JSngry

uh...

Not particularly, no.

This is on Kanopy now, watched it this morning and was very glad I did.

I have.

I'll pick up damn near anything for 40 cents. I do have to say, though - her overt Hollday-isms on that clip kinda creep me out. Not that she doesn't mean them, just that...there's only one voice I feel comfortable doing that thing, and it's not hers. I guess I'm a modest fellow at heart.

The title cut of Fancy Free got a lot of airplay on the overnight FM jazz show I heard as a teen. It always sounded good on the radio, a good sound to have on while doing homework or otherwise drifting off and out and back in again (and it wasn't just me drifting in and out, it was the signal out of Fort Worth as well). So I bought the record at some point and sat down to actually listen to it...underwhelmed would be accurate. BUT - it still sounded great, and when I began to drift away due to a lack of engagement in the playing, it started "sounding" better. So, there was definitely something there, if not in the details, then in the mix. And again - thank you Duke Pearson! In one kind of way, those records are kinda an analogue equivalent of the Yesterday's New Quintet records, they're more about the impressions of the music than the music itself. For some old-schoolers, that might be sacrilege or whatever to even consider that to be legit. But here we are, there it is, and so it goes. If it's a thing, and if that thing grows and takes on a family, hey, welcome to the neighborhood. Just pay your taxes, pick up after you kids and dogs, and don't be getting the police all up in here. If you cover that, glad to have ya'!

And Hawk! That was from Season 2. I'm hoping the writing gets better as it goes along...

The last Donald Byrd records that sounded to me like he was all in chops wise was Royal Flush and Free Form. We now know that he was slowly putting the horn on more of a back burner due to a combination of tired chops and law studies, but nobody said that at the time. and he still made good records, I mean Mustang is a gas, but that's because it's a good group record, not a good Donald Byrd trumpet record. And for whatever reason, Electric Byrd and others of the time have a lot of Donald Byrd playing trumpet. No matter - Duke Pearson!

Finished Perry Mason on Amazon Prime (which was a constant delight), now getting into this one. Is this show still considered "classic"? If so, why? I don't think it's aged well at all, especially the dialog, which is far too earnest far too often for anybody's good. OTOH, always (so far) shot on location(s), and a great look at a bunch of stuff that's probably not there anymore, usually with some "locals" in the mix. And that theme song....Nelson!

At some point, maybe the charm of Electric Byrd that some feel will get to me too. I very much like the mood of the record (thank you, Duke Pearson), but the specifics...not so much. Byrd's chops were slowly/irrevocably ebbing away (easier seen in retrospect than in real time), and none of the other soloists are particularly distinctive. I feel the same way about Fancy Free too, but not as much about Kofi (and why the unreleased stuff hits me better than the released stuff, hell if I know). Ethiopian Knights...hmmmm.... Maybe another listen to all of these in the future will get different results. I know enough people whose tastes and mine overlap far more often than not who really dig Electric Byrd, so maybe in time...but for right now, it's a better record for me to have on than to actually listen to, and again, thank you, Duke Pearson! "Mood music" is not at all a disparagement, and is something that is infinitely more easily said than done. As for the blog itself, hell yeah, I'm making it a point to check it daily.

Well, so do I, and so do other collectors. And we do it without their "help". Just sayin'...

Moody was an assiduous studier and practice. I think he was really committed to working through the Lydian Chromatic Concept book. That's why/how his "otside" playing always worked logivcally, it was solid math, and most importantly, executed with Moody's soul d always into it. So I can see how he would be irked by Ornette, who seemed to be some country boy sing-songy naïf just playing what he felt as it came to him, no plan, no architecture, no math, just impulse. Of course, no - that was part of Ornette's vibe, but not really his music. Ornette did his homework and had his math down, solid solid SOLID. But I can see how an overt hard-worker like Moody being turned off by somebody who, in his mind, just got up there and played...whatever, while he was in there busting his ass learning all the maths and permutations and implications and deliberations. But oh well, don't feel sorry for James Moody. James Moody was a motherfucker, period. And those Muse records are about the best things he ever did.

Tape is fun...at first.

Rightly or wrongly, I lump Solar & Hi-Hat together as partners working the same game in the same alley.

I seem to recall a time when the songbooks were not readily available on LP. This was in the early 1970s, when the label was all but dead. MGM was just letting it die. Then the reissue boon began, and one way or another, stuff came back in print. So, not an entirely crazy thing to say.

Do they add value to the packaging, or is it one of their usual oh, here's the stuff on CDs that we sold you, and a picture or three and a few generic words? I bought their Rollins Village Gate thing just because, and let's just say...I got nothing that I didn't already have except a little bit of cardboard. This would be a great set to do the old Uptown way, if anybody today is going to do things that way. Although, after what Sue Mingus did to Uptown, good luck on that. But geez, just the roster of piano players, that's all kinds of an essay right there!

Yep! I had around 500 jazz LPs by the time I graduated from high school, most from the cutout bins (and many of the same type you mention...talk about getting a "generational" jump on older forms of jazz...a total fluke of time/place, but god, wouldn't trade it for anything, truly a blessing). Moving them into the dorm each year (and back home afterwards) was a bit of a chore. When I got a place of my own, that was actually the first of several causes for celebration!

Did they have world class cutout bins where you lived? My teenage budget learned that that was where a LOT of action was for NOT a lot of money!

You got a Blue Note twofer twofer!

I've long been under the impression that Lubinsky ran such a hardcore "shoestring" operation that they didn't really have to have "big sellers" to stay afloat. FWIW, I remember as late as the early 1970s seeing Down beat classified ads offering a Savoy catalog for a dime. By then, though, they were doing Gospel almost exclusively. The product was in record stores in a way that the jazz records weren't (if there were any, they were Bird). It was funny, though, every so often, a Savoy LP would turn up in the cutout bins, and they'd always be old-school thick vinyl and equally thick cardboard jackets and OG labels.