patricia

Mike is in the process of restoring the site. Apparantly some hacker [may he/she roast in the eternal fires of Hell] gained access and screwed up the site. It took Mike and his associcates SEVEN YEARS to create and establish the site and a few hours for some miscreant hacker to wreck it, just because they could. The "Birthday" thread on the site is, apparantly, gone, as is everything after the middle of May. Damn. Also, I can't log on at all, because I "don't have permisssion" to do so and my e-mail address is already in use by another poster [ME]. I've e-mailed Mike and haven't heard from him yet. As for hackers, so revered by many; they are a plague!!!!!

Add my "YES" to the list. Although it's true that many jazz albums have been re-released on CD, that's not true of all the music on vinyl. I quite recently bought a turntable, to replace the one I had, when I switched to CD some years ago. This was fortuitous, in that there are many fabulous collections of old jazz, on vinyl, available out there and I am now into collecting them, a few at a time. There are some labels which never did go to CD and JazzTone is one I can think of, off the top of my head. Cheap label, but top names and well done cover notes. On that basis alone, call me crazy, having a turntable is worth it. I do have tons of different labels, but JazzTone was the catalyst.

Mancini has put out some great stuff and along with his themes for "Peter Gunn", "The Pink Panther", "Charade" and "Mr Lucky" one of my favourite LP's has almost a cross-section of his talent, divided into five distinct styles. The album is "Mancini Concert", which features his versions of Simon and Garfunkel, March with Mancini, the Overture from "Tommy", and "Medley From Jesus Christ Superstar". However, I bought it for the Big Band Montage which has a killer version of "Take The 'A' Train". He can swing hard when he wants to and, I think, he is well worth exploring. Another collection that I like very much is "Mancini '67" which has a great version of 'Round Midnight" included as well as his take on "Satin Doll". Mancini may very well have gotten a lot of his success from what almost amounts to MUSAK, but he is a very accomplished songwriter and arranger, as well as the orchestra leader with whom we are all familiar, in elevators.

Found TWO JazzTones at a second-hand store, a DOLLAR each: "New Orleans Jamboree" Paul Barbarin and his New Orleans Jazz Band Paul Barbarin,drums, Bobby Thomas, trombone, Danny Barker, banjo, Willie Humphrey, clarinet, John Brunious, trumpet, Lester Santiago, piano. and "Dixieland Free-For-All" Rex Stewart, trumpet, Albert Nicholas, clarinet, Ferdinand Arbelo, trombone, John Dengler, baritone sax, Herb Nichols, piano, John Fields, bass, Tommy Benford, drums. Covers are worn, of course, but the records are pristine. I've found JazzTone at various sources. Some were from vintage record places at around $10-$40. But, JazzTones are disposable junk to some people, as these latest ones were. I've also found them at garage sales and at second hand stores, for as little as 50 cents. Just keep your eyes open. There are lots out there, but they are usually owned by people who hang onto them. But, nobody lives forever. When I re-discovered JazzTone, about four years ago, I had no turntable. However, I found two or three, I think at least one was a ten-inch, with Woody Herman as one of the tracks and sent them to a friend in New York, who collects everything vinyl. Still on the hunt.

One of my favourite Carmen McRae collections is "Carmen McRae Sings Monk". Although I love Monk's music without any lyrics at all McRae adds something to his compositions which is wonderful, I think. Usually I don't like lyrics being added to jazz unless it was originally planned that way, but this, IMO, is one of the exceptions. Vocalese, again IMO, is not the same as singing words, in the conventional sense. The voices are additional instruments and, as such, add something to the whole.

Jazztone was a low-end, mail-order label, in the fifties and, I think, early sixties, which was an off-shoot of a classical music mail-order series. They first came out with re-releases of existing material, in compilations, on 10" LP's. There were not that many 10" records, before they moved to the just developed 12". The good thing about them was that they were the original artists and that each record had, at least, extensive liner notes and sometimes even a booklet which was included. They were very inexpensive, even for the times at around $2.00 or so, when other mainstream labels were running at about $5.00. They are available on-line, if you just search for "jazztone" records. My source has been used vinyl shops and they will charge anywhere from $10.00-$50.00. Considering that some of them are fifty, or more years old, most are in amazingly good condition. They are mono, but the sound is amazing. This series was really limited, particularly the 10", but they were of the top names, which we, as jazz aficianados, try like crazy to find. Now that many of the artists' work has been re-released on CD, I suspect that, like me, the historical aspect of having the Jazztones outweighs the ability to obtain the actual music. However, that doesn't stop me from snappin' them up at garage sales, estate sales and other places where people get rid of older relatives' old stuff.

He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle. Ring Lardner .................................. Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it. Maurice Chevalier .................................. Platonic love is love from the neck up. Thyra Samter Winslow ................................... People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. Douglas Yates .................................... I never loved another person the way I loved myself. Mae West

Terribly sad. We tend to think of our favourite performers as indestructable. Although most people seem to have other favourite Smith tracks, my introduction to Smith was "Walk On The Wild Side". His blew Elmer Bernstein's right out of the water. After that, I drank in everything he recorded. I keep forgetting that Jimmy is SEVENTY-EIGHT years old!!!! This is not to say, God knows, that I think he's lived long enough, but it's very depressing that he can't be with us forever.

As an unbiased observer, I gotta go with Ben Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanack" and the kite thing, as well as his constant prosthelizing must have driven his wife nuts. Ben was up for anything.

THANK YOU, SIDEWINDER, for my very favourite Idle/Cleese bit. I used to have that, and several others on a record.

