JSngry

And maybe it's not Monk at all, but Art Lande. Hey - no video, no proof.

What did he do on Roulette?

As fate would have it, a good friend (not a board member, btw) came across this side recently and sent me a burn, which arrived yesterday. I gotta tell you - I dig it quite a bit. Cromer's definitely out of Eckstine (& Earl Coleman), but his phrasing is less languid and more R&B rooted. I can only imagine him & Ricks onstage together w/the Ravens! But he's definitely a "jazz" singer in that he works around the melody w/o losing it. Very attractive how he does it. And he's got a bigass voice, one of those booming ones that you could hear in a big, noisy hall without a mike. But he can caress, too. His range is broad, and his pitch excellent. Simply put, he's a helluva good singer. The band is generic but excellent. Corea, Laws, & Carr were just beginning to make names for themselves (this side's from 1965, I believe), and had probably spent more than a few hours backing singers like this. That's the kind of apprenticeship that goes a long way towards making for a seasoned pro. Chick is all over the changes in his accompaniment, & Laws gets all the solos. He sounds damn good. Davis & Carr do what they need to do, and Davis does a little (just a little) of what he liked to do back then. All told, totally "in the style" w/o being cliched or boring at all. Joel Dorn produced the side, and he got a good band with a good chemistry to play the gig the way it needed to be played. The program is mostly all ballads, none overly familiar, with a few obscurities. It's definitely not "pop" in orientation, and very much "singer's fare". My favorite is probably "The More I See You", but "This Love Of Mine" is a close second. Cromer just sings the hell outta these songs! Jack, I can fully understand why you let this one go. At the time, singers like this were pretty common, as were programs like this. Cromer wouldn't have really stood out unless you were into this bag pretty hard. But I don't have to tell you that those times are long gone. Hearing this album last night was a refreshing treat for me, and I'll definitely be playing it several more times to come! I just looked on eBay, and the side's still available w/a 99 cent opening bid. No takers yet. I don't know the seller, but I'm going to go on ahead and recommend this one to somebody. Hell, you can probably get it for a buck. The only caveat is that you're gonna have to dig this style singing, which I know is not to everybody's liking. It's definitely a "niche", but it's a niche which I've come to both dig and appreciate (and both have taken time, believe me. But I'm there now). But if you like this kind of thing, all I can say is that even though it's nothing even slightly revelatory (the flip side of that is that it's totally unpretentious, unstrained, and/or compromised), it's a damn fine record by a damn fine singer of a type that don't hardly exist any more, and it's a little bit of a minor gem that there's no way in hell is ever going to be reissued. You'll have paid more and gotten less by some much bigger names. Less than 11 hours left as of this writing. Carpe diem.

Max Roach. He's a marcher, not a dancer, and if you want to do the exercise thing the way they do it nowadays, you gotta get into that marcher mentality.

You think that Jesus was a flightless bird? Interesting theory, but it's already been proven that he was black & Canadian. Maybe you meant Jeeves, of "Ask Jeeves" fame. Him I could see as a dodo.

Alec Wilder A Lion Tamer Leo Watson

Just listened to those clips, and ain't no Hank on there. The altissimo bit on "Well You Needn't" is definitely a Teo signature lick (check him out the Mingus Period sides & his own Prestige date and you'll hear it all over the place in some form or fashion), and that seals the deal for me. But the rest of the tenor playing is a bit gruffer than what I'm used to having heard Teo play in the '50s, especially the exit phrase on "Off Minor" which is damn near Bean Machiney. The Teo from this time that I've heard was playing more out of a Warne bag than anything else, but playing w/Monk in the mid-50s was different than playing with pre-Bohemia/Pithecanthropus Mingus & various other "workshop" type environments. And the recording quality no doubt colors the tone. So, per Chewric's request, a definite (-) on this being the Hankster and a highly probable (+) on it being Teofortwoeaux.

Well yeah. And it's not just the wide sound, it's the use of alternate fingerings to color the pitch and inflect the notes. Very Ben-like, I think, and as you said, a unique way of playing the instrument. I do wish those Philology sides were more easily available!

And what would the 'previously unreleased recordings by Monty Alexander, Kenny Barron, Horace Silver, Les McCann and Chick Corea' be?

Indeed! But you know, I wonder about Bethlehem's recording policy. Seems like they let tape run when a lot of other labels would have shut off. The reissue of Johnny Hartman's Songs From the Heart is just downright bizarre in the that respect. The guy clearly hasn't learned all the songs yet, but Bethlehem has take after take of him fucking up. And they eventually released them! Was "runthrough" not in their vocabulary?

Except... There's a Japanese issue of the big band material that includes a lot of false starts and between song chatter (including some disgruntled "AGAIN?" type stuff). It would appear that Blakey's chart-reading skills were not immediately up to the task at hand and that the band was forced to wait for him to figure out the charts by playing them over and over until he did.

Not much interest in the Philology material? Or is it under/off the radar of most fans?

Sounds like a job for something like ArtistShare, only for reissues that desperately need to happen. As far as I know, there's no such thing. Yet.

Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry - Where Is New York Now? Ornette Coleman live in Baghdad - The Empty Spiderhole

Bo Jackson A Jackson In Your House Tom House

Ornette Coleman - Booty Call

Peter Nero Floyd Cramer Father Tom Vaughn

The Penguin Guide To Jazz: Hey.

Wasn't it the Williamsburgh Bridge?

Matt Pinto Red Green Jose Lima

So, it sounds like this is basically functional music made with the attitude that "nobody's gonna be looking". That could be interesting....

No matter how bad it gets sometimes, life is always good unless the alternative appeals to you more. In which case, kindly do it in private, please.

The fact that Baron-Cohen is "an observant Jew" also adds the Kaufman-esque layer of the theoretical possibility that by posing as an Eastern European who would probably be assumed by most "clueless Americans" to be Muslim, that he's really playing a "Jewish propaganda" game to make Muslims in general look backwards, barbaric, & idiotic. So then the ADL's condemnation of the character then takes on a whole 'nother layer of irony! I have no idea if this cat's as personally off the hook as Kaufman was, but his comedy sure is!

Whoever's selling it on eBay is cheating themself by not mentioning the personnel.

Well, I didn't grow up w/a piano in the house, and ours wasn't a pre-television home, but I am old enough to have witnessed the "community sing" go from a fairly commonplace event undertaken wholly un-self-consciously to a kinda creepy thing that only the old folks did to something that only really weird people did to being ran through the societal wringer of increased focus on self to be reborn as karaoke. Really, there was the whole "follow the bouncing ball" thing in the movies/cartoons, and before that, as indicated above, people just got together and sang because it something fun to do as a group. No love for Mitch Miller here, the shit's pretty hard to take, but I will give props to the concept, and wonder if a society that has evolved from being content with singing as a group to one where it seems that everybody, no matter how bad, now looks forward to having the stage to themself has moved in the best of all possible directions.