JSngry

Ok, I was supposed to keep this a secret, but it's so absurd, y'all won't believe me. Besides, sometimes you gotta use the absurd to point out the obvious, right? And anyway, we be talking all this hypothetitheorhetorical "in principle" bullshit that's gonna get morphed innumerable kinds of viable ways once it hits the streets anyways, so what the fuck ever, ok? Here's the deal - I know this wacky "loner" type guy who's invented a machine that'll duplicate damn near anything. Cat lives in his mom's garage and shit. No girlfriend, wears smelly flannel shirts & nastyass chucktaylors all the time, etc. We all know the type, right? So let's say that I buy me a nice new Lexus, drive it for a while, say, 100,000 miles, and decide to get me another one. Them's some damn good cars, them Lexuses, but I likes the thrill of a new ride every wonst in a while. I sell the first one to a friend, and for a damn cheap price, because this cat and me go way back and we be tight like that. One sale, two owners, only one "royalty" paid. And this on a car w/100,000 miles on it. Lexus don't even get pissed. Hell no. Now let's say that I buy me a nice new Lexus, drive it for 100,000 miles, decide it's my car for life, don't never want to get rid of it, but I do want my best friend to check it out. I can feel the love just thinking about it (me and his sister had a really hot 'n' nasty thing going on back in the day, and he was totally cool when the shit took a hard left. Now that's a friend!) Maybe he'll buy himself a new one, maybe not. So I take the ride to my wacky "loner" type buddy, get a near-exact replica made of it (only flaw in this cat's machine is that it doesn't do exterior paint, so everything comes out flat grey) and give it to my homeboy, while I keep mine. Same deal - one sale, two owners, one "royalty" paid. And this on a car w/100,000 miles on it. Granted, it's a Lexus, but still... Lexus still don't get pissed?

Wally Gator Willis Jackson Todd Bridges

Because as much as you know, there is still more to find out. Hell, I'm more than twice your age & I'm still learning. It never stops, and be thankful for that. When it does, it's time to die. Now, chewy - do you know Tom Archia?

Not me. Solid happens to be one of my favorite Grant Green albums. Same. Everybody talks about Grant & (insert name here), but What about Grant & Elvin, huh? For somebody like Grant whose phrasing was all about the rhythm, you gotta look at Elvin.

The band is Hubert Laws (on flute & guitar ), Chick Corea, Richard Davis, & Bruno Carr.

Not everybody still lives where they used to.

Who are you, Big Al's computer?

FYI - Uptown released this as Jamestown, N.Y., 1958. No doubt a more honorable issue. I've got the Uptown, & it's totally cool. Hawk playing a high school dance w/a reasonably confident pickup band. He plays his ass off and you can hear him talking about shit like driving directions while the other cats are playing. Just another gig for him, probably one htat he forgot about as soon as it was over, but damn does he play. Bean Machine indeed!

I hear ya'.

Don Quidix Dorthea Dix Althea Gibson

The you better call Ghostbusters, because Ray Draper's been dead for a good long while. Now if it was Bob Stewart...

The fact that this cat is "an observant Jew" poking fun at U.S ignorance of Eastern European/Islamic cultures by feeding non-spop anti-Semetic absurdities to people too ignorant to see any of the layers of sublime irony is indeed Kaufmanesque. Perhaps even beyond Kaufmanesque. I gotta see this movie.

I wish I still had The Beatles vs The Dave Clark Five, a pulpy one-off magazine that came out sometime in 1964. It was intentionally slanted to make the DC5 look like heroes & The Beatles to look like bums. No idea who published it, but it made me madder than hell when I was 8. Now, I think it would be one of the funniest things I owned, if I still owned it.

I think the day will soon come when people who use dude in conversation will seem as silly as those who once bought Mitch Miller records. Dude, that time has long since come, which is why I dudify with great regularity. Hopefully the cynical irony will be lost on those for whom it is intended. Otherwise what's the point?

The Navy stuff is, yeah.

Chic was badass. Listen to the bottom and not the top.

Was Jonah on vacation last month?

Trane in the Navy was indeed rough, but Trane with Hodges is a man at work.

Heaven On Earth , actually.

Was he playing then?

I have "problems" with that one mysef. Too "cartoony" for me. But Tenor/Fallen Angels is the real deal.

