JSngry

Was RCA doing LPs in 1951 or before?

When teamed w/Stepney, oh hell yeah. The shit's all over the map, from psychedelic doo-wop to borderline wack vocal jazz to deep grit South((ern) (Side)) Soul to Power Funk, but its always got them voices, and them voices is good. This is what them that only know their music as Popular & Soulful nowadays call "grown folks music" in the best possible way. This seems like the right place to put in a plug for the three early 70's Terry Callier Cadet albums with Stepney... Sweet As Funk Can Be is an album of mostly Callier (co-penned) songs sung by The Dells & produced by Stepney. It is a sublime piece of work.

Does it count if you posted this yesterday & I just now read it today?

C'mon, y'all. it's for the Make Up A Wish Floundation!

Too bad there was never a Holiday For Shirts. Then we coulda had the Bud Bowl, only with Art Blakey CDs.

In fact, when I smoked, I smoked menthol. And when you'd get a, uh..."less enlightened" white guy bumming a cigarette off of you & you offered him a menthol, well, you'd best be ready for some culturally-motivated verbal hijinks! If you know what I mean...

Why "strangely"? Spend any time at all "in the community" as a smoker, and the "preference" becomes obvious pretty quickly. You could tell a club's demographic by its cigarette vending machine - clubs catering to a mostly white clientèle would have no menthol offerings, or Salem which is about the "whitest" tasting menthol on the market. Clubs catering to a more mixed audience would offer both Salem & Kool (or Newport, never both), and clubs with minimal white visitage would offer Kool, Newport, sometime B&H menthol, and, back in the day Players menthol (gee, what do you think the target demographic was for a cigarette named Players?). But never, ever, would such clubs offer Salem. Kool, btw, still sponsors music fests aimed at African-American audiences, mostly hip-hop/DJ-related stuff.

Coral had a bunch of stuff - Buddy Hackett, Phil Foster, Steve Allen, and others. Firmly middle-50s. I've seen Myron Cohen 78s on Yiddish(?) specialty labels too. Speaking of 78s, there's this site: http://www.hensteeth.com/home.html which used to look like a BSN offshoot, but now is a shell of its former self.

Yeah, about 15 years ago, when Nickelodeon show WB cartoons late in the afternoon, this one came on, like, every 6 weeks or so (or so it seemed). Both my kids recognized the music as jazz and always called me into the room when it came on.

"The culture" has always been "hostile" to jazz in one form or another. What's changed is that there used to be a "jazz culture" that was big and broad enough to take care of all that, a system of highways with loops, feeder roads, interstate, local, county roads that all went somewhere, and there really was no way you couldn't get there from here unless you really didn't want too. Some folk bitch about all the Cannonballs, Eddie Harris, etc. bands/gigs, but... that shit was part of an overall fiber, and as such, it served the role for some of getting on the road from here to there, and it made the trip seem pretty damn natural too. Transportation the way you want it to be! Nowadays, it's all about "I'm playing the real shit and everybody else is jivin' ". Ain't no highway system there, unless it's a self-absorbed highway to hell and/or oblivion, whichever is more American Classical. It's come to this - talking to teenagers to get them to get on a road that ain't going nowhere in the hopes that the increased traffic will force the road to miraculously change direction. When that works, let's try giving everybody cancer so that it can cure itself! On the other hand, ain't nothing wrong with "jazz" that killing it off so it can begin to grow again won't fix (and that goes quintuple (at the very least) for what passes as the "jazz culture" of the last 25 or so years). Don't laugh (or curse), that's how forests and forest fires work.

When teamed w/Stepney, oh hell yeah. The shit's all over the map, from psychedelic doo-wop to borderline wack vocal jazz to deep grit South((ern) (Side)) Soul to Power Funk, but its always got them voices, and them voices is good. This is what them that only know their music as Popular & Soulful nowadays call "grown folks music" in the best possible way.

yi!

Now, how 'bout them comedy records? Berman (hits, right?), Sahl, etc.? Granz-era, right?

ooops....

Blues Project, Laura Nero, The Hombres, Janis Ian...

Also, and this is a generalization which I might need to retract upon further reflection (or not), I think there was a tendency amongst "boppish" players to "pull back" a little, if only subconsciously, when playing with "older" style players. I think it has to do with the tendency of the older players - and Hawk in particular - to have a more "straight" 4/4 feel to their basic rhythmic impetus. The younger guys's rhythm was more naturally...subdivided, and I do think that some "accommodation" was necessary. Gladly taken, usually, but necessary nevertheless.

Buddy Terry's Prestige side Natural Soul features a core group of Terry, Larry Young, & Eddie Gladden. On two tunes, this core trio is augmented by Woody Shaw, and this quartet (I like to think of it as Pure Newark Unity...) forms the group for the album's highlight/centerpiece/whatever, a cooking 12:28 jam called "The Revealing Time". If that makes you drool, don't feel bad. It is that good.

Remember, Ben hit L.A. first, before moving to Europe. Why? Hopes of more giggage. Getting away from the racism motivated a lot of cats, but simple economics - i.e. gigs - was the cold hard facts of life, one way or the other.

Al Bolton, the KSLA-TV (Shreveport, La) weatherman who also played drums.

That's a very interesting remark, but I'm not sure what it means. The jazz that was "in fashion" in the fifties seems to have been mainly revivals of big bands - Harry James, Les Brown etc - or easy listening jazz - Sinatra -> Les Baxter, via Gleason, Freshmen, Shearing, Fitzgerald - very little "hardcore" jazz appears to have been "in fashion" - Ahmad Jamal and Garner are about the only exceptions. If you mean "in fashion" with the jazz public, well I don't really know what was in fashion with the jazz public in the fifties. I think white audiences were probably going for West Coast stuff, as well as the output from Verve. Possibly black audiences were more focused on Hard Bop, though honking sax men remained popular until the mid-fifties. Gross generalisations these and I hope they'll be read as approximations. If something like this is what you intended, then I can see your point. MG Cats like Hawk, Eldridge, Webster, etc had a hard time getting gigs in the 50s. Fact. Not "modern" enough.

Damn dude, err...ma'am...that leads me to wonder what else you haven't done in your 64 years... Seriously, lay off the Metrecal & eat some fish!

No, not unless you feel a need to get deeper into that whole out-of-Detroit hardbop thing and all that it spawned. And if you ain't felt that need yet, don't force it, I'd say. OTOH, it's probably best not to go off on tangents about it that are based more in theory than in reality either...

When you're right, you're right and funny. Whe you're wrong, you're wrong and funny. I like it better when you're right and funny. This ain't one of those times. Oh well!

...and Barry Gailbrath - George Russell = ? "Barry's Tune", which = how you hear Burrell and...what else of note? Gailbrath was playing parts. And well. But the # of players who could approximate the whats/hows of how he did that then is exponentially greater the $ of players who could do what Burrell did. What, you gonna put fuckin' George Van Epps or Howard Roberts on a session w/Trane? Tina Brooks? Yeah, and Lester Young needed Elvin behind him instead of Jo Jones. Of course. Sometimes I think you don't hear the peoples unless they scream at 'cha... In that case, you hear what you wanna hear, which is not necessarily all that is being said.