JSngry

Uh, by freeing me of the nightmare of still having to make a living by playing "Mustang Sally", "Green Dolphin Steet" & "Nardis" (especially "Nardis!") when I'm 75 just to put some money in the pocket. That is not a future I'd wish on anybody. Yeah, I still got a saxophone, but when you gotta use it to make a living instead of using it to make something you really believe in (and I still believe in Marchel Ivery playing GDS, just not me playing it), it's much more of a curse than a blessing. Am I a dinosaur? Am I irrelevant? As a person, no, I hope not. But as a craftsman desperately trying to eke out a living by playing shit that is for all intents and purposes dead & irrelevant outside of the cave, God I certainly hope I am. I've recently turned down a few such club dates, pickup bands playing Real Book tunes for $50.00. Fuck it. I hope it all dies, and soon. If that's all people care to make of music, fuck 'em. Life's too short to aggressively persue personal & spiritual mediocrity, and life's too interesting outside of that particular cave to live and die there. Give me something to believe in. I can't believe in music being "important" just because it's a job, or because it's all I "know", or because I "love" it (besides, not all love is pure, and not all love is healthy). It's gotta mean more than that, and it does. When/if I can find something to believe in, I'll be there. Until then, if you want it like that, you can have it like that. Me, I got better things to do than get upset because the mode of making a living I've had in the past is no longer viable and/or relevant to the 21st century. I've got options in this life when it comes to just making money. People say, "oh, but at least you're doing something you love". Yeah, like I love playing tired ass shit with tired ass players. Can't get enough of that, let me tell you. Playing "Mustang Sally" & "Brick House" & "Ipanema" & GDS & Stella & all that other shit is better than being a plumber or something? Why? Tell me why. For most of the people I know who believe that, it all comes down to that it's better to not have to deal with "regular" people any more than you have to. It's better to play bullshit than it is to deal with reality. Is that the best that music has to offer, an outlet for socially-challenged recluses? I think not. Is music your soulmate or your cheap ass street whore? Give me something to believe in, not to fall back on. It ain't 1997 any more, and it sure as hell ain't 1957 any more. Music as who I am has little if anything to do with "playing gigs" if those gigs are nothing more than exericises in delusional futility. And the ones that are going away for the most part are. No tears here.

Dude, if you can pay $300.00 (or up) and provide a good vibe for a local band that's not playing the same old same old, you're going to be swamped with requests to play your series!

Differnt curves curve at different angles, I guess. Never have really heard this one. Heard it a few times over the years, and it seemed really good, but never did it stop me in my tracks. But it's been 20 years or so since the last time, so who knows?

Dude, you have to have no idea about what's going on in the underground to make a statement like that. Jesus, I've just scratched the very surface of it, & I'm hearing shit that is totally irrelevant to a statement like that. Cats are playing drum machines like a percussion orchestra, and samples are being morphed beyond recognition of their source, turned into something else entirely. And sometimes - GASP - "real" players are being used right alongside all that. Music is being made.

Seems possible.

Bingo. So, I guess Dickie Wells & Curley Russell were victims of rap too... The gigs now are with the new musicians making music the new way. When things change, bodies fall. Adapt or die, gracefully or otherwise. In the big picture, all that's being "lost" is gigs for competent (or better) replicators for whom there is a dwindling need (who needs a suckass funk drummer on a dance gig when you can have Clyde Stubblefield on your hard drive? Now, if you got a suckass drum sample, whose fault is that - the machine or the person who created the sample?). The herd's being thinned, and boo-hoo about that. Sure, there's original, creative voices who are having to struggle, but where's the news there? Did computers kill Herbie Nichols? Anybody who's got the real thing will find a way to do it as long as they can hold on. And how long they can hold on has always been an issue. But what about the young players who don't have the outlet? Hey - young cats who really want it/have it wil adapt, one way or the other. Everybody else is fucked, but oh well. It's about time. Let them be fans. We need more fans, not more craftsmen masquerading as "artists". "Rearranging old music"? Yeah, like playing "Green Dolphin Street" for the 90000000000000000000000000000000th time on a club date with an unispired pickup band is a bold declaration of creative independence. Right. Or like cover/bar bands provide a real creative outlet. Of course they do. Changing tastes, changing economics, hell, changing mindsets, failure by cavepeoples to accept reality, lots of things going on...... Waaaaay too many easy generalizations going on.

Damn.

And why should you?

I'm talking about the LP (which I have) relative to the way I know it would have sounded live. This downloaded file alters that sound somewhat. But really, once you've had a good taste of live big bands, recordings seldom satisfy w/o the compensating use of some imagination/memory...

Gary, Indiana nearly made me vomit. Square business.

That would suck.

