JSngry

An Esmond Edwards production!

No real beef against the Mizells here, they're deeply respected in certain "beat-ology" circles, and on those terms, I can get them. but other than that, unlike much of the other "funk jazz" of the era, it didn't grab me then, and I still haven't "gotten" it, other than I know have a better appreciation of what they were doing. It's an ok concept for a change of pace (at the very most), but these guys kinda took it everywhere, and damned if I have yet to warm to it. Another thing about the Butler BN - the longer it went on, the more and more it was all about L.A. based studio dates, not about "slick street jazz" or whatever you want to call it. That's one thing in particular that made Sonny Lester's Groove Merchant work the "Possible Parallel 70s Blue Note Alternative" that MG suggests it was - Lester slicked shit up, but underneath it all was usually some East Coast club talent. BN, otoh, turned into a production factory, like CTI only without the imagination or real jazz skills featured in the mix. Strictly production... I'm imagining Groove Merchant 70s music w/some slickass 70s BN covers, and...I don't think I can handle it!

GREAT! I'll be looking for one as well, then.

I do not have that Paris show. Damn.

Not the Elvin, that was vault material produced by Omar Clay, Butler being "Executive Producer". The Byrd...not at all fond of that one...just as bad as the Mizell stuff in my opinion, albeit for different reasons... The Morgan...yeah, but...if you look at the timeline and the original album credits, there was a "transition" period where Butler at first co-produced w/Wolff and then actually produced artists left over from the old BN, and it seems as if he stayed out of the way for those albums/artists. This is one of those. Nothing at all "Butler-ish" about it at all. As for the Grant, that was GGs last album for BN. Butler (w/Wade Marcus) had been around for Grant's albums since Visions. If you again look at the timeline, when Butler first assumed the lead at UA/BN, there were a lot of "pop-jazz" albums like Visions by a lot of people. In retrospect, these were not as bad as they seemed at the time, although few were as good as you'd want them to be either. If he had stopped there, ok, the shift was on once UA/Transamerica, bought out Liberty (far more the turning point than Liberty buying out BN, I think), and it could have been just another case of corporate bullshit winning the day. But he didn't, and it wasn't. The whole Blue Note Hits A New Note thing was enormous in terms of "push" (i.e. -marketing). You could sign up for a freakin' newsletter for cryin' out loud, in case you wanted to know how chapped Bobbi Humphrey's lips were or weren't at her last gig, I guess...This wasn't intended to be just a co-opting of a label's name, this was a hoped for movement, a redefining of a legacy/brand name/whatever. And almost all of it was crap and/or repetitious redoings of a formula that had worked one time. There was no "rebuilding" or "redefining", just cheap opportunistic riding of a formula and farming out of work to slicksters, who did what slicksters do - make slick music for ready, and short-term, consumption. The only two "serious" artists left on the label were Hutch & Horace. The former's output began to be produced (to lessening effect as time went by, imo) by Dale Oehler (Butler again being "Executive Producer"), the latter's work shifting from Butler w/Marcus to Silver w/o any noticeable change, so I think this was one of those "stay out of the way" dynamics. And they got less and less push as time went by. Silver's was the very last release of new, original material on BN before it went inactive, and believe me when I tell you that it was released damn near in a vacuum. All "style" & no substance. Go to THIS PAGE and see how the covers got prettier and prettier while the music got emptier & emptier. And that's not just a sign of the times either, since, as noted earlier, you can (and some did) make "commercial", "jazzy" music that is not as totally devoid of content as most of this effluvia was. I'll give this much to Butler's BN though - it laid the groundwork for GRP, since Daves Grusin & Rosen became an active production team there. So if you want some, any, kind of "lasting legacy" from it all, there it is, and you can have it.

Is it back in stock yet? I've yet to receive a shipping notification.

WHOA!!!

Where was this released before? I've tried to obtain all the grey-market Rollins I can, but haven't seen this one yet.

That's a good point, especially since so many of the Butler-era BN albums had him as "Executive Producer" and fewer others as "Producer". There was clearly room under the Butler "umbrella" for other producers to work, and why Lester chose not to (or had it chosen for him) is an interesting question.

Kinky!

Ursula Rucker would probably consider her an "ancestor", it you know what I mean. She was married to Ornette for quite a while (pretty sure that she's Denardo's mom) & has also recorded with then-members of Prime Time. But Celebrations & Solitude, the one on Strata-East that's the topic of this thread (it's just her & Richard Davis throughout), is quite the "Underground Classic".

The same ones it does everywhere else, I guess. I tend to try not to listen too much to conversations in the men's room.

