JSngry

This Afronaught cat can come along in my car anytime. Especially when I'm driving.

I take no back seat to anybody when it comes to Rollinslove, but geez, the guy's been inconsistent all his recording career, and although the Milestone records are most accurately appraised through a different lens than their predecessors (so much had changed in both Sonny, the jazz world, and the world in general), still, some are a LOT better than others, very often on the same record! OTOH, such has always been the case with Rollins, imo. BTW, I more or less totally agree with his assessment as to what happened. But I no longer find it useful to let it begin and end with "race". That gets nobody anywhere except deeper in the rut. There's broader and deeper human inadequacies at play in all this. Let's challenge the species, not the races, that's a fool's game. Didn't always see it like this, but now see no other way forward. Elevate!

PM on: Charles Mingus - Triumph of the Underdog Charles Mingus - Sextet Live in Oslo 1964

Exactly. And today's "jazz" drummers are finally starting to bring this sensibility into their playing, not just broken beat, but hip-hop approaches in general. But this broken beat thing, yeah, the first time I heard it, I was like OMG!!!!!! I GOTTA FIND A DRUMMER LIKE THIS AND GET BUSY GETTING BUSY, that shit was just putting all the accents exactly where I was feeling them with a pulse that was in no ways wrong. But I learned two things pretty much right away - 1) a lot of set drummers don't even want to consider this because they feel it's degrading to take inspiration from "machine"-generated ideas (a few people shut down the conversation before it even began with some variant of "if you're going to ask me to play like a drum machine then you can go fuck yourself", and you know, if that's the attitude, then they too can go fuck themselves afaic) and (a lot more deeper) 2) this shit breaks down to being a lot more complex that it appears to the casual ear, so not only is their a new coordination paradigm required just to get the basics going, but to do that and then improvise, to spontaneously react and interact, that takes a...newer (and as much as I hate to say it, a younger mindset) mindset. Not just the beats, but the weight of the sounds, none of that translates literally to a drum set. so it's not just a matter of porting over one thing to another, there's a lot of serious learning and adjusting to do. And for real, even if you want your mind to do something, the older you get, the less easy it becomes to just turn on a dime. But it's definitely do-able, and what's beginning to happen now will only continue to happen, and develop. Of course, it will involve musics that most "jazz fans" have no interest in even knowing about, much less listening to, but, you know, it's not being made for them, so they don't/won't matter in that world.

Bobby Timmons didn't ooze soul, he damn near hemorrhaged it!

Well, that's where what used to be called "broke(n) beat" came/comes into play. Somewhere not too long ago I posted a YouTube clip of a live set by some DJ (Afronaught, maybe?), and it was all this type thing. The dancing on the floor was incredible, and for me, somebody who has not one, not two, but three left feet, I could feel it most powerfully.

This may or may not have at least something to do with Miles. But those first few sentences sure carry weight knowing what we now maybe know (and definitely what has been passed around for decades).

The original Chicago house was kind of crude, but Larry Levan started moving it ahead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Levan Good House Music swings. Great House Music (on either the cut or the overall mix level) has so many layers going on (both at one time and as part of the overall arc) that it can be listened to as seriously as it can be danced to. You won't be listening to conventional "melody and changes" songs, but you will be listening to moving parts out the ass being quite intentionally moved, and often enough, some really good/great vocals on top of it. Above all, though, it swings.

Those Movie Mars cartel shops will do good on current-ish mainstream product and non-specialty catalog items. But for low-quantity specialty items such as this, my experience has led me to not even try there any more.

Still available there. After shipping, about $20.00. Might seem a tad dear in the moment, but next year at this time, you'll likely not miss the money but still have the CD.

Read the liner notes to Ego...

Cannonball always had bands, not just groups. The exception, ironically enough, was the Mercury years, where he had a real working band, but the records didn't really sound like it. The Zawinul-Duke/Gaskin-Booker/McCurdy bands are my favorite overall, just because of the odyssey they ended up taking. By the time I got to see Cannonball live, it was Hal Galper on piano, which was fine, but the group's arc had kind of completed by then. Although, Pyramid, with that band, was an interesting (enough) album. But Galper moved on, and Cannonball's records turned more to "project" mode.

It was a weird book. A little too much adoration, no real discernment on display, plus the weird thing about Sonny smoking too much pot for too long. Not saying that wasn't true, but it was just a weird thing to get as much of a focus as it did.

Same, if it includes dates where he was not the leader but "just" the arranger.

I gotta go with your Dad on this one. For me, "60s Lee Morgan" doesn't really begin until he comes back from the (figuratively) dead with The Sidewinder. Then shit starts to happen. Take Twelve...eh...

In the car yesterday and today: Don't know how much revisiting this one's gonna get... THIS otoh...definitely!

Race is just the symptom. The diseases are xenophobia/neophobia. But in The American Discourse, we get hung up/stuck on race because it's easier to stay where you know than go where you don't. And god knows, America knows everything about race and racism except how to get past it. So rather than trying to get up and over, we keep digging down and in. Dig? On a completely unrelated note, Nisenson's Sonny Rollins bio was a little bit of a big mess, and I've never had 100% trust about him since. So I dunno, jazz was not murdered, it essentially committed suicide. And yet that spirit lives on anyway. How about that, eh?

I just grab something from the unlisted pile and stick it in until it plays through at least once. If I like it, it plays through more than once. If I like it a lot, I'll just take the long way and/or sit in the driveway for a while longer.

Yeah, well so is Brian Wilson. It's not a problem being who you are, any problems are the result of how you do who you are.

Did you sense any "protection of turf" by Holman in this, or was it just more like we can only do one at a time and right now it's Holman? Unrelated to that, does anybody have a list of all the projects that Florence did for Pacific Jazz/World Pacific? Seems like he pops up on more of those things than I initially noticed, very often in the more "commercial" records, but hell, a gig's a gig, right?

Ra wasn't just about self-sufficiency, he was about self-invention and reinvention!!!!!!

The photo or the actual product? In either case, I'm not 100% sure, ever.

Actually...Stan Kenton. Coming from a totally different place, obviously, but his early (1959 was the beginning, iirc) efforts in colonizing the colleges were quite impactful to the sustaining of a certain type of big band well into the 80s and 90s. But perhaps less obviously today, his Creative World enterprise (formed in 1970) handled not just bookings, but also was able to produce and distribute new recordings and take control of the old ones. and not just that, that organization offered for sale the Kenton library from ever era, scores, parts, everything. It was all about self-reliance and self-sufficiency. I'm happy to add this because the general default of this notion of breaking away from the established economic structures is to look at African-American artists, probably because of the obvious socio-political implications therein. But - somebody like Stan Kenton can be used to show that even without those realities there was (and still is) ample incentive to do it yourself, if it was important to you to so do. Today, that seems to be the norm with creative musicians. We can debate how well they've handled their business (as well as the barriers that still exist for trying to break away from established economic structures), but the notion remains and grows.

I think there's a good radio program to be made focusing on all the music made by the various self-determination groups of the 60s and 70s. AACM, BAG, Tribe, UGMA(A), Strata, Strata-East, who else? In real time, the records were not usually in general distribution channels, but in retrospect, they represented a cause bigger than the simple motivations of wholesale/retail. They were looking to control capital - financial, intellectual, and directional. They recognized that true self-determination means having the ability not just to create, but to also control what happens post-creation. In that sense, perhaps relevant now more than ever.