JSngry

Dumb? Like low IQ? You have data to support this?

Play It Loud (I'm Deaf and I''m Proud)

It wasn't Dr. Huxtable, it was Chet Kincaide.

Live 365 used to be the greatest thing ever. And then: https://support.live365.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006783787-What-happened-to-my-pre-2016-Live365-account- Hasn't been the same since.

People are telling me to play this loud, why is that?

I believe I have mentioned several times that I saw Katetta Aton live once with a Malachi Favors band at the Chicago Underground Festival in...1981? She blew me away, totally, but it was only a few years ago that I could find somebody/anybody who knew who she was/had been. Then they pointed me to a blog version of this, apparently her only record(?). She's nothing here like she was live, I can assure you!

After all, he's just a man.

Vol. 3 arrived this afternoon and has been played. Whoa! This is a voice to be reckoned with. Attention should be paid.

And see, this is where we run up against the cold, hard fact that ultimately this is all algorithms(plural?), somebodies' breakdowns of what "is" is for different musics. You can't get it to think anything other than what it's been programmed to know. Maybe as AI moves on, some adaptive learning will get programmed in and we'll be able to flirt with it, gain it's confidence, and then see what happens, but right now, it's pretty much a music robot, a slave to its code. Now in a more perfect world, there would be all kinds of R&D going on in a mad race to be the first on the market to have a streaming service that could pick on on subtle hints, and give you something back that catches you off guard in the very best of ways and makes you want to come closer, let's explore this thing together, my dear, don't stop now. But this is all about market share, and is that a reasonable expectation? Or is it more reasonable to expect that the marketplace doesn't want love, it just wants its immediate needs serviced with a minimum of thought and/or hesitation? I think we both know the answer, and would be more than a little delighted to be proven wrong.

Witten was a player, the real deal. Always there. No idea if he still will be, but the Cowboys need him, or somebody like him. Not that I give a shit, I was quite happy this past season with loving the team, hating Jerry, and seeing them have just enough success to not have to seek to resolve that.

And of course, it's been blogged! Hey, look, it's Jon Appleton!

He was on at least two episodes of the original Bill Cosby Show, playing Jim, a hip janitor. The first episode was juyst a quickie walk through at the end, but the second one he had lines and shit.

...and supported one to get ready for Woody Allen...

Finding better selection on Spotify right now. Good call as far as that goes. Now if I could just get it on my Roku for free...one purchase already triggered! Now looking for the record that this was on:

I'm quoting.

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

I've really found Pandora's "brick wall" - contemporary (truly) classical, and/or African-American classical composers. Olly Wilson got one hit from one record, and then right away it's off to Khachaturian and stuff, and I'm like, o....k.... William Grant Still gets you almost immediately to Chopinland, and George Walker to....not George Walker. Ulysses Kay does not exist, nor does Arlene Sierra. Roomful of Teeth has a little bit of a presence, but not a lot. Lou Harrison can take you places, but you gotta guide it with the thumbs. And gottendammerungit, BOTH Hi-Lo's and Singers Unlimited aggressively push the Fucking Four Fucking Freshmen on me, relentlessly, no matter haow many times and how may ways I tell them to just stop that shit, please, please just STOP IT. OTOH, Gene Ammons left un-thumbed will get you a VERY tasty selection for as long as you leave it on. But, you know, Gene Ammons and Olly wislon, sometimes I want one, sometime I want the other. Pandora does not serve those wants with an equal efficiency. Hopefully Spotify offers a deeper catalog. I don't like using them b/c they're not free on Roku, and they require more user input, too un-radio-like.

Ok, I thought I remembered reading somewhere that they wrote it as some kind of a dark joke or something like that, maybe that Spector wanted something to put on a B-Side to force the A-Side and they figured, hey, this should do it. But maybe that was something and/or somebody else.

Correct on both counts. IIRC, both that one and "Do The Screw"(?) were done for "business purposes", either as contract judo, or DJ mindfuck about B-sides, something like that. They were not meant to be taken seriously, although they didn't tell anybody that at the time, that would've blown the purpose.

Part of the fun of listening to The Quotesmaster General, Dexter Gordon, is recognizing the quotes and hearing how (if he does) weave them into his lines. But even Dexter could overdo it, and they were never (except at his worse) the "point" of his soloing. And yes, I think that as time went on, Gitler's liner notes began to reference quotes heard in the solos. It was like he was becoming the Quotesmaster General of writers. I'll freely admit that I just don't get it, which is entirely on me. But - I don't get it.

Best as I recall, Gitler played a little bit of alto.

fwiw, I do not now, nor do I ever plan to, pay for a streaming service. I'm happy with ads. I grew up with ads. Ads on the radio are totally natural to me. If I ever need to be "alone" or otherwise intimate with my music, that's a different place for me. Is it a ritual or something? Of course it is. That's the whole point.

What did Duke have to say, Chuck? I mean, Stanley Dance really got my attention...that guy was a hardcore advocate, but I read both him and Gitler in JazzTimes for as long as they were there (or until I jsut gave up on the mag in general), and it seemed like the older he got, the less tolerant towards and more salty he became about the "blackness": of the music, and not in some "white liberal" way, but more like in a "native tongue" way. Thus his equating of Ornette with Ebonics, snarky, but still knowing what he did not accept as valid while intrinsically acknowledging that this IS language we're talking about, not showbiz goodtimes. How much "provenance" he had in that realm, well, good luck figuring that one out, but you know, he GOT that and never let it slip away. Gitler, I've maybe sounded harsher than I intended because omg YES, those memories, so vividly passed on, you LOVE somebody who does that for you. But - and this is where it got kinda sad for me - he'd write up all these club sets in JT (and it seems like he was always going out (and again, you gotta LOVE somebody who does that), but it was always the same thing -the club, the players, which set he was at, what they played, and always - ALWAYS - what quotes he heard in the solos. I mean, nice, and there's a "historical record" to be had there for sure, but...every time? At some point I got to be like, what I am reading here, I wasn't there so what can I do with THIS? So when it comes to "heft", Stanley Dance,ftw. But in both cases, lively, passionate, advocates of a type I don't see too much of these days, if only because the music was regularly live then and records were supplementation. I know Steve Reynolds has access to a world where that still holds, but if Steve had a Stanley Dance or an Ira Gitler to back him up on that to the rest of us, this would be a better world, period.

How is it "off limits"? People do it all the time. And they get pushback. And then the pushback gets pushback. At some point it's hard to tell who started it, and really, who cares? It's been a loooong time now, and it's long been a part of the general discourse. The less attention to it that musicians pay, the better, but, you know, they talk amongst themselves in ways that don't necessarily make it out to the general discourse. That's not what "off limits" looks like to me. You want "off limits" in a general discourse jazz realm, there are plenty of subjects. Criticizing "avant-garde musicians" sure ain't one of them.

I mean, people get hurt. Sometimes on the field, sometimes off. Sometimes they get fully healed, sometimes they don't. Thirteen years is a long time for one guy to never get hurt.