JSngry

By being right.

Up, if for no other reason than to counter the impression that I'm "jaded" or something. This is something I can get behind!

Nah, comedy itself is easy. It's the timing that's a bitch...

And cigarette wrappers.

Sorry y'all, but that was just too easy!

Damn, that kid needs to get laid, like...last week! :g :g

Damn, that kid needs to get laid, like...last week!

Up for the "why was 70s jazz fun?" thing. This is a part of the reason why, this relationship between a certain portion of Black Pop and Jazz and where it seemed then that it might be leading.. I spent last night at work listening to Fulfillingness' First Finale and remembering how many jazz musicians were paying attention to Stevie Wonder in 1974, not as a source for commercially viable cover material, but as a valid songwriter and "arranger", the creator of a music that was not jazz per se, but certainly spoke many of the same "messages" in an accent that was, at the very least, not unintelligible. For a while, it looked as if maybe "it" really was all going to come together into one big OmniMusic. And yes, that was fun!

I guess not!

Agree 100% with the first part of your statement, disagree 100% with the last part. You can ignore it, and it's really not all that difficult to do so. All those names you list, other than Garrett (up until a few years ago), I do tend to ignore. Not because they "suck" or anything, they're all damn fine players. It's just that over the years I've gotten "accustomed to" (or "spoiled by") a certain "scale of meaning" in jazz (well, life and music in general, but since we're talking jazz here, let's stay there), and for me, the whole current scale is unfavorably (again, for me) skewed by the lack of any "big meanings" right now to give perspective to the lesser ones. Like I said earlier, if these guys are the top rungs of the ladder, do we really need a ladder? It would be like if this was Rock in 1968 & The Jefferson Airplane was the best band on the scene. Good enough, sure, but if that's the best there was, it would hardly be a scene you'd want to get obsessively and/or personally involved in. At least I wouldn't. But since there were bigger pictures being painted aside the Airplane's, there's a whole...field there in which they play a favorable part, one of many, and if not the biggest (thankfully!), then one not without pleasure or meaning in it's own right on it's own terms. But not enough to be the field, if you know what I mean. On the one hand, it bugs me to hear the rabid dissing that these guys get, because they are all excellent musicians, and they are doing their thing as they see fit, which, even with "support" is still in no way an easy task. But I do understand the frustration, because... I want more out of them than they seem to have to give me. I need more. I've had more from others in the past. I know what the terms of a successful relationship are for me, and these ain't them. Not really their fault per se, but after a while, I don't think it's too far-fetched to ask this - if this is the game at the best it can be played by "a generation" (or two), is it maybe time to consider the possibility that the game as it's come to exist in the frame of reference that is these guy's world is either played out for good or else in a period of profound and prolonged dormancy/latency/whatever. I've asked myself those questions many times over many years, and have come to the conclusion that it's not only unreasonable to ask those questions, it's also not unreasonable to accept that the answer is, by all indicators, "most likely yes". And I'm ok with that, just as I'm ok with more or less ignoring their music. I still hear bits of it, people hip me to this and that, so it's not like they're dead to me or anything dramatic like that. I just don't feel a connection or an obligation for there to be one. No hostility about that at all, just a personal conclusion, and a great relief, actually. Makes it easier to make room for other things that might be lighter (now) but stir the imagination and spirit more. And that's what I miss from these guys that I got from The Giants Of Yore - the stirring of the spirit and imagination. And do I feel enough love/loyalty/etc towards the word/concept/whatever "jazz" to fake it time after time after time after time just to make it seem like it still matters like it used to? Truthfully....no. Not at this point. When it's good, it's great. Still. But when it's not... At some point in life, bad sex is not better than no sex, at least for a very long time, and then...just do it and get it over with. But the good stuff...you'll die for the good stuff until the day you....uh, die. And I'll be damned if I feel like dieing for Joe Lovano or Brad Mehldau or Joshua Redman. Sorry, just not feelin' it like that. I'd never be so presumptuous as to assert that anybody who does get their imagination and spirit stirred by these guys is "wrong", just that from where I stand now, and having been where I've been, it ain't happening for me. Somebody else, hey, they got their life & their stories-to-this-point, and maybe they're getting what I'm not, maybe what they need/want is not what I need/want, and maybe they're finding what they need/want where I'm not finding what I need/want. Good for all of us then! I'll still not be unconvinced, though, that whereas once Giants Walked The Earth, that now it's down to some Somewhat Tall People. Fair enough, but it does seem to me that the only way to see it otherwise is put everything on a Disney Word scale of proportion, open the gates, and everybody Feel The Magic. I mean, I enjoy illuison just as much as anybody, but once you go outside the gates, everything gets back to "normal", what ever that means.

He did a few cover photos for BN, but also the design for them too. What about The Basement Tapes? I know that's his photo, is it his design as well? Heck, I started a thread about a Time magazine cover photo he had done, but darned if I know where or when...

