JSngry

The only respectable thing to do would be to tell me that not only am I wrong, but that I'm ALSO full of shit!!! Well, that's a difference in MOs, I guess. I just assume that everybody (myself included) is full of shit, so that's gonna be a given at any point in time. But to tell somebody they're wrong, hey, that's personal!

So, when Mitter Whiskers pissed all over my Hendrix poster back in '69, I shouldn't have kicked the crap out of him? Now you tell me...

Well, yeah - great pitch, impeccable time, all that. No denying it, the guy had chops out the ass. Myself (who is in no way a great jazzman), I just get put off by the corny "hip" attitude, which comes into the music far too often for my comfort. But skills? Hell yeah, the guy was loaded with 'em!

I'll second all of that... I dunno, though, from a historical/technical standpoint, I like what I've heard of the Mel-Tones, even if the Torme-icity of it al is pungentacious. I'm interested in ("fan of" would be going too far...) the whole vocal group thing, and those guys seem to have preceeded groups like the Hi-Los by a fair bit in thier use of "real" "jazz" harmonies/voicings. My rule of thumb for Torme, though, anti-fan that I am, is that the further back in time you go, the less Tormealicious it gets, and for me, that's a good thing. So anything from, say 1960-ish or earlier is probably gonna be ok w/o too much "stipulation". Would like to hear more about the Mel-Tones at some point though...

Let's all try to smile like this, with or without pancakes in front of us!

Suddenly, an offer for head becomes a less-than-certain SURE!

Tax deductions await!

That's just a mirror of "the real world", don't you think? Conventional wisdom ain't always right, but it doesn't get formed in a vacuum either. I mean, when Big Al (who I count as a friend who can take whatever heat he generates) comes up with "I don't get what all the fuss is about Bird!", hey, is there any respectable way to tell him he's not just full of shit, but flat out WRONG? Far more interesting, I think, is when the "heavy posters" (and does "heavy" refer to post count, intellectual acumen, or poundage? ) disagree. To hear reasoned and explicit deliniations of one's personal pros and cons about the "conventional wisdom" is the type of thing that forces one to confront, define, refine, and often enough redefine one's own opinions about same, and for me, that's about as cool as this "discussion" shit gets! I do agree wholeheartedly though, that the tendency of the board is to be mocking and/or condescending to people who are young, enthusiastic, but not even slightly grounded "in the tradition". They come in knowing what they know, not knowing what they don't, all full of that clueless youthful energy that we all wish we had now that we got some smarts to go with it, and too often get told to get outta the yard, we just cut the grass and all that, and besides, they don't know who Hank Mobley is, so what do we need them for anyways? Yeah, I know, plenty of them are airhead-ish, but will they always be so (and examine your own history before jumping to a conclusion...)? Basically, I'm just tired of "jazz attitude" that seems to stem from nothing more than "Hey, I've listened to this many records and know this many names and bits of trivia, so I know this music. You haven't, so you don't. Come back when you do, kid. IF you can, and I doubt that you can." That's just wrong in so many ways... Anyways...

Yeah, Jim, I mean, your plate is full with real life right now, you ought to have the option/luxury of being CEO of this board and delegating the day-to-days to your hand-picked "management team". You've paid the cost to be the boss here, dig? There's enough love and reality in the mix to put together a good team, I think, and if it don't/won't please everybody (and we all know damn well that at any goven point in time that it won't...), oh well, it ain't a perfect world, and it would certainly be less perfect w/o any O-World at all, right? Better to be pissed of at/"ruled" by "our own" than "them", right? Let's keep talking and see if we can get this shazizzle rolling into the new year with some smiling faces on the breakfast plate, ok?

