JSngry

Yeah, here ya' go: http://www.amazon.com/Bali-Golden-Rain-Var...7142&sr=8-1

Back in the day, the Nonesuch Explorer series was the way to go. Don't know if that still holds, or even if they're still available. But they were (supposedly) straight-up "field recordings", so I don't know how much, if any, "world music" attitude came into play. For Balinese Gamelan, there was one Nonesuch Explorer album that had gamelan on one side & the Monkey Chant on the other. Lord knows that one was a favorite back in the day, that Monkey Chant. Pretty powerful stuff.

This music would not be possible without Ronnie Matthews and others like him, strong musicians able to bring solid (and that's a word too easily used as a dismissive, when in fact it can/should also a supreme compliment, given the endless opportunities for slippage there are in playing improvised music) style and substance in any context they're called upon to participate. A loss? Definitely. But as with almost all losses, one which is at least somewhat offset by the legacy. We come, we do, and then we leave. Hopefully what we do before we leave inspires those who come after us at least as much as it does who go alongside us, if by no other means than by setting an example for excellence. Ronnie Matthews certainly set such an example.

Chantix is designed to be used to gradually quit smoking. You're supposed to give in to the cravings at first, and over the course of the treatment, as they become fewer and far between, you've weaned yourself out of that obsessive/compulsive craving phase. Don't mean to be an alarnist either, but I've never heard of it being used in conjunction with other drugs like this, especially to induce cold turkey.

Anything form The Dells Sweet As Funk Can Be. Pick one.

14 out of 20.

I did the Chantix thing a year ago, and it worked as advertised. I've since gained weight in spite of exercising, which sucks donqui dix, but...

Hell dude (or dudette, I don't know your gender nor do I care), you don't need seven discs of anybody. But if you don't "know" Roy Eldridge as well as you think you might want/need to, this is a might fine place to start. The earlier stuff is more "classic", and 1-2 well-chosen discs of that is what you "need", if in fact you do. But just as you "know" different people at different levels of intimacy depending on what they do for you in intimate terms, so do many, myself included, pursue recorded music. Now, if all you know of Roy is the quasi-exhibitionist, firebrand, then that might lead you to believe that further intimacy is neither possible nor desirable. Fair enough, and so be it. But for those so inclined, and you may or may not be, there is more, so much more. And a lot of it can be had in this set.

Please allow me to amplify - Roy Eldridge was one of htose "jazz musicians" who was in fact a True Force Of Nature (capitalization for once used without irony, subtext, or anything other than 100% love, respect, and awe). The music on this set is all consistently in line with that, even the mellow" stuff (hey, mellow is a part of nature to, if it's real). So again - for god's sake y'all, don't fuck up & let this one get away

Sounds like a slight variant of the blues Miles used to play, uh... what was it..."No Blues"? The one w/Hank on Someday My Prince Will Come.

Nope. Especially not lately.

For god's sake y'all, don't fuck up & let this one get away.

He was with Mongo a little earlier, that's all I know.

Aside from the Bachrach side & There Is, no full albums reissued that I know of. Corrections welcome. But search the internet, and you'll find it, such gems as Love Is Blue, Musical Menu, Sweet As Funk Can Be, and others. Totally bad-ass! Trust me.

I really dig that Grant Reed cat here, but then again, I dig the shit outta Marvin Cabell, so that tells you how wrong about things I am. And I think that this is "in the vein" of Accent On The Blues, which is my favorite Patton album, period, only with a tighter band and better tunes. I [refer it to some of the BNs, actually. So why isn't this my favorite BJP side? Because I'm wrong about shit, that's why. But fuck it - my world, my rules, my right. Everybody got theirs, I got mine.

Chuck's in Iowa handling some family business. Beyond that, I know nothing.

Bird/Fats/Bud/Potter/Blakey @ Birdland, 1950. Although, that 1953 Open Door stuff....close call. But that's just the choice for right now, on this day, at this time, in this place.

