JSngry

Yeah. I get confused w/all the gramatticals sometime and just go for what sounds/feels right.

Back to Botkin, if anybody's listened to the "Elly May Theme" on the first link aobve, what instrument is he using for the high-pitched, Tatum-esque fills? I don't think it's a double-speed tape thing, not after seing all the instrument in that photo... And really, if you can at all stomach The beverly Hillbillies, go to TV LAnd sometimes and watch a few of those early shows w/Botkin's music. Pretty interesting...

Well, it looks real naff with the sponsors products plastered all over the furniture. The British one, on BBC, looked rather better And, lest anyone forget, it's (L-R) David Nixon, Lady Isobel Barnett, Barbara Kelly and Gilbert Harding. MG Blindfolds, dude. It's all about the blindfolds.

This was never reissued, not even on LP, not even in Japan! WTF is "Kean"?

Never heard of a harp guitar before, please fill me in. But the site that that picture came from http://www.harpguitars.net/iconography/icon-gibson.htm also hosts these rather...evocative images, a.o.:

It's the ugliness of America these days that the only options seem to be "catch and release" or imprison. In neither scenario is "getting on a better path" likely. Although, if "these kids" (and are they in fact young folk?) are in fact just a bunch of low-life hoods who never can/never will rise above being parasites on society, then, hey. But if they still got some gleam of life left in their eyes, you'd want to think that "salvation" remains at least a possibility, that probation and some functional social intervention mechanisms would be in place to give them one more workable chance to decide what kind of a life they're going to make for themselves. But dream on about that...

Yeah, it's been around. Gotta love it!

Can somebody say Angelo Mozillo? :w :w

Yeah, but I don't get the sense that those "planes" were anything that he didn't already know he couldn't work with. Which is why, for all it's self-evident reservations, I really have a preference for his later work. The notion of "forced moderninity" is one I accept, but unlike many, I don't see tha as a necessarily negative quality, becuase unlike this stuff, which is ultimately playing what you know even if don't know how much of it you're going to know at any given moment, the later stuff was really all about going out into a place where he wasn't at all sure if he knew what it was, or even where it was. And that makes for more of Mister Pepper's Wild Ride than does this, I think, although I know mine is not the consensual opion in many quarters. If you've ever spent much time hangingout among video games, you know that there's people who can excutehighly difficult games with great ease, simply because they've learned the patterns and probabilities and are ready for them in pretty much any permutation. Yeah. it's "seat of the pants" on one level, but on another,, it's really staying just getting better at one thing than it is "moving ahead" to some other place. When Pepper decided to really "move ahead", he took the type of risk that many players like to think/talk about, and they type that almost as many flirt with to varying degrees. But he just said "fuck it" and went on ahead and jumped off the cliff. He might have ahd a bigass umbrella to keep him afloat, but he sure didn't pack a parachute, if you know what I mean. To me, that plays directly to his "true nature" as a crazy motherfucker a lot more than his earlier work, which seemed to me to be more about "keeping it a secret", did, and when I choose to spend time with him, that's almost alwyas where I choose to spend it, and why. It just seems more "real" to me. Now of course, I never even heard Art Pepper unitl 1973, so by then the secret was out. I can see where if somebody had a history with him going "back before" then the opinion would be different. But that's my story, and I got no choice but to be stickin' to it.

Yeah, me too. But...

Oooh, I dunno...that one devolves into what you/we are talking about, but it takes awhile to get there, and until it does, it seems pretty up-front to me. Then again, maybe it just took a while for the shock of the change to the minor to wear off...

