JSngry

And that differs from swing how?

On the Internet, there's always pie!

Side dish? Those who know suggest... Seriously, I like lamb quite a bit, but have not eaten much of it outside of restaurants. Let us know how your recipie goes, ok?

Swing is...nature making love with time.

PMS! (The "S" stands for Sent...)

I can think of a few others - Pat Williams, Mike Mainieri, George Benson, a few others, but your point is well-taken nevertheless. I wonder if maybe this is at least partly because American culture has always been about finding a place of your own through finding a place apart, often out of an overriding neccessity to do so just to get away from all the bullshit. But I also wonder if we've not lost a certain level of connectiveness in the process, if perhaps our very real need to exist on our own individual terms keeps us from realizing and building upon certain broader commonalities. No easy answers... I'll tell you this, though - a world where people bitch about pop being mindless pap and then complain that the little bit that isn't such isn't really "important" because it is pop is a world that maybe doesn't want to be connected at any level to any other world than the one that already exists for them. Fair enough, but more and more I find myself asking why the "dumb people" should have all the fun. I mean, there's a huge difference between whoring out & just making real music that's not too "complicated" for a larger audience to get. But that then becomes a matter of spirit, and our spirits have been conditioned to tribalize and defend against intrusion as a material and spiritual survival mechanism. And that's a very real consideration. Still, simple pleasures (in life and in music) do not always equate to meaningless (or even less meaningful) pleasures. We lose sight of this at our peril, I believe.

Phil Ramone Creed Taylor Creedence Clearwater Revival

Funny thing about this music - I'm finding that even though it's not meant to be "listened" to, I get into it a lot more when I do listen closely. The rhythmic overlays are often quite involved (and varying), and if I don't get past the underlying steady 4 (when it's there - in broken beat, that's not an issue), I don't get to that layer of the music. Of course, once you get into that layer, it's easy then to just let go and fly, but you gotta get there first. Not being an active dancer (yet...), that means listening, and closely, even though I suppose you're not "supposed" to go at it that way. So much for preconceptions and "conventional wisdom"...

Oh really? I mean, I like branford, always have, but "giant", in a music where "mega-giants" on even the same instrumet would have to include Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, & Albert Ayler, as well as a whole big lot of people who in any other creative realm might well be contenders for mega-gianthood, but instead are "merely" regular giants in this one due to the mega-sized mega-ness of the aforementioned mega-giants, I have a hard time considering Branford as even a semi-giant. He's a damn good player, but so are plenty of other people. Now, if you're saying that he's a giant in the sense that the scale of expectations has shrunk all around him while he's stayed his medium-sized self, then you might have a point. But even at that, this ain't Disney World, so the illusion of reduced scale is not a relevant point, at least not to me.

The former should be obvious by now, but the latter depends on how you feel about how he, through words & deeds alike, reshaped the professional landscape of the music, both directly & through "ripple effect". We've had roughly a quarter-century of unnecessary & irrelevant debates about what is/isn't "acceptable" to be considered jazz, who is or isn't playing "real" jazz, and just all kinds of bullshit in general that has resulted in a professional environment that is a helluva lot more fractured, factionalized, and tunnel-visioned than it was that quarter-centruy ago. We've also seen the evolution of the "image" of jazz evolve from that of a music distinguished by a slightly "dangerous" viscerality into that of a grand cultural status symbol that is to be revered for merely existing instead of earning its keep by delivering a living & breathing immediate relevancy that also has the depth to stick around over time. Any music suffers when its sudience expects to be readily & immeditely comforted by the mere presence of a historical legacy rather than confronted & challenged (at some level, not necessarily "stylistically, but emotionally) contemporary challenge. Will the music recover? Well, the mummies & necrophilliacs already have their museum, so they're set for "life". But the rest of us might as well get on with the business of making & developing music that for any number of reasons will never be accepted as "jazz" in that museum. All we run the risk of is not being relevant to the people who go to the museum to fornicate with the undead. That, and not getting their money and business networks. Oh well. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

But that was what he wanted to do.

There's a commonly played chromatic whole note counter line to "Idaho" that's identical(?) to the counter melody of "Well, You Needn't". What that has to do w/anything, I'm not sure, but I think it's interesting.

He's turned JAZZ into a ideologically codified, institutionalized "art music" that nobody cares about any more except for subscribers to his cult. They'll keep it "alive" forever, just for themselves. The rest of us can move on, and most likely have, to jazz, a music that can be any damn thing it wants to be, even if not everything that wants to be jazz can be. It's playing to that difference of perspective that separates the mummies from the living.