Not Yosemite Sam, no, just the Astrodome Home Run Spectacular: http://www.astrosdaily.com/history/scoreboard/ And Kallas was with the Astros for a few years before going to Philly. With the Astros, he teamed with the urbane, Gene Elston, who did innings 1-2 & 8-9. & the down-home Uber-Homer Loel Passe who did 3-5. Kallas did 6-7 and was very much the freshly starched, sparkingly scrubbed Nice Young Man. His, "and that ball is an ASTRO ORBIT" was his signature, and he never did get it to where it sounded like he was saying it because he had to, if you know what I mean. And oh my yes, Cedeno was hyped to the high hills in Houston! This was an expansion franchise, remember, and for the better part of the 60s, they played in a setup with no divisions, just a 10 team league, winner take all. So the benchmarks for improvement, and therefore cause for excitement were of a different nature that today. I remember when the team first had a chance to finish at .500 - you'd would have thought that they were competing for the Series! So when a young stud like Cedeno shows up, a kid with true potential, you better believe that the organization made it sound like he was Jesus With Pine Tar. And they did! Here's Loel Passe calling a play by Cedeno. Loel talks like a hapless PR puppet, which is a big part of what he was, but by no means was that all he was. http://www.astrosdaily.com/audio/72ccitphr.mp3 Loel Passe was...Loel Passe. God bless Loel Passe.

The home chord, the one that is the key of the song. Everything else springs from that, where it "goes" & how it "returns".

Well, show me when "genius" is "conscious", and I'll show you where it's probably not genius. But no, I don't think that they "knew" what they were doing in the way that you describe. I do know, though, that they both, McCartney in particular, were serious about "music as music" if only as a matter of attitudinal disposition. So although I don't think that they really "knew the theory" behind what they were doing, I do think that they knew enough to hear changes that did what their's did and had enough of a musical instinct to follow that instinct rather than either find themselves painted into a corner and just giving up or else just thinking that it sounded weird and leaving it on the floor. Keep in mind, also, that Lennon & McCartney were of the last generation, more or less, who came to Rock & Roll songwriting from a world where there was no Rock & Roll, which meant that they were hearing, and absorbing the influence of, musics more "harmonically involved" than the idiom in which they themselves worked. But whereas so many "wrote to the medium", they took it upon themselves to bring other things to the table, and thus the difference. I've also heard it posited, and rather convincingly, that what they did was distinctly "British", that so many of their devices were rooted in English folk songs, madrigals, ballads, and the like, which, this sense of "intuitive recognition", is why large portions of the British audience instinctively reacted to their music positively, where American audiences initially found them "weird". "Conventional wisdom" likes to focus on how they and all the other British Invasion bands lifted from American sources, and that is very true, but with Lennon/McCartney, you have to look at a fundamental "British-ness" as well, something that set them apart, and a quality which only some of their followers could fully indulge in themselves, requiring as it did some "musical sophistication" outside of just copping old Chess sides.

