JSngry

He's said that it was something he wanted to try. You can say that about any number of other things that don't go well. There is one cut I kind of like, though, the one where he talks about people he's known. Otherwise, though...road to haell, etc.

It's on Blue Note, no less!

His last album for Blue Note turns Django tunes into dance music for the Post-Kamasi World, and succeed splendidly. I was as shocked as I was surprised! And pleased! Much to my surprise! His organ trio records also have a lot of the Rahsaan-esque playing described in the OP. I get that his "inside outside" thing can be annoying, and I don't know how much of that has really changed. But now that he's not on every 4th record that gets released anymore, and since he's seemed to shifted his repertoire to a more "populist" bent, I find myself enjoying him more now than I did then. Small doses effectively aimed, that sort of thing. No matter, for anybody looking for that "type" of playing, I think that objectively he more than qualifies.

Y'all don't ever listen to James Carter?

oh...my...god...so wrong, and yet so right...

I do recall there also being some Neal Hefti charts, published (by Kendor?) charts of "Cute", "L'il Darlin'", and some things he had written for Harry James, like "Teddy The Toad"..."boogaloo" stuff, none of it relevant to our age group, none of it post-BS&T. etc. But it was there.

Celestial love, indeed! John Gilmore in particular. And the saxophone section in general! and June Tyson, for finding all those in-between notes and letting them be right rather than trying to force them to be "right".

I don't know, I wasn't there, too young, didn't get to high school until fall of 1970, and we got a new band director who was a player himself. this guy wanted to get out there and let his best players play.. So, new charts, new rhythm section instruments, everything new, nothing from the old director's program. But there had always been "dance band" charts for student bands, some of which might have been ok"? Our school had a library of them from the previous band directors, and they were nothing to get excited about. Glen Osser is a name that showed up a lot, and he did charts for Johnny Mathis and the like, but there were just basic dance band charts, thigs to play for your parents and shit, like an Ozzie & Harriet gig. I forgot to add Gil Evans to the list of people who were making new records during the time, epic records, Section playing, I still enjoy section playing. done right, it's a utopian collective creation experience of a better/higher good. Not done right, it's borderline fascism and/or dehumanizing manual labor. But done right....yeah.

They were married!

Big bands were really easy for me to get into in the early 70s. There was a resurgence of the idiom, and almost all of it featuring updated material that reflected the changings of popular taste. Don Ellis, Gerald Wilson, the afore mentioned Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich...Count Basie still going strong with his "swing machine" groove (and with Lockjaw on the gig when I first saw them in 1970!), Stan Kenton, and of course, Duke Ellington...that Great Paris Concert album came out in either my freshman or sophomore year o high school, and one of the band geek bought it for Cat Anderson, but OMG, that's one of the great Ellington albums, period, forever and ever. Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, another one. All these people were alive and making new music, no reason to avoid it, it wasn't for jitterbugging, that's for sure! Then there were the "horn bands"...really just rock/pop bands with fancy arrangements for horn sections, but they fit well within the overall fabric of the time. A buddy of mine and me got into a tag-team game once, first one who could not come up with a jazz-roc and/or horn band, no matter how obscure or tangential, lost. The game went on a lot longer than either of us expected! Who won? I don't remember, but it was an epic battle, that much I remember! I was also part of the generation that began to reap the benefits of the "stage band" movement, where band instructors weren't afraid to talk about this music (well, the part of it they knew about), and actually give it to their students to play. Our band had real Stan Kenton charts, purchased directly from Creative World, and we mostly sucked at playing them...but we had the experience of how that music worked. And of course there was a huge incipient movement for student-appropriate charts by people like Don Sebesky, Benny Golson, John LaPorta, ao. It was a great time to be a kid with a horn and a hip(enough) band director. You were encouraged to get in there! Point just being that "swing" bands, yeah, that was my parents music, but by the time I began to engage with "big bands", it was a totally different landscape, one that was not at all retro...except that it kind of was, just because of the instrumentation. But it felt new, what with rock beats and electrical outlets for the bass and guitars and all that. And they were ALL touring, the college market was open and ready for business, Brubeck all over again. But I did catch the Kenton band playing an honest to god dance gig (after hearing them at 2-3 concert jobs), and the difference was...steep. But still, live big bands, playing for real people, paying customers, right there in front of you. Fun, that's what it was!

James Carter, especially with his organ group.

Joe Pesci sings, apparently. I know he's a huge Jimmy Scott fan, so kudos to him for that.

Condom Jazz!!!!

So Wynton won't be doing no Rudy Ray Moore tributes or anything like that, right?

That's a very good record.

That uncle I mentioned earlier...I had learned about "Maynard Ferguson" at about the same time I did "Stan Kenton" (another weird confluence of time/place/stage band...in retrospect, a totally unlikely congruence of a lot of pieces being in one place at one time), so when Maynard started with his MF Horn series and I bought them, he flipped out, especially over "MacArthur Park"...and then, as Maynard's records got more and more "pop" oriented and I dropped out of them, he got all excited at a family gathering and said, "Jimmy! You won't believe who I heard on the radio the other day - MAYNARD FERGUSON" Wow, Doyle, really? What record? "ROCKY! He's made a record of ROCKY and the radio's playing it, MAYNARD FERGUSON!!!!" I figure he was getting that wrong (for several reasons), so I listen to a likely station - a non-Rockcentric Top 40 station (I guess they'd call it "Adult Contemporary" now?) - the next day until I heard it, and it took about an hour and a half, but there it was. I like "MacArthur Park" a lot better than "Rocky", but yeah, sure enough, they were playing Maynard Ferguson on the radio, he did indeed have a hit record.

