JSngry

An earlier CD issue of IN THE BEGINNING. Different title, but still Muse.

B.B.'s 78. He sits to perform now. But the voice and guitar chops are still 100%, even if he shares the solo duties with two other guitarist. Bobby Bland is 73, and is still Bobby Bland, thank God. The body moves slow, but the voice is intact. Amazing. I'm glad I went. These guys are icons and ain't gonna last forever,

B.B. was in Dallas Monday night w/Bobby Bland. It was a really good show.

Hell, I'd even buy an album of outtakes...

You may very well be right. I just keep having visions of stuff like that series in the late-70s that Lionel Hampton did for the Giants Of Jazz label. That stuff seemingly turns up in every budget rack in America, always ion different labels. Same thing with those Midem concerts and the Wynton w/Blakey 2 Bubba's. Staples of the budget bins, they are, and on countless different labels. I don't even mean to imply that they don't dig Horace. No doubt they do. I'm just saying that if the rumors are true and Horace is not doing too well these days, the question, "do we give him a deal?" always has the answer, "Sure - worst case scenario is we get his very last session. No fan's collection will be complete without it." How many times have you looked through a budget bin inhopes of stumbling across something really unusual, see the name of a familiar artist, and get your hopes up only to find that it's the same old stuff being repackaged for the umteenth time? "Horace Silver" would certainly be a name that would get my attention, and if I didn't have the material, or if I was a newbie who had heard the name but not much more, I'm spending 5-6 bucks and getting the side. I guess what's really making me cynical is the rest of the label's website, especially their "news" section, which is a collection of press releases and photos, none of which convince me too much that this is not an operation that is more about "product" than anything else. Of course, there's nothing really wrong with that at all. But I'm still leary that there might be a movement afoot to capture some of the legends' last gasps in a manner that does not honor their true stature. For instance, if the way Max Roach sounds on that recent thing he did with Clark Terry is the way he always sounds these days, I'd just as soon he never make another record. Hell, I wish he hadn't made THAT one. Sometimes I get all positive about documenting some folks up until the very end, but sometimes I think it gets kinda ghoulish. Depends on where my head is at. Right now it's in the "let it go" mode, but a month or so from now, it might not be.

WHOA! Nobody said anything about Horace being exploited. By all accounts, the guy is a damn good buisinessman, and I don't worry about him getting the short end of any stick. That's not what I meant at all. What I'm cynical about, based on the look and feel pf the company's website is why they gave Horace a deal, not the deal itself. Wasn't it Bob Weinstock who said something about the function of a jazz catalog being to reissue it (what's the exact quote?). I'm only saying that even if Horace might be fading due to age, and even if the album he gives this company isn't on a par with his past legacy (legacies, really, given that his "Unioted States Of Mind" and beyond work is a legacy unto itself seperate from the one before), these guys will probably be glad to have it, because it will be fodder for countless cheapo CD issues for years to come. They can lease and lease and lease. Or form countless cheapo labels themselves. Coming soon to a Flying J near you! That's a cynical viewpoint, but until I'm proven wrong... But no, I didn't mean to imply that these guys are trying to screw Horace or anything like that. Horace ain't gonna let himself get screwed, you can bet on that.

King Heroin - neither my favorite king nor my favorite JB cut.

Well, quality and obsurity issues aside, look at it like this. Let's say there's an album that you'd like to have for either sentimental reasons or for one or two cuts. but no way in Hades do you want the entire album. So what makes more sense - getting a decent condition used LP for 5-6 bucks (or less), or spending twice as much (or more) for a CD? Especially since you can burn the prefereed cuts to CD if the convinience factor is indeed an issue. Live better for less, I say.

Ewe gotta be kid-ing me, he said sheepishly.

Oh yeah, I love it. But as far as "favorite Ornette from the 70s" goes, I dunno. You got SCIENCE FICTION, DANCING IN YOUR HEAD, AND CAPTAIN BLACK in a menage-a-trois of aural pleasurements, with SOAPSUDS and BODY META ready to do the-tag-team thing. Like I said - it's ALL good to me!

Dude, a goat's gonna reek, no matter what. Might as well make it smell like Joe Namath in 1968.

That's the cat that did "Abeline", a song that many non-C&W buffs might recognize.

If the Ben Webster box comes like this...

JSngry, thank you... You're welcome. That's my "serious" answer in an otherwise humerous thread. Life o'the party, I am!

Can't we all just get along? What abou Chicken Ala?

Dude - I misread "babes" as "babies" and thought that to be REALLY good advice.

Happy Birthday to a totally wack (in the GOOD way!) cat. May "quality vs quantity" be a quandry you never have to face.

The cynic in me (which was greatly fueled by reading the rest of that label's "news" section) wants to think that DH1 Studios is thinking long term, that if they get Horace Silver's last album(s) that they'll have a commodity that they can make money off of, through either leasing or releasing, for decades to come. Somebody's ALWAYS gonna want them to complete their collection, ya'know, regardless of how good they are or aren't. That PR photo kinda reminds me of vultures circling an old lion, just waiting for the signal to dive in. But that's just the cynic in me. The optimist in me says that these guys really dig Horace and want to give him every opportunity to create in splendor works worthy of his true greatness. You GO, optimistic self!!! GO!!!!!!! You're gonna be right ONE of these days!!!

Personally, I have a hunch that "harmolodics" is a combination of real, practicable theory, genuinely inspired genius, and a bit of smoke blowin', depending on who's doing the interview. It's a good "tag" to put on an ohterwise "untaggable" (and therefore more difficult to market) music, and it does make for a good theory as far as the relationships of group dynamics, but the actual explanations of the specifcs (like that Harmolodic Clef in the booklet to the Captain Black LP) start getting REALLY vague, to put it mildly. So I give a sly wink of the the "angle" eye to Ornette for the whole Harmolodic thing, while at the same time I give him my unabased awe and unconditional love for the actual music. Having said that, the FIRST demonstrably "harmolodic" passages on record might be the written parts on FREE JAZZ. Go back and read Ornette's commentary on his approach to those, and you see the roots of what he's talking about in Harmolodicism in perhaps its root form.

You don't recognize Mark Furman and Rodney King?

So what's the deal with Jack Wilson and these cuts that match the timing of somebody elses's performance of the same tune? Have we uncovered a NEW type of evil here? Seriously, who the hell let Leroy Vinnegar(!) get away with playing so far out of tume? I'm actually relieved that it's not an Ahmad Jamal cut. Couldn't imagine Jamal letting something like that slide. But it does show you the pervasiveness of the Jamal/Red Garland esthetic in it's time, how that was "the way to play" for a lot of players. Who is Don Wilner? Any relation to Hal?

Maybe it's just me,but I thoought that this was the funniest line in the whole piece.

Nobody has a dream?