JSngry

How terribly undignified.

It is what it is. Not "fantastic", but it don't suck either.

If possible, yeah.

Hey, I dig that cut. Glad to hear it agian!

That Zawinul side must've come in...

Grossman was not without, uh..."personal problems", and if even a tenth of the stories I've heard are true, the guy's lucky to be alive. The no-show @ Ronnie Scott's would fit with this.

Ah, you beat me to my hint. And here I thought you didn't really know... Dude, my memory's not that bad!

Excellent choice for AOW, mom! I like this album very much. More now than I did then, to be honest. Choosing between it and Terra Firma, I might take the latter. Might. Mike mentioned Grossman's "later" move off into Rollins-land, and I know what he means. However, with the benfit of hindsight, I can hear any number of moments on both of those albums that parallel Sonny's 70s music as well as the latent Rollins-ness in Grossman's playing. There's times I think, "hey, this is the type od record Sonny was trying to make!" Something else I didn't hear then that I hear now. Also agree that Jan Hammer was bringing something special to the this type table back in those days. That, I heard then. Definitely prefer the original title, although I can tell you that there's a cult of tenorists for whom the new one is most apt. Those Grossman PM sides made quite an impact on more tenor players than you might think.

My point exactly!

Yep. Inside joke, ask Big Al. I'm being sly... I can tell you this - it is unusual to have a clarinet solo on a thing like this. Must be a reason...

Bass clarinet? Try fuzztone guitar. Still say it sounds like a Steve Miller song... (...2...3...)

Pretty sure that R&D was underway. But even if not, how much foresight does it take to see that if you, the owner, can crank out perfect copy after perfect copy ad infinitum, that it's just a matter of time before that same ability reaches consumers? Not much, I'd think. This is simply technology we're talking about, not some divinely endowed mystical power.

Like Robert McCullough on "Super Bad"?

I find it very hard, damn near impossible in fact, to deny the validity of a good WOOT WOOT. &

Your selection might be limited there. Try exploring some online vendors like CD Universe or Amazon. You can look up at the uppermost right hand corner of this page and find a search function for either site. Anything you buy through that search will result in this site getting a few cents off the sale. It's a good way to get exposed to a much broader selection of music than you'll find at your local department stores and to help support this site. Win-win! And btw - both sites are safe, honest, and reliable, so if you need to throw your bucks back to your folks to let them let you use a charge card to make an order, they can do so with confidence. Either way, when you see/hear (there's online samples at both sites) all the great music that's out there that you've never heard of (yet!), well, you think you're excited about music now...

Why shouldn't they be? And why shouldn't there be an esthetic built around their usage? And why shouldn't that esthetic be built around truly timeless principles like color, contrast, rhythmic sensitivity & interaction, all that good stuff? And why is a generation or more of "real musicisians" leaving it to these musicians of today to figure this stuff out on their own, and then talk trash when it they don't? If you don't raise your kids, they'll raise themselves, and whose fault is it if you don't like how they turn out? Face it - unless you're singing and.or using your body as a drum, any instrument is a machine (and a case can be made that even the voice is a machine). It will only do what the player makes it do, and what the player makes it do is going to be based on what the player knows and is capable of imagining. When you get right down to it, a bad sample is no different than a bad trumpet solo, and a bad loop is no different than a bad arrangement. Either way, it's a failure of skill and imagination. If Ellington could imagine and make manifest that glorious orchestral sound, and if Zawinul could do the same w/synths, then there's absolutely no reason why somebody can't/won't do the same w/computers/samples/drum machines/etc. No reason whatsoever. Anybody who's interested in the nurturing of the human/creative spirit should be looking for ways to bring that about among those interested, if only by offering "moral support", instead of leaving it as a matter of scornful indifference. Like Charles Scott said, people gonna do what they gonna do. Best to give guidance of spirit even when guidance of specifics/mechanics may be entirely undoable.

