JSngry

Tried the Ashkenazy / Concertgebouw, yesterday morning thanks for the tips. I liked it, and have no need to pursue the work further, except live, if the opportunity presents itself again.

Infant Eyes, Spirit Of The New Land, and Revelation are certainly the definitive Carn sides, but before those he did a trio album for Savoy in 1969 that I found pretty satisfying in a much more "traditional organ trio" fashion. Hardly something you "need to have", but if you find it, enjoy!

I am a dumbass. I would have thought that would have been apparent long before now. Having said that, although the machines are now exponentially easier to use, that has not corresponded to there being less to know to understand them. PCs are becoming very Mac-like, you know, "it just works, that's all I know". Well good. If it just works, there should be no questions. And yet there are! Besides, people occasionally need to get their ass out of the house for doing something besides being alone in a crowd.

I'd also recommend Milano Strut for Pullen, a organ duo with Don Moye.

Also...we got people around here talking about "do we REALLY need libraries today, since everything's on the Internet now?" Seriously, people are starting to think that. Independent study is always groovy, but if you don't know what you don't know, you can end up still not knowing what you don't know, only more of it. My biggest worry though, is the ongoing stigmatization of learning in a social context, private schools vs public, internet vs classroom or library, the whole idea of going it alone as much as possible on everything. I think learning is both a private and a communal activity. It worries me a bit when people default to "I'll look it up". Well, yes, if you know what you're looking for and what to do with it once you find it. But if you don't know a lot of general things, odds are good, there's plenty of other people who also don't know it, so get together and learn together. Meet people, ya' know? THEN be alone!

Uh, no they're not. I learned music starting with the very basics. I've learned history by looking deeper than last week's headlines. It's a good thing to do, getting a solid grasp of the basics. A failure to do so leaves you in the position of always being a reactive consumer. As far as computers, I know plenty of people who can type, copy/paste, do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but don't know shit about computing of software. Tell them to go to a command prompt and they'd not know what the hell you're talking about. Tell the to look at their cookies and they'll go to the pantry. Etc. etc. etc. When somebody says they don't know the lingo, hey.And he's frequently on here asking for advice on how to solve some seemingly "basic" problems. And he's been working on older, basic equipment. This screams to me of a guy who has a computer and only knows how to do a few basic tasks with it and want to know more. Well, ok, learn the basics, learn how this shit is put together, learn the basics, and then be confident with your machine instead of being bound by it. If there's a dumbass to be had, it's the person who doesn't take the steps to gain the knowledge. And if you don't know the basics, you'll never be able to get there except in bits and pieces, which is not really knowledge as much as it is knowing how to be better at being lucky.

If you really know "nothing" except how to press buttons and push keys, I really recommend taking a class. The learning is very structured, very linear, they start you at the beginning and introduce things in a logical, progressive manner. By the time it's over, you should know not just how to do something, but why you do it that way, and why it works that way. Once you get that basic, foundational knowledge, THEN you can start clicking around and exploring. It will make more sense then, the things you do. I don't recommend just buying a textbook and doing it solo. Textbooks are designed to support lesson plans, which means presenting information in the socialized setting of a class, and that's very important. The interactivity of a class, a good class, anyway, is one of the best ways to learn. A knowledgeable leader and a group of inquisitive learners is a time-tested method of meaningful learning. And don't sweat the class. The one I took was full of adults on either side of my age, and we were all there for the same reason - this computer "thing" was something we knew we needed to know, and we wanted to find out, as you said, what we didn't know, and then learn it. The classroom setting was great, because there were a lot of people who didn't know the same things I didn't know, and a lot of times, some of us had a knowledge gap that other people had the answer to, and vice-versa, like we all had pieces of a puzzle then put them together in class. And with a good instructor, when you think you have something figured out but really don't...that won't be allowed to take root. Very important, that! And remember - anybody who takes THAT type of class is not going to be full of some young whiz-bangs who's going to throw shade on all you weaklings . It's all going to be people like you, people who know that there's more to be had from these things than just knowing a few basic things and nothing more. As we get older, the thought of going back into a classroom is no doubt a little creepy. But remember - this is not something that you're doing for a report card or a transcript or anything like that. This is learning something you want to learn, for the sake of learning. Enjoy it!

Yay baseball!

KDs HAR-YOU date is very strong, even if it seems to be sourced from a tape badly needing repair/pitch stabilization/etc. (or was the original record like this too?), The Condoli date is not essential in any way, but him an Stan Levey represent quite nicely.

Who owns the material now? Any one party? Or is it piecemeal? Or is it anybody?

