JSngry

Really? I thought it was all about herb...

That was probably this one: From your initial description of what you're looking for, I'd say the Candids are the ones to get, especially the two under Bartz' name. That's some good stuff there.

Full-length audio clips! This one is killer: http://www.jazzdocumentation.ch/audio/rsrf/riverboat.ram Red Saunders and his Orchestra: Red Saunders (d, ldr); Sonny Cohn (tp); Fip Ricard (tp); Marty Martinez (tb); Harlan "Booby" Floyd (tb); Porter Kilbert (as); Leon Washington (ts); Mac [McKinley] Easton (bars); Earl Washington (p); Jimmy Richardson (b); Sun Ra (arr). Universal Recording, Chicago, December 31, 1953 BL-54102 Riverboat (Clark Terry) Blue Lake 101, Chess CHV 415, Bellaphon [G] BJS4032, Empire Musicwerks CD-N1

For all the heaps of praise this one has gotten, it's never really worked for me. "It Was A Very Good Year", yeah, sure. But otherwise...I dunno. It's potent ammunition for those who think that Sinatra's artistry was based more on sentiment than skill, I think. Now, Moonlight Sinatra, that's one from roughly the same time that gets the ears going.

Dude, I saw a Korla Pandit 78 once at a flea market. Has a little picture of his head on the label. I passed. But now, actually having heard him, I wish I'd picked it up. Just for the label. Yeah, it looked like this:

http://www.korlapandit.com/jettesatin.htm

Found another one: The audio's out of sync though.

Y'ever get the feeling that's what he was going for when he made Love, Devotion, and Surrender with McLaughlin? I don't know about y'all, but LDS is a huge letdown for me... Don't know if that's what he was going for, or if it was a Sri Chinmoy hoe-down in action, but, yeah, that side didn't do too much for me either, and still doesn't. Probably the best "expansion" of the concept was with what was recorded/released on Lotus. Not really an "expansion" of the concept as much as a full(er) flowering/bringing it to the older repertoire as well, which worked pretty nicely, I think. But that didn't see US release until waaaay after the fact so unless you heard it as a J-Import fairly early on (I didn't hear it until '79 or so, by which time the band had already swung back towards a more overtly commercial sound), it's nothing more than a quite refreshing document rather than part of the "official" evolution. Or not.

If he were born 20 years earlier, he'd have been born in 1929.

Nostalgia appeal for this one is high, because hearing it in 1972, when I was 16 & had been discovering & devouring jazz of all sorts, jazz-rock of all sorts, and pretty much anything "jazz-related" with an appetite that could conservatively be described as ravenous, was a real mindfuck. The first three Santana albums had been favorites from the git-go, each one moreso than the one before, but the side w/Buddy Miles didn't do it for me, and I was wondering if all the noise I was hearing about Santana going a new "jazzy" route was just that - noise. So when Caravanserai hit, I was curious. Well, from Hadley Calliman's opening notes, I knew that the noise was no hype - this shit was happening, and in a big way. Now, a lot of my faves from that day are still faves, but not for the same reason(s). There's defintiely a nostalgic appeal to a lot of that stuff that comes from having been there, and I lack the "objectivity" to sternly judge the music purely on its merits (well, I can, but what price "objectivity"? Once you know you have it, what do you do with it other than have it handy for occasions where it's needed?) And yeah, there's that factor that plays into my enthusiasm for this album. No denying it. But dammit, it is good. Damn good in fact. It's an album that captures a moment of "purity of vision" unlike few others , and this at a time when proclaimed "visions" were abounding far more than the things themself. If it was too good (dare I say too pure?) to last, and if Santana himself might have lacked the "overall musicianship" to drive the thing to the next level, or even sustain it at this one (and that's in no way a dis - the guy's a marvellous player & has always led excellent-to-great bands, but to go all the way off into the type of territory he opened the door to here was just not something he was equipped to do, nor should it necessarily have been - this, after all, is an album of "vision" and of realizing that specific vision. Building on it would be a separate/different task altogether), oh well. It's a glorious triumph anyway. When it comes to rendering a personal "final judgement" on things like this, nostalgia sometimes trumps objectivity, and sometimes vice-versa. Rare (and cause for joy) is the occasion when they compliment each other. Caravanserai is just such a thing.

I don't think Dallas would be a better team with Nash still around. Nash has been a better player with Phoenix than he ever was with Dallas, and I think that has a lot to do with the system Mike D'Antoni has set up. I also wonder if Nash could function in the slower-paced, defensive-minded system that Avery Johnson has brought into Dallas. Guy I agree. And I don't hear any Phoenix fans screaming that they's have won if they'd have had Dirk to go with Nash.

Not at all a bad idea.

Gordon Jump Van Halen Van Basten II

That's on Nasty Gal, iirc, the Island album that's been reissued seperately.

Michael Bublé Michael, to whom Dionne Warwick wished a meassage sent R.B. Greaves

Any numbers on the Max?

Peter Littman, then?

Van Horn strikes me as more of a Lin Halliday type...

I like to sit at my desk with my hair mussed, my shirt wrinkled, butter-rum Live Savers on my breath, my fly open, & Lockjaw Davis blaring from the PC. People leave me alone when I do that. Mission accomplished.

So, are tracks 15-16 more from the Joe Gordan date, or other Blakey material?