That sounds quite daft to me, Jim. Most people live in second hand houses, but my present house is new; I paid the building firm; it paid the designer/architect. When I sell it, I want the effin' money - why should the designer/architect be paid again, and again and again and his descendants and heirs for the next one or two hundred years? (It must have been a bloke, my wife says, because he buggered up the design of the kitchen.) MG Sounds like a bit of applying the economics of one industry to another. Designers/architects don't get paid royalties. They get what in musician's terms would be considered "session fees", renumeration for a specific job performed. Now, if you're proposing that musician's session fees be raised to thae point where a relative handfull of jobs a year provides for a comfortable income, well hey - I'm all for that! But get ready to see a dramatic drop in the number of albums recorded and released. How many $12.50 (retail) CDs do you have to sell to create the gross of one $125,000 house? 10,000. How many non-popular CDs sell 10,000 copies? Not many. So the scale and terms of "employee" renumeration are adjusted in lines with likely revenue. Or else, have designers/architects get paid a minimal session fee and then have them wait for a payment of the nominal percentage of the sale price. Let's see how well that one goes over. And how many building firms do 10,000 jobs a year, year after year? Not many, if any. So the scale and terms of "employee" renumeration are adjusted in lines with likely revenue. Apples & oranges we have here, if in extremely simplified form. Each industry has an economic model which better serves its individual needs and realities. A bit of tweaking to the current system with the goal of putting a bit of extra change in the pockets of the laborers isn't necessarily daft, I would say. Having said all that though, a system to pay reduced royalties on used sales isn't something I' m going to crusade for. It would just be a nice little something extra for the musicians who, after all, are the only ones in this game (besides the labels) who (theoretically at least) approach the enterprise as an investment (after all, what are royalties other than a return on a speculative venture?). Some artists choose to waive royalties up front in return for a larger session fee. That's their perogative, and in many cases it's a smart move. But for those who don't, hey, why not look to get a better return from your investment, especially at a minimal cost to the consumer?

When I joined BMG ten years ago, I studied a website which was devoted solely to the record clubs from a consumer's point of view. It said that the standard recording contract signed by the artists calls for the artist to receive one-half the usual royalty for discs sold by the record clubs, except that they were to receive no royalty for discs given free by the record clubs. I take that to mean that the artists receive one-half royalty for each Your Music sale. However, when BMG offers "Buy one, get two free, then unlimited $2.99", the artist receives one-half royalty for the discs sold at $18.99 and $2.99, but the poor guys who were arbitrarily selected to be the two free CDs don't get paid anything. I've heard otherwise, but I hope you're right!

I have these: Warne Marsh - Ne Plus Ultra Steve Lacy - We See: Thelonious Monk Songbook Steve Lacy - The Way Cecil Taylor - The Eighth and recommend them without hesitation.

Well see, that's the funny part right there - nobody with any sense is really thinking of her was a "jazz" singer. That's a marketing ploy, and if you bought into it, even to be offended by the notion, you're a sucker. Natalie herself talks a lot about making "jazz records", but I don't know that she's seriously considering herself a "jazz singer". If she is, she's a sucker too. What she is is a damn good singer, period. And what she's been doing, and doing rather well, I think (even though, again, it's relevancy to my lifestyle is vitually nonexistent), is making records that are a throwback to the "adult pop" of yore. Jazz is in the mix, maybe even be the primary esthetic, but it's still pop. I myself have absolutely no problem with that if for no other reason than the results have mostly been good adult pop, and I'd much rather have good adult pop than bullshit adult pop. I hate to see people blinded by marketing bullshit at the expense of taking music on its own terms. If you listen to a Natalie Cole records of the last few years through the expectational prism of"jazz", well, yeah, it's pretty lame (but then again, so are most of the supposedly jazz records being released). But forget about jazz (an increasingly easy proposition these days) - what you got is a singer with good chops singing good songs with good arrangements and good players. Nothing deep about it, but nothing wrong either. Buttloads of shit like that getting made like that today (as always), and it all comes down to how good the singer is, and how well they handle the material in the context they're put in. I'll take Natalie Cole over Krall, Monheidt, Caryn Allison, Lorraine Feather, damn near all of today's crop, simply because she's a much better singer. All the criticism (whining is more like it..) I hear of her from the Jazz Cave is that "it's not really jazz". Well DUH. I don't hear anybody say that her phrasing is bad, or that her pitch is bad, or that her range is limited, or that her voice is thin, or that she mangles the words. I don't hear that because you can't say it unless your ears are full of the Jazz Hate. Much to my surprise, I'll even take her over Gladys Knight's recent Verve "jazz"album. No way that Natalie is a better singer than Gladys, but damned if Natalie doesn't fit into the material & context better than does Gladys. "Jazz"? Yeah - who's a real female jazz singer today that's either not older than 60-something or waaaay uinderground or tied to some sort of "image nostalgia"? Gimme some names that won't make me laugh. This type of jazz is pretty much dead & has been for quite some time. It's all pop now. It's just being marketed as jazz. Wake up & smell the formaldehyde.