I actually had a little taste - a little taste - for Swing/Big Band, because that was what my folks played in the house that I liked. Frankie Carle records, not so much. Glenn Miller records, yes, I liked that well enough. Louis Armstrong from the Glenn Miller Story OST, like that a LOT. Plus, my dad would make it a point to come into the room whenever sullivan had a Big Band on, so that reinforced for me that, ok, this is not as bad as all that, really, it isn't. That was the only instrumental pop that I had any real exposure to until Herb Alpert/TJB, and I did not really like that so much, not in the middle of all those records that were BOOF-ing out of the radio. I have come to appreciate it, but still do not really LIKE it. Getting into the OG New Orleans stuff, the ones that had banjos/tubas/etc. that took a while. But then Baby Dodds, once you hear Baby Dodds, you can't unhear him, nor do you want to! But "big bands", yeah, I had an uncle who was a stone big band freak who got ALL kinds of excited the first time the words "Stan Kenton" and "Woody Herman" came out of my mouth..out came the 78s and that was that. I got reinforcement along those lines, even if playing a Don Ellis record for him didn't go over so well. But, you know, when you're looking for support and knowledge, you don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? You take what you can use from where it's there, and what's not there, you look for someplace else. I can honestly say I've never been into any kind of music for which I couldn't find people to share some knowledge... eventually. I can also say that that was much less true in pre-intenet days. But..all you have to do is just start talking and see who bites on the subject, you really can never tell. Like, I met an old guy who did wheel alignments over in Longview, and come to find out that he played lead trumpet for Jan Garber back in the day, but that was just a gig for him, what he really loved was jazz and who he REALLY loved was Johnny Hodges, and oh, if you ever see that album he did with Lawrence Welk, it's ok, but really, go for the stuff with Wild Bill Davis. This guys telling me this while in a grease-covered jump-suit with fingernails that you couldn't get clean with a sandblaster. And OH - keep away from that one with the Petula Clark song on it, it's commercial rubbish. So, what was it that somebody told an esteemed member here once upon a time..."talk to people".

What Griff was referring to (or at least once did) was that Jaws actually corked some of the keys on his horn shut so they wouldn't be usable. Griff says he asked him about this and Jaws just said something like "I don't use them, so what do I need them for?" I've hear a few other tales of the same thing, but I can't say that I've seen any video confirming this. Still, it's something that apparently was a thing. Which would explain how he got "those sounds" - he must have had some alternate fingering system that would only work if certain normal fingerings would not work becuase those keys were not available to him. I would love to find video or other visual confirmation of this.

Yeah, still too much. It's a total boot with no indication that an original source recording was used. "Digitally Remasterd", yeah, what the fuck does THAT mean here? For this type of thing, 2 CDs is not worth any more than one. And one is pushing it...if it's on You Tube, you can bet it's on Dime (if they still exist?) and/or already circulated amonst at least some collectors.

Stepney was into electronic music as well as pop and jazz. https://prince.org/msg/8/169991 "For The Record: Charles Stepney" by Edwin Black, Article reproduced with kind permission of Downbeat Magazine. Originally printed November 26, 1970. "As an arranger-composer-producer, Stepney maintains a musical stockpile that ranges from R&B images for the Dells to the electronic images of Mother Nature's Son. Although Stepney operates widely within the electronic field his approach is unusual. At a time when the rage is the synthesizer, Stepney cranks out a great volume of material using alternative methods. "I had been anticipating working with the Moog for about 10 years before we did Mother Nature's Son on one," recalls Stepney. "Frankly, I wasn't that turned on. That may have been because right now, there's only one Moog in Chicago and the rent is so high every breath costs a fortune. But here I had been expecting all kinds of wonderful and beautiful sounds, and found that the Moog produced no more than a new version of what we had before. Right now, they're very limited." "I really prefer," he says, "what some might call the old-fashioned means, but what I consider the more resourceful and inventive means of producing the sounds we accept as electronic. I can get excellent effects by altering and distorting legitimate sounds with tapes and stuff. If you keep up on the latest developments in acoustics and electronics - you know, subscribe to various international engineering magazines, you can pick up all sorts of techniques." Stepney's effects for Ramsey Lewis are mainly derived from a rare, out-of-print volume, New Musical Resources by Henry Cowell. Page after page of that book defines revolutionary (at least in Cowell's day) piano concepts, including techniques for elbow and forearm, cluster overtones, and resonant muting. Stays Stepney, "There are other sounds worthy of musical organization besides the conventional, sonorous ones. So we can take a cluster and know which overtones to expect, score that for divided strings and winds, and the difference sounds electronic. Sort of like Lygeti's Requiem. Or Atmosphere is another one, where a whole new quality of sounds is scored for natural voice and instruments. We do the same for Ramsey and instill that electronic texture, although, like I said, we did use the Moog on Mother Nature's Son."

Those would be by Charles Stepney!

How about The East? I know of Pharoah & Mtume...who else?

I only just learned it myself, from that Sun Ra In The City book, or whatever it's called. Chock full of information, just have a beverage handy, because the academic tone of the lingo is regularly quite dry. But - absolutely worth it. Humorously enough, they talk about the Pershing (both hotel and lounge) in the context of South Side real estate & social evolutions. Not one word about the Jamal record. But, you know, I already knew about that, so, missing pieces filled in, good. Still a teensie bit of "outside" context wouldn't hurt any, right? If I'm misremembering any of this, please correct, anybody! https://southsideweekly.com/64th-cottage-grove/ http://jackojazz.com/files/2213/3304/6062/Pershing_Hotel170.pdf https://www.domu.com/chicago/neighborhoods/woodlawn/history-in-woodlawn and then...you can see the sign for Budland...wonder what that record store was?

I've seen the pre-order prices, and...ain't no way I'm paying that for this.