Helluva run, & you can add (at least) Ellington Indigos, Bal Masque, All American, Lost Session, & another "dance" album whose name I forget but it has a "French" theme to it (or is that Bal Masque?). I feel as if I'm leaving something out (besides the odd singles and such). However, Uptown & Masterpieces come from an earlier stint at the label. Not that they are any lesser for that. I guess for sheer audacity, the last RCA-into-the-freelance period probably wins out, but still, I eman, the band was tighter than it probably ever was, before or after, Columbia was an "agreeable" label, and it was just a good time (great time, actually) for everybody concerned in pretty much every way.

In a world with a little more axis and polar pull, that could have easily been James Carter...

The way around that is to name all files w/the same # digits. Instead of "Track 1", call it "Track 01". "Then wehn you get to "Track 10", the leading "1" will follow the leading "0" and all will be well. Depending on the program/environment, there's quite often a hierarchy as to how files will be ordered, and it has everything to do with things like that, as well as "-" vs "." (that's especially noticeable when dates are involved), "%", "#", etc. as leading filename characters, and spaces between characters ("Track 2" will not necessarily follow "Track 1", because of the extra space in there!). But no need to apologize or otherwise "feel bad". The only way I know this stuff is from screwing it up more than a few times myself... :w :w

Radiant white!

Mr. Freeze Icepick Slim Albert Collins

Ditto for Disc Two.

I'll have to at least partially disagree. The rhythm section sounds GREAT -- one of their best performances with the band, locking into some very funky, very greasy grooves. Lloyd himself sounds terrible. To one degree or another, that was the story of that group's records from beginning to end...

Excellent recs there from CT! Plus, if you like straight-ahead, there were labels like Muse, Xanadu, Steeplechase, Galaxy, several more, all putting out quality releases. You also had Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Music Inc. and who all else carrying the "progressive inside" thing along, Joe Henderson on Milestone...Nessa Records, every album a gem....etc. Getting into more "production-oriented" stuff, the early CTI albums by Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard, Milt Jackson, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, etc. all contained a lot of top-shelf playing ensconced in "listener-friendly" environs. And Columbia did plenty of crap, but also some pretty good things along those lines, like the first two Heath Brothers albums, and some Cedar Walton "fusion" albums that were actually composed of his typically challenging compositions, just "re-grooved". People got/get kinda bugged about the "slickness", but otoh, plenty of people were buying those records and enjoying them, and it gave some fine players careers, not just gigs. Fusion? Ended up ugly, but early on, plenty of exciting, challenging music. You know the names, look up the numbers. Funk-jazz evolved from the Bob Porter Prestige to more along the Roy Ayers, etc. semi-disco stuff, usually at a loss, but not always. But you gotta really want to go there to got there, if you know what I mean. But the slink lived on, as it does today. the slink refuses to die, and as a point of fact cannot be killed! There was plenty happening, and no, not all of it was good, and what I mention above is only part of the overall picture. My point about "fun" is that there was plenty of stuff happening, there were markets for it, and if you got a bug up your ass to do something kinda off-the-wall in terms of "combining ingredients", it was OK. Somebody was gonna listen. In fact, when Wynton first came out talking smack and "calling everybody back home", it actually seemed like maybe not too bad an idea, since there were so many different possibilities that it too often seemed like diffusion was going on. A little bit into that, though, and many folks began to realize that going forward sometimes means jumping blindly into the unknown, and if it's "safety" you want, hey, cling to the tradition (and vice-versa). But by then it was too late to really do anything about it on an industry-wide scale. And now...El tiempo lo dira. But, I mean, if you were around then, into jazz, and heard this stuff (and maybe you could avoid hearing it, but seems like you'd almost have to try not to...), and it didn't make an impression, then, maybe it's not for you. Also, people complained about the music becoming more of a business than a music, and, yeah, ok. But the music's always had a business attached to it, and without the business, who gets to hear the music? So as the society changed, the business changed, and the pressure was for the music to do so as well, for obvious reasons. Which did lead to some awkward and tense events. But the alternative would have been for all of it to slip away further and further into the background, which is what has been happening ever since we lost that "middle ground" of enough good players making enough listener-friendly records to create a commercially viable "midpoint" of the aesthetic spectrum. Now, it's either one side or the other, and guess where all the audience is? So yeah, messy decade, messy business, plenty of messy music and musical choices being made. But in spite of all that, an alive decade, full of vibrancy, energy, and the spirit of moving ahead, whatever that meant to any one individual. That's how I remember it anyway.

Uh...some people do consider this a sacred day...

Both discs downloaded, Disc One fully extracted and burnt, no problems anywhere. :tup :tup A friendly suggestion, though - a consistent file-naming formula (including spacing between characters) makes it a lot easier to transfer files between programs, as does calling some thing "01" instead of just "1". A minor hassle to correct, though.

Arnold Stang Mustang Sally Sally Ride

Mother Father The Pope