An Ernie Royal session for Vogue, a Babs Gonzalez date for Manor, A Bennie Green set for Jubilee, a little Budd Johnson, and plenty of James Moody. What's not to like?

Community college should have something for you. That's how I started learning. Knew absolutely nothing. Still don't know very much, but knowing the most basic things makes it easier to then figure things out further on. Not everybody learns the same way, so it may be that a classroom setting, where you can ask questions about things in a book that don't really make sense, will be a better way for you personally to learn than tackling a book solo.

Gonna be in the car for the next few days:

This morning, not right now... then one side of

Joyce Bulifant with that black hair is not even slightly unattractive!

If you don't already have it, here's a Collectables 2-Fer with Midnight Walk + And Then Again that works really well. I had the former on LP (what a happy day that was, finding that one and A Caddy For Daddy AND Action - mint copies all - all in the same place on the same day and being able to talk the guy down from $25 each to $50 cash for all 3 because that was all I had and I was standing there right now ready to spend it in Longview, Texas, and his record show in Austin was more than a month off. It was all true, and it worked!), but I had been completely unaware of the other one until finding this CD years later. It's a great listen, and it's cheap!

I'll posit that the compositions (and the soloing, for that matter) on Passin' Thru, underneath the "slick veneer" has more in common with those records than it does anything resembling "bebop". And that's something that happened in a segment of 70s jazz that got dissed out of proportion to the reality (imo) - the "presentation" of the music changed, but the nuts and bolts of the music itself did not. If you go to playsome of this stuff and try to approach it like "commercial music"...good luck on that, because it's not going to work. The changes are too involved, the vamps need to hit a deeper pocket, just all kinds of things. You can take some of those things and reverse them back to "straight ahead" a helluva lot easier than you can forward them into "smooth" or whatever you want to call it. They're just not built like that.

I'm of the mind that the only real use for a 45 from that era is to experience the specific mix that was used to punch 'em up on jukeboxes and AM Radio. Doesn't sound like these are going to be that.

At this point, all I do is try not to drop them or handle them while or immediately after eating fried chicken. Even if you don't touch the plaing surface, good grease is hard to stop.

Same (named) label as Guy Lombrado. And they both used saxophone. Small world after all!

A name that for some reason immediately springs to mind is Jimmy Heath. The Gap Sealer was an excellent record form the early 70s, "modern" (if not "cutting edge"). Then he went back to relatively straight-ahead bebop, made a good (enough) record or two, and then got The Heath Brothers thing going, and oh btw - the first Heath Brothers record on Columbia is a GREAT record in terms of compositions, playing, and production. It seems to be dismissed by "the establishment" because of it's "commercial" touches (of which there are more than a few, but jeesuz - that's both beside the point while being exactly the point. I would invite anybody who's not emotionally bound to "style" to listen to the compositions on that record, and the playing that goes on therein. Those tunes are very nicely involved, details abound, and the playing is fully engaged. No halfassing going on, just a mellow sense of intent. This is a record full of expert music played by experts, yet very radio-friendly. All of that merits consideration, I should think. So, tow totally different Jimmy Heath records from within the 70s, each one strong within itself, and neither like the other, at least not superficially. But underneath the surface, they're both pure Jimmy Heath. That's hardly a 70's thing, but it seems to have been more present in the 70s for more people than usual, if only because what was considered a "commercially viable jazz record" in, say, 1977 was a helluva lot different than at anytime before, and possibly since. So many options....

OTOH, I share the assessment that "70s jazz" gets a horribly bad rap, usually based more on emotion (EVERYTHING'S CHANGING!!!!!) than on objective musical evaluations. Sure, some things were NOT good (particularly in terms of recording...too much indiscriminate "direct" everything...), but all the whining about electronics and keyboards and funks and fusions and avant-gardeness and "commercialism"...yeah, you had a living music and this is what it looks like when shit is alive and engaged in a world that is also alive and engaged. Not every change works, but that is evolution, In retrospect, it seems like everything works or doesn't. In real time, it's not that simple, and certainly not that clean. REAL shit be messy! Plenty of bad records made, but plenty of GREAT music made. And look what happened when the organic changes were brought to a more or less enforced halt (as much as was possible). It's taken a loooong time to get over/around that. A humble suggestion (related to Chuck's point) - maybe after the first list is completed within parameters, keep the blog open and look at other things, artists/records that escaped the initial examination. There's a LOT to look at in this decade - it started with the last gasps of Albert Ayler, ended with the first inklings of Wynton Marsailus, and in between...pretty much everything that could happen did happen. Everything.