JSngry

Bob probably wrote it disappearing cyber-ink...

Hmmm...when I think "Blue Note Sound". I think soulful, bluesy (concrete AND abstract) music that was very much of its time, sometimes reflecting it, sometimes defining it, yet music that also continues to sound fresh today. When I think of pianists who defined that as the label's "signature", I come up with two names, pianists whose work laid the foundation that all the others built upon and examined the various components of in myriad different and personal ways: Albert Ammons & Meade Lux Lewis.

STRONG seconds for this one, Randy. HELL yeah! "Save Your Love For Me", "Happy Talk", & "The Old Country" were staples of AM jazz radio in these parts for years, and when we had that kind of programming on a 7-day basis, these tunes got ingrained into my subconscious, the same way any "hit" does. Unlike the kind of hit where you eventually get to hate it and try to erase it from your memory, these tunes's appeal only grow stronger as the years pass. Great stuff - timeless joy and eternal soulfulness in action.

Short answer? Because most people have a poor sense of history beyond what happened yesterday, and tend to think and react totally in terms of the here and now. Doesn't matter HOW we ended up segregated by race (well, of course it matters, but you know what I mean in this context...), if that's all people know, and all that their parents, grandparents, etc, knew, then the assumption that race is the definition of "our kind" will most likely go unchallenged by the vast majority of any group until circumstances force a confrontation with that "conventional wisdom". We saw (and still see) the "our kind" principal at work in the waves of immigrants over the last century, including those of today, and it never really goes away. For example, ask Catesta if he doesn't feel a slightly special bond with other Italians (at least initially), and remember also that these immigrants were often victims of cultural discrimination upon their arrival in America, and that members of those groups who still retain a lot of "old country" identity are much less likely to be percieved as "normal" Americans (unless they pimp it out for show biz purposes). I see nothing wrong with this bond based on ancestral national origin- it's a level of the whole "family" dynamic at work, I'd say, and a cheerful recognition of a shared cultural heritage is certainly nothing to shy away from in and of itself, is it? It's the foundation we all draw upon as we go forward, and if we acknowledge the deathly effects of slavery on erasing several generations of African-Americans' collective cultural identity, are we not the equally acknowledging, at least implicitly, that the identities that other cultures have, share, and celebrate are good things for them to have? Of course, we are ALL family at the end of the day, but forces over the centuries have "conspired" to cloud that fact in our collective minds, destroy it even. But things play out in such a way that The Truth cannot be hidden forever, and as our world becomes smaller, and isolation inceasingly difficult, if not impossible, the fallacies of the past will inevitably be put to the test and found wanting by the portion of the population that is interested in TRUE survival. Those who speak of the "preservation of the race" (regardless of what that race may be) are kidding themselves - races can never be totally destroyed, but species damn sure can!

Depending on who you believe, Beethoven.

OK, here's a devil's advocate typ question for those who proclaim an aversion to vocal jazz, or singers in general: How much of your dislike do you think is reflective of a desire to somehow be "seperate" from the world of Popular Music, where, after all, vocals rule. Do you think of jazz as a citadel of superiority, a domain where virtuosity, seriousness of purpose, and sophitication (in the good sense) rule and there's no room for the infiltration of something tainted with the possiblity of commoness as a singer, somebody who reminds us of the song's (and therefore the music's) roots in a world FAR less rarified than the instrumental jazz world? A devil's advocate question indeed, but one I ask without some slight degree of seriousness, because the ethos described above is one that I myself once shared, not fully, but to a fairly significant extent. I didn't want to hear "just" the song dished out by a singer, I wanted to hear something done with/to it by an instrumentalist. I wanted to hear the song made better than it really was! :D Wellsireebob, I kinda grew out of that (or more accurately, am GROWING out of that). I still don't care for a mundane singer, and probably cut them SLIGHTLY less slack than I do a mundane instrumentalist (otoh, I've been digging this thing they've been playing on KNTU by JOANIE FREAKIN' SOMMERS, and digging it pretty hard for God knows what reason, so maybe I've crossed the line and need to be shot before it gets any worse...), but for whatever reason, I've become quite attracted to the resonance, physical and emotional, of a good voice communicating directly, without the in-between of an instrument. It is a deeply personal matter, no doubt, but when, for example, Shirley Horn sings "Goodbye" on I LOVE YOU PARIS and hits that wavering climax, it grabs me in a way that I don't think that ANY horn player could. Not better in any way, but most certainly different, and unquestionably REAL and unambiguously DIRECT, the objects of our game, indeed! So never say never, Dear Friends - it could happen to you too!

