JSngry

Yeah, very nice. Actually some things I need this time.

Hey - it's a Buddy Rich big band. "Tasteful" is relative.

Pewburner is on my shit list. A friend ordered some stuff from them, and when he tried to make backup copies, he found out that it was copy-protected. That takes a lot of gall, copy-protecting a bootleg!

Well, yeah, we're on the same page here, and that's what I meant - somebody like Big Jay McNeely's tone was truly "distorted" in terms of how it was produced on/drawn from the instrument. Sonny had a freakin' pallate of tones, none of which were in the least distorted in that way.

Again - http://www.dovesong.com/MP3/MP3_BlackGospel.asp Have fun!

Sorry, but "ugly" in the 1950s would have been somebody like Big Jay McNeely who intentionally distorted the sound of the horn. Rollins' tone then was certainly big, but I maintain that the perception of "ugliness" was due mainly to the articulation and phraseology than the tone itself, which was nothing if not multifacited as the "need" of the moment dictated and quite controlled. Always. Intonation was sometimes an issue early on, as was occasional glitches in register leaps. But tone never was. Even the earliest Rollins, where he sounds like the horn can't handle his energy (not the other way around), is marked by a tone that is in no way "uncontrolled", and cetainly not "distorted". Certainly Illinois Jacquet's tone of the time was more "agressive", as were cats like Arnett Cobb et. al. But it was a time when certain elements within jazz were courting "refinement", which in some quarters meant "taking the edge off", which in yet some other quarters was extrapolated into equating certain types of directness with ugliness. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but there's a fatal flaw there, and it's that the tenor (any instrument, really, but I speak from what I know) will have one kind of "ugliness" when it's not being played with control, and another one altogether when a cat knows how to play. In the latter case, accusations of "ugliness" reveal quite a bit about the accuser and little, if anything, about the object of the accusation. Because, let's face it - the number of people who will spend the time and energy it takes to learn to so something well in order to create intentional, unmitigated ugliness instead of some sort of personal vision of "truth and beauty" are few and far between. Now, sometimes the truth hurts, as they say, and most folks do equate hurt with ugly, and nothing else. But that's their problem, isn't it...

Yeah, I'm betting that Paulie's not getting a free ride on that one.

Somewhere North of Ohio and South of Canada?

Larry, your comments about Balliet's esthetic preferences remind me very much of Stanley Dance's take on Gene Lees, that Lees had an attraction to the "nicer" (or "middle class") aspects of jazz that reflected a Caucasian-American "wish fullfillment" (my phrase, not his) that ultimately perverted, perhaps even denied, the root essence of what the music was, where it was coming from, and what it was really "saying". Which is not to say that Lees is without merit, just that there's a "lens" pretty much permanently in place that may or may not distort reality, depending on what is being viewed through it. Tell you what about Stanley Dance - "moldy fig" that he sometimes was (or liked to pretend to be...), when he was on his home turf, the cat knew in a way that few jazz critics have known.

Yeah, I know. It's just that if something wants/hopes to be some sort of "ultimate"... As for recs, I really don't think that Universal has done anything even remotely "good" with their holdings. A few very sparse compilations are all that I know of. There was a time when I could recommend hitting a few truckstops on the Interstate to find this stuff, but truckstops ain't what they used to be... There is, however, this site: http://www.dovesong.com/MP3/MP3_BlackGospel.asp But y'all didn't hear it from me, ok?

Slim Slam Slominsky

Don't know if it shows up on AMG or not, but I was surprised to find him on a live Tito Puente side from the very early 1970s.

No Peacock material whatsoever? Then, great as this side may be, it's incomplete.

Balliett's a favorite of mine, not for his musical insight, but just for his turns of phrase. With a large enough perspective, I can see where Balliett was coming from re:Rollins' tone, although, truthfully, I think that it was probably more the articulation(s) that bugged him than the tone itself. Sonny in those days loved to be, shall we say, "abrupt" sometimes. And Balliett was by no means the only contemporaneous critic to notice this. But otherwise, somments like this about Rollins' (and shortly thereafter, Coltrane's) tone strike me as the equivalent of people who complain that the jalapenos at Taco Bell are "spicy". I guess if black pepper sets your mouth afire, then yeah, But otherwise... And when was Hank Mobley's tone ever "hard"? Gimme a break...

Pigboy Crabshaw Jesus Christ Dan McCafferty

When you're playing keyboards with your feet, what instrument it may or may not be is irrelevant.

Not a musician mix-up, but I was just looking at Dusty Groove, saw George Benson's White Rabbit, and pronounced it in my mind as "White Wabbit". So maybe I confuse Creed Taylor with Elmer Fudd.

Don Cherry & Don Cherry Joe Henderson & Joe Henderson And all those Humphrey/Humphries drummers.

Yeah, but if you're going to play with your feet, you should stick to piano, like Jerry Lee Lewis.

A Flock Of Seagulls The Blackbyrds François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture

Captain Marvel Gomer Pyle Charlene Darling (did you know that she was a jazz singer?)

Please allow me, a by no means avid Rich fan, to recommend this big band side as a good starting (and perhaps finishing) point: Of all his PJ big band sides (and I've heard them all in-depth, since they were very much "in the air" when I first got into jazz as a high schooler), this one, overall, has the best charts, and most tasteful readings. Swings like a mofo on more than a few occasions, too. Good stuff, and I've even thought about rebuying it.

Bill Kenny J.C. Penney Jack Benny

Yeah, I forget who the singer was (Jeri Southern?), but Red heard a side of hers and brought the tunes to Miles. Or so the story goes. Hell, Red set the template for the "different backings for each soloist" thing that would really distinguish Miles' bands for the rest of his life. What the Second Quintet got into in this regard is a direct offshoot of the First Quintet.