JSngry

John Deere John Doe Fawn Hall

Also familiar to millions as a hit single contained on this hit album: But I'll take Hank's version. He plays the lyrics better than Tony sings them.

The Secret 7 Elvin Jones Earl Hines

Our equation for today: (Original BN Mastering & Mixing) - Alfred Lion = RVG + Everybody Else

Would that be Sacha Distel?

Enough to put him on a BFT?

Who "is" Pharoah? To me, he sounds like a "country boy" who's spent his entire life wandering in various wildernesses (right from the beginning, in Arkansas) trying to conjure up the Utopia he's convinced exists somewhere on this planet. Sometimes he's done it by casting out demons & speaking in tongues, sometimes by praying to the angels, sometimes by just laying down and staying out of the way. I get the impression that sometimes he's really feeling it, and that sometimes he's doing it because to do otherwise would be to admit a defeat to himself that he feels but can't/won't concede. Never do I hear anything even remotely "urban" in his playing, and never do I hear him warming to/embracing the here & now (and that may be two different ways of saying the same thing...). Albert was all about the excape through confrontation. Pharoah's more about the escape, period. I dig Pharoah.

Jimmy Rowles?

Worth it just to hear Bruce Johnston make a bari almost sound like Gene Ammons. Not an "essential" side by any means, but millions of energetic white men over the last several centuries have produced tons of music with far less of a benevolent spirit than the music contained in that album. Gotta appreciate that! MF Horn 3, otoh, just sorta dies outta the gate. Never did dig that one.

My personal history w/that music suggests otherwise. It took me a good 6-7 years to fully figure out just what the hell was going on with that album, just because the shit was so dense. I first heard it in high school, not too long after its release. A buddy who was a Maynard freak (gotta love the irony there) bought a bootleg 8-track copy at some East Texas gas station and let me have it because he thought it was garbage. Well, the sound quality was pretty muddled (you know how bootleg East Texas gas station 8-tracks can be), so all I could hear was a part of the whole. And even then, it was a part that sounded vaguely familiar, but not really. Hadn't heard anything exactly like that before, other than some implications in JB & Sly. This was 72-73, remember. In my neck of the woods (and in most of America's necks), we hadn't heard Fela yet, and the whole Euro-tronic thing was just getting underway (and didn't sound anything like this anyway, we now know). But I heard enough of the music to be grabbed by it anyway, and I kept listening in a state of fascinated befuddlement. When I went away to college in 74, I heard OTC on a good stereo (this was the era when college students placed more status on quality sound systems that anything else except the quality of the herb they could score), and it was like, WHOA! Now it starts to make sense. And then, little pieces of info from all over the world started popping up & in that sounded not unfamiliar in the context of OTC, which just pulled me back to it for further digging, more & more as time passed, it seemed. The first thing I heard that really screamed OTC to me was Remain In Light & ...Bush Of Ghosts. I can't prove it statistically, but I'm pretty confident that Eno must have bumped up against OTC at some point. And then the floodgates began to open. Dude, if you weren't "there", you can't fully imagine how totally freakin' out of left field OTC sounded at the time. Immediate, widespread, & obvious "influence" would have been all but impossible just because it was so unlike anything else. None of the other Miles music from this time was as impenetrable as this one, nothing even came close, not even "Rated X", which had the distinct advantage of the irresistable groinoverridingbrain factor. I'll not argue that the "elements" kept pushing ahead on their own, that makes perfect sense to me both logically & experientially, but I'm not about to concede that OTC itself just landed stillborn and laid there unnoticed for 10 years or so. My experience sugggests otherwise, & I know enough people who've had similar experiences with it to do that. We all kept going back to it & it made more and more sense (or more accurately, we gathered more external context to understand it) as the years passed. The question are these - would I have been as inclined to pay attention to those unfolding contexts if I hadn't heard OTC first? Maybe, maybe not, and to what degree I have no idea. Would the way I internalized & then acted on those contexts have been the same if I hadn't heard OTC first? Little more surer answer there - most likely not. And finally - is my experience unique to any degree? Most likely not. Sometimes "influence" is obvious & immediately apparent. But sometimes it's stealth. Something happens and just sort of time-releases itself into the bloodstream w/o anybody really noticing it until the transformative effect has been achieved. With OTC, I definitley think it's the latter.

