JSngry

Cali, you're points are all well taken, and I can't argue with them. All I'm saying is that in my part of the country, amongst people more or less my age at the time (teenagers), that record more or less coalesced and drove home the point that things had changed, and that they weren't ever going to un-change. It certainly wasn't a "defining moment" in cultural identity or anything like that, but it did seem to be one that provided the last push over whatever hump was left as far as taking it to the next phase as far as confronting the white world. In our area, schools were not completely integrated in1968, we still had that quaint "Freedom Of Choice" thing. The African-American kids who were in "our" school (the insanity of providing "choice to all" only to still keep the notion that there were still "yours" and "ours" was apparent to some of us even then, but insanity was the order of the day when it came to trying to avoid integration by "allowing" it...) all publicly practiced the "go along to get along" thing. What went on at home was often totally different, as I found out a little later when my level of social/personal interaction deepened and I got to see how much of a "facade" was still being put up in communities like mine, where integration was mostly at best "tolerated". But once the kids left home and came to school, there was still the "don't make waves" thing going on. That record definitely put a big crack in that facade, and it was a crack that let it be known that this was a "point of no return", and indeed it was. I'll not claim that that record was in any way "new" or "cutting edge" in that regard, but I will claim that it certainly seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of an old way of thinking/acting in the world I was living in, one that let everybody know that from here on out, it was time to get busy looking at how things were going to be instead of how things are, or used to be. Your experiences probably vary (differences between north & south indeed!), but these are mine.

Which one?

Hell, that happens to me damn near every time I leave the house to go to work... Got a copy of the new Nas from my son, btw, and spun it all last night. Good, interesting stuff, and lyrically, a lot of it it sounds like the 21st Century Jazz thread applied to hip-hop. BTW - the JB sample you referenced in another thread is from "Get Up, Get Into It And Get Involved". A tad less obvious, and more sublime for me, was the "After The Dance" sample on one tune (just had a burn, so I can't say which one. Nice! But yeah, if hip-hop is dead, where does that leave Wynton's version of jazz? Post-dead? Never alive in the first place? Alive, but in a world other than this one? All of the above?

Nah, that's just the vehicle for the real argument, which is that they each think that the other one is an asshole.

No. The term Black was in common usage by the time JB recorded "Black and Proud". The term Black was made popular years before JB's record. People who inspired this redefinition were Elijah Muhammad, the Black Panther Party, Malcom X, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and lots more. James, actually, was kind of late to the game and surprised a lot of us when he got on the bandwagon. Where I grew up (semi-rural East Texas), "Black" was considered a "militant" word (look at the list above, and you can see why people light-years behind reality on both sides of the tracks might see it this way). An African-American in those parts who referred to themself as "Black" outside of the African-American community was definitely not the norm. But afer JB's record hit, it was. The previously accepted term in the region, "colored", was over immediately. And it pissed a lot of white folks there off that "those people" would suddenly demand to be addressed in terms of their own choosing rather than accept what was offered. Now, I was only living in one place at one time, but I can't believe that the experience in my region was completely unique.

So James Brown is basically Archie Bell & The Drells super-sized, is that what you're saying?

The reason I find this premise so distasteful is the assumption of the author and, obviously, others by their lists, to associate fame and celebrity with importance. Maybe some people ought to find out about the contributions of people like Benjamin Banaker, Garrett Morgan, Louis Lattimer, Hannibal, Elijah McCoy, Madam Walker, Nefertiti and other great queens and kings of Egypt, Timbuktu and other African nations, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Madam Walker, Marshall "Major" Taylor and too many more to list. All "the top 5 black people" aren't/were not entertainers, athletes and/or Americans. Just because you don't know their names doesn't mean that they have not profoundly impacted the world. Absolutely. And this is why Clem doesn't have a fucking clue. Importance doesn't come from "empowerment." James Brown made black people feel good about themselves. That's fantastic, no sarcasim intended. But James Brown had less than no influence over the way black people were treated on a day to day level. For that, you have to turn to a Martin Luther King, Jr. who put his neck on the line over and over again to procure that liberty for ALL of us. You have to turn to a Thurgood Marshall who sat on the highest court in the land and made the decisions that helped open the door for a generation of American blacks. Civil Rights may have been, on some level, about the right for blacks to feel like human beings, but feeling good and being able to vote aren't on the same freaking level. Was JB a great man? No question. Does he deserve our great love and respect? Of course. Did he single handedly change the world? No, he did not. No more than Ronald Reagan tore down the Berlin Wall by saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." There's a big difference between the talk and the walk. JB talked the talk all his life. But even he would admit that he left it to others to walk the walk (unless you can point to JB's arrests during sit-ins). Can't we have a holistic appreciation of all this? Yeah, people gotta walk the walk, but those who inspire the walk and the direction it takes are just as important. The walk inspired by JB was markedly different than that inspired by, say, Curtis Mayfield, and to that attention should be paid and credit given. Again - fuel. No fuel, and what does the engine do? The fuel is not the engine, but the engine is not the fuel either. And there are many types of fuel that can produce many types of results. Symbiosis, yin & yang, you need both, can't have a front w/o a back, the bigger the front the bigger the back. And all that.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...st&p=596305

Beautiful recollections, Ed. Thanks for sharing!

I know it well. Side Two of the second Apollo album, the 2-lp one. It then goes into the "hey hey, I feel alright" thing and then jack-knifes into the coldest "Cold Sweat" on record. Maybe the baddest LP side in R&B history. Definitely nothing badder.

