JSngry

That's a baaaaaaad mofo rite there!

Not to be disrespectful or anything, but you're trying to reinvent the wheel here. Ornette's done been there, done that, and a lot more throughly for about 50 years now. And if you want to look at Bill Evans' internal voicings, they are frequently built off of this line of thinking. George Russell no doubt comes in here somewhere as well, and that's just in "jazz". I would also suggest looking at what happens when you keep your same shell voicing and change the root. The easiest/most obvious is to change it from a C to a Gb/F#, which changes the shell voicing from that of a #9 chord to one of a 13th. But any root note will do, and will also create/imply a new functionality. And speaking of functionality, once you leave functional harmony, you've inevitably got to confront "chords as color" rather than functional delineators, and then from there, it's on to "colors as sound", then on to "sound as sound", then "sound as music", and it just keeps going, rhythm as melody, texture as words, all sorts of breaking down/apart of what we;ve all been taught is "what music is", and if we're lucky, it allows us to create music that more truly speaks to how/what we as individuals think/hear/feel. It's a delightful journey, it is, but hardly a new one. I can't say with any confidence that there's any "new" frontiers left any more in terms of the components of music, definitely not in terms of tonality/atonality. But there are new challenges ahead in terms of structure, of how we assemble all we've by now collectively "discovered".

http://www.georgebraith.com/ http://excellencerecords.com/

late 70s white cover

I hear this a lot, and understand the point, but please, let us remember this - more than just "listening" to Coltrane, he traveled with him & played beside him night after night for more than a handful of gigs. He got it about as up close & personal & intensely & viscerally as you can get it. This cannot be emphasized enough! I know what you are getting at BUT -- the two hadn't played together (aside from maybe a sit-in or two) for almost three years when this recording was made, and the Cannonball recordings in the intervening time don't show the stylistic link nearly as much as this one or its successors do. Guy Sure, but I think that that's because Cannonball already had his own thing and needed time to....digest what he had been getting in his face for that time, let it settle in, roll around, and finally get put to use in service of his own voice. I mean, you can hear the immediate Trane influence as Milestones & KOB, and it ain't pretty. It's pretty ugly in spots, actually. I gotta think that 'Ball knew it too, that what Trane was up to was not something that he could easily assimilate & toss right back out. And I think that he figured out pretty quickly that although there was much in Trane's musical explorations that he could deal with, the..."tone" of it all would not be something he could adapt, not without changing who & what he was as a person and performer. Cannonball was above all a bandleader who had to keep a working band together. The Miles gig was a "career move" in that regard. So he didn't necessarily have the luxury (or probably temperament) to shut down & retool, if you know what I mean. Life was ok, ya' know? But he definitely heard it, and it definitely took, just in its and his own sweet time.

I hear this a lot, and understand the point, but please, let us remember this - more than just "listening" to Coltrane, he traveled with him & played beside him night after night for more than a handful of gigs. He got it about as up close & personal & intensely & viscerally as you can get it. This cannot be emphasized enough! Couldn't agree more, the real irony being that as his own playing increased in depth/seriousness/gravitas/whatever, the focus of the recordings on which this could be heard went decidedly in the other direction. I've said it before more than once, but those Capitol & later sides are some deceptive little suckers. You can hear them all kinds of ways, but if you focus strictly on Cannonball, there's a lot of stuff going on that his earlier playing never even hinted at, all of it about growth & progression.

Let me get this straight - smoke is coming out of your CD player & you wanted to send the Fire Dept. across the globe & 45+ years back in time? FAR PHUKKIN OUT, MAN! :tup :tup

Overtly?

The digipack replicates the LP cover.

Gotcha. So what's the second?

Was this recorded at the RCA studios (Webster Hall)? Sure sounds like it! Ok, I got to know where this one was recorded. DOH! I used to have this on LP, gave it to a guitarist friend as part of a "can't give you all the money, but..." deal for rent one month back in the day. A tribute to the Goodman.Christian stuff as I recall. Pretty sure that Woods is on clarinet here, dude. Not gonna bet the house on it, but will bet the back yard.

