JSngry

In-fukkin'-credible. Some of the VERY best late-period Lester Young on record, Jo Jones rockin' EVERYBODY'S world, & Jimmy Rushing grabbing life by the balls and daring it not to like it. Life, knowing what's good for it, doesn't put up as much as even a token resistance. Do VMEs have bonus cuts? The bonus stuff on the older version (things by the then-current band, some w/Joe Williams) is good enough, and gives you value for the money, but it's ultimately ephemeral compared to the original album. Either way, you get to hear John Hammond's introductions, which give new meaning to the word "self-absorbed". Priceless!

YEAH!

Uh, AOW stands for ALBUM OF THE WEEK, not ALL OUT WANKING. Just so you know...

I had some jazz 8-tracks in the late 70s. Some even still play, I think, maybe. ON THE CORNER, SWISS MOVEMENT, i don't rembember what all. IMPULSE! ws distributed ny GRT (sic, not GRP, although they were later) at one time, and they purged 8-tracks, and later, cassettes, in a major way. If obsolete formats don't bother you, the various format and label purges that end up in cutout bins, or used to, used to be essential ports of call for anybody looking to build a collection.

Tom strikes me as somebody who's proof that you can be a nice (enough), well-intentioned soul even AFTER selling your soul to Satan. Talk about beating the odds!

It's still there, swinging than ever, 30 seconds of supreme hipness.

I think Brenda mentioned this when we were there. Yeah, she's a freakin' Cyd Chartreuse, that woman is.

It goes without saying that I'll be getting this one for some previously unavailable Sonny Rollins from 1951. But the opportunity to hear Lockjaw and Big Nick together justifies this one all by tiself, if you ask me. Tenor madness bay-bee!

To go back a little, and to contribute nothing, I was NOT a fan of Tom Landry or the Cowboys. Hated them and their robotic methodologies, to say nothing of the incredible hypocrisy and moralistic B.S. That ran through the organization. Didn't become a Cowboys fan until the Jones massacre, and although things got worse it terms of the teams PUBLIC "morality" image than they were during the Landry/Schramm years, they haven't really gotten worse. The team was comprise of coke heads and degenerates back then too, but all this bs about "America's Team", "God's Team", and the using of the genuinely clean Roger Staubach to shine so brightly as to blind the public and the media as to how rotten things really were off the field and with the front office's business dealings made it seem like Cowboy Camelot or some such. In retrospect, I can see that Landry was a great coach for his time, but truthfully, he was a limited one, qualities which are not mutually exclusive of course. He had his own little world, for football and life alike, and he was able to make it work over the course of a truly remarkable arc. But when both the game and the players began to pass him by, his vanity (which was significant) and/or general cluelessness rendered him both incapable and unwilling to make even minor adjustments, and he would have gone down in disgrace, I think, as a King Lear-ish type figure if Jones hadn't have handled his dismissal as cloddishly as he did.

I remember the Paar tonight show just a little, but I better remember the stint he did on ABC taking Dick Cavett's spot after Cavett got let go. He might have been past his prime then, maybe, and the show never really found it's groove, but the guy was definitely worth watching. But I still laugh at ABC's thinking - Cavett wasn't beating Carson, he was too "intellectual", too subtle, so who did they replace him with? JACK PARR, the King of the, as he said it, small chuckle. Oh well, it was my first chance to see Peggy Cass outside of a game show or a sitcom. She was a trip. It was a different country then. We valued the subtle things a lot more than we do now, and we had a collective sense of intellectual shame that made men like Parr both necessary and successful - you could watch him and feel good about it, because you knew that although you weren't getting anything too heavy, you were still getting something with some meat to it. I think I'll stammer more than usual tonight, and try to be a little drier in my wit while I'm at it. R.I.P., and thanks.

Yeah, track # 5 sounds SOOO familiar...

All I ask is that somebody teach me how to do The Shampoo.

Seriously, be pissed. Be VERY pissed.

Hey, they were just Improvising...

Ok, it's working now. Just another cyber-glitch it seems. Weird how something like that can come and go in a matter of minutes.

Lots of the early R&B tenor guys, the ones who played on the studio dates anyway, had roots in the Swing Era. either the big bands themselves or the jump combos which served as transition from Swing to R&B. Al Sears, Sam Taylor, Red Prysock, etc. Another branch of the tree.

