JSngry

The lights are on, but nobody's home (in the clubhouse):

They key there is that the jazz tenor player actually had a gig... (JUST KIDDING!!!)

They had a hotel room in Manhattan for use before sessions. Seriously.

Hey HEY!

Hey...

Hey...

And I really don't like Mel Torme, especially with this kind of stuff, which is almost all he ever did, even when it wasn't this kind of stuff. If you know what I mean.

I gotta be honest - having never seen the film and not knowing what was supposed to be happening, that's exactly what I was wondering.

Man, that's really harsh. What's up with the anger and hardened heart that you felt so compelled to share such a hateful thing? Mel Fuckin' Torme, that's what's up! And Bob Buhl too!

Which is why I said when it came to music. Nothing else.

Hart Shaffner Marx

MG - Charlie Lourie's dead now. Has been for a few years. RIP. That series with the "(horrible) coloured dots on black" (shades of Indestructable gone horribly wrong!) was short-lived. It was the introductory run of "The Blue Note Re-Issue Series", and other than some cuts on the Turrentine, was comprised entirely of previously released material. Pretty disposable, then and now. This was when Prestige (and soon Milestone, and soon Fantasy) was lighting up the jazz world w/their 24000 series of "two-fers". This was Blue Notes first attempt at such, and it was soon aborted in favor of the "brown paper bag" series, which soon turned into being primarily a source for unissued sessions, although not completely. That was when the fun really began!

Cuscuna's on record somewhere as saying that the LT series was pretty much a matter of putting out as much as they could before anybody caught on. That's a paraphrase, but not too much of one. As for what anybody "sees" (or doesn't) in those photos, that's entirely subjective. The cover for Mr. Natural works for me - footprints in the sand (reverse footprints actually, they stick out of the san instead of go into it, other than one mysterious indentation in the right big toe), a green leaf, a little bit of sunlight, hey - it conjures an image to be of some semi-mysterious "nature boy" going along the beach. Mr. Natural indeed! Now, the Solid cover, that one was indirectly confirmed for me when a college buddy of mine, a hardcore Houstonian "ghettoite" (Fifth Ward), whose only goal in life was to play like Red Garland, first heard Ike Quebec & recognized a kindred soul by exclaiming, upon seeing the cover to Heavy Soul while listening to it, "Man, this is a pool hall motherfucker!" I rest my case. Seriously, what very few few of those photos have is a sense of literalness, so yeah, you gotta be inclined to go there in order to get there. But that's how I am anyway, and for almost all of them, I can get there. I remember Dmitry(?) saying that he didn't get the LT cover to Mother Ship. Well hell, that one was one of the more obvious ones for me - it looks like a power grid for some extraterrestial craft. No problem there! Another thing they all share is a sense of loneliness, desolation, abandonment, whatever, and most of it either at night, or in the shadows (that's a real "vibe" connection to the tinted B&W "classic" BN cover photos, I think. Think about how odd the full color cover of Mosaic looks in comparison to the other BN covers w/photos of the artist on front). No people, no faces, just remnants of things left behind. That too was very much in keeping with how the music inside was coming across in terms of the time it was being released. Remember, this was at the time of the end of BN, and the sense of the "overness" of this music was very real at the time. Those photos conveyed that spirit. Now, what I don't know (and don't really care about) is if those photos were consciously taken for that purpose. I seriously doubt that they were. But whoever chose them either had a feel for what was going on with this series, or else was that type of a freak naturally. Either way, they work for me, even if only by "implication". Usually, not always. And I still say that the photos for Dancing With Death & Etcetera are about as good a combination of album title & cover photo as BN ever did!

Ram Ramirez Ram Das Herb Alpert

Patton didn't play "flashy" (you didn't get hit in the eye by the sweat, real or manufactured, coming off his brow) and didn't do but a few pop covers (if any one of his albums was going to be a hit based on a "groovy pop cover, I'd think it would've been Got A Good Thing Going, with that killer one-two punch on Side Two. And after that side - well, with that side, imo - Patton's groove started opening up into a more open, less "commercially obvious" direction). Not a recipie for crossover success, and probably not something you could say about any of the albums on your list. Somebody else who's not on that list is Freddie Roach, of whom the same could be said.

La Cucaracha La Paloma Walter Pigeon

Yeah, UA was all behind the reissue series at first, but their interest wasn't sustained. The two-fer series raised eyebrows amongst us young stonednparanoid folk over here when the last release (Blakey, Corea, Turrentine, & McLean) came in slick covers, which seemed less high quality than the "paper bag" covers of previous issues. They certainly wore out a lot faster, that's for sure. I had ringwear on Hipnosis in about a year. There was a moment or two of silence, and then the LT series started hitting, with all those covers that all looked all the same unless you cared enought to look closely. And that was really what some of us thought, that these albums were being put out only for people like us who cared enough to look closely enough to tell the difference between one album & another. They felt like secrets that could safely be placed in the public eye because nobody would notice except the people who were supposed to. In a sense, I still think that. There was no advertising for these, only some of them got reviewed, and the whole series had a "Psssst.... Hey Buddy - you want some unissued Blue Note from the vaults? Come on over here outta the way and let's talk" feel to it. So yeah. I'm a fan.

You'd be surprised how many birthdays are the result of fat-fingering...

HB Eric Tomorrow!

HB MM!

HB Visenheimer!

Because Don Schlitten was a producer with a clear vision, at least when it came to music.

Sam's great on this, & a lot more "in your face" than George would be. Buy with confidence, I say. Yeah, the 1960 stuff w/Trane is the shit. But this is pretty damn fine too.

Be where? Yeah. You gotta remember that Blue Note was all but dead by the late-70s, even as a "pop=jazz" label. Those LT albums were like almost supernatural "messages from beyond" or some such for those of us on the first wave of what's now a full-fledged cult - people who were/are too young to have caught it while it happened but picked up that there was something special happening with that particular label. Those LT sides came out fast, and went even faster. As noted above, the last series or two must have had really small pressing runs, because a couple of them I only saw as promo copies. One, Thinking Of Home, I only found about 5 years later at a mall record shop in Roanoke, Va. And I had been looking... Point is, you just got the feel (later confirmed) that this stuff was being issued on-the-fly, almost as if nobody was looking. The somewhat generic general cover design seemed to have been created to not call attention to itself, to make one side look like the other so that nobody "important" would think that there was a relative shitload of stuff coming out in a relative short amount of time on a label that for all intents and purposes was no longer functioning. But like any good coded communication from the underground, there was always something there for the people who were hip to what the real deal was. And that was the photos. And I still maintain that far more often than not, those photos were more than a little fitting for the music, if also a bit "coded" at times (you might wonder what the hell a shot of a cue ball & pool stick have to do with either Grant Green or the tune "Solid" unless you were ever in an inner city pool hall that had a jazz-oriented jukebox, and then it would make perfect sense). So yeah, maybe you had to be there. But I'd like to think that with a little bit of background knowledge, those LT covers could be spared the simplistic dismissals that I sometimes see. No, they're not Reid Miles, not by any stretch of the imagination, but they're as much a part and place of the time that those albums were first released as Miles' covers were.

The article in full (just remember your mom's warnings about not making too many funny faces, lest one of them gets stuck...):