Damn know-it-all electronic musicians...

Sunset Eyes was PJ-14: http://www.bsnpubs.com/underconst/pacificjazz.html PJ-11 was a Harry Edison side (same source). The Baker thing was PJLP-11, a 10" LP. (same source). Maybe...the single was released before the album and by the time the album came out the title had been changed and the catalog number changed. A difference of 3 isn't all that much, and shit happens. Or maybe the 45 has a worn label and the "4" looks like a "1" due to wear, or dried vomit. Again, shit happens.

The switch doesn't have to "move", the circuit just needs to be opened. Something can be loose on the inside that you can't see from the outside. Take it apart, open it up, and see what's there. Something's loose.

Imagine a bold motherfucker begging you to hit him, letting out a bloodcurdling scream when you do, and then going on stronger and prouder than before. You think that didn't resonate? Not saying that that was what that was consciously about, but you think that it didn't resonate anyway? And that's just aurally. We're still focusing on the records. If you ever get a chance to see the 1968 Boston WGBH footage ini ts entirety... http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid25546.aspx http://www.thephoenix.com/OnTheDownload/Pe...d5-f817a94a8d16 Fuck the "iconic" (i.e. "safe") T.A.M.I. shit (but do it well and do it with love). This is the real deal. Pop culture my ass...

In an uncomfortably high number of cases, the assumption that there is a "deep" to go to is one that I'm having a harder and harder time making. The bar may be set as high as it can stand being set. Of course, that's the beautiful thing about living in a cave - known quantities set the standard, become the standard, and life's a breeze.

Look - what makes a switch work? The opening/closing of a circuit. Nothing more. So I'd look at the switch on that fan, open it up, take it apart, and see what's up. Something's opening the circuit. Might be a worn toggle switch that's not fully holding its position (it just take a little contact to open a circuit), might be some crud up inside there that's f-ing things up, who know? But it's something in the switch. Has to be. If it ain't, do you dig Sigourney Weaver?

Squirrells.

If you think Verve's a mess now, you should have seen it 30-35 years ago... If this is indeed the end of a cycle, I can only say that things have been left immeasurably better than they were found.

What about the possibility of a symbotic relationship between music & community that might allow, for example, somebody like Ellington to profoundly impact, either directly or indirectly, how somebody like King or Marshall views themself and their place in society, which in turn determines how they then interact with and impact society? Not all cultures (or subcultures) have that symbiotic relationship in equal measure, so evaluating it by a one-size-fits-all scale might not yield accurate results. "5 Most Important"? Lists & rankings? No thanks. Anything that limits is ultimately going to be false, so, uh....no. But was James Brown "important" on a level beyond that of "pop cultural figure"? Oh hell yeah. Up front, let me say this about Brown as a "musician" - he himself was a very musically limited person when it came to the technical - basic technical - aspects of putting together what he did. We had a bit of this discussion over in the other JB thread. The guy pretty much communicated "impulses" to his bandleaders, and they fleshed it out to a workable form. His organ playing, if you listen closely, is the sound of somebody knowing just enough to make it almost sound like they kind of know what they're doing. There was little or none of the intuitive genius of craftsmanship that you find in somebody like Robert Johnson in Brown. So to claim status for Brown as a "musician" by "traditional standards", Euro- or Afro-centric, is going out on a limb. But that's not why him or his music is so important. What's ultimately important is that he was able to tap into something deep, something at once primal and profound, something of damn near otherwordly power, and channel it in such a pure, unblocked, and unhindered form for so long. What it was he was tapped into you may or may not want to consider "spiritual", but it definitely dealt with spirit - human spirits dealing with things like pride, power, and place. And he did it in such a way and in such a time/place that it had an inestimable impact on a lot of people all over the world (we're so busy looking at JB's impact on American music & culture that we're overlooking the same impact that he had in Africa, which was not insignificant) in ways that went beyond merely providing a "soundtrack for their lives" or some such. The guy made a deep impact on the minds, and therefore the actions, of a lot of people who were taking a lot of actions that profoundly impacted a lot of the world. "Soundtracks" are one thing, but fuel is another, and I'll argue that Brown provided as much fuel for the global "Black Nationalism" movement of the 1960s as did anybody, since the purpose of fuel is to unleash potential energy and turn it into kinetic energy. James Brown provided a whole lot of fuel at a time when need for and consumption of same both appeared endless. What I'm trying to say is that "James Brown" was a helluva lot bigger than just James Brown. When he himself either realized this or forgot it (your call which, and I'll not argue either way), it was over, rapidly & irrevocably, although in the end he was able to have a respectable enough rebirth as a "cultural icon". But Cultural Icon is a step or few thousand down the ladder from Unstoppable Force Of Nature Directly Impacting Human Destiny, which is a position that he onece occupied, and occupied well for a significant amount of time. If you weren't there, you can be forgiven for not understanding. If you were there but have forgotten, you can be forgiven for letting time take its toll. But if you were there & never got it in the first place, you have no excuse.

No disagreement there. None at all.

Listen and/or ignore at your peril.

Communicating what? To whom? How? For what reason? To what expected/desired end? On the one hand, that's one of those statements that is so obvious as to not question, but otoh, it's also somewhat of a copout, akin to saying that cooking isn't about blending/contrasting ingredients, flavors, textures, etc., it's about getting food on the plate.

Now can we get the inside full-length of the Godfather in his street disguise?

That's what I'm talkin' about!