More about Richard Wang, please!

I caught Maynard a few times from the 70s on, and even "played with" his band once as a high school senior, a clinic gig, "Hey Jude", last tune of the night, that great band that was half Euro/half American, all the clinic students come up and read the chart with the band, culminating in a full scale "blow out", and yeah, I can't stress enough now much Maynard loved being in front of a band. That love was transmitted to the rest of the band too, because I can't say that I've ever seen a working big band that was less uptight. You travel with a bunch of guys of differing temperaments and "lifestyles" and yeah, things can get funky over time, and yeah, it shows to people who know what to look for. But every time I saw Maynard's bands, the vibe was way cool, and talking to people who played the gig, it all went back to Maynard himself. The thing about the earlier band was that, talking to some people older and more "inside the scene", Maynard back then was pretty much a man with a taste for the "good life" of all sorts (or so they say). So yeah he had a "lifestyle", but part of it was "staying beautiful", all of which I think you can see in the body language of those clips. After he went to India & cleaned up, he still kept the "beautiful, baby" vibe, and damned if I'm going to be one to find fault with that, at least in him. You follow your bliss, you find your bliss, you feed your bliss, and your bliss returns the favors. Lots of worse ways to lead a life, ya' know?

Pretty much, although there's a thing of Bird playing w/Dizzy's big band that might be worse.

All the Roulette material I have is on LPs, so I don't know what they did to the sound on the Mosaic. But it was a top-heavy band timbrally, and the sound of the Roulettes I've got tends towards the either maddeningly brittle or maddeningly, which means that some really great writing isn't always given the chance to be heard the way it should be. This type of writing need lots of "breathing room", and the recordings don't (or didn't...) provide it, usually. Too bad for all concerned... Personally, though, my favorite Maynard big band stuff was done for Cameo & Mainstream. Great bands, great writing, great playing, and Maynard was beginning to pull back on the high notes in a bid (by all accounts, internally driven) to get away from the whole "high note specialist" bag. Fresh Sounds put out the Cameo stuff at one point, but the Mainstream, I don't know about. The album was called Color Him Wild (reissued in the 70s as Dues, I believe), and one or two "show stoppers" aside (they come with Maynard territory...) is nothing short of superb. Mainstream is also where you'll find the sextet album but out right after the big band disbanded.

Definitely Lanny Morgan. I dig how Willis Conover understatedly calls this "an aggressive reading...." There's airshots of this band (maybe a few tears later) that are really scary, since they open up for solos & everybody comes to play. Very often hard to like Maynard, but usually not too hard (often easy, in fact) to love him. The guy did what he did, loved doing it, and encouraged his band to do the same too. What else do you really want out of anybody, really?

The Joe Brazil sessions exist, but in horrible condition. "Borderline unlistenable" is putting it about as politely as possible.

That Richard Davis stuff goes to what I'm trying to say - that Ra made an lasting impression on those who knew him. Not that he was an "influence", but that he did make an impression. People who make lasting impressions are in some ways every bit as important as those who directly influence, I think, because they give breadth/depth/clarification/etc to the what of the where.

