JSngry

I've just heard tghe one released cut, and my first impression was that it was a bari player, that's how dark his tone was. I think his playing sounds like a rougher version of the style heard on Breakthrough, which, depending on how you feel about that session, may or may not be dissuasive from pursuing the Steeplechase cut. Myself, I think he sounds wholly Mobley apart from the tone (and that too is pure Mobley at its core, in spite of the surface cloudiness). His lines, phrasing, and timing could come from nobody else. But there is an air of combined sadness and desperation to the emotional vibe that is pretty gut-wrenching. Again, this is a lot like how I hear him on Breakthrough, but I'll readily admit that that's a totally subjective call.

That was a family member, iirc, mother, aunt, maybe even grandmother. Never really sure exactly when the embochure problems began. Late 70s or early 80s, wasn't it? I wasn't really surprised to hear about it, though. Every time I see footage of Shepp playing, it's like he's damn near swallowing the mouthpiece and blowing really forcibly. Couple that with what sounds to me like the use of a pretty stiff reed, and you got a recipe for some kind of physical distress at some point or another.

A groovy player indeed! Back in the late 1970s, a college buddy of mine and myself found out that the President of either the Tulsa or Oklahoma City AFM was a drummer named Hugh Walker. We thought about calling up the Local and checking out if it was this same cat, but we never did. This was when long distance was expensive for college students and all that. A Google search for "Hugh Walker" drummer Oklahoma turned up this hit http://don.munday.tripod.com/id4.htm which suggests indirectly that a Hugh Walker either lived/played in Oklahoma and/or still does.

There are no wrong opinions. The sound of the electric piano in R&B (can anyone imagine Marvin Gaye's "Grapevine" without it?) is great, but I'd rather have Bill Evans, Cedar Walton and Tommy Flanagan stick to the acoustic instrument. Walton I can kinda go either way on, but for the other two I'm witcha. Although Flanagan's "Good Bait" on Rhodes was SWEEEEET! But yeah, right hands, right place, like I said. I think of electric pianos, Rhodes in particular, in terms of texture and color, and it's a texture and color that isn't going to work for every player in every setting. But personally, I prefer George Cable on electric. Joe Sample too.

And not unlike the use of handclaps.

Understood. all I'm wondering is if over time (more time than any of us have, I'm sure), "history" turns "influential" and "great" into one and the same thing.

The beast killed itself, but there's still some good life left in the bones for anybody whose spirit is pure.

As somebody who's not particularly concerned with neither canon nor cognoscenti, all I can say is "oh well!" Seriously though, look at all the great creators whose music has changed as their lives have. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, the aforementioned Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, the list goes on. And on. They all have had to deal with a certain fan element saying "yeah, I guess what they're doing now is ok, but it ain't like the old stuff", and they're not saying that as an objective critique. Of course, we're all entitled to our preferences. I certainly have mine. But let's be realistic - how many "greast" artists just all of a sudden wake up one day and aren't great any more? The shit just runs off into the night to find a new home. Oh well, that was fun while it lasted. It does happen, but usually what happens is that the greatness is still there, it just coimes out in different ways, ways that are often less obvious than before, and/or ways that allow for the middle-aged propensity for needing a little extra room for comfort. Now, tahnks to recordings, and the tendency of many people to "know" this music either whooly or mostly through recordings, it's real easy to locked into thinking that the guy who made such-and-such records back in the day is going to stay the same person forever, and therefore keep making the same type music. If you're an "act" who crates "product", well, yeah, I guess you can do that if you want. It's not that hard to do. But for everybody else, hey - shit changes. Your body changes, your mind changes, your desires change, everything changes sooner or later. An old man who plays like a young man is either a freak or a fool, dig? Not so much in therms of energy, but in terms of "point of view". After a while, burning down the house is not as appealing as building one, if for no other reason that as you get older, you kinda like having some comfort in your life, because, frankly...you need it! Shit starts to ache and pain and stuff like that. Raising hell is not nearly as much fun as it used to be, because the morning after starts lasting into the afternoon, and then on into the next night. I speak from personal experience... Now, some guys just don't give a shit. they're going to go all out until they burn out. More power to 'em. But that's a personal choice they make, and I'm not going to be the one to say that it's wrong or right, jsut as I'm not going to say that it's wrong or right to seek a little comfort. Coasting is one thing, a fundamentally different thing (and a fundamentally wrong thing imo), but "pacing" yourself (and your aims) isn't the same thing as coasting. I'm reminded of the story of the old bull and the young bull. They're up on a hill top, gazing down upon the herd, and the young bull says to the old bull, "My my my! Look at all those cows down there. What say we run down there and get us one right now?" The old bull says, after a long pause, "Why don't we walk down there and get 'em all over the next few days?" The old bull was not without wisdom...

