JSngry

Self-explanatory (in Capuchin Swing-esque green:

3:

It was all a blur when you were:

Self explanatory (and more than a little haunting):

The midnight sun (in the desert):

A downward spiral into oblivion (with just enough light for those who care to see it happening):

Trapped & blocked in (an unavoidable consequence):

A slice of the top (but of what? A Jailhose on Lonely Avenue?):

The car covers live! (But the car's abandoned now...):

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