Got it on a whim, arrived yesterday, playing now, and.... ....yeah. Probably not for everybody, but the "zone factor" here is pretty high. Let me put it this way - the version here of "Walk On By" is a lot shorter than Issac Hayes' (although not exactly AM-Friendly @ 4:57), but every bit as trance-y. The DG-penned notes refer to "baroque soul", and that seems apt to me. Stepney sees no need not to remake all these familiar tunes into his own image from the ground up, and his image for them is quite interesting indeed - "pop" but not "easy". Anything but easy, in fact... It's not all "perfect" by a long shot, "Raindrops Keep Fallin..." tries too hard to overcome the fact that the only way for that song to not be taken at face value is to play it at face value, and just ends up being silly as a result. But for the most part, this stuff is pretty damn fine. Recommended with the caveat that if anything "on paper" about this date is an automatic turn off for you, then nothing heard on the album will change that. But Charles Stepney...yeah. People like Charles Stepney made "pop music" interesting in all kinds of ways for people who fell outside the target demographic, if you know what I mean. Would that there were more like him today, tomorrow, and forever.

A personal noted to Jim - I definitely feel your pain with the frustration of the music business. The gig "scene" continues to deteriorate, and without a/some creative outlet(s) (or sometimes with...) to balance out the bullshit, you definitely risk losing your soul while you think you're saving it. The "straight world" is that it is every bit as loaded with traps and distractions to take you away from who you really are, that's no secret. But the bottom line is that any world where you work for somebody else is, and that definitely includes ours. Music is a blessing, the music business a curse. Finding a way to balance those out requires living your life as an artform unto itself. It can be done, bt it gets pretty wiggy sometimes. And I'm sure there's plenty of people in other fields who can legitmately say the same thing. But our case is a special one, because we're musicians, and musicians are special. Good luck.

I'm good for (at least) whatever individual financial commitment is decided upon. I have no idea whether or not I'm one of the "selected few" for whom this is perceived as being a "playground", but if I am, then I'd like nothing more than to keep my playground open. And if I'm not, well then I want to be!

It's the state you're in which causes you to have a conniption. Sorry, I misspelled it, but then again, when you make up a word, who's to say waht's misspelled & what's not, eh?

From the bowels of my coniptiulated soul!

Always!

Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby, & Jiohn Anderson doing a quasi-bluegrass version of "Super Freak" is an automatic "why not?". A reflexive "why not", even. So that's easy. Too easy, in fact, and that's where the "why" comes in. And that, my friend, is anything but easy. The big mysteries are easy. The bigger ones, like this, are anything but. And the biggest ones, like George Harrison asking, "How do you explain Gene Pitney?" are all but unfathomable!

Well see, that's just it. Too much guesswork all the way around. And yet, there it is!

I, for one, wouldn't give a crippled crab a crutch.

Well, Al, surely there are at least 53 things you wouldn't do to have snow down here this Christmas...

Which raises the point - are ongoing contributions for the continuation of the board appropriate, or is it at this point a "thanks for the memories" gesture? Fair enough question, but maybe it shouldn't matter. Maybe if a person is willing to contribute for the coming year (if there were to be one), they should also be willing to contribute for the past year(s). Just a thought. Agreed, but it's always easier to give "in the spirit of" when you know what the spirit is of. It's an emo/psycho/neurotic/spiritual thing, just like so much other stuff on this board.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3e5_1179370125

Which raises the point - are ongoing contributions for the continuation of the board appropriate, or is it at this point a "thanks for the memories" gesture?

And where is is there a pre-exisiting forum that is hospitable not only to jazz, but ORGAN jazz in particular, as well as all the other socio-musico things that come from/by/around that music and it's environs past, present, and future? The loss, if it occurs, will be deeply felt. This isn't "just anopther jazz board" by any stretch of the imagination...

If there's anything that can be done in the next few weeks to reverse this decision, I certainly hope that it happens. If not, well, it's a shame to those of us in the O-Community and, I suspect, quite a few lurkers as well, but it is a privately run concern, and it surely is a mental and financial stress. So I understand fully, and offer nothing byut thatnks and love. But still, if anything can be done to reverse this decision....

Yes indeed!