JSngry

Norman Cousins Smith & Nephew Uncle Sam

Milton Berle Ronnie Earle Jed's cousin, Pearl

yeah, same here. They may or may not be pawns of larger forces, but you look at some of these folks, see the look on their faces, realize that "back home" for them might well be some little village or something, a world where the whole country has less people that are in the stands, and where they might see somebody they don't know every few years or so, and that this is really a "trip of a lifetime" for them, and hey... There's a basic humanity there that is pretty compelling, I think.

In the real world, no. But in my own personal world, yeah.

Impressive is putting it mildly. I don't know that America is ready for the 21st century...

And also fwiw, almost all of those post-Mercy Capitol albums had at least one (sometimes only one) "hard-swinging" (if you count driving, modal/vampy things that aren't bop-derived in that category, and i know that not everybody does). You could probably make a really nice compilation of them and surprise a few people...

Oh, no doubt the earlier records are (usually) better records. Most of the Capitols and a lot of the Fantasys are not without..."trappings" of one kind or another (however, the few that aren't or almost aren't are dandy!). But I like Cannonball's playing better on the later sides. That's a distinction that I wish I didn't have to make, but it was what it was, and it still is. I'm in full agreement that Cannonball with Miles is more often than not the sound of a man in a severe state of discombobulation as he was having both his head and the future of music handed to him nightly. But I also think he welcomed the discombobulation, took it like a man and realized that, yeah, he had to keep on making a living but equally yeah, he definitely had some homework to get to. And that's what he did. After he left Miles, he unapologetically went on about the business of making a living (and more power to him for that, hell yeah), but he also kept doing his homework. And if you care to follow the evolution of his playing as it exists inside (sometimes deep inside) those Capitols & Fantasys, you can hear the results. Believe me, I can totally understand anybody not wanting to go to that amount of "work" (although listened to today, the "problem" with a lot of those albums for me is more programming than actual playing). But if anybody wants to, the story is there to hear, and it's a story not without some pretty significant evolutions.

What? Come on! Better than Card Sharks? Better than High Rollers? I don't think so... Well, think again!

That was the day we called it a Night.

Cannonball took his own sweet time about it, but by the time he died, he was pretty comfortable with some really stretched out harmonic concepts. The "Stars Fell On Alabama" from Phenix is so far removed from the one on the album w/Trane both tonally and timbrally as to be a different player altogether, even though, of course, it's not.

Everybody did! I got a hoot out of Kitty Carlise copping to the fact that her kids used to read Mad. SCANDALOUS!

As i remember it, it was on weekly in prime time, then went to daily afternoons, all on CBS. This was with Bud Collier. Then it went syndicated w/Garry Moore & was daily/nightly/whatever your local broadcaster wanted. GSN ran reruns of the Moore-hosted shows forever, and I tell you what, other than the cosmetics, the show is timeless. Simple premise - who's a liar, and who's not? Really doesn't matter what the story is or when it's told, it's all about can you spot a liar. Greatest show ever. I mean it.

Well, yeah, but track meets are really cool. Really. But they're hard to follow in person unless you're really keyed in, and are time consuming on TV, which honestly doesn't really cover them well, I think. But the Olympics, hey, great coverage, you get some narrative to the events (or used to, put me down with those who think that NBC has whored out big time in terms of regular network coverage, gimme the old ABC crew any day they become available again), and yeah, hey, it's all good like that. Would i watch a track meet a week if it was on with Olympic-style broadcasting? Probably not, I don't watch too much of anything regularly anymore except news. But once or twice a month, yeah, I do dig track (and some field!) enough to do that more often than not.

Sorry, but that cut seems out of place on the album to me, always has. Plus when people talk about how Cannonball had a cheesy, ok..."overly florid", streak, that to me is a prime example of what they mean. I don't hear it nearly as often as some do, but I'll not deny its existence by any means. Tell you what, though, it evolved itself rather nicely as the 60s wore on into the 70s. Eventually it was all but gone, or at least it had morphed into something more grounded than it had been previously. Don't misunderstand me, I'm a big Cannonball fan, but in many, many ways, I think, type of material aside, he was a "better" player later than earlier, sometimes significantly so.

Definitely no argument from me about the need for copyright laws, as well as the need for them to evolve & continue to offer protection to intellectual property. Might be an argument, though, about how effective that's going to be unless and until the legal conceptions of "it" in all its forms catch up with that of the reality, not the perception. Progress in real time is a bitch-and-a-half sometimes, doncha' know...

I'm no doubt in the minority, but the track events are by far and away my most favorite Olympic events. Always have been.

...except that KOB doesn't give us anything even remotely as counter-productive as "Dancing In The Dark".

and btw - check out the room sound. Great room sound!

EVER!!!!! http://classicshowbiz.blogspot.com/2008/01...-william-m.html

Guess that means it will be up to Lonehill/Gambit/Jazz Factory/Definitive to put it out. Better it be blogged?

Yeah, but the information that the cell is conveying is dependent upon us being aware (on some level) of the whole song. The electric piano BOINK would be just a BOINK if you didn't already know the entirety of Mr. Magic. The effectiveness relies on a certain amount of "cultural literacy", and that runs both shallow and deep. Sampling a whole phrase of a Ludacris song doesn't require a huge amount of awareness from the listener to "get it". Picking up on a BOINK from a GW, Jr. record from 30 years ago is a little more subtle. I totally agree. My point is just that there's now this entire musical...realm that is built entirely upon this sort of thing, a realm that can accommodate both the subtle and the blatant, the sublime and the ridiculous, the beauty and the beast, the fish and the fowl, the alphabet soup (incorporating the fowl) and the omega-3 fatty acids (incorporating the fish). If this realm not only exists but is organically active and evolving, as it certainly seems to be. then it seems to me that any "questioning of its validity" is little more than backwards looking wishful thinking, and that attempts to create a legislative protectionist environment against it are either doomed to fail out the gate or else can succeed only by the heaviest of heavy-handedness. Which simply means that this realm is like any other - that there can be both good and bad music made from the same basic tools, and that failure and success in this regard is a function of the artist, not the artist' tools. Even more simply, this boils down to substance trumping style. Again. Same as it ever was. The classics never go out of style!

So you're saying he should be allowed to put out his product, but then be shot, right? Which reminds me...

You know what's cool? I was listening to some broken-beat mix a few days ago, and this one jam hits and over the drum and bass groove it's got this one little staccato Rhodes "BOINK" and this one little staccato guitar "FLINK", these two sounds widely scattered, not in anyway repetitative or anything, and damn if just from these little (and I do mean little) punches (and I do mean punches) of sounds, I could tell, unmistakably, that what I was hearing there was "Mr. Magic. Unmistakable, just from two bits of sound a fraction of a second each. Now to me, that's somebody really getting to the core of how we as a post-phonographic civilization have been processing information all these years that he/she knows that they can pull two little micro-blips and immediately conjure Mr. Magic. I mean, that's knowing what it is that you know, and I've never been opposed to knowing, no siree, Bob, even though not knowing is every bit as cool so long as you know that you don't know.

Or even yet and unto still - how about this one: All this shit is played out as specific entities. The thing I so dig about Monday Michiru is that she's hip enough to intuitively grasp this and salvage all the good shit and turn it all into one music, thus freeing up a big buttload of crucially needed space on the cultural hard drive. But judging by sales, there's no market in that. too fancy. So some more people are going one step further and turning it all into pretty much one song. One endless song where any thing you heard back then you can hear again, but just the hook, because that's all you need to trigger those memories, and this way, when it can be anything, it can be everything, and when it can be everything, that's the only one you'll need.