JSngry

His death was inevitable, as it is for all of us. His life was a triumph, which is anything but inevitable for all of us. Here's to Frank Morgan, great musician and winner at life, not necessarily in that order.

Correction, Jewel is a southern label - Shreveport. It distributes Paula. But Paula was operated (and may have been owned or part-owned) by Chicago trumpeter and recording engineer Paul Serrano, (which is how Sonny Stitt and Odell Brown and Mal Waldron etc came to record for the company.) Lately, Jewel has appeared to be using the Paula label to reissue some stuff that first appeared on Jewel. I just looked at one of these, from 1996, and it sez 'ere: "Manufactured and distributed by Jewel, Paula Ronn Records, a division of Sue Records inc, PO box 1125 Shreveport." Ha ha!!! I wonder if Stan Lewis bought Juggy Murray's company some time? (His Extreme Nerdship strikes again ) MG I don't think so. Paula was Stan Lewis' label from the git-go. Paul Serrano produced some sessions on spec (thanks to Mr. Nessa for this info) and leased them to Jewel/Paula. John Fred was on Paula, and "Judy..." gave the label a big influx of cash there for a while. But I have some Jewel/Paula/Ronn stuff with that info on there, which is why I guess I confused Sue w/a southern label. I grew up about 60 miles from Shreveport, and we would go into that city a few times a year, our "trip to the big city". The downtown Stan's Record Shop was always a stop for me, and the Jewel/Paula offices were right next door, so this is something I know firsthand. I saw Stan a few times, but actually got causally familiar with his brother Ace, who ran another store out in the Shreveport 'burbs. Ace was a big jazz fan, btw, and always had the latest stuff playing in the store that he ran. It was him who hipped me to Jim Hall's Concierto album, it had just been released that week, and he was going all apeshit over it. You'd walk in there an hear anything from Gene Ammons to Oscar Peterson to Coltrane - as long as ace was in there by himself or with friends. When "regular" folks walked in, it changed to rock and soul. But once they left... Stan's downtown was a totally different trip - totally R&B, and later, funk. Hardcore, as befitted the neighborhood, and as the 70s evolved, the city as a whole. But even there, you could buy jazz of quality.

"It's Gonna Work Out Fine" was only in the top 40 for five weeks, a short run for a record charting that high. I can get the exact weekly positions at home tonight out of my Joel Whitburn 60's billboard chart book. There were a lot of one-shots on the pop charts by some of those southern acts like John Fred (Judy in Disguise), Robert Parker (Barefootin), etc. Ike Turner also snuck into the top 40 twice with the Ikettes in the 60's (including the divinely annoying good/bad "Peaches and Cream"). When I was growing up listening to top 40 radio from '64 on, Ike and Tina Turner were a distant, peripheral name to me until "Proud Mary", "Come Together" and Altamont. That's what I'm saying, that chart position alone is not an indicator of general popularity and/or market penetration. Take John Fred - his song "Agnes English" was actually a regional hit before "Judy...", & was re-released nationally as a follow-up single. It might have actually made the Top 40 in the aftermath of "Judy...", but by no means was it a true "hit", and today John Fred is considered a "one hit wonder", which he is on a national scale, even if the regional story is quite different. Anybody remember People? "I Love You"? Big hit #14, and there was a follow-up, "Ooh La La" that probably got onto the Hot 100 for a week or two. But who remembers that one today? Or them? I could go on - EVERYBODY knows The Box Tops for "The Letter" (#1 - and #30 R&B!) & "Cry Like A Baby" (#2) , maybe "Soul Deep" (#18) if you think hard enough, but only true fans or people like me who have weird Indestructable Top 40 Radio Memory Cells remember "Neon Rainbow" getting airplay - a little. Yet is shows as having peaked at #24. All I'm saying is that chart positions are ultimately just statistics, and that the same #s for different records do not necessarily mean the same thing.

Ok, I'm confusing Sue with Paula & Jewel, two other labels named after women, and both of which were Southern labels.

Interesting little things, they are, Alexander, Creque, Bernard Purdie, and throwing a most interesting wrinkle into the mix, Richard Davis. Are You Ready? has one side recorded live w/a different lineup, but one full side of the Sunshine Man band listed above, so I consider them "of a piece", even thought they're slightly different animals.

After all is siad and done, I can do without most of the swing stuff if I have/want/need to. But the ballads...my god, the ballads....

hey, i've got the drums unlimited. thanks. The Soul Note album is not necessarily a "good album", but it fits the bill of "free jazz christmas music" just fine. One side's a dark poetry/jazz thing w/Max's Odean band, the other sides a freeboppish improv thing w/Lee Konitz & Tony Scott added. Not gonna be on anybody's "recommended" list, I'm sure, but it's a good one to have anyway, just because.

