JSngry

As opposed to what?

This is the best I could find online. Sorry... mine's (much) bigger (again) And better! Thanks!

What's the reason?

Getz had his own blues, DEEP blues. He didn't need to play anybody else's. Guess it took him a while to fully accept that...

From what I've heard on KNTU, it's good, but you could go your entire life never hearing it and it wouldn't be any different than if you did. The only Carter sides I've made it a point to pick up are the two w/Joe Henderson (ALL BLUES on CTI & PARADE one Milestone) & UPTOWN CONVERSATION on Embryo. His BN thing w/Golson, (STARDUST, was it?) was pretty good too. Not GREAT, but pretty good. Hate to pick on the guy, his playing speaks for itself. That's his blessing and his curse, I suppose, depending on which album you hear...

No Dude, I tell you - IT'S THE MOTHER SHIP!!!

This is the best I could find online. Sorry...

Totally agreed, Mike, and I'd add SAY IT LIVE AND LOUD, a monster live gig recorded in 1968 in beautiful downtown Dallas, and another of the Chronicles series, DEAD ON THE HEAVY FUNK 1975-83. The latter is REALLY uneven, covering as it does the years where Brown really seemed to lose his way and DEFINITELY lost his commercial appeal. But even though it takes 8 years to get 2 CDs worth of good stuff (compare that to the other sets), the best of this stuff is not to be trifled with. If you do vinyl, and if you get REAL lucky, you might find SOUL ON TOP, a late 60s collaboration between JB & the Louis Bellson Orchestra, w/arrangements by Oliver Nelson. This bad boy is a GROOVE, the occasional silly number notwithstanding. Yeah, it swings, and Oliver's charts are NOT throwaways. Also on vinyl only (afaik) is TAKE A LOOK AT THOSE CAKES, which is partially covered in the DEAD ON...Chronicles set, but is really worth having on its own if you can find it. Some heavy grooves going on there, and it sounds like it ws recorded live in the studio just like the good stuff of yore. Classic cover, too...

Exactly! That's why it's such a gut punch emotionally. There it is, as raw as it's ever been. But what is "it"? THAT'S what got me to thinking, after I recovered from that gut punch. And that took a good long while. Brown was deep. Maybe an "idiot savant" of sorts, if you want to believe what some of his ex-sidemen say, not literally, just figuratively. But the deepness of the savant far outweighed the shallowness of the idiot, at least for a good long time.

Well, the cynic in me says that playing into the Blue Note Mystique is more important than accurately portraying the era the music was made, but I try not to listen to that guy too much. But I will say this - if HEAVEN ON EARTH ever gets reissued singly, they'd better LEAVE THE COVER ALONE!

Well, honestly, I don't dig Ellis all THAT much. But I dig him MORE when I think of him as a Western Swing player. Not a knock on him, he's an "honest" player, just my personal tastes. I don't DISlike him ever, I just tend to turn elsewhere for jazz guitar. But I don't scream in horror when I hear him either, if you know what I mean. OTOH, I'm quite sympathetic to complaints about Getz' playing from this time. Seems like he was either sublime or ridiculous, and it was a crapshoot as to which it was gonna be on any given date. Lots of times it sounds to me like he was just role-playing - blues on demand, if you will. Again, just the way it strikes me, and I WILL leave the room, if not screaming in horror, when this type of Getz comes on. For the other kind, I will CLEAR the room if I have to in order to have it all to myself without distraction. It would be really easy to blame Norman Granz for all this, but myself, I tend to blame Oscar Peterson, even if that's cliched and over-simplistic. Somehow, it seems to fit. Twangity-splangity-fleep-floop-doo. Leave no third or fifth unflatted and/or unbent, it's the house rule. But anybody ever says a bad word about Roy Eldrige, even his "excitabilty", well...God'll get ya' for that, Walter!

What Hampton Atlantic is there that Collectables hasn't yet put out?

Chuck, Lester was one who should know, eh? Fred Wesley's memoirs have been published just recently. Highly recommended, and worthy of a thread of its own. Tomorrow, perhaps... The '67 JB band? Maceo, Clyde Stubblefield, PeeWee Ellis, Waymon Reed, Jimmy Nolan....yeah, they WAS bad!

Screw my essay, assign the RECORD!

So waht's the deal - are the Skins coming together ahead of schedule or did Atlanta just get stungunned and not wake up in time?

So Maren - who was your fave Raider?

