JSngry

Some people are also... Never mind.

As long as you're on AMG, check out the sample of "Finally..." I can listen to that tune for hours on end. And have... I don't care if it & "Let's Get It On" are nearly somewhat identical. Both were written by Ed Townsend, and if you can't steal from yourself...

I don't know that there is any one compilation on the market right now that covers the entire history of the Impressions, from Vee-Jay to ABC to Curtom. There should be, But there has been a complete Vee-Jay CD out (Jerry Butler's great on this stuff), Rhino's got a "Very Best Of..." disc that covers the main ABC hits (and includes "Finally...") & there was a 2-CD anthology of the Curtom years that was 1/2 Mayfield years, 1/2 post-Mayfield years (as you seem to have found!).

I'm still bummed that we had only one family all night.

A quality Impressions comp is essential. Just make sure that it has the post-Mayfield "Finally Got Myself Together".

Wasn't Jose Mellis Paar's bandleader?

For Losers is my favorite Shepp sire, period. Which is not the same as saying that I think it's his "best". It's a concept album of sorts, and the title says it all. There's a lot of diverse material on this record, and a great cameo by Clarence Sharpe that serves as the focal point for the album's concept.. I've been moved to tears by it any number of times, but I gotta warn you - there's pain on this record, and it ain't an "easy" listen. Village Of The Pharoahs I heard back in the day, and it left me puzzled and cold, mostly the latter. Heard it again recently, and was fascinated. Lots of "world music" stuff, especially vocally, on there that I don't have the background to accurately classify. But I dug it.

The Bob Ralston renaisance is just around the corner. Be prepared to catch the wave.

Guess somebody finally smelled her feet...

That was a good band. Not their finest album, but not their worst either.

I tend to agree about the end result, but dammit, there's a helluva lot of individual moments of brilliance while he's not getting there. I'm a fan in spite of it all.

IIRC, Warner Brothers actually tried literally giving it away after awhile, in an attempt to get people into it. Didn't work. For those who aren't old enough to remember, Warner Brothers in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s was one hip pop (not rock, but pop) label. This was the days of those great $1 sampler albums they'd do, some of which contained otherwise unavailable material. They were actually into giving shit away, or almost giving it away.

Them Conn tenors was hefty!

One family all night. One. That's sad.

Sorry, but for me it's Sonny all the way. He broght a "scorched earth" style of playing that restored the yin/yang of the Davis/Trane & Davis/Shorter dynamic. Bartz comes in second for me. A very "vocal" player with Miles, and an effective color/voice, even if his vocabulary seemed a bit fixed. Liebman & Grossman? Fine players both, but they both seemed to be spending as much time chasing the Trane as they were playing the music at hand. Different tasks, those. Azar Lawrence was a "walk on" for the Black Magus concert, supposedly w/o anybody else being prepared for it (especially Liebman!). Carlos Garnett? Good player, but essentially faceless in this music. The Sam Morrison w/Miles that I've heard (studio and live) makes the choice of Bill Evans for the "comeback" band seem a logical continuation. I wonder how Rene McLean would've sounded in a 70s Miles band... Truthfully, the best (by which I mean "my favorite") post-Wayne sax player that Miles had was by far and away Kenny Garrett. I kid you not.

And flute, as did Liebman.

And how much is it costing ya'?

Yep - Spud Cooley, the Irish-Asian King Of Far-Eastern Swing, and composer of the enduring hit "I Only Have Eyes For Tzu". (my head is beginning to dance perhaps a little TOO much now...)

What is this, Meat The Potatoes?

Boxers or briefs?

You say that as if there's really any difference....

