JSngry

You missed a good game.

Separated At Birth? Bobby Jenks: Bobby Hill: Hell, the way that Jenks' heat resembles Nolan Ryan's, I'd not be surprised to find out that he is Hank Hill's boy!

His Master's Oink.

Is it just me, or does Jenks look like Bobby Hill?

Wow, that was fast! Not only did Sonny play the theme, but the show co-starred Clora Bryant! Or does that say Clara? You know how us old folks and our vision is... Anyway... Any discographical info on the Rollins theme? A long shot, I'm sure, but one never knows...

...a short-lived ABC(?) sitcom from the late-80s/early-90s(?) that had as it's theme Sonny Rollins playing "I told Every Little Star"? Not the Contemprary Leaders version, but a new one, apparently recorded specifically for the show? I meant to VCR an episode just to have the theme in my Rollins collection in some form, but never did. Details would be appreciated, and, as always, thanks in advance!

Fathead.

Apparently so!

Go Go Gadget Muzzle!

#6 is called "Fast Lane" on the source album, but like you, I've heard it somewhere else, and probably under a different title. Oh, it's #13 that has the spooky sound to it. If I didn't know better (and I'm not sure that I don't), I'd swear that it was Charlie Haden using the trick of playing along with pre-existing recordings like he did on that one Quartet West side...

NOT! 1 - I'll grant you the broad structural similarities, but that's it. If broad structural similarities were all that mattered, then Jayne Mansfield would be Mamie Van Doren. Case dismissed for lack of corroborating evidence! 2 - Objection overruled! Presuposes that thefts/borrowings/etc proceeds in a linear fashion, that once a source is "borrowed" from, then the next borrowing will be from the previous borrower. Would you similarly claim that anybody who was to write a TV show them with original lyrics and who paraphrased the melody to "O Sole Mio" was ripping off "It's Now Or Never"? Depends on the writer, of course, and since the Gadget theme was composed by Shuki Levy, I'd say that the odds were good that the Greig piece was more familiar to him than was "Topsy". In fact, if they says that I'm right RIGHT HERE, and since it's on the Internet, it's GOTTA be true! 3 - Contempt of court! "Identical" means identical, and since the opening phrase of "Odd Couple" has a 9th in it, that closes the case right there. Never mind that "Bags Groove" is a riff and that "Odd Couple" is a song melody that goes places after that opening phrase that are completely unrelated to "Bags Groove". Using a lingua franca riff as the basis for one phrase of an entire song is nowhere near the same as ripping off said riff, and prosecution should know better than to claim that it is. Prosecution is hereby ordered to get the CD accompaniment to That Devlin' Tune on the streets with all due haste and to get another book on the market likewise.

Would you believe "Peter Gunn"?

It's not, but thank god you hear it too. I thought it was just me! By golly, I thnk you're on to it! Is this something from the Jaki Byard/Joe Farrell sides recorded live at Lennie's On The Turnpike?

Making a distinction between A)source materials and B)processes, intent, and final result, I'll answer that by asking you this - Was Jelly Roll Morton "folk music"?

Perfectly understood, and the only reason I can't hear it exactly like that is simply because I hear a depth (in both degree and "meaning") of "tension" that runs throughout Nelson's work that I don't hear in others who "genre hop" to the extent that he did. But I'll freely admit that that's just how I hear it, that's what it stirs up in me, not that that's "really" what's there.

Have you heard Black Brown & Beautiful? The original, not the mistitled Bluebird compilation CD? I'm wondering how it "ranks" in comparison to that one. No matter, I'm going to have to check out the Prestige date. On a more trivial note, I have to say that although the cover used on the CD is, as I found out a few years ago, the original, it pales for me in comparison to the later cover, the one which several generations know as "the" cover. This smaller, digital reproduction doesn't do it justice, but the LP-sized image of a bluish-tinted Nelson, looking out on the world with a look of totally objective weariness, framed/propped up by fingers that at once suggest prison bars, weapons of warfare, cathedral steeples, and tools of passionately dispassionate creativity that at once records history and comments on it, with "documentation" to the rear of him and nothing but a record to be pulled out and listened to in front of him is one of the all-time great album covers. Certainly one of the most provocative. Does the CD reissue at least include it?

