JSngry

No time for the clip tonite, but will look tomorrow. promise. The broken-beat thing (I guess the hip term now is "bruk") comes in the push-pull around a central point/axis, and it happens behind the solos. In other words, the momentum is in the service of intensifying the experience of staying in one place rather than moving the experience along from Point A to Point B (or Z...). The elasticity pulls out, and instead of going somewhere else, snaps back, each time a little harder than the time before. That's not a particularly good way to describe it, but that's the best I can do right now...

Yeah, but where's he from, how'd he get "here", etc...

I have heard the records by that band, and "hits quite a bit harder" is an exponential understatement, I think! And it might be just me, but some of the solo grooves on some of the solos here almost seem like a "real player" version of that mix of jazz improvisational sensibility & broken-beat rhythmic esthetic that I've been hearing\wanting to hear for awhile now. Some might hear "fusion" or "funk", and I know what they mean, but this just feels a little different, and I think there might be some of that house/broken beat thing in the mix somewhere affecting that. And btw - who the hell is this drummer, Nate Smith? This cat's tough!

Why, is she an old-school Rollins fan or something?

Yeah, and?

Any thoughts on Adam Rogers' work? I only know him from his acoustic work w/Monday, where he's always sounded good. I'm really liking him here as well.

He's on Electronic Meditation.

Went through a little bit of a, to use the description of the guy who got me into the stuff in the first place, "non-glandular music" phase back in the day and had Electronic Meditation, their very first album. Just looked on the shelves, and it's still there, even though it's been 30+ years since I played it (or even thought about it!). That one's not at all like their later stuff, but I remember it having a little something different. The later stuff, the more overtly electro/trance/minimal/whatever I remember as being very well done and quite thoughtful, even if it didn't really click with me. But no disrespect here, they had (have?) their own thing, and you gotta respect that.

True story: In my later college years (ca.1978-79), I was taking my trash out to the the apartment house's dumpster. When I lifted the lid and looked inside, I saw a grocery sack full of old reel-to-reel tapes. Well hell, they followed me home, so I had no choice but to keep 'em... Upon listening, it turned out that they were almost all filled with portions of Music Till Dawn shows. Had no use for those, but the tape itself came in handy for taping then-impossible-to-find LPs off my buddies who had better collections... For a good while there, Unity & Members Don't Get Weary had a place in my home on a former Music Till Dawn tape. Seemed more than just to me.

No shit!

I was really trying not to, but I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't the first thing that came to my mind...

Oh, so you're worried that I might take my Chris Potter record and maybe some house/broken-beat and use them for some sort of neo-Nazi propagandistic power play in an attempt to take over the Music World And Beyond? Well gee, Larry, I certainly understand your concern, given my industry-insider status and my history of megalomania and such, but I assure you that my intentions are slightly less grandiose.

You got them two JoeHen/Wynton Kelley things. The booklet inside also listes Stan Getz - Nobody But Me, Randy Weston - Monterey '66, and Charlie Haden - The Montreal Tapes I, which is not listed in the 2nd of the Joe things. Technically, however, the Konitz stuff (really from a Tristano gig that Lennie couldn't make, iirc) is only unreleased in this form. A decade earlier, there were two LPs on Revelation that consisted solely of Warne's solos from this gig, The Art Of Improvising, Vols. 1 & 2. They are both superb, if a little "oblique" for the casual listener, since they really are only Warne's solos. No heads or anything, and if you don't have really good ears, you may not hear the changes the first time or twenty through (I kid you not, I've seen some pretty good players get stumped on this...). The question now is this - if Verve released 12 full performances, and Revelation released 34 tracks of Warne solos, who do we have to collectively blow to get the remaining 22 (at least) full performances released? Because those guys were in a zone that gig...

Well, Larry, yes they certainly do, and I'm glad you're not. Because "newness" alone don't mean shit to me. But joy and connection certainly does, and when/if I feel joy and connection from/with something "new", hey, gotta love it when that happens, no? I will admit, though, that I do experience an ever-growing frustration while being amongst my "peers" and having the "interest" seemingly be forever frozen in one zone, like that was the shit for all time and buddy, these kids today and all that kind of attitude stuff that's really just people turning not-young-anymore and forgetting the joy of discovery being an ongoing thing, like if you're going to keep a scrapbook and not keep adding onto it, isn't that kind of creepy, almost as creepy as keeping a scrapbook in the first place? That's another type of using culture as a club too, that notion that "I've seen it all baby, and there ain't never been nothin' like blahblahblah." Well, maybe in your particular zone that ain't never been, and maybe in your zone the heights have already been reached, but DAMN dude, ya' know....? But now that you got a little juice and all you want to do with it is Greatest Hits of one sort or another, hey...fuck that. I have not forgotten the intensity with which smug & complacent middle-aged & older folk pissed me off back in my youth, how they made me feel as if they themselves had created the world & how my attempts to make a world of my own were so much useless expenditure of so much useless energy (I'm talking musically here, but there were a few "life experiences" along the way that fell into the same vein...). Now, my generation, the dreaded "Boomers" are exuding waaay too much of that same vibe for my liking, and to think that now that I finally have a littlle "cred" based on a little bit of age and a little bit of experience that I could/should take the path of least resistance and play along with/become one of them is most unpalatable. And yeah, it is getting to be an issue now that the people I've known, worked with, liked, and come to love as spirits, for a good while are getting to be "that age". Ever spend an entire night on and off the bandstand "looking back" and not even knowing it? Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... My liking for the music on this album is based on it being what I consider good music, simple as that. My enthusiasm for the air fo fuquitousness that I think it exudes is entirely personal. Seems like it's impossible to have a strong opinion and not have a club come along with it, so put my club to the use - when it needs to be used at all, which is by no means all the time, just so you know - of encourgaging active engagement in the moment and discouraging self-congratulatory complacency. It's got nothing to do with style, and everything to do with attitude. They got a club, I got a club, everybody gots a club, dig? Don't for one second think that they don't.