Danielle - try an Wayne Shorter album called Speak No Evil, and then another one called High Life. You seem to be responding right now to compositions that set a mood, and both of those albums are full of exactly that, although the styles and instruments used are totally different on each album. If the solos seem to go on a bit long for you right now, don't sweat it. Plenty of time to figure all that out. Focus on the tunes themselves, and the moods they create for the soloing. Hope they work for you!

Motivation is good, great even, but I always suggest looking at the motivations of the motivator. Just because. But if he makes you want to do something constructive with your life, hey, that's a good thing. Just do it because you want to, not because you've been "programmed" to. Not saying that's what this cat is up to, just offering some advice for the long haul. Because not all motivators are altruistic in what they lay down. Now hey - shouldn't you be practicing?

Jim, would you say that he sounds a bit different here than usual though? (I'm otherwise not very familiar with this period of his work). He does seem a bit gruffer and, I dunno, maybe more emotional here, something that I've always attributed to Monk's passing just a few days before. I don't think so, not particularly. He wasn't playing tenor as much in those days as he did before or later, so that might be part of the gruffness, as might the event you describe. But as somebody who's followed all periods of his work with equal interest/fascination, I think he sounds very much like himself here, which is why the lack of ready identifications is surprising to me.

This is a new book you say? I've read the older one. What's the deal w/this one? Well yeah, I mean, when things go "off track" and it's because nobody tried to keep a hand in to steer, what right do "we" have to complain about the results? If "we" tried and lost, that's one thing. But - did we? And I'll say this as well - the best American "popular music" has always benefitted from jazz' presence, and jazz has always been happy for the gigs. Is it a coincidence that the percieved decline of pop music has paralled the willful withdrawal of jazz musicians from participation therein? I mean, what would Pet Sounds have been w/o The Wrecking Crew, and what were they if not a bunch of jazz players turned studio rats? That's a "apex" of sorts, but geez, if pop music used to swing (even if it wasn't "swing" music", it's usually because there were jazz/jazz-informed players involved in the playing, arranging, production, all of the above, etc. But when shit started getting digital and computerized, jazz people had mostly reached the point where A) they didn't want to learn the new instruments (and yes, a computer and programs are instruments, or can/should be) & B) they felt above the need to be connected with popular "entertainment" culture at almost any level. We're Artists, dammit! So who was left to make the pop music? Mechanics, pimps, hos, accountants, and idiots. Of course, there remain exceptions, but I hope/think you know what I mean. Now I can hear somebody saying, "Who cares? It's just pop music." Well ask yourself this - if it's dangerous to lose the existence of a viable middle economic class, is it not just as dangerous to lose the existence of a viable middle "cultural" class, and for precisely the same reasons?

I'm really surprised that the tenorist on #1 is not being readily identified... (not just by you Dan, but by almost everybody)

Very few of y'all know who Charles Scott was. Charles Scott was a Fort Worth bassist/"inner city" band director who for years played locally w/the Red Garland Marchel Ivery crew, a fine player with a quiet yet warm personality. I played a Juneteenth jazz/blues festival back in the 90s, and Scottie's band was the opening act. In it, he had Thomas Reese, another FW resident, and a pianist who was a better fit for Marchel the was Red, imho, Rachella Parks (then in her earliest teens), and... a bunch of rappers and kids beating on buckets (with a pretty solid groove, I might add). Well, "the public" dug it, but the musicians were livid. What the fuck was Scottie doing letting these no talent kids make all this noise? Scottie put it simply and truthfully for somebody who asked him exactly that backstage - "Look man, I got a school full of kids like this. They gonna do what they gonna do and this is what they gonna do. I just try to get them into doing it well. And they do know about Bird & Trane. I make sure of that." Defeatist, perhaps even irresponsible, some said. But not me.

Indeed not, although I tink it does correlate somewhat w/L.A. jump blues .

I keep asking myself what kind of dumbasses would fight a near-totally bogus war against home taping and then introduce/push a format that allowed for the making of exact copies before figuring out some kind of copy protection/deterrence plan.