I can give you two, three if you want to count a distribution acquisition: Columbia, pre-Butler. Clive Davis might have killed what he spawned, but before he did...major albums by Mingus, Ornette, Jarrett, a.o. Then Bruce Lundvall came in behind the left-over carnage and did fine. ABC-Impulse! was another strong label up until the mid-70s. As one example, while BN was releasing Bobbi Humphrey, Impulse! was releasing Sam Rivers. It might be forgotten today, but the Steve Backer-led Impulse! was aggressively (and successfully to some extent) marketing artists such as Rivers, Gato Barbieri, & John Klemmer (who, remember, wasn't always a "mellow" player) to younger college audiences. To assist in this, they still had Pharoah (who went into a decline of sorts along the way), and they always had Trane, just as they still do. And then they got Jarrett from Columbia... For that matter, I think that RCA was handling Flying Dutchman by the time the 70s got under way, and that was another label that put out some fine music, a lot of it with "contemporary" touches. I fully agree with this - now. But what really killed me then, and still sticks out like a sore thumb, is how little care and planning, and how seemingly much empty-headed trend-riding went on with what the label really got behind. Donald Byrd & Bobbi Humphrey have hits with the Mizells? Fine, lets have them make the same record over and over and over and over. And over. Same with Ronnie Laws/Wayne Henderson, same with Noel Pointer, same with damn near everybody. There was no evolution, no refinement of concept, no nothing except more and more and more (and more) of the same. The ones who sold got to keep making the same record longer than the ones who didn't, which is of course the nature of the beast, but compare how CTI managed to successfully present the same "sound" in a subtle yet real different # of ways. With CTI, there was always a sense that although the music was indeed "product", that the music itself mattered, that it was the reason for the product. With BN in the 70s, it was depressingly evident far more often than not, that what they were interested in was product, period, music be damned. Like I said earlier, you can make "commerical" music and still do it with imagination, taste, flair, etc. Or you can find a formula or two and ride it until it drops dead. It was the latter course that BN took in the 70s, and that, far more than any "defilement" of the BN "legacy" or choice of "musical direction" is what sticks in the craw to this day. Or to put it another way - do you think that all those putrid Gene Harris BN albums of the Butler era were the best they could have been? Could nobody have made the same "type" records with more taste and/or imagination? Or were they just going to have to be abominable no matter what? I don't think so. I just think that it was a severe lack of imagination about how to hit that "new note", simple as that.

From that bio: Jimmy Nicol? The Temporary Beatle?

HEY-oh!

Most definitely.

Yes.

Well, Lion/Wolff's did give us Sabu's Palo Conga, but that was a blatant "outside the box" release from them... There were other good BN albums released during Butler's tenure, no doubt, even if on some of them he was "Executive Producer", which to me has usually always meant that that's the person who approved/funded the project, not too much else. Important indeed, but... Something like The New Heritage Keyboard Quartet was a pretty wacky idea in concept - I mean, a quartet with two pianos as the lead instruments? Get outta here! But when those two pianists are Roland Hanna & Mickey Tucker, hey. And of course, the Hutcherson & Silver sides (although some of the former's seemed to suffer from lack of planning/budget/whatever as the years went by, for whatever reason). The Eddie Henderson sides weren't bad, although they didn't in any way measure up to the Capricorn sides which preceded them. And there were a few others, some not-sucky (but not great either, although that's a pattern long in place before and after his BN releases...) Chico Hamilton sides, etc. Some of it, like the Marlena Shaw & Carmen McRae albums, were actually not-at-all-bad albums from a jazz-pop vocal standpoint. And one or two of the albums by Ronnie Laws (produced by Wayne Henderson, IIRC) & Noel Pointer have held up as fine examples of that particular thing. So it wasn't all doom and gloom. But the overwhelming percentage of it was. And all of what got the label's "backing" was. And damn near everybody had done better work before and would do better afterwards, except for Bobbi Humphrey, who was a perfect, faceless fit for the Mizell brother's concept and whose later work exposed this lack of native personality with blunt fatality, & Horace, who did what he did no matter where he did it. Overall, I look at it like A) leaving aside the emotional ties to the "Blue Note Legacy" (the "defacing" of which was, as history has since shown, both inevitable, ongoing, and most likely inevitable), most of the music that Butler sanctioned was nowhere near as good of it's "type" as it could/should have been & B) there was an ongoing trend of artists in the "Blue Note Hits A New Note" bag coming out the gate with a strong first album & then not following up in terms of either quality or sales, which in this type of "commercial" music is sorta the object of the game. Both of those to me indicate the lack of a seasoned/knowing "steering" hand at the helm. So for me, the bone of contention remains that as much that the "new" Blue Note wasn't the old one in terms of musical "style" (although that was very much a flashpoint for me at the time), it's that the vast majority of it was just not worthy in terms of ongoing quality. You can be "commercial" and still bring lasting musicality & expression to the table. And so, so much of the 70s BN music just didn't do that. They rode into town on a rip-snorting bucking bronc, but once that horse started to fade, it certainly appeared that nobody who should have had an idea what to do next had one, much less any clues about how to treat it in order to keep it strong & fiesty. They just kept riding it until it dropped dead.

