JSngry

Bud Tarp - Be Back Lately

I keep getting all my mail. What are they doing wrong?

What about that Capitol Jazz Sessions or whatever it was called.?

An abundantly balanced perfection.

Sonny Tufts Dave Tough Ohio Express

https://streeteasy.com/building/28_02-33-avenue-astoria/4

Thomas Henry Ball Gregory Peck Greta Kukkonen

The Thin Man Fat Girl Tom Waits

Suenell Closset - It's All I Have

A celebration of the season!

I can tolerate unevolved behavior, but I'm done excusing it under the guide of "artist". That's one of the cheapest and most degrading copouts of them all

https://www.3ammagazine.com/emissions/2006/mar.html

Maybe, yeah. Absolutism is the coming rage, don't be left behind. Two choices: Absolute Fan or Detractor.

a "missing chapter" perhaps? Unjust if so.

I like Phil Woods pretty much straight through until he came back to America. Something(s) changed then, and I found myself being annoyed by how he was playing. But just that stuff, not the earlier stuff. The difference is that he went from drunkenly yelling FUCK YOU KING OF SWING to writing ripe emails about sunsets and O'Neil plays and wine making you a more authentic candidate to be a jazz musician. Quite silly stuff, and totally lacing the trenchant grasp of the succinct reality of FUCK YOU KIND OF SWING. His playing became equally ripe. He was just being true to himself, I suppose. So if that makes me a "detractor", even though I still find a great deal of his work enjoyable, so be it. It's the Age Of Absolutism anyway, so why not this too?

Define "detractor".

That was the point. That was always the point. If he could play today, it would still be the point Tell you what - forget about RCA and go to the Alfie record. Nobody had or could think like that, much less play like that, before or since. People talk about Coltrane's "quest", and indeed it was. Figuring out the cosmos is no small task But the quest of Sonny Rollins is just as daunting, if much less glamorous - to find out not just who you are, but how much More of you there is. No sense in fighting the Milestone wars yet again, but there are moments on there that tell us that he never stopped finding more there, even if he didn't want to make a record about it. And funny as it might seem, the first person I heard that I could tell had definitely been paying attention to 60s Sonny was Henry Threadgill, explicitly on the Air Lore record. That shit had me LOL-ing, like FINALLY!!! But you know, who can really play like that. This is the age of Xerox Jaxx and still nobody can do it. It's too damn hard, not just to play, but again, to even THINK. So, what is that "thing"? That "thing" is Sonny Rollins. He'll tell you that it's all about God, and sure it is, but it's about God as found by, though, and in Sonny Rollins, over a lifetime of doing the work and staying the course and learning how to keep his soul together along the way

and here's another one.

Yeah, I TOTALLY backed into an LP of it, one of the very first jazz records I had. There was a local "music store" (i.e. they sold pianos and would order sheet music when asked. In my litte town. They must have been in the RCA Record Club or something at one point, because they had this little raggedy rack of LPs, and there was this one and then the Benny Goodman Moscow date, each for $3.98. It wasn't until getting out into the real world that I found out just how scarce those RCA Rollins records had become. This had a direct impact, I believe, on how little tenor players of my age knew of this period of sonny's playing, which is, as I've said, a peak achievement of song-form improvisation. I got to college, and everybody was like TRANE!!!LIEBMAN!!!GROSSMAN!!! ETC!!!! and I was like, uh, sonny? Oh, sonny was good in the 50s, but that's it. And I was like, ok, between this one RCA I got and these impulse! records, I'm pretty sure that's NOT right... Etc. not to bore with the memories, but a culture that was even then beginning to depend on records to shape its awareness of "the big picture"...I think it's worthat least a little bloviation every once in a while. I mean, now, NOW, JUST now, people are starting to reevaluate all this, maybe Sonny WAS into a thing ALL his own after all, even on the Milestone records. But hell, what is this, 2022? That's a helluva long time for lightbulbs to come on, if you ask me. Oh, about LPs back in the day, on a LOT of turntables back then, you could get a side to just play over and over and over until you stopped it. the thing tracked out, the arm would pick up and then go back to the beginning and so forth, until you stopped it. Back when I didn't have a whole lot of records and something would get good to me, I'd just let it go like that, sometimes for days on end. Shut it off to good to school, turn it back on when I go home, keep it going all night while I slept, the whole thing. Turned it down so it didn't bother the folks, but yeah, you could do that, so why not do it?

Believe me, if you had the LP (and maybe you do?) The Side 1/Side 2 ratio would likely be, like 50-1, at least.

Yeah, Clapton was "blues" for white people. His racist rant doesn't seem to be out of place in the overall esthetic.

Yeah, and that's on Side One. Right after "If Ever I Would Leave you" which is also SO good. People keep trying to advocate for it, and I get it, everybody wants it to be that good, some people need it to be that good. But it's like the RCA equivalent of a slightly-ok Milestone record, yeah, it's not at all bad, but is it everything you want of it? Not at all. It's a bit "reigned in", and even if that was the intent...sorry about that.

Yes, it is that good. Just a bit hyper, perhaps, but those were the times. It's not at all stupid about it.

Exactly. Except...I had a piano-playing roommate whose girlfriend heard "Brownskin Girl" one time and then he had to learn it and play it at every gig of his or else he didn't get laid that night. But otherwise, yeah. Exactly.