Well, I don't know about all that, but Oliver Nelson is a guy who began fascinating me since I had the chance to play in a college rehearsal band that was led by a guy who, by striking up a friendship with Nelson's widow, had managed to get copies of some of Nelson's original big band charts. These charts were enigmatic in a way - at once sunny and bright, while at the same time being full of really dissonant, emotionally ambiguous voicings. You'd play these things, and sitting "inside" the sound as you do when playing in a section, and think, "Wow, wtf IS this?". Prior to that, I'd know of Nelson through this week's AOTW and a lot of the arrangements he did for Verve and othsr labels, and other than BATAT, nothing had really struck me as being particularly deep. But now, having gotten a clue as to where the "clues" might be buried, I began to listen closer and, the Prestige album withstand, broader to Nelson's work. It kind of became a "quest" of mine for a little while, to try and get a handle on just who this guy was who could write the music for The Six Million Man and Black Brown & Beautiful. No "easy" answer has yet to be reached, but that might well be the point, if you know what I mean. A real sleeper, imo, is the small group portion of Sound Pieces, especially the reading of "The Shadow Of Your Smile". What the hell is that all about?

No, I've missed that one over the years. No real reason, no real excuse.

Objectively, I agree with this. Subjectively, though, I have a different impression. I listen to Nelson's playing here and ask myself why, of all the things that he could have played, why did he play this? And, of all the ways that he could have played it, why did he play it this way? What's the message here? Of course, that's what we all do, at one level or another, with all music. That's the essence of communication - hearing a message and deciding whether or not we hear it, and then, if we do, figuring out what it means to us. Usually, it happens instantaneously, without any consciousness involved. We either get it or we don't, and that's that. But Nelson's playing here (and elsewhere) is so "layered" with implications beyond the immediate settings of the music that such an "easy" response has not been possible for me. What I've come to hear in it, finally, is an embodiment of the fundamental American conflicts - "Black" vs "White", "trained" vs "street", "spontaneous" over "planned", "commercial" vs "art", on and on and on. These are the conflicts that have created the friction within American jazz once it became "more" than a "folk music", and they are conflicts that exist to this day. I'd even go so far to say that they are conflicts that exist in all levels of American society, as is witnessed by fascination of so many White people with Black culture, a fascination that often enough leads to ghettoization and unfortunate stereotypes based on a shallow comprehension of the depths of what is being experienced, but also a fascination that exists precisely because there is a contrasting, for lack of a better term, "ethos", a different take between cultures on processing the information provided by the same stimuli and situations. This "cross-pollination" has been at the root of jazz, even when it was a "folk music", and it's also been the "story of America" in a lot of ways. The thing about Nelson is that, unlike so may others, he doesn't take sides. He's as likely to play a solo on a blues, such as the one on "Stolen Moments", that is more rooted in a European "classical" sensibility than it is in anything else. And he does it without a sense of irony, parody, or any other "signifier" that tells us what we "should" feel/think. Conversely, when he plays in a more overtly "jazz" fashion, his playing is also, usually, devoid of the obvious emotional shortcuts. He obviously has mastered the language, and he obviously understands its deepest meanings, but he doesn't in any way embrace them as being the defining elements of "who he is". So who is he? That's the question, and its one that Nelson often appears to answer by not even considering the question valid, as it seems to have had no real answer. He could, and very often did, write extremely commercial arrangements that often bordered on generic, yet. paradoxically, they always sounded like Oliver Nelson. Conversely, he could write deeply personal, moody in the extreme pieces, and they too always sounded like Oliver Nelson. The same applies to his playing as well. In Oliver Nelson's work, I inevitably hear the question of "Who am I?" answered as "I am everything and I am nothing. I can be anything at any time." I also hear the inevitable follow-up question of "What does this mean to me?" answered with "It means everything and it means nothing. It is what it is." Inevitability and ambiguity exist in equal measure and resolution to the fundamental conflict is never sought, perhaps because none is to be found, at least not for/inside Oliver Nelson. "Everything" & "nothing" is all there is to be found, and in the end, there's really no difference between the two. Not for/in Oliver Nelson. That is "The Blues", and that is "The Abstract Truth". So