Wow... That should set the cause of getting past White Guilt back several millennia. Or more.

Well, that's just what I've heard. But actually, Bethlehem was doing ok saleswise, I believe. Chris Connor was selling well, & some of their other things did ok as well. I've seen the original package of this set - it's a freakin' box. Figure in the cost for that + all the sessions, and you got a much larger than usual outlay for a label of this nature.

Or perhaps a few -- like Miles -- can do some of both, at the same time. Or maybe for some people the two are not always distinctly/intrinsically separate impulses...

Gene Stallings Gene Rayburn Jean Shrimpton

That was pretty nimble. Yet sincere. I mean, there's no need to be hating on a man's entire life/existence/whatever (or giving the impression that you are) when your object of disregard is just one portion of it. You gotta remember, I was there for the whole "Blue Note Hits A New Note" thing at the worst possible time - young, energetic, idealistic, and so not understanding why Blue Note was releasing John Lee & Gerry Brown records or why Bobbi Humphrey was getting bigger props (and from the sound of the records, budgets) from the label than was Horace Silver. I will say this though - I do believe that Butler gave the go-ahead for the reissue series that Cuscuna & Lourie soon turned into the Vault Exploration From God, so good for him on that one, and for not killing it along the way. All this to say that by stating my disrespect for what he did at BN & Columbia, I do not in any way mean to imply disrespect for the man as a man, including as a successful businessman or as a visible African-American in a role not usually occupied by same. The only reason I even said anything in the first place was because I started reading big ups to the cat for promoting Wood Shaw at Columbia, and again, to the best of my knowledge, the reality was anything but that.

How much was Butler involved with Woody? I don't see his name on any of the Columbia albums, and I've always heard that it was his idea to drop Woody off the label in favor of focusing on the hyping of Wynton. All the Columbia Shaw albums I have (which is all of them...) show Michael Cuscuna as producer & Maxine Gregg as Executive Producer. It was Bruce Lundvall, not Shaw who signed Shaw to the label, and it was Lundvall's Elektra Musician label to which Woody was next affiliated. If Butler was in any way actively involved in the promotion of Shaw while at Columbia beyond a "formal" level, I've been unaware of it up to this point. If anything, I think he was better off at the label before Butler's arrival. If wrong about this, I will gladly stand corrected & join in the appreciation for this effort. But this is the first I've heard of it, ever! On a personal level, hey, RIP & all that. After all, he was a man with family, friends, all that, and I respect that. But as far as his "contributions" to jazz, I basically feel nothing but scorn and contempt. Felt that quite strongly while he was alive, not going to change that now that he's not. Again, no personal disrespect intended, and fullest sympathies extended at that level.

Zawinul's on record as saying that Cannonball's band of the time was playing hipper music than Miles'. You can allow for some (lots) of ego in that statement, but the fact remains that Zawinul himself was contributing not only the hit "funky" tunes, but also some "progressive" material as well, material which the band, tight working unit that it was, attacked head on. Zawinul's also on record as saying that Nat was somewhat against the more forward stuff and was always lobbying Cannonball to keep it more inside, but Cannonball, shrewd businessman/artist that he was, saw the merit oin both directions and let both have their place in the overall presentation. (and btw, Nat still used Joe on his Live At Memory Lane album for Atlantic, where in "Painted Desert" we have a tune that sounds like a daguerreotype of an ancestor of something off of Mysterious Traveler. Ans also btw, Nat made that wacky Zodiac Sex record for Capitol with all the Miles-ish electronics, so either he came around, was a shameless trendmonger, or else the truth was somewhere in the middle) I think it's safe to say that Cannonball's band in the 60s (and even into the early 70s) was not necessarily represented on record in a way that fully reflected the scope of what they threw down with over the course of a ful evening in a club. As far as how much direct influence the had on Miles, I don't know and don't want to speculate. But I do think it safe to assume that Miles was paying attention in general terms to anybody/anything that was both "musically valid" and was drawing crowds and selling records. We tend to forget today that the records of the Second Great Quintet didn't sell for shit (relatively speaking) in their time, and from what I understand, club dates were all over the place in terms of how well they drew. I do think that Miles, not just out of "vanity" but also as a matter of personal temperament/philosophy had a need to engage "popular culture" on his own terms as a means of asserting his "entitlement" to not be shut out of same. So Cannonball's mixture of readily accessible funky tunes mixed with the more challenging stuff was not only selling records and drawing well in clubs but was actually able to have some "hits" (and one actual HIT) with that mix, yeah, I think that Miles noticed, and I think it's not for nothing that he went after Zawinul when (and for what) he did.