JSngry

And really, if you can say "Claude Osteen" more than 5 times in a row without starting to feel stoned, you probably already are...

Claude Osteen?

Who was the Dodgers' 4th starter in '63? I'm almost old enough to remember... (and am old enough to should be able to remember from my old baseball cards...)

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...