JSngry

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!

Six of one, apples and oranges of the other.

What's this string quartet thing? (Caveat - the following is totally an opinion piece, regardless of how "factual" in tone it is presented. Just want to make that clear up front) "We" used to talk back in the day about how Wynton would someday have to choose between classical or jazz if he ever wanted to be a "major artist" (yeah, I know...). well, it seems to me that he made the "wrong" choice, because the guy is (or was, anyway), an OUTSTANDING classical trumpeteer. Even more importantly, his whole aesthetic is cast from the "classical" mold - his ideas of tradition, "curriculum", repertoire, apprenticeship (ironic, given his comparatively breif time in that stage), playing the music as it "should be" played, playing down the significance and relevance of fresh thoughts and natural evolutions from "the street" when they come with perhaps less than total conventional technical proficiency behind them, these are all hallmarks of the CLASSICAL world, not the jazz world (at least not the one that I grew up in and around. Today, after 20 or so years of the Marsaillisian "big chill", that's a LOT more open to question...). That's not a dis either - the classical world is built on these very foundations, has been for quite a while, and those foundations serve them well in the perpetuating of a certain era and genre of European "art" music that deserves very much to be preserved. Questions/reservations about HOW this music gets performed, whther or not the goal of value preservation has become more important than music preservation (or to what extent asuch a seperation is possible) and/or whether focusing on preservation rather than keeping the tradition alive and vibrant through focusing on newer works and developements are another matter entirely, but those are questions that many have asked about Wynton's approach to jazz as well, and show yet again how he is, at heart, a CLASSICAL musician in mindset. For years, you heard the rallying cry that jazz was "America's Classical Music", a recognition that at its best, it was indeed "art" of the highest level, and that the music and its premier practitioneers deserved to be treated with the respect and acknowledgement inherent in such a designation. Unfortunately, this proved to be yet another case of being careful about what you ask for becasue you might just get it. I don't think that the idea in those days was to turn the music into a museum piece or an altar to be worshipped at, or to have it represent one specific and narrow set of musical and cultural values. Nor do I believe that the intent was to turn, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, the jazz musician into a "repertory player" in order for him to have a high profile career, to have "recognition" be granted for meeting preset criteria rather than for being an individual who succeeded in successfully bending those criteria to totally personal ends that still had a broader resonance . You want to know what's "wrong" with so much "straight ahead" jazz today, why it just doesn't seem to have the bite, the juice, the suck-you-in-and-not-let-you-loose quality of the older stuff, why there is SO much interest in reissues of that genre at the expense of newer releases? That's what it is - the music has become a "style", a vocabulary with strict parameters of content and execution, the goal of which is to EXECUTE within these parameters rather than to CREATE within them. A subtle, but enormous difference, if you ask me, and a concept that is TOTALLY "classical" in nature. Is it wrong to point the finger at Wynton for this change in the winds, this paradigmatic shift in the music we love so deeply? Maybe not - maybe as the music evolved towards less traditional (ie - "European") goals in both intent and execution it was inevitable that there would be, if not exactly a backlash, a REACTION from the sizable segment of the music community, players and listeners alike, who felt uncomfortable, for any number of reasons, straying too far from "home". I mean no criticism when I say that most of America, and that includes all races and occupations, of a certain age and older approach life (and by extension, music) inculcuated with a certain fundamental outlook that is "traditional" (meaning "European" & "Judeo-Christian") at root. Regardless of how far we might stray from those values, we still view them, consciously or not, as "home", our home base, the ultimate reference point when all is said and done. Nothing at all wrong with that, that is who we are, and to our ownselves we must be true. BUT - time marches on. New discoveries, musical, scientific, "spiritual" (this means different things to different people, but I hope there is at least a general understanding of what I mean), whatever, get made, and new cultural influxes occur in any society that is not totally isolated, willingly or otherwise. That is the very essence of life itself. As these cultural evolutions occur, "we" have the choices of either A) ignoring them (a failed proposition from the start, to one degree or another); B) looking upon them scornfully; C) acknowledging them and their legitmacy without getting into them to some (or any) degree (call it "live and let live" if you like); D) checking them out and incorporating whatever of them we find beneficial and stimulating and leaving the rest behind for those whom it DOES have use and relevancy; or E) abandoning all ties to our current selves and immersing ourselves in these new stimuli indiscrimately in hopes of finding something "new", something that will fill a void that we may or may not have felt all along and are eager to rid ourselves of at any cost. Well, E) usually leads to faddism and trendiness, so most "mature" people don't go that route, and only the most staid individuals