Sorry, not familiar with Roberta Gambarini. Where can I hear her? As for Torme, I'm not a fan, actually. Great, GREAT chops, totally agile with a great ear, but the emotional "tone" of his work just doesn't reach me at all. My problem, no doubt, because the guy's skills are undeniable. Somebody mentioned Ella too, and this is a sticky one for me, because I'm slowly but surely going from "like" to "love" with her as an interpreter. but her scatting is something I am very much on a "case by case" basis with. She comes out of a strong Swing Era bag with it, and can throw down pretty nifty in that vein, but sometimes it seems to me that seh goes for effect more than content when she scats. Again, that's no doubt my problem entirely, but that's just how it hits me. But GOD what an instrument she had, one of a kind. With scatting, like so many other things, Louis Armstrong set the standard, and as easy as he made it sound, he did it with such a totality of musical sophistication AND emotional naturalness that he actually set the bar INCREDIBLY high, at least as far as I'm concerned. Now, somebody who was an INCREDIBLE scat singer was Eddie Harris, but he was a freak anyway.

I respect her abilities, which are undeniable, but what she does with them has yet to appeal to me personally. For that "wordless vocal" thing (or even "that thing" WITH words) to work for me, the context has to be JUST right, and rightly or wrongly, I'm pretty damn finnicky. Two examples that spring readily to mind are both Ellingtonian - Adelaide Hall on ' Creole Love Call' & Kay Davis on "On A Turquoise Cloud". What I meant by horn-like was the improvisational language that a soloist uses, a language that as the music became more technically involved became less vocalistic in terms of actual vocabulary (although not in terms of inflection and tonal quality). The practitoneers of vocalese, notably the great Eddie Jefferson, could sing the actual lines the horn players played (with words no less!), which besides the often daunting speed of execution required often involved some harmonic play that was decidedly non-diatonic in nature, and therefore a bit more demanding for the average singer who dealt mostly with melodies that were usually not too chromatic or harmonically altered, or if they were, not done so at the speed of an instrumentalist's improvisation. But I don't know of too many vocalese singers who could actually improvise in the manner they sung other people's solos. Jon Hendicks is definitely one who can/could, although most of his recorded work is in either the traditional melodic mode or the vocalese bag (yet another indicator that, important, invaluable even, as they are, records are an incomplete documentation of the totality of this music) - I think he began as a tenor saxophonist, and it shows. Betty Carter had the harmonic ear for it, but she had her owm deeply personal bag, and scatting in the traditional sense wasn't really what she was all about. But DAMN did that lady have an ear!

Oh man, I played Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1981 with a touring hotel show band (remember when they had those?) that was 50/50 Black & White. We got STARED at constantly for the two weeks we were there, and little kids actually wanted to touch the Black folks' hair. Apparently, they had never seen a real African-American in the flesh, and many of the adults had gotten so used to not being around anything but White folks that the presence of people of color jarred them a bit. Can't say there was any hostility, because there wasn't, but you could definitely tell that the local citizenry was taken aback. With the same band, I played two other stints that proved to be pretty interesting, albeit after the fact. The first was in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where a 3 week engagement became a 1 week engagement, and, without some heavy-duty legal threats from our agent, a 1 NIGHT engagement. Seems that unbeknownst to any of us (until after we left town), Uniontown was a Klan stronghold (so don't nobody think that that's just a Southern thing...), and they were leaning on the hotel management to get us out of there ASAP. The other was in Coer D'Alene, Idaho, where we played out the contracted length of the engagement, but for some reason felt a really "funny" vibe everywhere we went. Well, come to find out (again, after leaving town) that the Aryan Nation was just beginning to make a splash in nearby Haden Lake, and nobody was really sure just WHAT was going to happen. It would have been nice to have known about this beforehand! But then again... It was also in Coer D'Alene that I got to hear some of the most purely soulfull music I've ever heard in my life. We were on break on a Friday night, and walked through the hotel towards the banquet rooms, where we heard a C&W band playing one slow tearjerker after another, with a pedal steel player who was just CRYING like nothing I've ever heard before or since. When the moment seemed oportune, I opened the door to the room to see who this guy was. To my surprise, it was a 40-something looking African-American male wearing a cowboy hat, jeans and boots, looking and playing like this had been what he had been up to his entire life (and, it being Idaho and all, it probably WAS!). Well, I thought, being a Black pedal steel player in Idaho would certainly give ME something to play about, but after hearing a few weeks later about how the Aryan Nation was coming into its own, I realized that, as moved as I was for those few minutes, I had probably grasped only a fraction of what this cat was getting across in his music. The thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong or evil with races and/or cultures sticking together naturally for social reasons. People DO tend to feel more comfortable with "their own kind", it's a perfectly normal characteristic of human nature, I think, going back to our earliest tribal days. The only time it becomes a problem is when the desire to stay together runs up against the need to intermingle (and that need might come about for any number of reasons), and the desire to stay together turns from a comfort and a pride into a hatred and an irrational fear. Civilizations evolve as a matter of couse, and homogeninity (sp?) cannot help but become a bad thing after a while, especially when the opportunity to have "new blood" introduced is consciously resisted. Joe Zawinul once said that if incest is the surest way to weaken and destroy a people, then it follows that the surest way to strengthen them is to engage in interracial/intercultural bondings, literally and sybolically. That maight seem like a typically grandiose Zawinullian pronouncement, but as the "Global Villiage" (itself a not-too-long-ago "new" notion) continues to shrink to what will probably be a "Global Patio", it's definitely something to think about, and should not be dismissed out of hand. We're all going to have to figure out how to get along, and by any means necessary!