Didn't EMI have a similar "fiasco" (and that "only" 600,000 sales should be considered "poor sales" should say something both about the scale of - perhaps unrealistic, what with downloading now destroying mothers and children like William Calley at My Lai - expectations of this biz at this level) a few years ago with Mariah Carrey? Didn't they famously drop her and didn't heads famously roll? And didn't she come back on a different label and have a big smash hit record?

Along ths lines, what wth Varese, Stockhausen, Cage, AACM, and all the other sonic explorers of the 20th century asking the question "What is music?" for so long now, it's only natural that such a question would filter into the "mainstream", and it's only natural that different people would arrive at different answers. It's also only natural that we, the "elite" (HA!) would not like a lot of those answers and that we would ridicule some people for having the temerity to assume that they were "qualified" to ask the question in the first place. I mean, is it really ok for Cage to have some guy sitting silently at a piano and presenting it as music and we all ponder the "meaning" of it all and not ok for some cat to create a sonic collage of samples for some other cat to rap over? Seems to me that in both cases, the question of what music is is being asked and answered in distinctly personal terms, and in neither case are the "old rules" being seen as set in stone. Sorry, but the genie got let out of the bottle last century. Too late to put it back in now. So let's start dealing with reality instead of Rambo-esque retro fantasy-wish-fulfillment.

Where the problem, if any, exists is with too many of these new musicians with these new instruments not having the vision to think beyond their immediate discoveries, discoveries with which I certainly have no issues whatsoever. But at some point, I hope that somebody/sombodies comes along and moves things along to the next (dare I say higher?) level of creativity & vision. There's defintiely shot happening underground, but it's waaaaay underground as best I can see. Absolutely no reason why it (this growth of vision & potential) shouldn't happen other than a failure of spirit, and if one can concede a potential for failure, then one must also conceed the potential for triumph. But who's there to offer the "moral support" for any of these cats to consider those potentials, and who's there to offer encouragement for them to keep pumpin'/pimpin' out the same old same old so the $$$ can be gotten while it's there to be had? And even worse, who's cynically exploiting all this raw talent from the POV that that's all "these people" are really good for? If you're not part of the solution... Seems like the classics never go out of style.

Joe - check your email tommorow.

Hey, screw Da' Bastids on this one (unless you got a J-import fetish). They got it at Amazon for $16.98, and you can order it through the O-Boards link.

Let me reinforce - this is not a "house" or "dance" album. This is first and foremost and old school descarga album that you can dance to (just like the old ones). But if you know Louie Vega's (and/or his MAW partner Kenny Dope's) work, you know that more and more of this type thing has been infiltraing their house work (and marvellously so) over the last 10 or so years. This album, though, is pretty much pure early 21-st century Nuyorican/Afro/Brazillian/etc. jamming of a very high quality with state-of-the-art recording/production.

Well, they don't play themselves. I've been conducting an experiment for 10 years now. Bought me a drum machine back then and decided to see if it was an "instrument" or not. Figured that if it wasn't, it wouldn't need to be "played" by a "player". So I took it out of the box, plugged it in, turned it on, and waited for it to start doing something by itself. Sitll waiting... Funny, my clarinet's the same way. Haven't touched it in something like 20 years, and it's not made a sound either. You know who's not an instrument? Tony Romo, He's a tool.

Quite possibly! http://www.dustygroove.com/browse.php?kwfi...1&incl_cs=1 Yeah, that's about it. Old school descarga meets new school pan-global dance music. If you're a stone Latin freak, you should dig it. If you like "Latin-Jazz", you should dig it. If you like good danceable grooves with music of substance on top, you should dig it. If you don't like any of that stuff, you probably won't dig it. But if you do, this puppy is coming highly recommended. Replay-for-listening value is off the hook, as is the fun factor. Instant classic it just might be!

I hear the big bands are coming back any time now.

That just about sums it up - in a positive way, I'd say. What's wrong with combining these musical elements? Nothing at all. I compress files I don't use much any more all the time. It's useful, beneficial, and frees up some much-needed space.

Good stuff. Maybe not $20.00 worth of good, but your mileage may vary there.

WHOA! FUTURE SHOCK! Dude, I watched that show religiously. For as long as it was on... Low-budget Soul Train knockoff, but with the incomprable Godfather egotisity overflowing from start to finish, done when his slide in popularity was more than slightly underway. Most vivid memory was of one regular dancer who, well, ok, you know how back in the 80s the thing was to wear a Benz hood ornament as a necklace? Yeah, well this cat predated all that shit by a decade, except instead of the Benz thing, he wore a JB 45 (for all you uber-kids, that's a record, not a gun...). I kid you know. Cat would be dancing all around with a freakin' 45 dangling around his neck from a chain. You can't get TV like that anymore. And you couldn't get it but for a few months back then. But them was the daze.

Music doesn't die. People do.