These are their Sue hits, John. 1960 A fool in love - Sue 730 - R&B #2, Pop 27 1960 I idolise you - Sue 835 - R&B #5, pop 82 1961 It's gonna work out fine - Sue 749 - R&B #2, Pop 14 1961 Poor fool - Sue 753 - R&B #4, Pop 38 1962 Tra la la la la - Sue 757 - R&B #9, Pop 50 Over a 15 year period, only one of their 25 R&B chart singles didn't make the pop charts (but only 3 others made the top 40). MG Again, the only one of these to crack the Top 20 is It's gonna work out fine, which peaked at #14. What I'd really like to see is how many weeks, those songs were on the charts, and at what positions. Having a #14 hit can mean a lot of differnt things, and if you peaked at #14 and then next week were $25, and then #52 the week after that, that's a lot different than staying in the Top 20 for weeks on end. And even if you did have the chart position for a quick minute, that doesn't mean that the records had short-range staying power in terms of airplay or store sales. A crossover hit like that could easy get chart position by a week or two of one-time crossiver guying and a few weeks of airplay, and then, it would be over. But the charts would take note of the activity and respond accordingly. You gotta also remember that Sue was a Southern-based label, and that non-exclusively-C&W Southern audiences always had (or tended to always have) a little bit more taste for R&B than otehr parts of the country. The sociology behind this is...."interesting", but as late as the mid-1970s, John Fred & His Playboy Band were still a big time regional (i.e. - Gulf Coast) club act playing horn-driven R&B (NOT "jazz-rock" or anything like that). Plus you got the whole Beach Music thing, to say nothing of actual Blues ("real" and otherwise). The radio was segregated, the clubs were segregated (well, the white clubs were anyway, and that's a story unto itself....), but the record stores usually weren't. All I'm saying is that two Top 40 hits is not necessarily an indication of crossover success. I can state with absolute certainty that although many white Southern music fans had heard of Ike & TIna before their UA years, by no means were they a household name outside of the R&B market. I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that if you went to somplace like Phoenix or Omaha of Racine or Scranton or someplace like that at the time, you'd find next to nobody who knew who they were. America is a large country with (back then anyway) a large # of regional & local quirks which transalted in "markets". To become/have a truly "national" hit was quite a feat.

Two albums, actually - Sunshine Man & Are You Ready?, both on Flying Dutchman.

The future of jazz? Audible panties.

Was just listening to Creque w/Harold Alexander today. Certainly enjoyable.

Thanks. I figure that at 52, by any reasonable standard my life is more than halfway over. So from here on out it's gonna be about staying reasonably healthy and totally in love above anything else, especially while I'm still young and healthy enough to reap some benefits from having learned a lot of lessons from a lot of mistakes.

Feat. "In the Red (A Xmas Carol)" Not "free jazz"? A lot moreso than the David Murray stuff mentioned...

If you wanna talk "real" hits, anything that broke the Top 40 but didn't crack the Top 20 would probably considered a "minor" hit. Anything that peaked below #40 was probably a regional hit with a little bit of national exposure, a non-hit record by an artist who had enough of a following for their records to get played/sol often enough to get noticed, but not in masssive quantity, or something like that. Making The Hot 100 was certainly better than not making it, but I guarantee you that an artist whose records regularly peaked in the lower reaches thereof was not going to be seen as "widely popular". Also, before Soundscan, the Billboard charts were compiled by a formula that included reported sales and airplay. So there was plenty of "wiggle room" for industry manipulations, room which I'm sure did not go unused. In other words, if you put out a record that made a little bit of noise in one or two "important" places, you could probably crack the Hot 100, and that would be ammo for your promo people to maybe stir up some more momentum and bump it up a few notches, etc. But if The People just weren't into it, you'd only reach a certain point. Simialarly, if you put out stuff that enough people liked & bought, and it got a little bit of airplay, you could get on the charts. But if The Industry didn't want to assist you, again you would peak in the lower reaches and that would be that. Of course, considering all the records that were being made back then, just being in a position to crack the Hot 100 was a sign that you were "in the game", if only on the fringes. But still...

What should really scare you is that in about 25 or 30 years, the people they're digging now wil start recording albums of standards.

I've yet to be able, after all these years, to form in my mind's eye a coherent, believable picture of Spector & Ike working in the same studio on the same material at the same time...

Both Here, My Dear & In Our Lifetime are major works, I think, (numerous) flaws and all. Stevie rightly gets a lot of play as The Motown Artist Who Created His Own World Of Sound And Other Realities, but hey, Marvin was maybe even further there with these two albums. They're not as "widely known" because those records totally tanked commercially, and only partially because of their flaws, which are more of degree than they are of anything "basic". Here, My Dear rambles in the middle, and In Our Lifetime was released "unfininshed" (and was likely to never have been finished, a la the original Smile), but damn, what music got made anyway!

Uh, wouldn't that be Idaho?

But that's a helluva song anyways!

Who the phuckke are you now, elder don chan?

Take it from John MAdden, Ace is the place. But really, so long as you have LOVE, LIFE AND MONEY, you got what you need, and if you don't, keep looking.

It's probably what made those Casablanca albums smell like they did...

Hey, it wasn't me who started that old crazy Asian war.

Neither of my kids are real "jazz buffs" or anything, although my son enjoys it as part of his musical buffet. But they both have strongly non-mainstream tastes, and show what I would consider discernment therein. Even if I don't dig a lot of it, I can tell that they can tell good from bad therein, and that they can seperate music from hype at some level. So I'm happy. They're listening & thinking for themselves, and that's really all I could ask for.