Well, yeah. It happens. Fact of life, no? It's also a fact of life that some people (and I don't mean you here, Jim) say things like "...something is happening here/But you don't know what it is, etc..." as part of a power operation -- in order to imply that they know which way the wind is definitively blowing and that anyone who isn't moving in that direction is already half-dead or deserves to be dead all the way. In such cases, it's not necessarily about any actual wind or its direction; it's about who gets to call himself a weatherman. Yeah, and some people say it just because something is happening and they just want people to wake up. If I see a tornado on the horizon, I want you to know about it. But do I want you to come to my house for protection, or do I even want you to ask me for directions to the nearest shelter? HELL no! And in the meantime, shit does happen, whether we know about it or not, and whether we like it or not.

Asked: And answered:

Oh, I bought the Alamacs...about 3 LPs of Bird stuff that had (mostly) never seen public issue before, the '44(?) Eckstine band's airshot, a Hamp airshot w/Mingus, plenty of goodies, and sold dirt cheap too, $2.98 per, IIRC. Always found 'em in some off the wall place, like in a "special" box at a book store or something like that. Never on the shelves of a regular record store. Of course, now that everything's been out on CD, it's no big whoop. But back then, it was a good case of serendippity-doo.

Well, not really "funk" in the "commercial" sense...more like...jazz/swing with something besides "ching cinga-ching" as the reference point... Thing is, the tunes don't all start out that way. Most of them begin life as something else entirely and end up in this...other place, this intense other place, before coming home again. But yeah, if you like Potter (and as stated previously, I haven't not really) and/or Taborn and/or want to hear some new music that is at once "challenging" and "in the pocket", by all means take a chance on this one.

Thanks, Guy. Ok, Alamac, yeah, what a trip that stuff was. Talk about coming out of nowhere and going back almost as fast... I think it's pretty funny that Drive Archive (another "out of nowhere and gone again" outfit...) didn't know the real source of what they were putting out. Kinda makes you wonder...

Well then, to paraphrase Rahsaan, prepare thyself to deal with an identity crisis, because this band/music has no bass player, and bass lines are as often as not implied thorugh the general momentum/rhythmic impeti (is that a word?) of the music. Yet there is a strong sense of groove. "Funk" or "Fusion" might describe it, but maybe not. Either way, the intensity and creativity, I guess you could call it the "spirit" of the music, is that of a serious improvising unit, not a poppish jam band.

Well, yeah. It happens. Fact of life, no?

This is the date that was out on Drive Archive, right? Agreed that it's mighty fine. However, the fine print on that one says "Originally released on Jazz Kings Records as JK 1205". No mention of Urania. Que significa este?

Thanks big for those photos. The old Recovery Room in Dallas was built a lot like that, a long, narrow "shotgun" structure, where the action was front-to-back instead of side-to-side. I suspect that a lot of older jazz clubs in America were as well. Not a particularly "glamorous" floorplan, but as far as meetin the ends of giving people a place to come, get some drinks, hear some music, and hang out for whatever reason, it worked just as well, if not better, than many a more "fancy" layout. For the purpose of shortest-distance-between-two-points-music-making-amongst-the-people, gimme one of them old-school "bars" over one of these new club/restaurant/health spas/lifestyle centers/tourist traps any day. Them's the kind of places that nobody goes to unless they really want to, and believe me, that matters all the way around.

And yeah, I might taunt/dig/wahtever from time to time, like on the Taborn thing. But my heart is full of love when I do so, at least as much as I am full of shit.

I'm only speaking for myself. Y'all can do what you want. But for myself - I used to think that all those old folks (like my Dad, too many times...) who railed against a world they no longer understood were sort of pathetic. I mean, not all of them were that old, and the idea of living a good portion of your life as a stranger in your own world was something that struck me as wholly unnecessary and not a little...suicidal, at least in the metaphorical sense. When Aric rails against those "Beards", I totally understand what he means, because I recognize a previous generation of such people from my own years, and dammit, they pissed me off then, and frankly, no, the passage of time hasn't made me more sympathetic. For a long time, worrying about becoming one myself wasn't an issue, but in the last few years, it's finally become the time where it is. Some will say that it's natural to "fade away" into the comfort of knowing what you know and luxurating in it. That's good as far as it goes, but when it gets to the point of getting so mired in what you already know and digging deeper and deeper backwards w/o making at least a little bit of reciprocal motion forward, then hey. Whazzup with THAT? I mean, I got no problem with building on what you already know. It makes no sense to have learned and then disregard. But it also makes no sense to confuse "re-learning" the same old stuff over and over (AND over...) with actually "being there". Surely it's not impossible to keep moving ahead and adding/building on. I'd think that the joys of accumulated knowledges/wisdoms would compel rather than discourage such activity. I used to hear the cool old folks say that dancing keeps you young. At first, I thought that was a literal statement about the benefits of ongoing physical activity. But I now see another dimension to it - time is a river, an ocean even, and it moves in a flow all its own. When we "dance", we become a part of that flow and keep going. When we "sit", we expose ourself to the inevitable/unavoidable erosive effects of that flow, and we wear down/out a lot sooner than we need to. We gonna be dead soon enough, ya' know? So what's the rush to get it over with? But like I said, I only speak for myself. Y'all can do what you want.