But she ain't got nuthin' on LTB, I assure you! (Or nuthin' on, period. But that's another matter altogether...) Thanks for all the greeting. It is appreciated, I assure you. Never a dull moment in the O-Ring, and for that I am more thankful than you know. No serious partying for me until probably Saturday night. Gotta drive outta town for one of my uncle's funeral, then drive back same day, go to work tonight, play a gig tomorrow night and then go to work again immediately afterwards (it's the 16th, the due date for mortgages), and then come home and sleep until I wake up (and not one second before). Plans once all the madness is over? Getting the kids out of the house as much as possible for as long as possible, snuggle up w/LTB, and experiencing life at its finest. Again, thanks. The O-Board RULES!

He's BACK!

"No, my dick chose for me"?

That drummer's got the right idea!

It's a miracle nobody's gotten run over yet.

"That's the way the world ends - not with a whim, but a banker." - Paul Desmond

Yeah, I know what you mean. I know a drummer whose idea of a jazz beat is ching-chinga-ching.

Oh yeah - THIS motherfucker: If you definition of "jazz" includes On The Corner, then by all means hop right in! Also on the list for me would be groups like United Future Organization, Jazzanova (corny name, but some pretty involving music), & Kyoto Jazz Massive (ditto), although the latter tends more towards taking the whole "jazz/electonica" thing towards "dance music", if that's a problem. If not, there's some amazing confluences happening in the stuff of their's I've heard so far.

Often better by what it suggests to be possible than what it actually delivers, but what it suggests is pretty damn intriguing... I've almost posted about it in the Recommendations forum, but DG no longer carries it, and I don't know of another reliable domestic (i.e. USA) source. But definitely worth searching for, if only to give you something to think about, like what's, maybe, hopefully, yet to come... And have you checked out Mike Ladd? Negrophillia has got Thirsty Ear written all over it (and I mean that as a compliment), but Welcome To The Afterfuture is a "hip hop" album that feels a helluva lot more like jazz than it does anything else, at least to me. And Ursula Rucker, although a "hip-hop poet", almost always has jazz-informed electonic music behind her. You can get into the words, get into the music, or get into both. Obviously, the last way is the way I'd recommend.

I don't know either, but I do know that "the world" and "the music" have more often than not been going off in somewhat different directions for the last howmanyever years. It's nice to be right, and it's ok to be alone, but sometimes I ask myself if what was once even a tenuous connection to "real life" has become no connection at all. In a few cases (Braxton, Threadgill, Cecil, a.o), the answer is a resounding no, but sometimes I get the feeling that a party's being given and nobody's coming because it just ain't that much of a party in the first place unless you've never been anywhere else...

Well, thank god it's ART now. Hardly anybody cares, hardly anybody listens, but so what? We got CULTURAL LEGITIMACY now!

Yeah, that took some getting used to, but I got over it by A) finding some stuff that actually didn't have it (or where it was more subtle) and B) focusing more on what was happening above the four-to-the-floor. That's where the real action is! Then again, maybe what I've been listening to isn't stereotypical "house". I keep popping up against the term "dance underground" when checking out new stuff that I like, and I still don't know if that's supposed to mean that house itself is still considered "underground" or if there's a whole subset of dance musics being made that run counter in one way or another to the stereotypes. Either way, the one thing I've known from the git-go is that this is not music that's intended for "serious listening". It's made to purely be felt, and to be moved to. I'm asking myself if that quality automatically precludes having something else included, some "musical substance". I've heard plenty of things to suggest that it doesn't, although nothing fully formed as much as I'd like for it to be. But I'm thinking that that's not a "problem" with the music itself as much as it is the people who are making it, or more to the point, the people who aren't making it. Why shouldn't seriously musical erudite people make seriously musically erudite dance music for serious dancing? Why aren't seriously musical erudite people make seriously musically erudite dance music for serious dancing? Other than a few cats like Eddie Palmieri & Monday, I hear cats that are mostly on one side of the fence or the other. Is it that they can't, or is it that they don't want to? Either way, I see a problem with that. I'm not one who believes in feeding the mind and starving (or even under-feeding) the body, or vice versa. The former macrobiotic in me still screams the need for BALANCE. And like the man said - the bigger the front, the bigger the back. Anything else just ain't right.