Happy Birthday, Baby (and at 26, I mean that with nothing but envy... )!

Might want to ask him how he hooked up w/Ron Horton. One story that I hear is that Horton heard Hill perform w/a band that was not cutting the material at all, so Horton, a huge fan and admirer of Hill's, volunteered to transcribe all his tunes and assemble a band who could execute the material cleanly. One thing led to another, and soon enough, DUSK was born. Like I said, this is just what I hear - you take these tales of "I saved Mister X from Fate Y" with a grain of salt (and no, I didn't hear it directly from Horton, just a good friend of his, so add another layer of healthy skepticism to the mix) and Hill might not tell it that way, but it WOULD be interesting to hear how it came to pass, and what role, if any, Horton has played in Hill's current public "resurgence". It might also be interesting to see if he has any tales about his years travelling under the aegis of the Smithsonian(?). I seem to remember him saying something about years spent "bringing jazz to places where they didn't usually have it", or words to that effect. This was in the years between LIFT EVERY VOICE and SPIRAL. I agree, don't push the "Blue Note Years" too heavily. Guys like this get asked questions like that ALL the time, and most of them have one form or another of stock answers that they deliver to people they expect to never see again, or rarely. Don't know if Hill's one of those guys or not, but it's true that most artists don't like to dwell too much in the past (unless that's all that's keeping them viable today).

Ah, Compost.. I've never heard them, in spite of years of trying to...

No takers? The things are really well put together audio-collages and wouldn't be at all out of place on SMILE, a Turtles B-side, or a Firesign moment of extremity. Pretty damn interesting if you ask me. NOBODY'S listened? C'mon...

Some tangental Jamal trivia to be found in this thread: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...=6&t=1364&st=0&

Oh well, you can't please all the people all the time, I suppose. C'est la vie... Myself, the main thing I really dug was the hookup between the drummer and the bassist, how the drummer combines the Clyde Stubblefield "Funky Drummer" bag with the Roy McCurdy "Mercy Mercy Mercy" concept and how the bassist and him really seemed to be of the same mind from beginning to end and get their groove on pretty effortlessly. I really feel 'em, and the more I listen to the cut, the more I REALLYfeel 'em - these two got it goin' on. The guitar solo was pretty flowing too, I thought, in spite of the dated sounding fuzz tone, and the distorted electric vibes...well, do distorted electric vibes EVER go out of style? :D Seriously, this thing's a reminder for me of what the very earliest "fusion" (well, it wasn't called that then. If it was called anything, it was called "jazz-rock") was all about - jazz players just looking for a different way to play. Like it or not, I think most would agree that this cut has a "swing", an innate "jazz quality", that most later fusion did not have. Now to the details - believe it or no, that's a Hoagy Carmichael tune! On an album originally released on Ahmad Jamal's own label! That pulls $400-$500 on eBAY! With John Abercrombie on guitar! It's a group out of Boston called Stark Reality that was led by vibist Marty Stark (who later went on to play ketboards on the BUCKINGHAM NICKS album), and the album is a CHILDREN'S album called The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop put together by Stark at the instigation of Hoagy's son Hoagy Bix for a series on Boston PBS. Besides Stark and Abercrombie, the players are bassist Phil Morrison and drummer Vinnie Johnson. Released in 1970 on Ahmad Jamal's AJP label, it's apparently become a Holy Grail for DJs and BeatHeads, and it really does go for 4-5 hundred. But that's about to change, probably, since it's just been reissued on Stones Throw. I found out about this the other night whilst breaking a self-imposed ban on trolling Dusty Groove (the bastards!) and saw this listed. For some reason, the blurb caught my eye, one thing led to another... Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to the clip , here's a photo of Stark Image in action: Here's a link to the story of this "Cult Classic": http://www.stonesthrow.com/starkreality/ And here's the original:

Hey, I'm cool with it as long as you guys aren't bass players on a gig with me. B)

A consistently engaging set that is always fun and quite often profoundly profound. Considering the principals, could it be otherwise? Definitely "essential", at least in my mind. AZALEA!

