JSngry

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.

Not for nothing did he have such a good run in Basie's band.

1 - I don't hear it as a ripoff of anything at all, except of countless spy/detective show/movie themes that placed emphasis on color tones in a minor key (and along those lines, the bridge to the Perry Mason theme is freakin' GENIUS!). And even then, I'd have to consider it more of a subtle parody of those things than a ripoff of "Walkin'". Sure, both tunes hit their color tones on the upbeat going into the first measure, and both tunes end on a descending, almost sequential pattern, but good lord, how many other tunes do that? I can hear a similarity in those regards, but it's so general, with the actual specifics so different, that if I was to claim anything, it would be ingenuity, not theft. 2 - Absurdly close? The only similarity is that both use descending minor phrases that begin on the 5th scale degree and that both go to a subdominant chord after four bars. That's it! Chicago and Salt Lake City are both cities, and both have lakes. Are they also absurdly close? 3 - Now this one is just wrong! Inspector Gadget and Topsy would both apper to be derived from Greig's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" to one degree or another, and Gadget is a helluva lot closer to it than it is to Topsy! Don't believe it? Listen for yourself and see, uh...HEAR! http://people.nnu.edu/wdhughes/mountain.mid Now really, if it weren't for "theft of feeling and basic melodic material", we'd have hardly any Popular Music, would we!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I agree that the sales are/were the way to go at Red Trumpet. It takes/took patience, but there are/were some great deals to be found. Plus, if you do/did a general search for "jazz" with no other parameters, you'll/you'd get everything they have/had, which from time to time includes/included some OOP LPs at quite reasonable prices. Service is/was indeed impeccable, and their packing should be placed in a museum somewhere to serve as an example of the heights of perfection of which humankind is/was capable. I kid you not. Here's hoping that they pull through/I sure hate to see them go.

Yes, he's already out-posted Sangrey. ← Full of sound and fury...

The work done at the Xerox/Palo Alto facility is a fascinating subject.

Newspaper ads w/checklist boxes. Love it!

So, was "Walkin'" a common call at jam sessions in the late 1940s?

Yeah, what kind of a demo was this? A compilation of already released material given to you by a friend to "demo" the artist yourself, or a demo session made by Red himself? Red's a player who has developed a bit of a cult following over the years. Nobody claims that he's "great", but he brought a unique "street" flavor to much of his work that continues to have a certain appeal to some.

Have you had the Ultimate Insanity sauce? "Gourmet" is a misnomer. "Too freakin' hot to be useful to any living creature" is more like it. One drop on the tip of a toothpick will damn near raise blisters. I kid you not. It's strictly a gimmick, or, in the wrong hands, a tool of punishment. Maybe I'm thinkng of that "Reserve" stuff he makes up, in shich case I'll gladly change the image. But that's my analogy.

Hey, a street-team pimping of a worthy artist is a refreshing change of pace!

Y'all come on down! (and bring the Deuces!) Just remember one thing, and one thing only - no matter how may idiots you hear say "jah-la-peen-o", doing so is grounds for justifiable homicide. Get that right, and you'll be cool. The other stuff, like learning to pronounce "Bexar" like it's the aspirin, has a user-friendly learning curve. But not the jalapeno thing. No sir!

True (and again, I pretty much despise Sandoval's music to a degree that I do few others), but "ethnomusicolgically", the "European" threads run much longer and deeper in Brazilian music than they do in the Carribean musical cultures, so equating the Brazillian musical traditon to the Latin/Carribean one is a bit of apples and oranges, I think. I look at Sandoval's music (and looking at it is the best I can do...) as combining a hyperactive "Latin" musical temperment with the worst aspects of jazz extroversion. The worst of both worlds, so to speak... If not for his age, it would be tempting to envision a scenario where Sandoval learned to play jazz by getting a bunch of 70s-era Hannibal solos (which I truly love, btw) and, reversing the time-honored tradition, setting the turntable at 78 rpm in order to learn them...

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In fairness to Sandoval, he comes from a non-American (non-jazz, really) tradition of trumpet playing that places value on the whole "bravura" aspect of the instrument. You listen to cats like Chocolate (Alfredo Armenteros), El Negro Vivar, Luis "Perico" Ortiz, etc., and you can gain a better perspective of where Sandoval is coming from than you can by comparing him to American jazz trumpeters. Having said that, though, I think it's safe to say that Sandoval is to those players what is to , which is to say that he takes a nice (and already bold) concept to such extremes that its usefulness to anybody but the masochistic and/or tragically macho is doubtful at best.

That's about as solid info as we're gonna get on this. Only 4 weeks to go ... ← First-hand info here.

Sounds to me like an old airshot or location recording with some instruments overdubbed a few decades later.

Turn is indeed fine.

Your work speaks for itself, as do you. Hard to beat that combination. Best wishes, and stay healthy!

Rich.

2005.

Yes, I have. A very interesting article that has piqued my interest in getting that Dameron book. I Love Lucy? So, who is/was this Irving Reid cat?