JSngry

It's not. But when presented as such, I think that whoever does so is trying to make the point that there is "music" in everyday life. Sounds colliding in harmony/dissonance, individual rhythms interacting in interesting ways, all of it by chance, yet somehow there's an overall shape to it. I'd imagine that the presenters view it as a kind of "sensitizing" experience, an exercise in encouraging the listener to hear the poetry and music of their immediate surroundings. It's there, and quite often, it's delightful. The cool thing is, you don't have to buy it, send off for it, or otherwise look for it. It's just there. Always. It's free, and it's never the same twice. The ultimate improvisation. Having said that, though, since I figured this stuff out more than a few years ago, and since I'm still going through life hearing like this, it's the LAST damn thing I want to hear when I turn on the radio. (But it's NOT a bad idea at all to listen for the "music" in our daily activites. Really, it's not.)

Pat Patrick plays on A.K. Salim's AFRO SOUL/DRUM ORGY, a beautiful gem of an album on Prestige that has a fronline of himself, Yusef Lateef, & Johnny Coles playing over an African drum choir. Not likely to be reissued on CD anytime soon, I'd think, because of it's "eccentric" nature, but well worth picking up if you find it on vinyl. I saw Mario Rivera playing tenor w/a Tito Puente-led Latin Jazz All-Stars group in 1981, and he BURNED (among others in the band were Jorge Dalto & Andy Gonzalez. A very "avant-Latin" leaning band and a very great one). Ditto for the bari solo he plays on TIPICA '73 EN HAVANA, a salsa album on Fania. This is one interesting player that I have a hard time finding on records. But the cat is a serious player "deserving of wider recognition" as they say.

Ya'know, I don't know whatever became of Bruce Johnston, and I didn't care for New York Mary AT ALL, but he played some pretty spirited bari w/Maynard in the early 70s and gave a good showing on Braxton's Arista big band album, so i figure that anybody who can cover that much ground sucessfully doesn't deserve to be forgotten. Besides, he played bari to where it sounded like Gene Ammons. Gotta love THAT!

What Rudy needs to do is re-record the last sustained piano chord that is the end of "A Day In The Life".

No mention of Leo Parker yet?

Sounds like the facts to me, Bev!

Well, yeah. That doesn't say that he destroyed the tapes or anything like that, right? Just that he never sanctioned their release during his lifetime. Well sir, the Pablo album came out in 1976, so... Still, there is a grey area, isn't there? I'm inclined to believe that this is the recording that was pressed into that single petal of a rose (sorry....) if for no other reason than the band is WAY more in tune and together in their attacks and releases and dynamics and all that stuff than usual, which leads me to believe that this was a "special" recording session and not a "workshop" date. But I could be wrong. I do know this much though, I was ALL OVER this album when it was released, because I had Ben doing "Single Petal Of A Rose" in duet on one of those Impulse! DEFINITIVE JAZZ SCENE compilations that was long OOP, and other than that, I had heard nothing else from the suite. But that one piece was just SO beautiful and moving that I figured that the whole suite performed by the full band just HAD to be a mother. And when I bought the album, ran home with it, and playedit, I was not disappointed. When John McDonough gave it a 3.5 star review in DB and compared Duke's writing on "The Queen's Suite" to Henry Mancini(!), I just about got into the car and drove to Chicago to punch him out personally (you think I'm opinionated NOW... ). In a long list of flat-out ignorant Down Beat reviews, THAT one ranks in the uppermost echelon, to be sure. BTW, do the OJC liner notes reprint Dances' liner essay from the LP? In them, he tells of how Duke came to meet the Queen. Pretty funny (not laugh out loud funny, but amusing, nevertheless, I think) stuff.

Sure. I just take it for granted that when I somebody else talks about things like "depth" and "substance" that they're just expressing their own opinion (I know I am) an proceed accordingly, unless I get the impression that an edict from on high is being handed down, in which case I usually rebel, even if I agree with the opinion. I used to be real careful about adding "in my opinion" & stuff like that onto every sentence (or so it seemed), and still am sometimes, but these days I figure that we all know each other well enough that it pretty much goes without saying that for most of us, these are opinions being expressed as such, and not attempts at writing The Ten Commandments in jazz terms, if you know what I mean. I'll give you an example - Lon & I hold totally opposing viewpoints on latter-day Wayne Shorter. TOTALLY. But I've know Lon long enough to accept that, because I know him to be a great guy with a lot of knowledge and very acute ears. So if he's wrong about Wayne (JUST KIDDING!!! ), I respect his opinion, because I know it's coming from somebody with enough knowledge about and sensitivity to the music that he's GOT to have some good personal reason(s) for feeling as he does. Similarly, when I post really RAVE things about this stuff, he doesn't bust my chops on it, because I think he knows ME well enough to respect that I've got some deeply persoanl reasons FOR liking it. In spite of all the strongly expressed opinions masquerading as "fact" in these forums, I doubt that there's more than a handful of individuals who REALLY believe that their opinions, no matter how passionately felt or deeply informed, should pass as gospel for anybody besides themselves. They'd not last long if they did. Of course, everything I've just said above is STRICTLY my opinion, so...

I was under the impression that this WAS the original/only recording of the suite; that Ellington only had one copy PRESSED, but that this was the recording from whence that pressing sprung. Stanley Dance's LP liner notes certainly imply that, althought they don't say so specifically. No matter, it's a marvelous work, and the band, early 1959, is superb. A "must have" in my book.