Now as for Pepper, that was one tightly-wound motherfucker, always had been. I sensed it even before it became "common knowledge", and I suspect many others did too. Net result was a certain "fascination", but no real desire to get too close for any real length of time. If my own life would have been predicated on sanity and sensibilty from the beginning, then maybe, but those qualities took a while to take root, and the one thing I've always believed in is that you don't sit down at somebody else's game with more than you can afford to lose. Now, if you put the "best" (i.e. - least off-putting) qualities of Desmond & Pepper together, you probably get at least 50% of the way to Lee Konitz, and Konitz is a player I've always warmed to, sometimes quite deeply so ("sanity and sensibility" aplenty, there). That might seem like an irrelevant conjecture, but we're talking about three men of roughly the same time period and not wholly dissimilar "cultural" backgrounds, so it's more like an observation of life's crapshootin results than anything else. Sometimes (Often? Always?) "liking" a particualar player is at least as much a function of how one receives their personal vibe as it is the question of are they "good (or even great) players". I think so long as you know what stirs what in you (and that's the benefit of discussions like this, eh?), then if one decides that there are "lesser" players that one "likes better" than "better" players, then hey - that's playing directly to Music As Life rather than Music As Music, and that's a good thing, usually, as long as you keep it real (whatever that means, and if you have to ask, well, don't until you've figured it out...).

Yeah, really, Desmond was Desmond, and that was that. You got what you got, and if wasn't always prefect, so be it. There's still much to love, and if there's reservations involved, again, so be it. How often in life do we find love that eventually doesn't come with some reservations? If it's our spouse (and/or a really, really good friend), we grow through/past it, but for everybody else....life's too short to be wondering why people are like they are and not like we wished they were (or think they could/should be). Which is not to say that it's not fun to ruminate on, or that we can't gain focus within ourself by doing so, just that in the end, nothing changes, especially when it's dead people we're talking about. Is that masturbatory too?

And you teach the class!

I think that Desmond used playing the way that other players used heroin.

Again w/Abeleen:

Does this mean anything to you? http://megamemory.homestead.com/

Interesting!

A friend hipped me to a 1964 album called Persepolis by the Staffan Abeleen Quintet: http://www.dustygroove.com/item.php?id=254...%3Bformat%3Dall Good enough stuff, but the tenorist on there was a cat named Björn Netz, and he really caught my ear. Sort of a fusion/common ground/missing link between Getz, Yusef Lateef, and Booker Ervin, if you can imagine that. Google turns up next to nothing, so what, if anything, does anybody here know about this guy? As always, thanks in advance!

Oh yeah, to seeline/clave - welcome indeed. Looked at your blog (it is yours, right?) and was intrigued. Also looked at that AAJ blues thread and got kinda barfy. Glad you're "here" now, hope you come to feel the same!

My name is Janet. Miss Jackson if you're nasty.

My name is Maggie, but they call me Michelle. I can be my woman's woman when she needs it, but damned if I'll be anybody's bitch. Waiter, another glass of warm milk.

I've been surfing into the BH reruns on TV Land, the early ones, and the guitar musics that I'd been hearing since back in the day (Day One, really, isnce this was a staple in our family's viewing for years, and even now it's a favorite recreational view) finally jumped out and grabbed me by the earballs and told me that whoever was resposible for it was some kinda bad muffalucker. There were all kinds of "jazz" influences in the tunes & playing that I'd always just heard and disregarded that now for some reason caught my ear as the work of somebody who was putting a lot more into sitcom music than they really needed to, if you know what I mean Turns out it was a cat named Perry Botkin, and turns out that he was indeed a serious player. Y'all probably know all this already, but just in case not, check it out: http://bakeyandbetty.com/botkin.html http://www.uwyo.edu/news/showrelease.asp?id=712 "Elly May's Theme" is a classic (it's as cheesey as it can be, but totally in sync with its function, and oh by the way, tell me this cat wasn't into Tatum) but listen to the shows where he plays (it appears he only did the first two seasons), and come to find out, there's all kinds of crazyass shit going on.

Dude, if I'm on a gig, I better remember some basic shit or else I'm going home early, and w/o my money. :rmad: Otherwise, the whole "tabula rasa" thing is better as a notion than as a reality. If you spend enough time doing anything and don't absorb some fair amount of basic informations, that's like....fucked up!