JSngry

I remain hopeful. That would be nice.

I have this record...my parents bought it when I was but a tot, and I still have it. Looked at it this afternoon while rearranging things, in fact. And that bus still trips me out. Did then, does now.

And vice-versa as well?

"Blue Velvet"?

Ah yes. I refer to those as Tux, Bux & Sux gigs. I would refer to it as Dues Blues, but the money was so good (but not enough!), the music so bad (but fun!), and the crowd so nondescript (but nice!) that it would be insulting to the notions of both Dues & Blues to do so. It was like...the money was horizontal, but the check was vertical. So hell if I know what it really was.

Is that what all this is about? Settling a score with Wynton? Damn, talk about throwing good time after bad... But as long as you're at it, tell me more about what kind of a soul Louis Armstrong had, please. Such insight has heretofore proven...unattainable.

And I'm telling you that in at least some quarters in at least some portions of America, that damn near any African-American vernacular music that is not hip-hop or MOR is consensually referred to as "blues". Of course, I'm in Texas where nobody knows shit about no blues...

Might I ask what is Ted's pod? Look out Mr Lowe!

Ted, can I put your pod under Allen's bed tonite?

No, time to go play a tux gig. Don't have to worry about any blues there, real or imagined!

Dude, the word "blues" has become so meaningless as a "musical term" these days, it ain't worth fighting over any more except as an economic interest. And god knows there's plenty of that... I mean, you go into South Dallas and say "blues", you're liable to get responses ranging from BB to T-Bone to Tyrone Davis to Marvin Sease to even Luther Vandross! "Country" blues, you'd be hard pressed to find any street-level awareness of that. But people feel something in certain distinct musics, and they feel compelled to call it "blues". And ain't too very many of them hip to Wynton, god bless'em! Now to those of us smart people who know better, that's just nonsense. But to the people whose music this is all a part of the fabric, there is a common thread, somewhere. Or so they think. Maybe we should give lectures to them to remedy them of their ignorance. Ya want me to book you into the South Dallas Cultural Center, maybe on a theme of "NEGRO! LEARN YOUR BLUES!!!" I'll collect the advance, I leave it to you to collect the door...

You ever wonder why you get misunderstood so much?

AAAAAAARGHHHH

"blues" is a consensual term, no way to define it literally. Only a fool would try, and only an even bigger fool would claim that they have succeeded. Now as for this: I agree wholeheartedly, with the caveats that it ultimately also does fall under the consensual meaning of "blues", no way around it, good luck at ever changing that, and that no matter what you bring into your house, no matter where you brought it from, it becomes a part of your house. Even though Armstrong existed above it/us all, he still did not exist in a vacuum, obviously. His language became a valid stream into "blues" almost immediately and has remained there ever since, if for no other reason that (and this is where all the "musicology" talk turns clueless + ) "blues" is ultimately not a style of music, but a state of mind. What goes in really doesn't matter, except as academia, but what comes out is what hits people where they live, and that is what gives all this shit life, not some analytical debate. What goes into Armstrong's "blues" was indeed many different things, but to say that what came out wasn't "blues", man, you're telling several billion people over the course of 3/4 a century that no, no, no, they're been getting it wrong all this time. They've gotten a lot of things wrong, these several billion people over the course of 3/4 a century, but I really don't think that this is one of them...

I've not yet heard this particular collection, but I've never heard any Barron that was less than interesting, and usually they're more than just that.

Sso, then, are you saying that Rollins was reacting to specific verbal "lines" instead of to an overall cultural esthetic of which those lines were an expression (and only a partial expression at that)?

Ok, so which of these traditions does Bird come out of? Or was Bird not a great blues player either? I do not at all understand the strict literalness of this mindset. It seems arbitrary and wholly self-imposed. I'm all for discovering/recognizing currents, but to deny that piece by piece they tend to merge, and that at some point they all come together is missing the point of it all, no?

Now that's just silly. First of all, if you don't have a reason for getting out of bed in the morning other than to define things, then...whatever. Never mind. That's just too sad to contemplate. Otherwise.... You say that Armstrong's blues playing was "brilliant but not really as blues playing". And yet it has been recognized as such - blues playing - since it first went down. Even if it was rife with other influences, which it certainly was, it just sorta zoomed right in there and became part of what everybody present at the time (and even more afterward) accepted unhesitatingly as a part of the language of the blues, maybe as an evolution, maybe as a revolution, maybe some or all of the above, but definitely in line with what damn near everybody would consider "the blues". Now you're going to come along all these years later and say, not so fast, no, it's not really blues playing because it doesn't meet my proscribed definitions/criteria/whatever? To what end, the Lowe-ification of American Music? Whazzup with that, huh? Sorry dude, but unless you can offer up a helluva lot more clear definition/delineation of what you're talking about here, something that bears some semblance to reality and not some grand "theory" that you have, I'm calling bullshit right now. It makes no sense to say that Louis Armstrong was not a great blues player even though he played brilliantly on/in/of the blues. What does make sense to say is that he greatly expanded the language, parameters, the "aesthetic" if you will, of the blues by bringing to it what he did and finding places for all of it so organically, but you have not said that. You have said that Lois Armstrong was not a great blues player, and sorry, but that is just stupid.

So...you define the blues and thereby what is not the blues? Sorta sounds like Center Lincoln, but let me know how that works out for ya', ok?

It's a solid session and does what it sets out to do about as well as can be done.

The Bill Carroothers Comedy Jukebox has long been the stuff of legend: http://www.carrothers.com/comedyjukebox.htm

I like the percussionist. It opens up the time.

But who was this band? Who were these people?

Definitely one of 'em. But who are these guys? I mean, ok, Rusty Bryant, sure, Khalid Moss, somewhat slightly. But Harold Young (who will indeed be missed)? Eddie Brookshire? Fred Masey? ? Who are these men who make music that is exactly what an album with a title like this needs to offer in order for it to be real? Maybe it's their anonymity that just makes it that much more real. After all, Unless you're already there, most of the Saturday Night Brothers I've ever known weren't known anywhere else. But DAMN are these brothers tight, like a real working band that had played this music in its natural environs more times than either they or anybody else could count. No way that this is a pickup band. No way. There's too much breath in the music, too much collective oneness to the groove for it to be a non-working band. To the best of my knowledge, never reissued, not even as part of 2-fer. That's just wrong. but such is the fate of so many Saturday Night Brothers. This album is a treasure. Go wherever it is is you go to find such things, pay your respects, feel the love, and never again wonder if there are such things.