Or so claims http://home.teleport.com/~jfitz/music/oddb...allarchive.html I don't know about "strange", but there's SOMETHING going on here, and I think I like it. From the site, w/links to mp3 files provided Wee Willie Shantz Kings Bros. Trio Hush Puppy Hush http://jfitz.laughingsquid.net/audio/oddba...shPuppyHush.mp3 Wm. Shanks ©19?? Spot Pub. B.M.I.; (mono 45rpm Mark Twain (St. Louis 18, MO.) 79568) Coo Coo Bird http://jfitz.laughingsquid.net/audio/oddba...-CooCooBird.mp3 Sax. Leroy Harris Wm. Shanks-H. Dixon ©19?? Spot Pub. B.M.I.; (mono 45rpm Mark Twain (St. Louis 18, MO.) 79569) — Friends, you are in for a treat. This record is truly beyond description but I'll try. Can you imagine John Cage jamming with Negativland inside a moving boxcar full of victrolas... or perhaps an old backwoods codger, swigging mash whiskey from a facejar, has been working on these songs for 40 years and he finally got a chance to record them, but the only band he could find was a family of occultists who live at the junkyard. Anyway this record has it all -- prepared sound objects, recording manipulation, sing-speak vocal somewhere between nursery rhyme and shaman ritual, semi-aleatoric stringed instruments, and even a sublime saxophone solo. Even the handwriting on the label tells a story. I can see the original owner writing her name on the label, and then putting the record on her turntable. After listening for about about twenty seconds, she tears the record from the player and slashes two marks on the label, to remind herself "Never play this record again!" She then stores the record in the kitchen and uses it to grate Parmesan cheese. Eventually, after the grooves loose their edge, she props open the screendoor with it. In other words, the condition of this vinyl is saddening. Add that the recording session and process were very noisy and chaotic. However, I did digitally repair the worst of the vinyl damage. Just be prepared to "eat your fried mush", OK? If you know anything about Wee Willie Shantz and company, please contact me. I would love to learn any details. If you know a slab of vinyl stranger than this one, please contact me, because until then, I declare this to be The World's Strangest Record!

This is some cool shit! http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/stark/SR_Dreams.mp3

Allegedly recorded, allegedly still in the can, allegedly at Rollins' demand. Also allegedly in the can at RCA - hours, literally hours (some rumors have the figure in double digits) of unreleased stuff from the Villiage Gate/OUR MAN IN JAZZ dates, again being forbidden from release by Sonny's refusal. Lucille is likely to get some pretty interesting offers when the dark day comes...

Oh yeah - scatting. Most singers should leave it alone becasue they don't have THAT kind of musical knowledge. It's ok for a REAL Swing-or-earlier based singer to do some whompdidomps, but when you get somebody doing an otherwise "modern" presentation and all they can muster is a lot of repeated note blopdeblops or some really basic lickage, it's embarassing for all concerned (except, apparently, the singer...). You want to "sing like a horn player", then SING like a horn player, dammit! Learn some harmony, some theory, SOMETHING. Sing what a GOOD horn player would play, not what a hack would put out in a desperate attempt to get over. Jon Hendricks - now THERE'S a motherfucker who can (could, anyway) do it right. I caught him 3 nights out of a 5 night engagement in Albuquerque back in 1982, and each night he did "Stablemates", each night he scatted on it, and each night he did something different while doing so, improvising with the same harmonic awareness (including extensions, substitutions, and alterations) tonal shading, and rhythmic flexabilty and subtlety that a horn player would. No jiveass blipblopbloodies for this cat - he sung a solo, a REAL solo. Not too many singers can hit it like that, or even CLOSE to like that. But that doesn't stop them...

Something else that's been bugging me the last few years is the trend of marketing what are essentially "cabaret singers" as "jazz singers". I'll not name names, but you know the type - they come out all glammed up just oozing of "sophistication" and take us on a trip throught the Great American songbook, throw in a few "obscurities" just to reinforce their "sophistication", and they do it all with something resembling a jazz rhythm section and without a hint of any feeling for the lyric and/or the melody other than how impressed they are with themselves for singinging such "sophisticated" material. We are supposed to feel special for having the good taste to enjoy such a presentation. Nobody breaks a sweat or sheds a tear, except on cue. Hoopty Damn Doo! I'd be hard pressed to define exactly what "jazz singing" actually is, but much less so to define what it's NOT, and this ain't it.

OK, Phil might be a little, uh, "preoccupied" these days, and Vince's whereabouts are uncertain at best, so who better to ask than THIS guy who, through the abusiveness of THIS guy has the Mono experience every day of his life!