As a rule, I enjoy Herb Ellis more when I think of him as a REALLY hip Western Swing player than as a jazz musician. An irrelevant distinction, perhaps, but it puts that very real twanginess into a better, more listenable, perspective for me. Barney Kessell's from Oklahoma too, shares a lot of common roots, but he sounds a lot more "pure" jazz than Ellis ever did. Just an observation, not a value judgement one way or the other. So, like, was Herb Ellis a pioneer of Fusion in this regard?

Arno, you're the real deal. PLEASE feel free to contribute your opinions, recollections, whatever on this board as often as you see fit. I'm sure I speak for all of us in this regard!

Probably the 2CD set that JoeG mentions. Uneven, as were those years, but enough killer stuff to make it worthwhile, and then some. Good liner notes too. You can get the actual THERE IT IS album on CD, but I don't know but that the amount of filler on there ends up making it less of a value than the 2CD set in the long run.

Now that could be VERY interesting, even if Al Jackson is no longer with us. Teenie Hodges on Blue Note, maybe? Oh HELL yeah!

I'm telling you man, it won't post well. VERY subtle, VERY minimalist. You have to see it firsthand. And even then, you might not dig it. Many people don't.

Oooops, sorry. My bad. The LT series was the "survivor" of the mid-70s "Blue Note Reissue Series", a set of twofers that began with some conventional "best of" sets, but quickly evolved into primarily, but not exclusively, a means to get previously unissued sessions (as well as heretofore long OOP obscurities like the Herbie Nichols stuff) into public circulation. As the 70s wore on, and BN's pop/jazz roster all got snapped up by other labels (mostly Columbia, it seemed) without being replaced, these things got less practical financially, and the reissues soon began coming out in single disc form, with the LT prefix in their catalog number. A LOT of great stuff came out as LTs, but Cuscuna has admitted that his philosophy by that time was to get as much out as quicly as possible before the powers that be pilled the plug. So not a lot of money was spent on artwork and such. The covers all followed the same format - one photograph inside a white field, with the artist's name in bold fond, and the ablum title, in smaller, regular font, above the photo with a thin graduated grey stripe forming a border for the title and the photo. Another, wider graduated grey stripe ran across the top of each coverIt was cheap and functional. These albums are sometimes refered to as the "rainbow series" too, becasue there was a diagonal rainbow pattern running across the top left corner of each one. Actually, the series was officially labelled "Blue Note Classic", but nobody calls them that anymore. Now, I LIKE these covers, by and large. Like I said, they're cheap and minimalist, but the photos used are often QUITE evocative. The one used on Andrew Hill's DANCE WITH DEATH is quite simple (like a lot of them are) - it's a color shot of one red high heel shoe in a shrub. But it's a night shot, the lighting like it's from a flashlight a few yards away (like somebody, a detective perhaps, is about to discover this wayward shoe but hasn't just yet), and it's a pretty kinky shoe, actually - VERY red and VERY high heeled. It's a spike heel in fact, a VERY sexy shoe. The image is very "noirish", even though it's in color, and dammit, it TOTALLY fits the mood of the title, "Dance With Death". You got some heavy Raymond Chandler vibes going on here - flirtation, seduction, sex, murder, a lone shoe found in a bush as a remnant, all that stuff. A Reid Miles "tribute" cover just won't give you that. Which, like I hope I've made clear, is just fine. I just think the LT covers get a MUCH worse rep than they deserve. The uniform look was no doubt economically driven, but it also gave the series a distinct look, alook that made it clear that these were NOT "regular" BN albums, that these were different, that they were coming out for the first time (mostly, a few actual reissues came out as LTs, but very few) in their OWN series, and I liked that. Still do, in fact. An LT cover adds to the historical perspective of the session having sat in the vault for however long before being rescued in a definite way that a "lookalike" cover doesn't, and I think that it's good to have that point in your mind. Not while listening to the actual music, of course, but when thinking about how things played out in the Blue Note saga. Maybe it's the uniform look to the series that turns many off. This I can understand. But the individual photos are often worthy of a closer look, imo. Geek talk, all of this is. But hey - I AM a geek!

Another hint - it was a "theme song" for a long running radio series. [add edit] Oh great, the site's not up now. It was this morning. Damn. Ok, it was the sound of the "Monitor Beacon", from NBC Radio's weekend Monitor series. I found this site last night, and it's full of sound clips from that great series, including a REALLY funny Nichols & May bit. Oh well...

Al Green on today's Blue Note? Now THAT could be interesting!

Hmmm 38, eh? Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway, but usually too busy (and therefore too tired) to bother. The key word being "usually"... PERFECT! Happy birthday buddy!