choose A) on a regular basis, so that leaves us with 3 methods of confronting societal evolution with some kind of awareness and interaction. For me, depending on what's on the table, C) & D) are the most sane and sensible choices if one care at all about remaining fluid in the flow of existence. But Wynton and Co. seem to prefer B), the method of scorn and active dislike. Which is an honest enough decision, and one which again fits in PERFECTLY with so much of the "Classical" mindset. I can respect those who choose that route even though I disagree with it myself - there's something to be said for having such a strong sense of identity that you don't feel the need for any input from any soure other than what you already have, a deep sense of pride and a reservoir of all kinds of strength to draw upon that is more than adequate as it is, thank you very much. Where I get agitated is when people who make that choice go beyond preserving their own world and get into trying to stifle, destroy even, the newer worlds that are evolving as a matter of natural course all around them, and this, THIS, is what I feel that the "Marsalis Revolution" (or is that "Counter Revolution"?) has more and more come to be about - not JUST the preservation and glorification of a specific set of values (values that are actually quite valid, beautiful, and continuously relevant when stripped of any dogma), but also the suppression (perhaps even destruction) of values that come along that run counter to, or at least modify from without, those precepts held so dear by the "faithful" and the "natives". This too is very much in tune with a sizable segment of the "Classical" community - hearing tales of the battles faced when attempting to program 20th Century works by certain major orchestras, or noting the struggles of contemporary composers to get their works performed, even ONE time, informally, much less presented in a formal setting, is enough to convince me that there is a significant portion of that world that wishes nothing more than to "make it all go away", and by any means necessary, including starving/strangling/whatever the lifeblood/lifeline/whatever of those who would contribute something new. Jazz, a sizable portion of it anyway, has indeed become "America's Classical Music", but in the WORST possible way. If Wynton himself did not actually generate this turn of events, he certainly capitalized on it, and soon assumed leadership, daringly agressive leadership at that, of the movement that grew up around it. However, time is like water- you can't stop it, you can only stall it, and the last few years have seen begun to see a break in the damn. Perhaps just a small crck as of now, but you know how THAT works. Be it the increased interest in "groove" jazz of all degrees of "progressivism", or be it the renewed interest in "free" jazz, old and new, there are signs that the moves that Wynton made to stop what he saw as "deterioration" of "traditional values" will have perhaps served no other purpose than to have him set for life in a position where he reigns over a willingly captive audience of a certain age and older, an audience that will contain fewer and fewer (but, inevitably, some) young faces as the years pass. There's a whole present and future of people who are ALL about being "fluid" (probably to the extent of being detremental, but that's an evolutionary issue that will play itself out in its own due time). The LAST thing they're interested in is venerating and preserving the past as a fixed entity - for them, the past ,present, and future are all sorta the same thing (a perspective that, although most likely actually shaped by "digital reality", is also in tune with the "everything is everything" spiritual "discoveries" that Western society has had on its plate for the last 50 or so years, even if said society has treated it like the brussell sprout that they know they're going to have to eat if they want dessert but go through any machinations necessary to put off until the point of no return arrives). The "fact" that Wynton is so resolutely "Classical" in makeup, personally, musically, in every way, makes one wonder what would have happened if he had devoted his obvious passions and energies, as well as his undeniable technical skills, to the existing Classical world rather than using them to remake jazz in its image. Myself, I think he could have revitalized that whole scene, infused it with a distinctly "New World" perspective that it so desperately needs, and struck a blow for racial inclusiveness of potentially immeasurable significance. But it would have been a HUGE struggle, a battle of epic proportions that could have really, REALLY, taken its toll on him as a person. Nevertheless, had he survived and won (and I think he could have, had he the stomach for it), his triumph would have had the legitimacy, legitimacy of the deepest kind, that his "triumphs" in the jazz realm do not begin to have for many of us. No matter how hard, politically, socially, whichever way, Wynton had to work to get what he now has, it bears the stigma of having been "granted" by the graces of the cultural establishment rather than won against them, given TO rather than won FROM. You could say that, given the choices he's made in light of the battles he COULD have fought, that he took the easy (well, easier, anyhow) way out. That he didn't really pay all the dues that he could/should have, not in light of what his options were. That he took the path of least (ok - less) resistance when faced with reconciling his deepest, truest nature to the choices available to him, at the moment of truth that all people, especially people who aspire to be "creative" in a meaningful fashion, inevitably face sooner or later. That in the grand scheme of things, he "settled". And that, Dear Friends, is about as ANTI-jazz as anything I can think of!