Well yeah! I'm struck, though, by how Trane hooked up w/Ra in the 50s, got one/some of his mathematical/numerological cum musical writings, and apparently held on to it for years, and that supposedly(?) it was a local Chicago cat that suggested the hookup. I'm also struck by anecdotes of how so-and-so (usually some local guy like Richard Evans(?)) used to hear Ra doing his thing(s) and thought he was kinda out there but as things went along, hey, it began to make sense (or at least more sense). Having come up in a city with no such back culture whatsoever - especially in jazz - I can tell you that having one where people's ears/minds have already been "prepped" does make a difference. It's not a question of "getting it" or not as it is just having people not getting totally convulsive and Shut It Down NOW reactionary when something comes along. And I gotta ask - who else in the jazz culture of Ra's Chicago was creating similar stimuli? There well may have been others, and we need to know about them. But even if Ra was one of some, he still was one. I don't mean this as an attempt to "backwards validate" or anything, but I know how various cities' scenes have "personalities" of their own as well as Personalities, and the two only sometimes intersect. I'm also not looking to make a Ra/AACM connection, because other than "spirit", I've never really heard one either. But I do know that all cities scenes are formed by forces beyond "what you see and hear", and I can't disabuse myself (yet) of the notion that the Chicago scene that the AACM stepped into would have been of a different spirit w/o Ra than it was with. A Macro- vs a micro-influence if you will, somebody who, as I said earlier, either cracked the doors open just a little or else kept them from closing, if they had in fact already been cracked open by somebody else. I know that that's not the original question, but maybe it's one that could be asked and answered to better effect than a simple "did the AEC cop from Ra?". That one's pretty much a connect the dots, but the other goes more to how cities' cultures develop how they do, and on that one, you don't need to be a direct/personal/whatever influence to be an influence, if you know what I mean. To look it it another way - why did Ornette get such rabid rejection in LA for so long while Ra, while not "warmly welcomed" was able to get something going? Was it him, was it the city, or some symbiotic combination of both? Speculation abounds (and is dirt cheap), and that time machine seems more and more appealing!

No harm, no foul, & no matter how its framed, that's some amazing work by The Nicholas Brothers.

From what I've been hearing, I prefer later/recent Basso to earlier by a reasonable margin, although indeed, it is all good. It's just that he's really mellowed into this rhythmic pocket that is pretty darn deep (in terms of "place", not of "profundity"), and I don't know but that it's not a function primarily of age.

Would it then be fair to say that Ra did what he did (and that it did make its mark in at least some fashion), but that he was one of several/many, and that to focus on him at the expense of those others would create an imbalanced view of the "wholeness" of it all? Sorry to be so....anal about all this, but I really am intersted in getting as clear a picture as possible.

Yeah, that's what I mean. I overread your earlier post about that before, sorry. To me it's not an issue as I use the external drives simply for storage, not to play the music, at least not so far... if I'd ever consider doing that, I'd definitely go the route of having, say, to 500 GB drives which I'd regularly synchronize. But so far, I only quickly plug the external drives in to put stuff on them or get stuff from them onto the ipod or onto the computer to edit or whatever, never to play things. Ah, but you see, "intent" of use is not consistent with intent of design. HDs are designed to be both "storage" and "playback", whereas other mediums such as CD, LPs, tapes, etc. are designed to be storage only. You can have the information and not have anything on which to play it. If all you have is HDs, when you lose your "playback" capacity, you lose the information simultaneously. If I'm wrong about this, let me know. If you can repair/replace the stylus/etc. portions of a HD & still keep the data intact, wouldn't that be swell? But is that usually how it goes?

I guess I was thinking more about the effect(s?) that Ra's pamphlets, lecturing, whatever/etc might have had on the city's jazz culture in terms of opening up minds to the possibilities of "other possibilities", so that when the AACM came along and actually went there, it wasn't like everybody was all WTF? about it. I remember Chuck talking about how Von was all good with the AACM, & I know I've read - maybe in DB - that Von worked w/Ra early on and how one night he "heard" Ra's music as the difference that it was. So maybe, if/since Ra's influence on the actual music wasn't there (or minimally there) is it possible that his influence was one of "climate", that without him and his presence on the local scene (& I get the impression that Ra was not at all above "holding court" regularly, and that plenty of local guys who weren't part of his thing would at least hang out and listen to what he was saying. Hell, Trane hung with him at least once then, right? So it doesn't seem like he was all off in a world by himself all the time...), doors (of perception?) were found to be cracked open that might have otherwise been found locked shut? I'm not formulating an academic theory, mind you just looking at what "we" know and wondering how the pieces fit together inb the end.