Glad it's not just me.

No, not that. When I click on a link, I get a page with the title but no listings, and when I type in a title, I get a bunch of unrelated titles.

Oh yeah. Some of you might think/know of Harris only as a commercially oriented funk(y) player. Rest assured, that's NOT what you get here. More meat than a John Holmes highlight reel. BTW - our friend Geoff is picking AOW after me, so stay tuned!

Go on, click on a song title's link or search by song title and see what happens. Hope it's not just me...

Time for Ray Wetzel's estate to earn some royalties.

Not a problem. I hardly ever drink coffee anymore and ephedra's been outlawed. Besides, these days, although it's too often the last thing I find, sleep is one of the first things I look for. The irony is delicious, especially fried.

Jim, may I take you up on your promise before BFT6 hits us in the face? Ok, here goes... First of all, "Days Of Wine And Four Roses" was written by Lyles as a tribute to Charles Brown, with whom he gigged locally in NYC for a while in the early-mid 80s, before Charles' "rediscovery". The title is how CB always introduced "The Days Of Wine And Roses". It's a beautiful tune, with changes that move logically, yet in a totally non-cliched manner, and a melody that displays a melancholy lyricism that's neither trite nor precious. The sustained notes in the melody and the second part require full attention to the subleties of phrasing and dynamics to make everything sing the way it needs to. It's an "easy" song to hear, but not so easy to play correctly. About the session - we left Dallas at about 11 AM, expecting to make San Marcos about 4-5 PM. About 30 minutes after we left, heading south, it began to snow. By the time we hit Waco, about 90 miles away, we were in the throes of a full fledged snow and ice storm. We briefy debated turning back and rescheduling, but full of a sense of mission, we quickly decided to go on ahead, that they'd have to kill us to keep us from making this album. The further south we went, the worse the weather got, and before too long, we were travelling about 25 mph tops, when we moved at all. We got to Austin about 6 PM, stopped at a Whole Foods Market to stock up on premium beers, and finally pulled into San Marcos about 9 PM (San Marcos is in the "Hill Country" of Texas, and by then, driving had become rather, uh, "adventurous", to say the least. We had rented a cabin in the woods, and getting there from San Marcos proper SHOULD have taken 20 minutes or so, but it took another hour and a half. After checking in, we called the studio and the engineer. Guess what? The studio equipment had somehow frozen due to the negligence of the maintenance staff, and the engineer, who lived o top of a hill, was unable to leave home. But he placed some calls, and a plan was put into place to have the studio ready the next afternoon. When we arrived at the studio the next afternoon (another crawl of a drive), we found out that the engineer was still unable to get out of his house, but he had called two of his top students to come in and get things rolling. These kids were good, and we had a productive afternoon and early evening, getting acclimated to the studio, getting everything positioned right, etc., and then recording a bit. After that, we spent some time getting some samples ready for insertion into the mix. We ended up using two tracks from that first day's work, although I'm sorry to say that I can't remember which ones off the top of my head. The next day, the roads had been cleared, the regular engineer was in place, and we spent an entire day and part of the evening recording the rest of the album. Mixing took place the following day, an all-day affair which left all of us totally drained but happy (eventually...). Now, about me and this solo - we had been rehearsing 2-3 times a week for a month or so to get everything good and tight, to eliminate all the kinks in the heads and the formats, and just to simulate, as much as possible, a regulary working band so the record would have that "seasoned" feel to it. I was drinking tons of coffee and ingesting some pretty heavy quantities of ephedra and "miscellaneous" to maintain energy for a true round-the-clock schedule at home and while playing gigs and rehearsals. A few days before we left, I thought I was having a stoke - I got real light-headed, my left arm went numby/tingly, and my heart was beating WAY faster than it should have been. I called LTB to come and get me. She took me to the doctor, and he checked me out thoroughly. All was well, just heart palpitations brought on by all the stimulants, and an anxiety attack brought on by the palpitations. Cut out the coffee, ephedra, and etc, and you'll be fine was the doctor's assessment. So I did, which was difficult to do on the trip down, given the "party" that the other two non-driving members of the group were having all the way. But I was good. We cut "Days..." early on the second day, and before we tackled it, I decided to have one small cup of coffee to counteract the beer I had been