This is the guy you need to ask..

Yeah, the Jamal trios with Israel Crosy and either Ray Crawford or Vernell Fournier (New Orleans Drummer Alert! ) pretty special. Funny thing - in the 70s, a lot of those albums were available in the cutout and used bins with great regularity. I nabbed a few, and have heard most of the rest. Other than a few overtly "commercial" things, it's good, often enough great, stuff, and it's current unavailability is indeed a Crying Shame. What about the earlier Okeh material - what's its status? I bought an old used Epic album way back when that contained some (all?) of that stuff, and find it every bit as good as the best Argo/Cadet material.

k.d. did a vresion of Porter's "So In Love" on the First "Red, Hot, & Blue" thing that was terriffic, and a live version on the Letterman show (a few nights after the airing of the RH&B TV special) that was stunning, full of the sultry melancholia that is often at the root of Porter's "best" songs but that most singers, for whatever reason, seem to overlook, and that the RH&B version only hinted at. Wish I had taped it.

Although it's been decades, literally, since I've listened to them, I remember enjoying HOT HOUSE FLOWERS (great, really intersting string writing) & BLACK CODES FROM THE UNDERGROUND (solid on all counts, imo) a reasonable amount. His first album was pretty cool too - I really dug the tunes and was willing to chalk the somewhat unformed/derivative soloing up to youth. J MOOD was the beginning of me getting turned off of Wynton. The quartet setting, and its lack of a contrasting front-line voice, called attention to what I began to see as the limitations of his playing (limitations that I had noticed in THINK OF ONE & FATHERS AND SONS (yes, I was actually INTERESTED in this guy at one time!)), and those limitations seemed increasingly to the fore with what I heard of his subsequent albums. Couple my growing disinterest in his playing with the anger I began to feel towards him at his pompous, B.S. pronouncements in the press (they really did get worse as time went by, it seems to me), and the whole "empire building" trip that he and his cohorts got into that for me pretty much brought the organic, ongoing evolution of jazz, as it pertained to the general public's perception, to a grinding, screeching, TOTALLY UNNECESSARY halt (and even tried, successfully so in some important business sectors, to set it BACK a few decades), a move that I felt personally from both a career and an esthetic standpoint, and the result is that other than J MOOD and the Vanguard set (which got a fair amount of airplay here, and caught my attention solely for the work of Marcus Roberts), I am totally unfamiliar with any of the albums on this list, and have no desire or intention to change that, probably ever. Sorry!

Nellie Lutcher, perhaps? She's Ravi Shankar's mother, you know.

I coulda swore it said "Seymour Butts"...

"Good one!", laughed Jesus. (LOVE this image, btw. Wish it were better know, or more accurately, taken to heart by my fellow C-Words... )

Dude, I'd rather eat lunch IN an O.R.!

FAST answers! More please! And somebody help a kid out - what's up with this "stabilization" business? What's that all about anyway? I don't get it.

Between Popeye'a, Church's, Golden Chick, Grandy's, Williams Honey Fried, and Babe's, I'll be DAMNED if I go to a KFC for fried chicken! But when I've been elsewhere, places where fried chicken was considered "ethnic" cuisine, as in either African-American, and/or Rural Southern, I'd prefer the flavor of OR but the texture of EC. Too many joints leave the OR on the mushy side, and that sucks. BTW, is it just a regional thing, or is it a national trend that the Big 3 PepsiCo-owned fast food chains are now cross-branding? We got various assortments of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut combiations all over the place here, and sometimes you can get all 3 under the same roof. The standalone, single brand, units of these chains is rapidly disappearing.

