JSngry

For Grossman, I'd reccomend Some Shapes To Come & Terra Firma.

There's a lot of Grossman doing the Hyper Trane thing, which I usually don't like either. But he does it so damn sincerely and forcefully that I end up liking it against my better judgement.

The Grossman stuff is totally gonzo - over the top and adrenelin (or something else...) charged. Subtlety goes out the window, and that ususally bugs me to no end. It kind of does here as well, but not always, and not too much.

Now THOSE are a few of my favorite things!

WHOA! That's a truly legendary room. Congrats, and kill'em there!

Up. for shameless self-promotion. Y'all cum!

Finally got around to buying that Ace/BGP reissue of two of Freddie's Prestige dates that Brownie mentioned. Not as much gel-factor as on the BN dates, but much marvelous music neverthenonetheless. Two more great liner essays, as well. Two questions: In addition to reprinting facsimiles of the original liners, there's a little "modern" (1998) blurb. In it, it's stated that Freddie moved to Paris in the '70s and became an arranger for Oliver Lake's big band. WTF is that all about? It also makes mention of a third FR Prestige date, a thing called MY PEOPLE (SOUL PEOPLE) that had a horn section. Anybody ever heard that, has it ever been on CD, and where can I get a copy? Freddie Roach continues to satisfy.

Who was the tenor player on Bullmoose Jackson's "Big Ten Inch"? Wasn't Jackson, iirc.

It was a gradual transition, actually. As I see it, the evolution was equal parts natural inclinations, geographic/cultural environment of the times, and financial consideration. As The Jazz Crusaders, the group always played "soul jazz" type material as well as the more straight-ahead stuff. Some of the later PJ is full of unabashed commercially oriented material. Then, being in L.A. and all, they, as individuals, started doing seeion work and got exposed to that scene (and I may be wrong, buit I think they probably had an influence on groups like the LA Express). Their last albums as the Jazz Crusaders & their first as The Crusaders basically had the same type of music - funk-jazz. Now, they were all from Houston, so this earthier appraoch came naturally to them, and although the change was not without its awkward moments, pretty soon they got it right. This early/mid-70s funk, Texas R&B period is fine with me. The grooves are right, and the feel is true. But as happened with everything else in the 70s, the trend towards glossy and glamorous got hold of them too. STREET LIFE still works fine for me, but after that, eh... Honestly, though, in terms of how well the music succeeds on its own turf, I think that an albums like CRUSDAERS 1, SCRATCH, & THOSE SOUTHERN KNIGHTS are probably "better" than the PJ stuff. But I like it all, at least until the music began to serve the production, instead of vice-versa.

"Blackberry Winter" has gotten a few covers. Good songs, always, but I dunno, kinda "precious" a lot of times too. A good song and a good "jazz vehicle" are only sometimes the same thing, I think.

This thread is apparently dividing along the lines of Monster Booty Lovers & Non-Monster Booty Lovers.

Krptonite got'em.

Favorite R&B tenor solo? Easy - Fathead on "Greenbacks". Perfection in 12 bars. Even if it was on bari. This is gonna be a fun thread, I hope. Very anxious to read others comments and suggestions. Julian Dash is on the radar!

Works for me. I've never been taken by the whole Baker "mystique" thing, which is pretty much absent entirely from these sides. Just good Hard Bop, nothing you've not heard before from other sources, and nothing particularly "deep" or "personal", but the type of stuff that still sounds good anyway.

In the case of Serena & Venus vis-a-vis a television show such as this, the bottom IS the reality.

The prosecution didn't have a clue how to play the jury. The defense did. It's like musicians who expect their brilliance to be automatically and instantly recognized and accepted. That ain't the way it goes. You got to find a way to reach your audience, and if you don't, if all you do is sit there and say, "Look at me! I'm BRILLIANT! You GOTTA love me!", whose fault is it when nobody does? The defense's job is to establish reasonable doubt, the prosecution's to remove same. Juries are an audience, pure and simple, and the knack to reaching an audience is to identify points of commonality as well as any potential "soft spots" in terms of resistance and/or acceptance. The prosecution failed miserably to do this. In fact, they seemingly failed to even recognize the need for it. It was as if they were submitting data to a computer for objective evaluation rather than to a group of humans who, incredible as it might seem, might have had reason to suspect the police & judical systems. It was this arrogance, this refusal to deal with the reality of the jury as well as the reality of the case that cost them the case, I do believe, and yes, that's 100% their fault. Yeah, an in-all-probability guilty man got off, and that's a drag. Neither the first time that's happened nor the last time that it will, but it's still a drag. A real cultural/social/whatever gap that definitely & obviously presents a threat to the administration of real justice to and for all strata of America was exposed, and that's a good thing. Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it, right? Now, the question is a simple one - have we as a society spent more time on addressing and attempting to resolve the issues and conflicts that the Simpson case brought to light, or have we instead been trying to comfort the farmer by attempting to convince him (and ourselves) that the fox got away with robbing his henhouse simply because the chickens let him?

Can't overlook the Miles Prestige date, which is, iirc, the one that caused Mingus to identify Schildkraut as Bird in a BFT.

Hmmmmm..... Dusty Groove used to offer that The Spook Who Sat By the Door bootleg, and now it's not even listed as being out of stock. Can't find a mention of it anywhere there...

Doug Carn's the pianist on the new Curtis Fuller album.

Yeah, but what there is is choice!

Probably old news to a lot of folks here, but I jsut heard it. It's great. Komunyakaa's poetry is direct, and he recites it in a very unaffected manner. He says stuff I can relate to in a way I can relate to. Hardly an intellectual analysis, I know, but there it is anyway. The music's great too. It ranges from blues to Afro-Cuban to ballads to Ra-ish moments to other. It reamins focused, and never becomes self-indulgent or over-dramatic. You also got Fred Hopkins on here (always a plus in my book) as well Jeff Parker on guitar and some other players with whom I am not overly familiar, but probably should be. Everybody shines. Tchicai's tenor tone is at once warm and gut-gripping, and he uses it in the service of a direct lyricism that I personally find irresistable. People expecting a "jazz meets poetry" event full of unapproachable abstraction in music and lyric will be disappointed, as will those expecting a Beat type thing for all ye olde hipsters. No compromises are made (the hardestcorehardboppers amongst us will probably not dig this), but no histrionics get played or sayed, either. In fact, I'll go so far as to call this one of the most successful/satisfying jazz/poetry affairs I've yet to encounter. Satisfyingly mature and deeply human. The label is 8th Harmonic Breakdown out of Chicago, and it's available for $16 from Cadence: RIGHT HERE. Check it out, y'all.

Nekkid is not as important as prominent booty.

My sentiments as well. I wish that the entire album had been vocals w/band. I usually find McCann's piano work to be fun at the moment, but w/o staying power. Otoh, I think he's a very good singer. The version of "Please Send Me Someone To Love" on this album is worth the cost of admission by itself.

How real are we talking here?

You realize that you've just jinxed yourself, right?