I don't think that you could call the feel/time of DIYH "strict" in any form or fashion. It's loose, it's liquid, it moves, and it grooves, all without there being any rigid patterns or "beats" coming into play. It's got a steady pulse, to be sure, but it's a pulse that is alive and mobile, not stilted and fixed. Not all of the later Prime Time pieces had this quality to be sure, although it seems to me that as the bottom got more "fixed", what was put on top got even more open. Personally, I think it's an important contribution/insight/whatever of Ornette's later music to show that rigid times do not need to lead to rigid thoughts, that in fact when the downward/inward pull increases that it's possible, probably even essential, to find and provide an equal upward/outward counterforce. Hey - I'm very suspicious of people who don't like at least some form of dance music. People who don't like feeling a dance have a major character defect if you ask me, and more often than not they're people who pose a threat to all things good. By the same token, I'm extremely hostile to those who would reduce the dance impulse to a prefabricated, two-dimensional set of Pavlovian spasms. They too are a menace to society. What I dig about Ornette, and especially about the album under discussion this week, is that, good country-boy-gone-to-the-city that he is, is that he's always been a dancer (and a singer, too). Hell, his tone alone dances, you know? But he's never, even in Prime Time, stooped to playing "dance music" that is nothing more than aural puppet strings. His dance music is always open in some form or fashion. It recognizes that dance, true human dance, isn't just a series of steps and moves, it's a creation caused by a reaction. Lose the reaction, and you lose the impetus for the creation. Dancing In Your Head was Ornette's opening creative salvo fired against a world that was becoming increasingly and irrevocably "plugged in", a world dependent on the power cord (power chord?) as umbilical cord. It shows us that we can change and still stay the same, that we can still create in reaction to a changing fundamental social paradigm. Tone Dialing was to the Digital Revolution what Dancing In Your Head was to the Electrical Revolution, and what The Shape Of Jazz To Come was to the Automation Revolution. As far as I'm concerned, they're all are Guidebooks For Survival & Sanity In These Changing Times Of Ours. A dancer, even one who dances in their head, is always moving. It's harder to hit a moving target, doncha' know...

Pete Fountain came to prominance on the Welk show, iirc. The "best" Welk shows were the ones towards the end, whne the show was in syndication. Paul Humphrey was the drummer, I think, Skeets Hurfurt was on lead alto, and with Havens and Questa (no match for either Fountain or Hucko, but a good player nevertheless) the band brought a core of "jazziness" to the fore that it had heretofore mostly squelched. More and more, little things began to creep into the show that hadn't been there before. I actually remember a small group jam version of "How High The Moon" ca. 1975 or so that ended with an out chorus of "Ornithology". I thought I was going to die.

