JSngry

I like Perkins on the Billy Higgins Bridgework record too. Dandy! I well remember that Perkins Cadence interview, but it just seemed to me to read that at some point he found something lacking in his own playing, it just wasn't satisfying him as much as it used to to do tht. So, you know, he started looking around, and then proceeded accordingly. To read too much more into it than the guy just started wanting something more/different/else, I don't think there's any place to go with it past that. Some people are content being content, some people move around a few times over the course of their lives. The only really "bad" answer is to want one but do the other.

That record that Bill Perkins and James Clay made together is great! Sometimes people just get curious and see where it takes them. Not just musicians, people.

I think at some point, the bezt/only answer is just that it happened. It realty happened.

Just checked, and in 1952-53, it was indeed Nat Hentoff, and sounding very, VERY silly, playing alliteration games that make you want to severely curtail his freedom of speech, no questions asked.

Who was the guy who did all those interviews with Brubeck on the earliest Storyville broadcasts? Nat Hentoff?

Not Hammond, it waa whoever was in charge of the Spoken Arts division of Columbia at the time. The deal was that as Spoken Arts performers, they would get a slightly smaller royalty, but have unlimited/unbilled studio time. Well HEY! Those comedy On Vinyl podcasts are just incredibly rambling and repetitive, but there's so much good information in there. Proctor doesn't have memory problems at all, even if he does seem to have zero ability to filter or condense those memories. Oh well!

My point is that they ALL fucked, and if the purpose of leadership is to find the sad song and make it better, then this is dvilworld leadership, to take a bad song and make it burn down worse and worse. Baltimore is nothing that can't be fixed, but only by those who know where it's broke, how to un-break it, how to actually FIX it, and then keep it fized. Ain't note of that going on here, so, top down until we can turn around. Clownshow everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

I'm confused, is/was anybody attempting to defend the postmaster of Baltimore? Where did all that come from?

I'm waiting for it to come out that all these copies suddenly popping up are some sort of underworld counterfeit game, or some other gangster game being played from within what's left of "the industry" Still, I've ordered mine. Why stop now?

Of course, none of this really matters as much as it does if the material is not geniusfunny to begin with, but I think that Don't Crush and Bozos are high-marks not just in terms of comedy/humor, but of recording, period. The whole "studio as an instrument" thing, they layering of the mixing is just phenomenally intricate, creative, and perfectly executed. And none of it digitally on graphs with waveforms and shit, all analog, when bounding tracks was hi-tech.To me, spicing seems like some sort of pact with the devil, I swear. And I grew up watching people kinda do it halfway good. Waveforms, hell, that's actually easy. But splicing is sorcery! Guess I'll have to bite the bullet and make the shelf space for the single CDs. I really want to revisit the cadences of the speech(es). I did not know taht Proctor had such an extensive background in theater/musical theater pre-Firesign, but that makes sense, thinking about it. Comedy is rhythm, hell, everything is rhythm, so better understand the cadences, better understand the rhythm, better understand the life, better understand....etc.

it all ends up in the same place, though. You can let your feelings change your thoughts, but not so sure if the other way works. At best, you can think yourself into maybe revisiting your feelings. And upon revisiting, you might find that your feelings have room to be refined. But the gut gonna gut, every time. In the end, if shit bugs you, it's just gonna bug you, period.

I try to think about this shit before going off on somebody, really, I do.

Found this recently, from 2016, and I gotta wonder if Proctor needs a partner to talk in an interveiw, becuase, how do I say this...the guy RAMBLES more than a little. Believe me, I find myself rambling more as I get older (and always kinds did anyway...) but this guy...he had one one hour block to get through the origins on the group and look wha that turned into... Still, the work speaks for itself, and it's never boring (at least the first time told)... No matter, I have heroes, and Firesign Is one of them...more than some musicians, actually. Vision out the ass, brilliantly executed.

