JSngry

Those later Johnny Quitar Watson sides are full of gems. Go ahead, let him ta-ta ya'.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti...nnelid=91439392

WON'T touch this.

Dude, I listened to all available clips and don't hear any of the harmonic machinations you mention. Maybe my Internt's busted or something and it's removing all dissonance? Can you be more specific as to what you're hearing and where it occurs?

It's not a matter of me or you. It's about the actual and potential life of "it.".... As Sappho said in another poem: You may forget but Let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us Well, good. Like I said, I do my best now, and hopefully it does what I hope it will do over time, namely, not fuck anybody/anything up (at the least) or give them simple pointers/inspiration/whatever to keep getting on the goodfoot (at the best). But it's not like I'm going to be getting a .....report back or something, nor is it likely that I'll have an opportunity to fix anything that goes wrong as a result of a misunderstanding. In fact, it's unlikely taht I'll be able to do too much of anything other than be dead in whatever state being dead actually is. Now, it might be a lot of things, this whole being dead thing, but of all the possibilities posited over the years, the one that I cannot buy into is that of the "proactive from beyond". So if I can't do anything about it once it gets here, no, for me, it doesn't matter. Too often, we sentimenatlize and otherwise gradelloquently inflate our immortaility while inadvertantly trivializing, demeaning, and underplaying our mortal, temporal life. Seems to me that's kinda backasswards. Take care of/kick some physical & metaphysical ass NOW, which is where you DO have some control over direction and shit, and let tomorrow deal with it best as it can.

I'm gonna stand up and say it: They may not be the best things she recorded, but they do NOT suck. Relative to life at large, no, they don't. Relative to life as Areatha, yeah, I think they kinda do. "The Weight" just a little less than the other. But throw "I Say A Little Prayer" in there and we're back even. HArdly a new observation on my part, but you could say that Aretha = Ray Charles in terms of musiacl/social evolutionary and musical stylistic force and not be too far off the mark, I think. And that means that there's some impossible highs as well as some depressing lows. Now here's a question - where would Tina Turner have been by 1967-8 or so if "The Industry" hadn't fucked Spector on "River Deep...."? And what kind of Pop field would those first Atlantic Aretha sides be playing on? The mind reels at Ike & Tina actually becoming mega-stars under Spector's guidance, just as it does about Aretha stepping up/into the American PopTop Dick40Clark arena with a Primal Soul Woman Tina already beaming down from on high. I don't think America could have handled it. But that's not how it happened, so hey.

It ain't gonna make a difference to me, because I'll be dead in 100 years, god willing. Like I said, do you best now, because this is your chance. But am I going do be somewhere in 100 years where I can actually look in on life and....FRET and...PONDER about what kind of music and shit is going down? god, I hope not!

That's some funny shit, and, yeah, I done been by there my ownself, in, among other years, 1979, courtesy of some good friends who had gigged with Joe Tex. Small world, ain't it? Now, the Malaco (dead as a live label, I do believe, check out where, a.o. Denise LaSalle's latest have been coming from, it ain't Jackson) Oldsters ain't gonna be too down with that, because they do not wanna hear any kind of rappers. Uh UH. They, especially the Shes, GOTSTA hear a song sung by a singer. And that's the thing - it all comes down to a singer with this crew, and the connections made can be very intimate if the song and the voice find that zone. But it's gotta be a singer, and there's got to e a song. Millie Jackson can do a month-long preamble, but by god, she better eventually drop that song.

It's not so much that I don't "care" about the future as it is, hey, you do the best you can while you're here and then...that's it. Out of your hands after that. As for "will there be jazz fans in 100 years?", I'm kinda like, yeah, sure, why not, but I'm wondering what they'll be a fan of and why and all that stuff, as well as will there be bow ties and cardigans involved, and then I get like...I kinda hope not, if that's the way it's gonna be, but it probably will be, and nothing I can do about that, so yeah - what difference does it make? I do hope there'll have been a Lester Bowie postage stamp by then, and that there's a national ballot a la Elvis, whether to go with Face-Painted Lester or Lab Coat Lester. If we're not there by then, then again - what difference does it make?

What difference does it make?

Dude, ain't that The Great Question Of Life for us all at some point along the way?

No doubt. But the fact that it lives on today, even in what to my ears are horribly synthetic forms, but to The Base (old, older, oldest, and olding, but otherwise same time, same place, same same) are just The Way It Is Today, suggests to me that "dead-end" is kind of the way it's supposed to be, as much a built-in assurance that nothing too far flung gets too far in as it is a guarantee that nobody too far in gets too far away. The Peoples seem to want it that way, and hey, it's their call. And FWIW, nobody in The Base that I know thinks that shit like "Freeway Of Love" is worth a damn as anything other than a good song to play in a Bennigan's or some other sort of field trip, and good for them on that. But damned if "Dr. Feelgood" don't still get played daily or more when ever/where ever an opportunity presents itself, even/especially when there ain't nobody else around. Or so I'm told.

