JSngry

Nifty.

Star People is a great record, imo. Apparently Teo edited the fuck out of it (surprise!) to the point of rearranging Bill Evans' solos (and he was not too happy about that!). No matter how it came to be, it's a very "hot" record, basically a Miles Plays The Blues Today record (and I think it was one that Gil Evans had a big hand in as well?). Scofield (with whom I have lost interest like a very slowly developing flat tire) is great on hear, as soloist and comper, his quirky sense of time and harmony was never on better display (context matters!) than it was here. Decoy, otoh, is a very "cool" record (some would say cold), and very aptly titles, imo. There a lot of subterfuge in this music, a lot of "saying one thing and meaning another". It's not too terribly emotionally different from what Gary Thomas was doing at the time on his own M-Base dates. Those were very cool/cold too. I loved them, but I get how they would not be for everybody. Just sayin' - there is substance on both of these records. Emotional attachment is up to the individual, but there is substance, ideas that consciously and knowingly push against the norms of least resistance. You're Under Arrest, otoh, is the one Columbia record that pissed me off from the first play. Maybe the title cut killed it for me, but it sounded (and still sounds to me), like a cartoon...no, not a cartoon, a caricature. Other that that one tune, what is it, "Katia"?, the whole thing sounds like it's not meant to be taken seriously. The irony is that it's also the record that introduced "Human Nature" and "Time After Time" to the Miles repertoire, and they stuck around up til the end. So what do I know, other than I loudly cursed at the record while it was playing, and not in the good way.

I don't know about albums, but I seem to remember gigs where he led groups but did not actually play, or played very little. Business is not always this kind. Cuscuna did it with Andrew Hill (and maybe Sam Rivers?), somebody did it for Roy Eldridge (it seemed, he did lecture gigs after he couldn't play). It does happen, people in the business making sure something is there to come in. But it's not the norm, imo.

Our fire ant populations here seem to have been on the decline, something about the higher temperatures and more erratic rainfall, iirc. no tears being shed here.

History will be more than kind to those who found ways to keep Freddie busy (i.e. - keep getting paid) when his chops failed.

There's a LOT of cables on Decoy!

I'm not about to argue emotional connectivity, that's entirely personal/subjective. No wrong answers there. But "suck", that's a claim of something deeper than just "it doesn't reach me"...although, as a crude, emotional ejaculation totally devoid of any thought whatsoever, hey, I myself use it with glee, so feel free to call me out the next time you catch me doing it, it'll come soon enough...

Yeah, well, I listened to them all in real time, for whatever difference that makes. But I can tell you with no doubt that the step-up from The Man With The Horn & We Want Miles to Star People & Decoy was palpable, meaningful and amore than a bit of a relief, actually. And with everything else that was happening at the time on either side of "the fence" it was great to hear that Miles wasn't going backwards. Have you really listened to Decoy? There's a lot of shit going on there, it's in no way simple music. Compare that to the bar-band 70s Miles of The Man With The Horn & We Want Miles...yes, progress, yes, involvement, yes, ideas again, engagement, music. Real music. As for Sonny, hey - life itself is most often a pile of dung. Hell yeah I'm looking for the gold, and happy to find it. A little nugget here, a little nugget there, next thing you know, you got something usable. And the way he built the orchestration of/within the band over the span of a show...masterful.

forgiving of what? I listen to the actual music being played, the musical devices, the individual players, the intent, try to look at each performance as something other than sound coming out of the speakers. What is there to forgive? Somebody on here posted a really nasty putdown of Ricky Wellman a while back, and I'm like, whoa, you must not know who Ricky Wellman was, Ricky Wellman a significant musical contributor before he ever played with Miles, and it's a pleasure to experience his Ricky Wellman-ess and all that springs forth from it being there on Miles Davis records. Same with Kenny Garrett, same with John Scofield, same with Marcus Miller (as bassist and as producer), same with Adam Holzman, same with etcetcetc. These people were all players with contributions to make and how they made them with Miles is not at the level of "suck". Nothing there to forgive, and besides, I don't forgive either Dingo or that record with Quincy, because there's nothing there to forgive. They're just not good records, period. Dingo is actually a piece of well-palyed crap, #michellegrandsturdsnotalwaysgold. Not looking to ever hear them again, didn't pay money for them then or now. No harm, no foul,

There's still people who say that about the 70s work, like Fillmore and Big Fun and On The Corner and Pangea all suck, and I'm like, really? Those are four really different musics and they all suck? That's the only observation? No awareness of the differences (and the similarities), no weighing of the differencs, they just "all" suck. That's kinda like saying all vegetables suck...or that all orange vegetables suck. It's not something I can take seriously as anything other than a really simplistic explanation of a perhaps uncritical guy instinct.

whatever that means...