That's precisely what's so disconcerting to me... cause I can't sense it, either. I'm of the mind that Shepp played through his limitations--and not because of them. It feels as if the negative implication of the 'Shepp always wanted to be a changes player' is the latter concern (that he couldn't), but I'm glad you put in your two cents--there's a dimension to that idea that's far more positive, more in line with what Shepp articulates emotionally (and not just technically). Dude - "limitations" are only there when they're there, and most in the 60s Shepp, I don't really hear them as being there, so there were really no "limitations" to play through! I mean, if you want to paint fruit, and can do so splendidly, how big of a limitation is it if you can't paint dogs, unless you decide that you want to paint dogs? And I in now way meant to imply that Shepp always wanted to be a changes player. Frankly, I think that it was pretty far off his personal radar for most of teh 1960s. Like I said, there were more "pressing priorities" in the 60s, musically and socially, than getting your changes together. So once again, the perception that there were limitations is based on the premise that he was doing something otehr than what he really wanted to do, and that's not a premise to which I subscribe. Before and after, yeah, probably. But during? I don't think so. The times when he did play changes in the 60s show him playing them just fine, using his vocabulary of the time, at times masterfully creating a whole new way of playing changes (a way that was certainly evolutionary, but also entirely his own). It was after the fire died down that I think he took stock and decided to go back and re-evaluate. And there was some rough sledding there for a few years, because he was trying NOT to play like he did before. Why that is, we can only speculate. but I'm sure he had his reasons. Definitely "musical", and probably personal as well. People change as they age, and I don't think it's really fair or accurate to judge one phase in terms of another. Goals, means, everything can be, and often is, different from one time to another in the same person, so you don't necessarily want to compare the apples of one phase of a person's life to the oranges of another. That works with some people, but not with others. And Shepp is one of those for whom I think it doesn't.

I think he went there.

Electric pianos rule. In the right hands in the right place, of course. But whenever I hear somebody dismiss them out of hand, I get upset. Because that's just wrong. Selah.

Careful - splinters can blind!

Can't say that I see any need whatsoever for any sense of "diminuition". Life is what it ends up being, and it gets there how it gets there. Many detours and surprises accompany that, and that's not a "diminuition", that's just what it is. The only need for a sense of disappointment would be if we sensed that Shepp was trying to play something and not succeeding due to technical limitations that prevented him from saying what it was that he had to say. The only time I get even an inkling of that is on the Candid sides w/Cecil. But not too long after that, something else took over inside him, and he pursued it vigorouly, and usually most successfully. There was a fire in his belly that raged furiously for a little under 10 years, and he gave hiumself over to that fire unconditionally, which is how it usually should be. Some glorious triumphs there, so why they should be viewed as anything other than a man getting it out excatly as he meant/needed to escapes me. If it was not found along the path that he began on, or returned to. so be it. Life's like that. Now, as for what came after, hey - LOTS of things came after, not just inside Shepp, but inside America, and over the entire world. A fire need fuel, and the fuel for that particualr fire wasn't there like it had been, and not just inside Shepp. A lot of things changed, a lot of things stayed the same. Things will be things, ya'know? So yeah, the path changed. What would the alternative have been? Some cats die, some cats live. The ones who die get off easy because there's no more decisions left to be made. The rest of us take stock and go about the business of getting where and what we want/need by whatever way we think best. This is, I think, what Shepp has done, and it's all good imo, even when it's not so good.

All those possible responses , and not one I can use! How about - "If it's integral to the music, yes. If it's not, but it's good players, maybe. If it's just some wankerism, no. And if it's a Latin date, it damn well BETTER have congas, and preferably more!"

An interesting comment. Just wondering what the difference is when it comes to history & historical evaluation, which is what this is, and will become even more of as time passes. Is there really a difference, in historical terms (informed historical terms, that is), between "greatest" & "most influential"? How "great" is something going to be considered 250 years from now if it ends up being little more than a blip on the evolutionary radar? It's a serious question, and frankly, I don't know the answer.

This is the Trane I listen to more than any other over the long haul. Bar none, and it ain't even close.

Well, I can't argue with that seven, but there's any other sevens I couldn't argue with either, so...

Then again, there's always the possibility that Shepp in the 60s had "more pressing priorities" (as he, imo, should have) then getting his change playing together, and that once the smoke cleared, he took a very methodical approach to doing so. He certainly gained fluency as the decade progressed, which in turn would explain his increasingly "conservative" perspective - he now had the chops to tackle this type material with more than "mere" fire and "attitude". Besides - whatcha gonna do after you burn the house down? You can either live outside for the rest of your life, or you can go about building it back the way you want it. I don't think that Shepp was ever a hardcore "deconstructualist" or anything like that. I really think that he had every intention of being basically a "changes" type player from the git-go. But the passions of the time led him into other areas of more immediate necessities. I'm certainly glad that they did, but I'm equally glad that he went back and took up where he left off.

Shoulda clarified, my bad. And I'm not totally sure I got this story right, so don't take it as gospel, but it's something about Perkins getting called to sub for Gonzalves on an Ellington studio date, just to play parts, because Paul was too trashed to make it. Either Perkins took it and was totally freaked out, or else he turned the offer down because he didn't feel worthy. One or the other, and I'm pretty sure it was the latter. But either way, it's not the attitude of a typical "studio musician".

Correctamundo.

I'll disagree, but respectfully so. The editing and the mix/EQ-ing are piss-poor, however. It's interesting to catalogue the devolution of Shepp's revolutionary rhetoric at this juncture--the sentiments are the same, but the music is not. I've always semi-interpreted this as a silent assertion on Shepp's part that "the tradition" was always "revolutionary" at root, and that now that the fireworks were over and the sleepers awakened, it was safe to go back inside.

For all the talk/associtions of Perkins w/Prez & Rollins, he repeatedly told Pete that his favorite tenorist was Paul Gonsalvez.

Fearless Fosdick Mke Nomad Happy Rockefeller

Does the water level of the lake often rise to or over where these stumps are? Because water "erosion" will round 'em off like that. You see it all the time on the shores and banks of lakes and rivers around here, where spring rains often cause water leves to rise and then fall back to normal several times per season. Over the years, they get rounded off like that.

Herb Albert Dolores Erickson Rolf Ericsson