JSngry

Ok, case in point - I just picked up a CD of her duets with Ellis Larkins, which I've hear highly praised for as long as I've heard anything about them, and...I'm not hearing it. She makes the Gershwin tunes sound dorky (which they mostly are, actually, too bad about history, it's always right, but it's not always good), but the other standards too, her and the lyrics really seem uncomfortable with each other, and the melodic contours follow suit.. It's a very, uh...disorienting listen for me, like somebody took a good record and tampered with it to make it uncomfortable on purpose. And yet - there are other versions of those songs that she's done that are just wonderful, full of life and confidence and sass and everything you want out of this type of thing. It can't be "having an off day" or anything, because there's other records of hers like this, and also of the other kind. Weird. But at the end of the day, there's stuff like this, and all is well as long as it's there:

I wish we'd stop thinking of sound waves as just things we "hear". The vibrations of the waves are not processed entirely though the ears. Both super- and subsonic frequencies do reach the body and are processed by it. In the limited world of "hi-fi", yeah, ok, sure. That's a spec game. But people, please - do not allow you or your persons to be fooled into thinking that the things that exist but can't be immediately perceived by your "senses" do not matter. Your emotions and your intellect are at stake. The de-evolved person is one who allows themselves to be deprived of an awareness of a fuller range of existing vibration. These people will be the dullards who are happy to exist on whatever sustenance is provided to them, no questions asked (because they have no basis from which to ask any questions). If it exists, it matters. Maybe not to your "ears", but to the basis of a shared existence. If you don't believe me, ask Milford Graves (or anybody else who is engaged in liberating the species), and/or ask all sorts of propagandists (or anybody else who is trying to enslave it). That's usually an unpleasant experience with a recording, right? But hearing the same thing played live, with presumably the same dynamic execution, can be exhilarating. But - live, you're usually in a bigass concert hall, not in a car or a room in our house. And in that hall, there is ambient noise, air conditioning, people coughing, shifting, hell, breathing...anything but silence! It creates a "buffer" between the sound's source and it's destination. and it's not particularly unpleasant! I'll not go so far as to argue that the tape hiss of analog recording serves exactly the same function, but I do think that seeking "absolute silence" in a recording/playback chain is something to be filed under "be careful what you ask for, you might get it".

Never wanted to go down that particular wormhole (the "GAS") with her (or anybody, really), but did get bit by the Nelson Riddle bug a while back so checked out all her albums with him, and will only partially/slightly agree with that as it pertains to those albums. With the passage of time, it seems to me that Ella was a pretty weird character, musically. All over the place, not in "style", that was pretty much a constant, but in terms of "warmth"...possible "engagement". My god, she had a glorious instrument, and whenever she wanted)?) to, she could make it cast a radiance that made any setting sound like the best idea for anybody ever. But other times, she was just silly (especially when scatting, sometimes she would get ALL up in there, and sometimes it would be, like, oopie-oobie-beeble-deeble-weediewaddydoo, SHUT UP!), and yet other times she seemed totally detached from the song and the setting. Just...all over the place, not like any other great jazz singers I can think of. Just....weird. I guess she was a "private person" (whatever that's supposed to possible be code for), but still... But geez, listening to her and Louis Armstrong sing together...nothing weird about that!

Yeah, but Buck is a CRANKY old man. Dusty is just crusty. Although, you know what they used to say, time waits for no man.

Or maybe just too old, period.

Odyssey Of Iska is damn near an opera...perhaps my favorite Wayne record overall. The Price you Got To Pay to Be Free is an amazing record, all over the place, something to please every taste - and to piss off every taste. But putting aside matters of "taste", it's all in a deep Cannonball pocket, therefore whatever anybody doesn't like, it's not Cannonball's fault. I still keep hoping that there's a treasure torve of unedited, fully stretched out club dates by this band, was really was an amazing group...when was the last time that seriously hard jazz chops met up with grassroots popular appeal for such a sustained period of mutual love? . Captain Buckles, yeah, I had to look a long little bit to find the LP on that one. Worth the wait (and the effort). Fathead...yeah.