Not a professor, just a guy who's listened & thunk about this music & its peoples long enough to have some fairly well-formed options. Anybody can do it, really. All it takes is time (which you can't do anything about) & willingness (which you can do something about). But thanks for the kind words. However, I gotta take some issue with this: That's a wise route towards "appreciation", but it'll quickly get you on the road to nowhere in terms of "meaning", what is, what something means to you personally. I'm all for appreciation, and I see a lot of dissing (not just here, but everywhere) that (seemingly) totally disgards and/or marginalizes the very real accomplishments of craft and other things relevant to appreciating something "on its own terms", and that, I think, is dangerously close to the self-indulgence of destruction for the enjoyment of destruction. But otoh, if you can really find some meaning for you yourself personally in something, no matter how "good" it might be, then what? Is it cool to just accept without at some point examining? I don't think so, if for no other reason than that leaves us open to, at worst, "programming", cultural brainwashing, whatever you want to call it, the wholesale buying into somebody else's definition of what it means to be "us", which is really telling you what it means to be you, and who but yourself has the right to decide that? That's worst case. Best case is that we don't really give ourselves the chance to grow by asking ourselves some questions along the way. Nothing necessarily "wrong" with that, some people don't want/need to grow, and yeah, ok, but... All I'm saying is that "appreciation" & "meaning" are two different things, neither to be taken lightly. Sometimes they reinforce each other, sometimes they pull at opposite ends. You just never know how that's going to work out. But - neither is sufficient by itself, and neither should be nurtured (or supressed) at the expense of the otehr.

A 10' LP. "LP" is/was used to denote playing speed, not record size. My mom used to have a 7" "LP" (a promo item from Gerber Baby Foods featuring Rosemary Clooney released by Columbia during the height of the "speed wars") And "album" is used to denote any "collection" of material. There were "albums" of 78s. So technically...I want to know how the damn thing jumped from 4 songs (my version) to 8 over the course of the years, and how many of thos 8 are on the Blakey CD? BTW - I also have a 10" LP album of Blakey (got them both in the same trade back in the day, I gave up the ultra-deluxe WB version of Never Mind The Bollocks..., seemed like a more than fair trade...), so if the Blakey CD is 8+4, I'm even. If it's 8+6 or 8+8, then not. And if it's 8+5 or 8+7, WTF?

The thing that I too often take away from an Ella performance is that it's not quite "honest", and I think that Larry's notation of her perceived almost-pathological shyness plays to this. By all accounts (that I've read), she was a "complicated" person whose music was not often (enough for my tastes) reflective of anything but hey-it's-a-happy-swinging-life-I-got-no-worries-or-cares, when the reality for her was most likely anything but. Now, avoidance of pain (and/or other realities) through music has an honorable, at times even great, traditiion, but usually it's built upon either a level of escapism that's un/super-naturally grander in scope that that from which escape is being attempted, or else it's just batshit loony. Ella never really went in either direction. It seems to me that she built this world of "perfect" singing and stayed inside it with an almost fearful determination to let nothing come neither in nor out of it, as if her singing was her shell to protect her against "bigger" non-musical issues against which she had no resources to cope. It's not quite a case of "arrested adolescence" as was the case with Brian Wilson (who, god bless him, created works that were both un/super-naturally grander in scope that that from which he was trying to escape escape, and that were just batshit loony). It's more of a case of a severe case of emotional agoraphobia finding its sole functionality through a truly beautiful voice, and it's because that voice was so beautiful, indeed, perfect, that criticism of her work is not something that I can offer untempered. Because dammit, the woman was a great "singer". I just find too much of a conflict (usually) between what I hear and what I feel and what I think/know I should be hearing and feeling to ultimately be satisfied. The blues album Dan mentioned is a case in point. It is, perhaps unwittingly, the most "naked" Ella I've heard, and it is a fascinating jumble of skittish contradictions - one second (and when I say "second", I mean it almost literally) down & dirty, the next all polite, never really settling into one "true" personality on a simple blues date. It's as if she can't make up her mind who she wants to "be", again, on a simple (or, apparently in her case, not so simple) blues date. Clearly, this was a woman of deep internal contradictions. Is it possible that, deep inside, Ella was more twisted/tortured than Billie? I'd not jump to an answer too quickly... If it would have been asking too much to have a person of her "stature" play out her psychodramas in her music, I don't think it's at all unfair to note & respond to the resultant feelings stirred within by wondering, with total disregard to all things Memorexian, "Is it real? Or is it Ella?" Sure, she had a beautiful voice, impeccable technique, and quite often was able to put them to use to create some wondefully perfect sounding music that really asks for nothing more than to be heard as such. And it's hard for me to argue against that music on those terms alone - Richard Davis was right, I think, to do what he did in that class. But I feel like an "enabler" of sorts by doing so, if not to her (hell, she's dead & I never even knew anybody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who saw her getting into a car somewhere), then to the notion that "perfect" and "beautiful" are enough by themself. They'll make for "good music", sure, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But "honesty" & "emotion" inevitable come into the mix at some point if for no other reason than that somebody always brings them into the mix, sometimes unpleasantly & unwelcomely so, and you gotta either deal with it or avoid it completely. I'm not saying that Ella avoided it completely. But I'm not saying that she really dealt with it either, and its not like I can't hear/feel that there was something "else" inside her. Her "happyhappyjoyjoy" persona is just not one that rings true to me, and her "sophiticated/elegant" persona, as "perfect" as it often is, seems more a shield than an expression. The question is inevitably posed - do we have a "right" to "expect" more of an artist than they are willing to give up, or should we just "accept" it for what it is? Yes, and yes, and that, since you asked, is the greatest source of my ambivalence - not hate, mind you, but a strong sense of ambivalence - towards the legacy of Ella Fitzgerald.

I get it!