and here is where I have to speak very carefully, but...it's not entirely unreasonable to look at "George Coleman" as nothing but (or almost nothing but) a one-man lick factory...I had to listen to a lot of him for a long-ish time to get past that about him. But that has been, for a very long time, sort of what he bases his playings on - licks of some variety. And if he's not careful, there would be whole solos that were really elaborate running of licks and sequences across keys that were dazzling as long as you didn't bother to expect anything else. But, about George Coleman: he came from a very solid "blues" background, it was his original/native tongue, in the voice as it is for all of us, our voice we grew up hearing being one that we never really lose he also knew better than to do JUST that one thing with the licks. well, he often knew better , not always. and most importantly - he did it with an end in sight, he knew there was "the other side" to all of that, and he got through there. But you talk about he Golden Age Of Post-Imagination...A George Coleman incompletely considered/understood could easily be seen as one of the Accidental Predictors of it.

I've had the LPs for decades, listened to them from what seemed like every angle, figured that was that, but for some random reason recently want to go back and check out the layering of cadeces. Did not want to have to fuck with the LPs again, so figured, hell, it's Columbia, there will be some kind of Original Albums Doololly Package, but....no. That seems wrong.

How it happens for me with anybody is when I sense that there's been just that scintilla of a degree of seperation removed between template and self. A post-Piinochio state of being, and pointing out ASAP that at least as often as not, we are our own Gepetto. Influences are hardly the problem for anybody. Also, this is The Golden Age Of Post-Imagination, and not just in music

nor on CD. alas. Look at this rather lengthy list of damn near too many of everybody and deapair that there is nothing for Firesign. https://www.discogs.com/label/276597-Original-Album-Classics So, this is true:

Alexander's problem is not the imitation part - as others rightly point out, he's not JUST a George Coleman clone - but it's jsut that the guy has no imagination. None. Zero. Extraordinarily competent, swings well enough, all the means to say something but unfortunately absolutely nothing to say. Nothing. Scottt Hamilton really bugged me the same way for a long time until finally, for whatever reason, it seemed like he finally let the copyist drop off and let the individual (such as it was) come outside and play. And then he stopped bugging me, and I could, in limited amounts, actually enjoy him. Alexander is always on all the records these days, at least the ones that get played on local jazz radio, and I can always tell it's him because he bugs me in the same way every time out, for the same reasons - so gifted in tools, so empty in to what use those tools are put, and always, still, now, and probably always, almost sounding like George Coleman. But then there's Houston Person - never a heavyweight of a tenor player but one of the most personal voices "on the scene today" (and really, the notion of "the scene today" is laughable, there's no scene, there's at best a spot or two) but you know, Houston Person made a LOT of records becuase Bob Prter wanted him to, not becuase he was ready to step up as a "major creative voice" or anything. But Houston Person kept making records, ALL kinds of records, and one day, eventually, that little bit of stick up his ass dropped out, and there was Houston Person, not really a "better player", just a "better voice". One critical layer of constriction finally got shed, and it made some of the all the difference in the world. That looseness, that comfort of knowing that finally you got your own thing, even if it's not particularly "original" in it's components but it still comes out of you and nobody else...I don't get that out of Eric Alexander to this day. I'm sure he does feel it, else why otherwise would he keep doing it? But I don't hear it or feel it, and in the end, that's ok, because apparently outside of a few people on this board, what anybody thinks about Eric Alexander is not critically important except between him and the people who can get him paid as either buyer or seller, which is really how it should be.

it is simple. And yet, experience-diminishing vomit persists in places and times both known and unknown. Don't be like vomit.

...has there ever been a OAC/etc, you know, budget repacking of original albums for The Firesign Theatre? I could really use that for their first four or so or more, but definitely those first four LPs. But I see no evidence of any such thing ever having been made, which means that it never has been, correct?

Soundstage archives, where are they now?

Al Cohn & Jimmy Rowles – Heavy Love (Xanadu/Elemental, 1978) Billy Hart – Enchance (A&M Horizon, 1977) Those two can go on any list of anything of any time.

Oh Chirst, now Harry Allen's in the mix...all this ephemeral flippancy of insufficient individual identity springing forth from an apparently good record with the definitely good Bootie Barnes? Proof perhaps that the cream starts at the top but the flatulence keeps rising forever?

Thanks for the heads-up, I just ordered one.