I can think of but two times in my life when I've gotten smacked upside my head by a personally relevant musical revolution in real time, as it happened, the kind of thing that comes out of the blue and grabs you by your gut and changes things forever. The first was seeing The Beatles their first time on The Ed Sullivan Show in January of 1964. But that defining moment (I immediately knew somewhere inside my 8 year old self that music was to be the life for me, some how, some way, and that everything else was going to be secondary) was not without some lead up - KEEL-AM in Shreveport, La. had been playing the shit out of The Fab Four for a few weeks prior to the Sullivan show, so I was primed. The TV gig just sealed, no, seared the deal. The second time was in the summer of 1977. I was home from college for the summer, and had been flirting with Music School Burnout. All the "formalism" of the legit stuff was really starting to beat me down and all the Jazz Education Rules were beginning to make me feel as if maybe jazz was not the music for me, at least not the kind of jazz I was fighting indoctrination against. I'd begun to flirt with the early punk bands and to revisit the rock and pop of the 1960s just to get in touch with that energy, the feeling that music was something you played because you had to do it or else you'd die. I was getting it from some jazz, but not the type I had regular opportunities to play at school. The whole music thing was getting kind of...dreary. So, it's the summer of 1977, and I'm in Dallas on an off-day from my summer job in Gladewater as a roustabout for Texaco, and I'm making the rounds of all my favorite Big City Record Stores. I stop in at a place called Metamorphosis (Rod surely remembers this place), and I'm browsing the bins when I come across a promo copy of a new album by Ornette Coleman with a really cool cover called Dancing In Your Head. I'd not heard any advance word about a new side by Ornette, and the personnel listing on the inside looked pretty, uh...different from anything I'd heard by him before. And I had heard a lot of Ornette before - a 45 of "Una Muy Bonita" was one of the very first jazz records I owned, Free Jazz was one of the first 50 or so jazz LPs I ever bought, and I'd bought pretty much all the Atlantic, Blue Note, Impulse!, and Columbia stuff by the time I was 20. So I knew Ornette. Loved Ornette, in fact, and knew well what was up with him and his music. And this record looked to be not at all like any of it. So I bought it immediately. Got home from Dallas about 7 PM, checked in with the folks, ate dinner, and went into my room to check out the day's purchases. Of course, the new Ornette was first. I didn't understand how Ornette could have a new album out on a major label (A&M - home of The Carpenters!) and I'd not heard or read anything about it. How could that be? Oh well, let's put it on and see what the deal is... WHOA.... From the very first sound of Side One, I knew that this was something else entirely, that my world was changing right before my ears for the better. Every microsecond of this music was a revelation. I listened in awe at the sing-songy theme from Skies Of America that was played over and over and over and over. I listened in ecstasy as Ornette played an endless solo that was as inventive as it was organic. My jaw literally dropped as I heard Rudy MacDaniel (he wasn't Jamaaladeen Tacuma yet, at least not in the personnel listing) play how no bass player had ever played with Ornette before, and on electric at that! The guitars and the drummer, hell, I was too much in shock to hear what they were doing, but I good feel it, and it felt right. Damn right. I was stunned when the side finally ended. Too stunned to turn the record over in fact. The old-school multiple-play turntable had the balancing arm up and off to the side, so the tonearm picked up, and the side replayed all by itself. I listened. That went on for a while before I could finally muster the presence of mind to turn the damn record over. Lot of good that did - it was the same thing, only completely different, with a little bit of Morrocan stuff thrown on at the end. That side was also allowed to repeat god knows how many times. I fell asleep to it and I woke up to it the next morning. I wasn't sure exactly what I had heard, but I knew that it had come out of nowhere, literally, and that it had connected in a way that music hadn't been connecting with me lately. Was anybody else doing anything even remotely like this? Not that I knew of. Why not? This was music that was damn near perfect - sure, there was dancing going on in the head, but as the prophets had advised us just a few years before, free your mind and your ass will follow. Here was the proof! (Already) long story short - I went back to school that fall energized, revitalized, and ready to do with music school what any sane creature should do with any schooling - get the knowledge, and fuck all the dogma they try to sell you as being further, more rarified knowledge. I became absolutely committed to dancing in my head, and anywhere/everywhere that led to. My Lab Band Career was shot, but my life, my life, not my programmed existence, had begun anew. Almost 30 years later, the world has changed. This album did make some noise, finally, and it spawned a little Mini-Revoltion. Like all of Ornette's revolutions, the direct influence proved to be pretty insular, even if the indirect influence eventually spread far and wide. The Big Chill of 80s Retro-ism tried its damndest to silence the revolution, and it did a helluva job. But it didn't succeed, not totally. Ornette continued to grow along the way to his next manifesto, Tone Dialing, and now, finally in the last few years, we're hearing younger players who absorbed the lessons of Dancing In Your Head, not so much in terms of stylistic imitation, but more in terms of realizing that freedom and dancing are really synonymous if you've taken the time (and the necessary precautions) to get your shit together as a human being. It's the basic lesson of jazz, really, and Ornette keeps keeping it current, even if the current has AC involved. Can you live a totally unplugged life? If you can read this... I'll leave it to others to provide musical (and/or other) analysis of this album. My experience with it has been way too personal for me to do anything other than tell y'all what it did to me. It came totally out of nowhere (I may well have been one of the first 500 or so people in the world to have heard it, which blows my mind now almost as much as it did then, if for altogether different reasons), but it was definitely the right thing at the right time. Finding this album when I did and how I did might have just been a cosmic accident, but it's the type of accident I wish for everybody. Dance on!

A friend found it for sale online and was asking me if I knew what it was. I figured it was a compilation but wanted to put it out here for the pros.