", but now that I'm about the same age that he was then, it makes more sense.

Blood Ulmer w/Charles Burnham. Odyssey was a hoe-down from start to finish! It's almost 30 years old, though, so hardly "contemporary", but still...

it'll make it better. whether it will actually fix it or not...

BBefore the whole OJC thing, that was how you got it if you got it new 99.8% of the time....good liner notes too, iirc.

Skills. simple as that. skills. Making a good pop song and a good pop record (so not the same thing...) takes skills. I mean, yeah, ok, a lot of his late 70s stuff is "iffy", but...you get something like this, and it's just so damn good being what it is that all the lesser crap fades away when it comes time to feel the love or not. Funny thing is, back in the day, Herbie pretty much lost me after Manchild (really, after Thrust, but...), so when Sunlight came out, I heard about this godawful new Herbie record with vocoders and pop songs and shit like that and I just immediately...RECOILED. But then a few months ago, somehow, (blogs, probably), I found out about Herbie's band with Webster Lewis (an interesting cat in his own right), found a version of this song, and said WOW, that's a really nice song. One thing led to another (including the side w/Kimiko Kasai, not exactly "essential" but a good listen or three nevertheless), and the more I heard this song the more it ingratiated itself to me. So yeah, Herbie! Sorry it took me 30+ years to get it.

Thanks for noticing! I really like this version too (an edited version of the one on Sunlight, it seems), goofy as the visual is...the song itself has a beautiful melody, Herbie could always write a good melody, nice changes, logical but not cliched...and it's got HOOKS! A jazz musician who understands HOOKS! Not that anybody "should" or "needs to", but if it was that easy, everybody could do it...and everybody most definitely can't... I mean, if that descending bassline into the chorus doesn't suck you in, wellsir, no longass roadtrips with you then! http://www.youtube.c...h?v=zDdpD5P2ytU Ya' know, "Dolphin Dance" meets those same criteria...only this is funk/disco. Oh well! But take away the funk/disco, plug in 1965 instead of 1978, record it on Blue Note, and I bet plenty of people would be talking about what a neat "composition" "I thought It Was You" is...

http://thecahokian.blogspot.com/2010/03/return-of-east-pharoah-sanders-came.html

Does Saint Peter know this?

oh hell, i forgot all about that one... anybody got a scan?

Somebody must've loaded 16 tons...

unless you got one of them old-school amps with a mono switch...

I guess this is beef?

Is that English? Either way, cool word!