Speaking of Cage, here's another one that I've always liked (in this version). There are other versions (with and without the Aria), but for me, this one is perfect.

"Christopher Columbus". Thus the title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus_(jazz_song it wiggled its way into this as well:

Skills ( & a taste for "the marketplace") exceeding vision, which is too bad, because every once in a while, they even up. If this was not the best cut on the record, then it would be a pretty good record.

Exactly. And sometimes I don't mind dealing with it like that. But sometimes I do. As a musical philosopher/conceptualist, I am totally into him. But there's more to music than just philosophy and concept. If all you had to to was think (or not think...)...That's an excellent destination point, but a horrible starting point. imo, of course.

B1 –Alan Hovhaness Upon Enchanted Ground B2 –Alan Hovhaness Suite For Violin, Piano, And Percussion Columbia Modern American Music Series box from Sony. I would be so in on that one.

Dial Classical Mosaic. They're running out of Woody Herman and will never run out of Louis Armstrong. And John Cage sells (some) records.

I did. What I haven't been able to find is a lot of information about Jeanne Kirstein (past the liner notes) and/or whatever happened to her.

These are absolutely essential, imo.

Chuck Findley? Do tell!

Really wasn't sure what this was going to be, Dusty Groove had no description, but oh well, took a chance, and it ends up being quite enjoyable! Per: https://en.schott-music.com/shop/musik-fuer-saxophon-aus-berlin-vol-1-no321470.html The 1930s saw composers in Berlin beginning to use the saxophone as a classical instrument – the alto sax paired with the piano being a particular favorite. But alas, the heyday of the classical saxophone in Germany was all too short. The Nazis’ cultural policy was the kiss of death for this pariah instrument. Yet a good number of works for the concert saxophone still emerged in the face of this restrictive environment. Some appeared in Berlin, others were created in the exile that many composers had to choose after 1933. Only a handful of works for alto sax and piano were written in Germany after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that this format finally enjoyed a rebirth. The four-part series “Music for Saxophone from Berlin / Music for Saxophone from Germany” offers a selection of works for this distinctive liaison of instruments – from pre-war Berlin, post-war Germany, and again from Berlin’s flourishing musical life at the turn of the millennium. Most of these are world-premiere recordings. “Music for Saxophone from Berlin Vol. 1” kicks off the series – and brings to life the enthusiasm which renowned composers from the 1930s had for this relatively new voice in the choir of classical instruments. The “ultimate discipline” of the sonata comes alive in exciting and rebellious pieces for alto sax and piano by Erwin Schulhoff, Wolfgang Jacobi, Ernst-Lothar von Knorr, and Erwin Dressel. Humorously jazzy, classical and elegant, soberly linear, romantically opulent. This is the diverse palette of styles that composers explored around 1930–32 – just before the National Socialists seized power. So it sounds like there's a series? Can't say I'm going to burn up the internet looking for the remainders, but if any of them show up, hey, sure!

Great band, good charts, and it could be danced to.

Buck Caton came dressed to play!

He was either in prison or else working hard at Riverside when the BN run would have been most likely. For the better part of the 70s he was doing Heath Brothers, and then after that, from what I understand, he had a good thing going as an educator/clinician. I don't know how much he would have wanted to trifle with Steeplechase or any other label where publishing considerations might have been on the table. You can make a safe bet that a guy who wrote as prolifically as he did was, at that point, going to be pretty serious about that. This is a good time to call out these two on Soul Note, not particularly "well-know", but very good indeed: Seems like an unlikely grouping, and maybe it was, but everybody came to play.

And The Heath Brothers did ok in their time - 7 albums in 8 years, all but one for "major labels" with good promotion and distribution. Plenty of Jimmy Heath compositions on those.

Thanks. That twofer cover definitely got my attention. The original covers might be easily filliped through/over in the used bins, especially the second one. Maybe not the first one, but that layout...