Do you leave your system on when it's not in use? I don't mean for a few hours or so, I mean like a day or two (or more). I've heard that this is actually best, since it avoids the "shock" of the initial power-on, and that it also allows the circuitry to "stabilize", whatever that means (eplanation anybody?). But what about the "wear", such as it is, of having a machine on non-stop, especially when it's not being used for a while? Anybody got the inside scientific skinny on this matter?

None that I could speak of, but the first few bars of "Up..." have changes that could pass for those of "Forest Flower", a not unthikable comparison considering how big a crossover success (by jazz standards anyway) Charles Lloyd in general and that album in particular were in those days. Jimmy Webb was certainly not one to avoid the "conventional", that's for sure!

Haven't bought this new release on Enja Justin Time yet, but it's been in heavy rotation on KNTU, and it's just a matter of time... Like Von Freeman's THE IMPROVISOR and Teddy Edwards' SMOOTH SAILING, DEEP IN A DREAM presents a more-than-veteran saxophonist in a program of straight-ahead material. More importantly, and also like those albums, the saxophonist in question has developed a totally personal expression, and sounds like nobody else. I've never DISLIKED Mariano's work, but neither have I felt compelled to really explore it either, his epochal work on THE BLACK SAINT AND THE SINNER LADY notwithstanding, so this album, what I've heard of it, comes as a bit of a revelation. This, ladies and gentlemen, is "straight ahead" jazz the way it doesn't get played very much these days - deeply, DEEPLY personal in every aspect (especially in Mariano's tone and articulation, which I think would be impossible for anybody to duplicate, and how many players of this type music on the scene today can you say THAT about?), full of thought AND feeling that go beyond the obvious into the sublime, and an overall quality that is at once serenely relaxed and constantly probing. In other words, this is music by an old guy (Mariano, according to AMG, turns 80 this year), and there is no "second hand" quality to his playing whatsoever. Indeed, aside from the aforementioned albums, it's been YEARS since I've heard "standard" melodies played so personally, or these type changes dealt with so organically, at least on a recording. If I say that Mariano here combines the tonal quality of Ernie Henry with the spontaneous phrasing of Lee Konitz, don't take that as a literal description, it's not. But it is the only comparative description that comes to mind to describe playing that really defies comparison. And talk about emotion - the first tune I heard off the album, without knowing who it was, was "I'm A Fool To Want You", a tune that is not to be trifled with if one wishes to get to its heart (Sinatra's WHERE ARE YOU version is the reference point for me, in many ways, and for many things). I was driving when this tune came on, and halfway through the first chorus, I had to pull over, stop the engine, and just listen, so powerful was the presentaion of the melody. I can't remember the last time that that's happened. The improvisation continued the story began in the melody and didn't go off into a lot of change-runnung, as is so common in the playing of ballads. This, I thought to myself, is a PLAYER, a musician of the highest order, one who actually DOING what most folks today merely attempt. When it was announced as being Charlie Mariano, I was more than a little surprised, but that's my bad, I suppose... The other tunes that KNTU has aired ("You Better Go Now", "Spring Is Here", and "Deep in a Dream") have all had the same quality, although my personal emotional attatchment to "I'm A Fool To Want You" no doubt is coloring my assessment of that tune as being the best I've heard so far. The rhythm section (Bob Degen, Isla Eckinger, & Jarrod Cagwin) is expert and sympathetic, but it is no dis to them to say that they're more effective as support to Mariano than as soloists and/or as a distinctive sounding trio. To get that, you'd have to have guys of Mariano's age and life experience, and how many of THOSE are around? Which, for me, is exactly why this music is so special - there just AREN'T too many guys like this around any more, guys who continue to grow and deepen in wisdom and feeling, and whose music does the same. In short, a rare and special presentation, at least what I've heard of it. Has anybody heard the whole thing? Is it all this good? Comments, please, if you have!

In a can, if you're Chef Boy-ar-dee (who, by the way, is the father of Frank O. Americanne).