Now available as

Pablo.

Great stuff, and a somewhat overlooked document in Trane's evolution. Well worth getting into, and at length. Some much music there.

Yeah, kids need to see that their parents are human too....

In many ways, my singlemost favorite Bari solo is the one that Fathead plays on Ray Charles' "Greenbacks". Not particularly "heavy" or anything like that in terms of chops or vocabulary, but a beautifully structured, organically balanced 12 bars that has a Zen-like perfection to it. If it were THAT simple, everybody could do it.

I know quite well what 'depth' and 'substance' mean to me, and offer no apologies for doing so. But I'd not be so presumptuous as to assume that that's what they should mean for anybody/everybody else. The cliche "you gotta stand for something or else you'll fall for anything" rings totally true to me, but so does "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Balancing those two premises is an ongoing, often frustrating, contentious, and perplexing struggle, but that's half the fun of it all, I suppose. "From the oyster comes the pearl", doncha know. Cliches - if they didn't already exist, we'd have to invent them!

It's all good to me, and I don't mean that as "cute" or anything like that. I listen to the spirit, not the style, and I find it all over the place, and not really concentrated in one particular era. Besides, I go through so many "phases" that it's almost schizo. Go on a Lester Young binge for a few weeks then straight to an Electric Miles obsession to a Sinatra-fest to a Bud Powell party to a Brian Wilson marathon whatever strikes my fancy next. Some people call it "eclectic", but I simply call it being a musical slut.

I'm glad that I still have new old players to discover (as well as YOUNG new players, of course), and Wilen seems like he's gonna be a fun one to get into slowly but surely.

Early Ronnie Cuber was a BLAST! The stuff w/Benson & Lonnie Smith, sure, but going back earlier, he had a feature on "The Lady's In Love" off of Maynard's COLOR HIM WILD album on Mainstream that is just a balls-out burnfest. WHOOO! I also got a video of him w/Lionel Hampton's band sometime in the mid-60s, on some TV big band dance show, and he stretches out on "Flying Home". Lemme tell you, that puppy ROCKS! The guy looks to be about 12 feet tall, weighing in at about 25 pounds, with fingers the length of well-fed tapeworms, and he is BLOWING, rocking the house in a totally hip fashion that finds (or maybe even INVENTS) the common ground between Illinois Jacquet & Pepper Adams. Lionel, never one to miss an opportunity to let a good groove go on and get mo'better, just lets him go, and go he does. Easily one of the best examples of bebop-inspired pure party music I've ever come across. But I guess the guy mellowed out, went into the studios, etc, you know the rest. What little I've heard of him over the last 25 years or so has still been good, but DAMN, when he was a kid, relatively speaking, he was a DANGEROUS motherfucker!

You're probably right about the Davis thing. I was really into a revolt against the hyper-brash recording quality of a lot of late-70s jazz records, being in full thrall of Blue Note/Van Gelder-mania, at least when it came to straight-ahead type stuff. But Charles Davis and "loose" are kind of synonymous if you know what I mean so I'll no dobt appreciate it a LOT more now than I did then. I think Iwas expecting a '50s/'60s type date, and that was just plain ignorant of me. I got the JAZZ IN PARIS thing w/Bags on piano, based on what I heard in Dr. J's Blindfold Test. Sounds like a REALLY good session.

If Free For All (or any other trombonist) reads this, I like to know what he thinks about what I view as Prieter's seemingly remarkable technical advances when he started playing "freer" music, from his time in Herbie's sextet onward. Seems to me that as a "hardbop" type player that he has some issues with the music, not always navigating the changes real fluently, but that when he started playing less "confining" music that he really blossomed into a really virtuoso player. It's almost like his "problems", technically speaking, were not so much a matter of his not having the greatest chops, but instead were a matter of not feely fully comfortable in that context, consciously or not. But I don't know. My buddy Greg Waits played that duet thing w/Sam Rivers for me this past weekend, and I gotta tell you - that's some SERIOUS playing by all concerned!

I have to think that "Early Morning Stroll" as heard on BREAKTHROUGH is properly titled. Seems like there was no opportunity for confusion there - Hank had the tune in for the session, and there was nothing else of his to confuse it with except the title tune, and that would have been almost unthinkable. Seems like the opportunity for mistitling would have been much higher on THE FLIP, where all the tunes were Hank's. Besides, I get the vibe from the music that THE FLIP might not have been the most tightly organized date in the history of Blue Note, if you get my drift so a transpostiotion of tune titles could certainly be understandable.

Lou vs Cannonball? That's apples and oranges. No, it's more like oranges and tangerines. Very similar but fundamentally different when push comes to shove. I like them both equally, more or less, but would never substitute one for the other, in either direction.

Damn straight they are!

That Davis Tadd thing was on West 54, the same short-lived label that released Slide Hampton's first WORLD OF TROMBONES album, and what else? I bought the Davis album in the 70s, didn't care for it, thought it was too loose, ragged, unfocused, whatever, and ditched it in about a month. But the Bastardinous ones at Dusty Guruve had a sealed copy for sale at a good price when I found that Wilen thing earlier this week, so it's coming back to me. I think I might have acted too hastily back in the day...