So, what's the joke here, anyway?

oh i agree but that's a question for Titans & musicologists. i could be wrong but at present my instinctive feeling is OTC dead-ended in its time & the various elements therein kept pushing forward like the river across a shipwreck... meeting up again later in different, sometimes similar sounding forms. So, what - it came out, nobody heard it in its time, or if they did they just blew it off only to later look back and say, "Oh. Now I get it!" I can go for that a fairly high percentage of the time, but nowhere near 100% Somebody was listenening and getting it. Hell, I even remember listening to K104 ca. 1978 and thinking to myself that I was beginning to hear hints of Miles's shit popping up in the mix. Had a conversation w/Dave Liebman ca. 1979 where he said (complained, actually) that the only cats around paying attention to OTC were the funk bands. Liebman was not necessarily my go-to guy on the State Of Funk Today , but it kinda confirmed what I thought I was already beginning to hear. Now, like I implied earlier, it might have been the producers, not the players, who were hearing it, but the point is that somebody was hearing it and acting on it, even if it was only circuitously. Now, I also do think that "ahead of its time" applies here as far as direct influence goes, that maybe/probably there's a lot of retro-archeology going on. But I also do think that that's paid off with some direct influences, some clarifying/refining of visions that already existed w/o ever having heard it (for all the BeeBopperz 4ever, think Dexter Gordon being influenced by Trane or Luke finding out that Darth ws his dad). Like I said, I hear too much similarity for it to be accidental. And in my book, that's still "influence", although of a different kind than you are talking about. But something, anything, that changes you is still an influence, and when it's an "ancestor" doing it, hey, attention must be paid.

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All I'm saying is that no matter what anybody knows or doesn't know (or says they do or don't), I don't see how you can trace the stuff backwards w/o eventually hitting up against OTC. And before that, what? Somebody(s) heard it, and somebody(s) passed it along. The similarities are too many and too frequent to be accidental and/or parallel. Shit just don't work that way. Bottom line for me is this - OTC happened, and then so did everything else in its own sweet time. Now whether or not who it got passed on to and whether or not they passed it on to etcetcetc knew/knows the source is an interesting academic question, but so is whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll know, and not before. So let's look at yesterday's forecasts and ask ourselves this - what would all this sound like if OTC hadn't happened? Your guess is as good or better as mine, but I'm having a hard time seeing (much less hearing) how it would sound like it does today. And that matters as far as it matters. Which is all I'm saying.

But Ben's "Deep Purple" justifies its existence.

If you had said "Poly-Currents" & "Genesis" instead, I could say that's ok, you know what it is you're passing on. But...

I got the LPs. I can dub 'em in when I want to hear 'em. If that time ever comes.

The "this cat" link got screwed up (at least for me). Here's one, unscrewed... Grooverider Sorry about the screwing. Can I buy you a bottle of syrup for the inconvenience?

Points well taken all about how it got there, but I still think that OTC & GUWI form a "crystalization point" for much of what came after, especially in terms of basic pulse. There's Euro-pulse & there's Afro-pulse, & the shit that I'm talking about has Afro-pulse. If anybody else was doing Afro-pulsed ambientloopybrokebeattrippycutnpaste shit like OTC at the time, I'm unaware of it. Correct me if I'm wrong. Dub? Nope, that was that, and this was this. Would it have happened w/o Miles? Sure, probably, eventually, in some form or another. The currents were already there waiting to cross. The point is that Miles (and Teo) did it. It might well be a matter of indirect influence at this point, but that's life in the cultual vacuum. Indirect influence is still real (quick, no peeking - who invented the internal combustion engine? Hell if I know, but I drive every day anyway.) Indirect is just direct that nobody knows enough to look at. And yeah, there's been a lot of noise for OTC from downtown for quite a while now. But downtown is downtown. It's relevant to all this the same way that a boat dock is relevant to the life in a lake. Anybody remember the quote from the Tingen book from one of the 70s band members about who their audience for the live gigs was? It wasn't Whitey, and is wasn't rock. I have a strong suspicion that the reason why contemporaneous history paints the music of OTC & GUWI as not really reaching any audience in particular is that the people writing that history didn't know where to look. And they still don't, other than where they get called to by people who want to call attention to themselves. But who am I going to believe, them or my ears?

Man, when I moved to Albuquerque, the only hump I had to get over was the fact that I ws from Texas. They hate us there!

Dude, if you told anybody in Albuquerque that you thought you were in Texas, you're lucky that you didn't get murdered!

Did you take locals or expresses? Locals can take you to some very unusual places...

Well, ok, I doubt that the majority of hip hop / funksters practitioneers have given this music a good listen, but I'm more than a little sure that the majority of the producers have. And that's where the creative action is in that music, with the producers. Now, if you're talking drum'n bass, beatcraft, remixology, etc., that's a whole 'nother thing. I've got no doubt whatsoever that those cats probably know this shit inside & out. No way they couldn't. Find a copy of this & tell me that this cat hasn't totally absorbed On The Corner: And this, I'm finding out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Truthfully, it's both.

Wally George George Wallington George Wettling