drinking pretty much non-stop since we stopped in Austin. Big mistake - I immediately began to feel light-headed, I turned pale, and my heart started racing. Lyles, knowing what had went down a few days earlier, asked me if I was ok, and I said, "Sure. Let's go" even though I wasn't sure exactly what would happen. I knew enough not to get anxious though, so the aniexty attacks never came. But the other symptoms lingered on as we began to get a take. I had begun to really "get inside" this tune in the last few weeks of rehearsals, and I wasn't about to step down now - we had all been through so much hell just getting this far, and everybody was pumped, sensing that "triumph" was within reach. But my head was feeling REALLY funny as I began to play, although by now it was coming and going in 3-5 second intervals. I think you can hear a combination of confidence and carefullness in my solo - there's times when you can hear me feeling really loose and comfortable, and other times when you can hear that I've got both feet planted firmly on the ground to guard against falling down, both figuratively and literally. After the take, we listened to the playback, and I asked for another go-round, as the symptons had begun to subside. We tried a few, but none had the "suspended" yet "rolling" quality of this one. Lyles and Dennis are some of the LISTENINGEST M.F.s I've EVER known, and they were with me all the way on that first full take (we had a false start or two before getting a full one). But I was too wrapped up in asserting/proving myself (and TO myself) in a "healthy" manner to just relax and play, and they were with me on THAT, too, damn them. So we went with the first take, finding it to have just the right quality to compliment the overall vibe of the tune. There's two fingering glitches along the way in my solo, one brought on by the "condition" of the moment, and the other by the idea reaching my fingers a split-second too late. I'll not tell you where they are, or which is which, 'cause it's none of your damn business! One thing you don't hear on the cut as presented by John is the non-musical intro, the "Whilst travelling through this unfriendly world" thing. When we made the album, we had been hearing rumors that Charles Brown had either died or was just about to. I came across this phrase on a compliation called GOD'S MIGHTY HAND - GOSPEL EVANGELISTS (Gospel Heritage HT CD 09, and a total mindphukk of a CD, btw). The track in question was cut in 1948, and features a brief singing segment followed by a preaching one. Sister Winn has a very "primative" style in both segments, and the recording quality is somewhat shrill and tinny, reflecting the condiitons under which it was both recorded and pressed, I'm sure. But that phrase stuck in my head and the band's (especially after the trip down...), so it was decided that we HAD to use it for the intro to this song. We had gotten the sample isolated and captured the night before, and presented it to the engineer during the mixing. I worked with him to get the speed slowed down, but with Sister Winn's pitch kept intact (the miracles of digital!). When we got that far, I asked him if he coud put some effects on it to make it sound like "a big but disembodied voice coming from the clouds", and if he could get the tempo of the spoken words in sync w/the tempo of the song, so a rhythm would be established by the words that would not be broken when the music began. "Sure, give me about an hour" was his response. So we all went off to a neighboring bar for beer, food, beer, some TV, beer, a few cigarettes, and beer. When we came back, the guy had it done. Not bad for a guy whose main gig, besides teaching his craft at the college in San Marcos (the college also owns the studio, which is a converted fire station) is being Willie Nelson's engineer. His name is Bobby Arnold, and he went from being downright perplexed at our music to being furious that we expected him to be able to figure ANYTHING out playing like we did, to digging it, to actually getting enthusiastic about the mix and post-production effects (a band that's 3/4 comprised of SERIOUS Beatle-heads HAS to play the "studio as an instrument" game at least a few times their first time out, even if we're otherwise all-accoustic) we insisted on doing. I'm not real crazy about the overall sound of the CD, my own sound in particular (I think LIVE AT THE MEATHOUSE captures all of our sounds more accurately), but I gotta hand it to the guy - after he got over the initial shock, he got on the team all the way. Well, that's it. Hope that's some decent enough commentary. Thanks again to everybody who dug the piece.

No comments on the whole Fibonacci sequence thing? Sounds interesting if true, but you know how some things take on a life of their own not based in reality.

People tend to be who they really are, intentionally or not, so some music is political & some ain't. But since people tend to be who they really are, intentionally or not, some listeners are political & some ain't. The combinations are nearly endless!