OK, I plead cultural predisposition to ignorance (even though I used to be a big Beatles fan, and still like to hear them every now and again). What is special about the Beatles' chord progressions? OK, I plead cultural predisposition to ignorance (even though I used to be a big Beatles fan, and still like to hear them every now and again). What is special about the Beatles' chord progressions? Yeah, me too. (Though I WASN'T a Beatles fan, after "My Bonnie".) MG Ok, relative to the Entire World Before Them, no, not especially unique. But in the realm of Post-Swing Era Popular Music, their cadences often fell "unusually", they'd land somewhere you'd not expect. Not usually really radical, just...not all that common. The little bit of the linked article that I was able to stay awake through goes to unnecessary, er....great lengths to say just about the same thing. A few early examples: "I Want To Hold Your Hand" - The first part of the A-section: I V7 vi III7 That III7 is setting up the relative minor ( vi ) as tonic, but now, the phrase goes back to the I. And forget about the bridge, that thing just kinda floats around. never really landing anywhere concrete. "If I Fell" - Most people with reasonably harmonically acclimated ears can tell that this one plays beacoup games with false/deceptive resolutions. "She Loves You" - At first, a I vi iii (instead of the usual ii or IV) V cycle is sly enough, but when it comes time to say "she says she loves you", things start getting a little clever, going I vi ii7(b5) V - the ii7b5 "should" be found in a minor progression, not a major one. the symmetry here is nice too - in the first part of the phrase, the use of the iii chord, with its major 7th of the home key built into it, in the third bar adds extra "sunniness" to the feel, whereas the use of the ii7b5 in the second half - again the third chord in the sequence, but this time in the 6th bar instead of the 3rd, because the harmonic movement has suddenly slowed down, changes coming every two bars now, instead of every one bar as it started out - adds a very minor feel to an other wise typical major progression. So here you have a case of two four chord progressions in the same A section of the same song, and in each of them, the third chord adds accented harmonic "identity" to the progression, one major, one minor, the "irony" being that they both resolve major. And if you want to look at the form as A-B-Chorus instead of A1-A2-Chorus, then both the A & B sections are 8 bars in length, both use variants on the classic I-vi-ii-V progression, variating the 3rd chord of the sequence each time, only the A section uses its 8 bars to go through he sequence twice, but the B section only uses it once. No, none of this was "new", but for a Rock/Pop band, it was a significant opening up of the "space" available in which to put your progressions. The symmetry became less inevitable, and the tonic chord no longer had to come about with redundant monotony. "Unpredictability" was now a desirable option, not something that the A&R man scratched out at every opportunity. You take all those Lennon/McCartney soundalike songs/records, what really seals the deal on them is the changes, and it usually involves some minor chord being used in an "unexpected" place and/or function. Jazz, the better Tin Pan Alley types, and of course, classical composers had all gotten to this before, this opening up of the playing field. But it was Lennon/McCartney who brought it to rock (with maybe a spirit in the dark nudge from Bacharach, maybe). The list of examples could go on quite a long time, and even long after they all went solo, three of the four still showed an ability to craft those progressions that would throw you for a little loop here and there. For those of you for whom this is all gobbledygook, sorry, but this is the language being used in the music. If you want a totally "non-technical" explanation, the best I can offer is "longer and/or different ways to get to the tonic chord".

A Prelude To Bubbles: http://www.astrosdaily.com/audio/69closer.mp3

http://www.astrosdaily.com/audio/70cedenohr.mp3 Check out the scoreboard sounds.

It's been my experience that true "newness" is never digested easily. It just happens, BAM. You react one way or the other while the chain reactions go on and on. The "digestion" part doen't even have a change to begin in earnest until things "slow down" a little bit. Keep in mind that for most folks, "digesting" events isn't about "what is happening" as it is "what happened". Digestion is a reflective process, and reflection is difficult if not impossible when there's ongoing bombardment. Part of the "problem" is that so many people have gotten so "smart" that they think it's not cool/wise/whatever to allow themselves surrender to the "new". The puposely keep a detatched perspective under the guise of "objectivity" or something. Well, ok, but that kind of rules out the possibility of a full scale "upheaval" of anything, because the only way that happens is when content and non-objective emotion join hands, and most importantly, hearts. Or maybe the new upheaval is the ouster of the willingness to give it all up to the passion of the immediate for fear (although it would never be called that...) that there's nothing sustainable/substantive there. Maybe it's all going to be about "now" being defined in terms of how we can recast "then". Because "then" is a known quantity by now, and can be "digested" for as long as needed. Could be. That's certainly a "digital" emotional paradigm, I'd thing, and this new world a' comin' ain't nothing if not digital. Only thing is, eventually, you digest everything, and then you gotta shit out what's left (and there's always something left) and eat something new. The longer you postpone that inevitability, the uglier/weirder it gets when it finally happens. But if that's the way it's gonna go, thats the way it's gonna go.

The bring the circle even fuuler (and something so obvious that I must have been an idiot not to recognize it yesterday), I had a road gig last night - in Houston. buh buh buh BUH buh buh BUH