Again: Two use two disparate examples, nobody has made records like "The House That Jack Built" & "Ain't No Way". Nobody. And believe me when I tell you that the "base" for Amazing Grace still gets goosebumps of a rare variety behind it, if casual unsolicited conversational testimony is to be believed. Now, is that the result of "taking advantage" of opportunities? Oh hell yeah. If you got your shit together, that's what you're supposed to do. Why she had those opportunities in the first place, you can ponder all day, but when the results pay off like that, it sorta becomes a non-musical consideration, I should think, a worthy - at least - topic, but irrelevant to the actual music. Now, when we gotta hear the mostly superb and aforementioned Soul 69 (kinda hard for me to imagine doing it any other way, but that's just me...) start to unravel over the course of Side Two and then totally unravel end with a really wack Bob Lind cover, well, then you/we can go there and not be schmucks about it. But only if we recognize that that's one side of a coin that maybe has more than just two sides, even if that's all that that record has. I mean, c'mon, "Chain Of Fools", in spite of being overplayed and underlistened to, is just a freakin' great performance from top to bottom (and I'm talking specifically the layers of music going on, which is something you get on Aretha's best records, and probably for the same reasons you get it on Ray Charles' best records - she's either on piano herself at some point in the proceedings or is otherwise inserting herself into the band, and I've already made your joke for you there, so you're welcome), with a sheer force of a type - not necessarily intensity, of which, yeah, sure parallel and elsewheres you can match, but type for which there is no equal. "Icons" are easy to bust on because iconography as practiced in this neck o'the woods is usually always a flimsy excuse for a craniorectal brainmarketingwash. And I'm all for blowing that shit outta the water, over the river and through the woods, and my, grandmother, what a big chest wound you have, the better to fill you full of bullshit, my dear. But still, seeing past the hype can still leave some shit that just won't go away, notable some sort of "force" taht goes over above and beyond just music. And for my money, Aretha at her best is/was one of those things. That it doesn't come nearly as often as it could have (and if you wanna go "should have", well, that's a game I'm not even gonna play...) is one thing, but if you wanna posit that it never came at all (and with Soul 69, that should be all but impossible, barring some physical deformity, and even then, a real man can make the brain come), then...no. No.

And in this case, something from Carol King, like the song... I got no problem with Aretha = Erratic, especially from 1969-70 on, and I got no problem with Other's Greatest Moments > Areatha as a whole, but Aretha at her very peak, and enough of that peak made it onto enough records that I think we can recognize what it is and isn't, is just...in a class by itself. Which is not to say that there aren't other classes by themself that = Aretha's. But anybody who don't recognize that once you strip away all the feel-good Mainly Whitey "Queen Of Soul" iconism-by-default and about 50 gajillion other forms of nostalgia that you still have a formidable singer with a formidable-enough legacy is just a damn fool.

Yeah, and it not only rings, but it can dance just as good as it walks.

Tony Kubek cetainly wore a cup oftne enough, but having never met the man, I couldn't say if he was a cup, even occasionally.

Details, please!

Why should any of this surprise anyone?

Got any #s on what % of that same generation went Yuppie, not to say voted for Reagan, Bush, & Bush? Myself, I'm a Boomer, and I got over it a loooong time ago.

Cup Drive. Saw it today while talking my daughter to school and taking a new route through a new developement. Not Loving Cup Drive, not Stanley Cup Drive, not even Measuring Cup Drive or Halfa Cup Drive or DD Cup Drive, just outright Cup Drive. Seems a bit odd, no? However, both my daughter and I latched on to it as new new form of insider juvenile insult. "Hey, don't be such a cup." "God, what a cup (s)he is." "You're being an outright cup." Maybe you gotta be there. Or be me. But I think it's odd. World without end, amen.

Blame them damn Gen Xers again.

And oh yeah - apologies for any offense.

Can't speak for everybody, but I was still in grade school... Discovered Strozier throuh Don Ellis & Oliver Nelson sides ca.1973 or so, then some Keno Duke Starta-East sides, and took it from there... Funny thing is, Leonard Feather consistently used Stozier as a poster boy for his "Crow Jim" crap, an example of a fully able white cat who wasn't getting gigs because of his race. Believe that he even posed the Strozier question to Max Roach, who took it at face value. Later on, I remember Strozier claiming that he had "African ancestors", or something like that, maybe in a DB article about Oliver NElson's early 70s African tour, where Strozier's ethnicity apparently caused a lot of specualtion amongst the spectators. Nelson was coy about the whole thing. This thread, though, is the first time I've read confident claims that Strozier wasn't "white", or even "mixed", but outright "black". After all these years! (and opportunities) Life gets wierder every damn day... "mixed", "outright black", I usually respect your comments more than anyone else on this forum but this coming from you is confusing, maybe you need to talk face-to-face with some black people. You will not hear "mixed" and/or "outright Black" come out of their mouths. OUTRIGHT BLACK, what a stupid comment. no one is "outright" anything. A white woman with blond hair and blue eyes once told me that she was an african american. I looked at her like she was cracy until she told me she was a native of South Africa and is now a US citizen so technically she was correct. As intelligent as you are, I'm sure you won't repeat such ridiculous comments in the future, you're to smart for that................. Hell, I don't even hear "outright black" coming out of my mouth. I suggest that the effectiveness of my syntax (i.e. - the quotation marks conferring a suspension of literalness to the whole phrase - and also note their use arounf the words "white" & "mixed" as well - for what I thought would be obvious reasons, my bad about that) on either my conveying and/or your interpreting end might be lacking. In either case, the point was that this is the first time I've ever heard anybody claim that Frank Strozier was "black". And it is/was. Now, "mixed", that's another story. Maybe up y'all's way it's never used, but I assure you that that absence of usage is far from universal. and yes, I've heard it used many, many times by "black" people. As for needing to "talk face-to-face with some black people", well... You wanna got there, you can. But I won't, and I hope you don't. You don't know me or my background nearly well enough to make such a naive, and conceivably insulting, statement. Let's just say that I in no way speak out of "inexperience", ok?

You gotta drink more for them to do that.

YES!!! It's got George Adams too, and in very good form at that.