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I heard that Shadow's body was found crammed into a trash can in some NYC alley. If true, an ignoble end for a most noble drummer.

Have yet to have had the pleasure, but I do find Fortune's American albums of the last 25 or so years to be less than fully satisfying. The Strata-East & Horizon sides, otoh, still work for me unconditionally.

This one hurts.

So much to say. Too much, maybe, for one sitting... In terms of presenting a coherent and unified vision, capturing a mood, a time, and a place, creating a lingering and ever-deepening fascination, and just in terms of overall mojo, comparisons with Kind Of Blue are not out of line. Not at all. Oliver Nelson was a truly gifted and multi-faceted artist. I'd go so far as to call him "deep", in the truest sense of the word. Unfortunately, his career path tended to blur, and at too many times obsure, this. But in this album (and in his other unalloyed masterpiece, the all-but-forgotten Black Brown & Beautiful), it's on full display, and the results are as compelling as any music can be. The reason for this, at least for me, is a fundamental tension, an internal conflict that is accepted rather than battled against. You can hear it in the compositions and the arrangements, where the lead lines are all pretty upfront and "accessable" and the inner voices are darkly yet subtly dissonant, sometimes extremely so. You can hear it in his playing, where a passive, almost "classical" saxophone tone is used to play lines that burst with harmonic defiance and rhythmic obstinancy (has anybody, other than perhaps Steve Lacy, ever swung so hard by not "swinging"?). You can especially hear it in how he plays with and against Dolphy (perhaps even moreso on the Prestige dates they made together), a player whose playing is the opposite of Nelson's in nearly every respect. Dolphy's emotions explode without hinderance, Nelson's always threaten to but never do - overt versus implied. I get the feeling that if Nelson was to ever "cut loose" emotionally that the results would've been dangerous, "scorched earth" type stuff in the extreme. but he never, ever. did. In the end, any Nelson/Dolphy collaboration inevitably has Dolphy leaving the most residual "relaxation" in this listener's psyche. That is no small feat, I believe, and that's what I'm talking about when I say tha Oliver Nelson was a deep cat. The music of few, if any, "jazz" musicians contains so much overwhelming, fundamental tension and inner turmoil that is so fully expressed by not "expressing" it. In this regard, Nelson and the Bill Evans of this general period have a lot in common, and I don't think it's an accident that Evans's presence on this date & KOB is one that without which the music therein would be fundamentally different. The difference in these albums is that on KOB, Evans was being used by the leader to provide a brilliant, foudational amplification of but one aspect of that leader's personality. On Nelson's album, he is used more as a foil - Nelson's internal tensions are at least the equal to Evans', probably even greater. Whereas on KOB, Evans had the role of "defining" the ambiance of the performances. pn BATAT, he's responding to an ambiance that already exists in the most fundamental of ways. If it can be said that Evans was co-designer of the house that is KOB, then it can also be said that on BATAT he was stepping into his "dream house", one entirely of somebody else's design, but one that was more "him" than anything he could've constructed for himself. Yeah, Blues And The Abstract Truth is a deep album. Hell, the title is deep. Oliver Nelson was a deep cat. Everybody on this album (I'll include Barrow too, just because) is/was a deep cat. You can dive into these waters without fear, but you can never, ever, touch bottom, much less get out on the shallow end. There ain't no shallow end.