Jeez, I hope Miles is not entering his Jimi Hendrix/Alan Douglas phase... Musically/creatively Star People and Decoy are both acres apart (sorry, not gonna say miles apart) from The Man With The Horn and You're Under Arrest. I don't know why some people just lump them (and all the WB albums, for that matter) all together. Maybe it's the instrumentation, maybe the production, I don't know. But there is a pretty radical difference in both the type and the level of musical content between these records. "Liking" it or not, that's none of my business, but a serious listener should be able to discern that other that being "post-comeback Miles Davis records", The Man With The Horn and Decoy are two fundamentally different things, as, for that matter, are Tutu and Amandala.

Co-leaders, not Various Artists. billed as Hagans & Printup. Goes under H, and after the Hagans led-alone inventory.

Seems that Donald Byrd got so busy doing educational work and carrying out business duties that he let his chops gradually go. It starts, slightly, in the mid-late 1960s. He was a very busy man, doing a lot of things that did not require playing. He got a little back by the time he did those Landmark dates, but just a little.

Exceptionally lucid.

That's a better deal than this: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=10607868633&cm_mmc=ggl-_-COM_Shopp_Rare-_-naa-_-naa&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9JzoBRDjARIsAGcdIDUvCNxGxnSFYxRh6i1uJuLcaMT5NkuoMe_QQy34-8HCMxhNr0rh2MgaAg1TEALw_wcB

I'm less than 100% certain of that, actually. The guy was so, uh..."eccentric" about the studio...who knows what got caught while he was walking around, going off mike? Or started out rilliantly but then crashed as he became self-conscious again. Or maybe he did get loose, forget himself, and did one of those extended energy burns like you hear on the bootlegs, and then when it was over, you know, well, we're not using THAT and then he does another tidy, earthbound take and releases that. The possibilities are endless...But now that there's not going to be any newly created Sonny Rollins records...we can fret about wasted glories and all that, but that's not going to change anything. We can, however, if we want, listen to the live stuff from all those decades, line it up with what came out of the studio, and see if there's not some kind of a narrative there other than the tired/provably false one that Sonny Rollins just forgot how to play, or lost hope, or whatever the latest variant of that lie is. Me, I think it's as basic as that he did not want to be held prisoner by his records and took it to a bit of an, again, eccentric conclusion. But more power to him for keeping hold of himself as he felt necessary.

You got three nights of recording to fill up four sides of an LP with no redundancy of material and a desire/need to present enough originals to make the nut with composer royalties and shit. That does not necessarily mean including the best performances from the entire engagement, it just means assembling product, with multiple criteria of inclusion. Now, somebody tell me what drove the inclusion of all that stuff with Donald Byrd, whose idea was that? One whole LP + one cut on another. What got left out so that could go in? There might be something like an amazing "My One And Only Love" or something like that that just wasn't a fit for the product. Or 2-3 more takes of Silver City that got to that zone and they had to pick just one (or maybe what we got is a composite?). Just saying, the record is product, the music, not so much. And maybe nothing else reached the heights of those two. But I'd like to have a chance to find out!

I heard some Lionel Hampton Groove Merchant cut blind at a buddy's house one time. I thought the drummer must have been Tony Williams. It was Buddy Rich.

100% agreement on Byrd, and I was pleased enough with this record in real time. But it bugged me how "Autumn Nocturne" and, especially, "Silver City" we so much more in the zone than anything else on the record. I gotta wonder what's in the can, if anything, that reached the level of those two cuts.

Dude, not just Trend-legit, but MODE-legit as well!

oooohhh, a Friday!

It had to have been a United Artists thing. That's the cover that Solid State used here.

Aw hell, that's Mark de Clive-Lowe! Been following him for years now. Interesting guy, actual analog chops to go along with his digital skills. I try to follow him as he goes along, he's doing things. This is a really interesting one, if you can accept the basic concept of Music Inc. Big Band as House. Personally, I find it delightful.