JSngry

Jeesh...

Well, ok, yeah, cool, whatever. Actually, the point in posting this was to let it be known that the board was getting a little more expousre.

Which audience? The audience who's only/mostly interested in reissues and/or retreads? I'd say that that audience is pretty much already connected. It's a small one, but hell, what do you expect? The audience who wants to hear challenging new music that doesn't replicate the old? There's an audience for that, even if it is smallish and fragmented, but everytime you call most of that music "jazz", cries of righteous indignation are heard across the Land Of The Guardians. The audience who wants to hear entertaining instrumental music that's not too unfamiliar/complicated/confrontational? That type of jazz is already pretty well connected with its audience, be it Smooth or Jam or whatever. The audience who wants jazz to serve in the role of Official American Cultural Triumph? Again, connected. Lincoln Center's doing good business. Jazz as we've known and loved it is pretty much dead as a vibrant musical form of today. Evolution works. But jazz as a mindset/spiritual vibe will never die. Hell, it existed before jazz as a musical form ever did, and it lives on today. It's the jazz audience that needs to reconnect with today, not jazz music with its audience. I could someday maybe even be persuaded under the right circumstances to say that it's the audience that's killing the music, not the other way around. Do we want our children to know and appreciate the great musical and spiritual legacy of jazz? Damn straight we do. But what do we want them to do with that knowledge and appreciation? Regurgitate it in perpetuity, or do something of their own with it? We say that we want the latter, but then too often recoil in horror when the results aren't comfortably similar to what's gone before. Bodies dying is natural and healthy. Spirits dying isn't.

Cat Balou Adrain Belew Fred Below

I didn't want to be the first to say it outloud! Surely you jest.

Gary Moore Bud Collier Kal-El

Carpetbaggers Rug Cutters Mat Maneri

First thing I thought of actually. That and Felinni....

http://www.mondaymichiru.com/press.aspx?langID=1&t=1 Read the June 2006 newsletter. Thanks to Val, and much love to Monday.

Tool Hammer DJ Screw

Thanks for sharing. Check this out: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ee2W45rJdrM&sea...onday%20michiru Somewhat the same thing, only with saxophonists instead of horses.

Wellsir, lessee... You got a supposedly mint condition set of music that you know you dig at a better price than you've ever seen it before. I'd say you got screwed, dude.

Sam Most Abe Most Jack Lescoulie

The Headless Horseman The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 4/5 of the Billy Eckstine Saxophone section

KD on Our Thing.... Not that's personal.

Spread on!

Jerry Rice Uncle Ben Frank Brown

7 AM? Seriously, if it goes 6, that'll be as far as it goes. Dallas might lose focus a game or two as they did against Phoenix & San Antonio. But honestly, other than Jet they looked pretty unfocused offensively last night and still won by 10. Thank you, Jet. 5 is my best hunch, and a sweep is not impossible. It is unlikely, though. Mavs are going to have to fight like hell every game, but really, the team is too deep, too fast, too focused, and too hypnotized by Avery to lose a best-of-7 to Miami unless there's a critical injury involved. Shaq, gotta love him. D-Wade, gonna be one of the all-time greats, and seems like a great human as well. But beyond that, there ain't a lot there, not in comparison to Dallas. Nothing personal, and no gloating or trash-talking intended. But this edition of the Mavericks is one helluva team, and it's a team whose time has come.

Beaucoup!

http://www.m-base.com/ The earlier M-Base recordings show a concept being developed, and are opften more fun to think about than to listen to. These later ones show the concept fully matured and internalized, and they're powerful, provocative music. When I talk about the relative handful of "jazz musicians" making relevant music of the now, Steve Coleman is definitely included.

Yeah, Delicious Poison has proven for me to be very much the "stealth" record of the bunch. Dug it ok at first, but it just keeps getting better with every listen... I'm also just now beginning to realize how much "different, and yet stylistically joined by her talent" also describes her vocals. She doesn't have just one voice, she's got a variety of voices, and the way that she varies them from song to song (and within each song) is pretty amazing. And I'd be hard pressed to name anybody in opo who creates contrapuntal background vocals any better or more diversified, and only a handfull who've done so as well as she has. And it's usually all her, overdubbed, and ina variety of voices, both lead and background. After a while, the sheer cumulativeness of her talent hits you (or it did me, anyway) like the proverbial ton of bricks. All these great songs, all these great productions, all these great vocals, and it's all her. The productions aren't (almost) exclusively hers until after 1999 or so, but that was seven years ago, and she did do her fair share of self-production prior to that. It's not like this is just a good singer who gets lots of outside help to make it sound good, or just a great songwriter who depends on somebody else to produce her, or just a gifted producer who needs outside songwriting/singing talent to realize their vision. No, she's all of that her ownself. And its not like there's just one song or one album that "captures her essence" or something like that. They all capture quite nicely the essence of whatever it is they're doing, but each one is, like you said, Lon, different. 4 Seasons is a self-contained masterpiece, but so is Optimista, and so is Episodes In Color. So are almost all of them, and they are all diffeernt yet they are all from the same place. Hers is a subtle talent, to be sure. But it is also a massive one.

I don't detect any enthusiasm behind those sentences. Perhaps none was intended. No enthusiasm, but no disgust either. She does what she does more interestingly than the bulk of her peers, and it's not without some musical interest in/on those terms. Are there other people I'd rather hear, especially on BN? Sure. But does her signing to the label make me cringe the way that the signing of, say, Michelle Shocked would? No way. Really, I think we all better get used to this type thing. The market for "real jazz" is not enough for a corporate label to get by on, even when all the (imo) "faux real jazz" and the market for it is factored in. So a corporate jazz label is going to have to come up with some kind of angle to sell product, and if that angle is "interesting alternative pop made by and for an over-35-ish audience", hey - that's what they gotta do. It's funny, really, how the signings at BN parallel the decline and eventual elimination of "real jazz" at the local NPR station about 20 years ago. Over the space of a few years, that station went from having jazz 6 nights a week to having the music programming become "eclectic" (which meant more and more artists like Vega, The Neville Brothers, Laurie Anderson, etc. and less and less jazz of any sort). Listenership increased for a while, but eventually the staion went to a predominately news/talk format. When BN starts releasing CDs of Diane Rehm, then I'll know it's really all over. Until then, hey - the number of people making really interesting "jazz of the now" is depressingly small anyway (and often enough isn't even considered jazz by the Jazz Police). Keep the reissues coming for those of us who still want/need to hear the stuff played the way it the way it was meant to be played, let the indies give us the worthy stuff of the new, and let the corpolabels give us interesting (enough) pop music with at least some tangental relation to jazz, either in musical influence or attitudinal sympathy. I'd rather hear a good, interesting pop record that challenges the conventions of its genre than a tired jazz retread that seeks comfort in same any day of the week. Especially Monday!

A total burner.

And that's the problem right there - too many people don't dance no more. Don't matter if it's King Oliver or AEC - DANCE TO THE SHIT! And if the dance ain't in you, youmaybe got a problem. This I do believe.

40 years and you've never seen joy in a Braxton fan? Dude, you ain't seen joy 'til you've seen me dancing to Braxton!