Read the label on the cheese in the market. If it says "cheese food", it's so adulterated and processed that it isn't even called "cheese". Avoid it, as you would the PLAGUE. Cheese is bought at a cheese shop, or a good deli. Period.

He was a class act. RIP Harold Ashby.

Apparantly 68% of all Inventive Inquisitors, such as myself, are meat-eaters and would order steak in a restaurant. I'm a life-long vegetarian, so I guess I'm already in a subgroup. I think that the meat-eating Inventive Inquisitors are skewing the catagory. Just as I suspected, it's a conspiracy.

Isn't "intellectually challenged" the correct expression? I'm not as kind as you are. I was going to say "retarded", but stopped short.

I wrote an IQ test, almost exactly like this one, about a week ago, [i had dropped off my resume and it was part of the interview]. Now I'm worried that I'll be eligible for a government grant for the intellectually handicapped.

No such thing as bad Billie. She always laid her heart out there and that is why she is still listened to, even in her "down" years. Good for you!!

Yes he was. Nobody in the family thought he would amount to anything, and, apart from "The Planets" and a few other compositions, he didn't do much more than teach music and live in relative obscurity. He was a dreamer, the oddball in a family of athletes and English teachers. My favourite picture of my father is of him and some friends, at a jazz club. He was some dapper-looking dude, in his pin-striped suit, fashionably drapey, a fedora, tipped back on his head and the blondest hair I've ever seen, except for my younger brother's. He looked like a skier and a pretty fun guy. The group includes some ladies in draped evening dresses and there are several full martini glasses on the table. The band and the dance floor are visible in the background. I used to look at it, to remind myself that he had a life, before his serious one as a dad. Funny how we never think of our parents as being young and out there.

My Dad died six years ago, but I still feel his presence. He was born in Norway, but emigrated to Canada, after college, at nineteen. He travelled on the train, to B.C. and often told us [my three brothers and me] that he lived on coffee and donuts, through the whole trip across Canada, because that was the only thing he could say in English. While he lived in Norway, he had been a champion ski-jumper, as had his father before him. He continued to compete after he came to Canada and I remember his trophy shelves and my mother grumbling about polishing the trophies. She considered his competing as an obsession. My parents met, quite by chance. Dad was in his late thirties and was dating a local girl. The War broke out and he joined the Canadian Army [The Princess Patricia Light Infantry] and was sent overseas. His girlfriend knew he would be in London and suggested that he look up her cousin, Kari, if he wanted company. She thought that because her cousin was seven years older than my dad, she was safe. Well, Dad met Mother, married her and my oldest brother was born in England. They had three more children after Dad brought Mother back to the small town in B.C. and they were married for twenty-five years. Unfortunately, Dad was an alcoholic and they were divorced, after my youngest brother went off to college. However, the passion, even when they were both very old, was palpable and they never stopped loving each other, or us. They passed a love of books and music on to all of us. [Dad's uncle Gustav a music teacher and lifelong, obscure composer is the composer of the symphony, "The Planets", which is quite well known.] One regret I have is that I didn't listen to my father when he advised me to wait for "The One" and not marry until HE found me. But who listens?? So, I lift a glass to my father, a true gentleman and a man who valued laughter and, above all, LOVE.

There are two available. "Fabulous" and "Dressed To Kill" Izzard is one of the funniest stand-ups I've ever seen. His humour is quite often based on fact, particularly British History, unvarnished, and skewed a little. Brilliant!!

Love Shelley Berman. [the "convention" bit is a favourite] George Carlin is hilarious and very insightful. [love his bit on "stuff"] My current favourite is David Sedaris. "Naked", "Holiday On Ice", "Me Talk Pretty One Day", "Barrel Fever". All of his books are also available as books on tape, on which he reads his own material. Nobody else could do the narrative as well as he does it. My favourite Sedaris bits: Santaland Diaries Dinah the Christmas Whore True Detective The City of Light In The Dark Me Talk Pretty One Day [sedaris learning how to speak French, while living in Paris] Brutal.

Forgive me for not mentioning Jackie Wilson and Brooke Benton. Benton particularly. I'm still looking for the album on which he does a great version of "Walk on the Wild Side" that rivals both Elmer Bernstein's and Jimmy Smith's. Add that to "Lie To Me" and there you go. I didn't put Ray Charles on my list and should be flogged.

It's interesting that we all have favourite scenes in Hitchcock films. I know I do. I mentioned the bedroom scene in "Rebecca" and didn't mention the shower scene in "Psycho", because that's the only one that even non-Hitchcock devotees know, even if they've never seen others. However, there have been other admirers of Hitchcock's work [brian de Palma, for one] who have paid homage to that one scene in their subsequent films. I know that I never see a shower scene, in a thriller, without thinking of "Psycho".

AND it's got Tallulah Bankhead, very enjoyable as the career woman/reporter. Very much a WWII film, but entertaining as such. Sort of a filmed one-act play as well, but better than Rope IMHO. I have both of them, so I'll have to watch them again. So far, "Rope" is my favourite, but I haven't seen "Strangers on a Train" for awhile.

Those of you who love "Fargo", as I do, may remember the scene in the Radisson Hotel, where Steve Buschemi's character has hired a lady of the evening. He's making small talk, asks if she enjoys her work, then opines that any hotel lounge which has a class act like Feliciano, [who could be seen, playing in the background] was a first rate place. It was hilarious at the time, but hey, he wasn't wrong.

Etta James, Al Greene [forget the Righteous Bros. version of "Unchained Melody], Marvin Gaye, Johnnie Ray [not everything, Lord knows, but his "High Drama, The Real Johnnie Ray" has a kick-ass version of "Lotos Blossom" and other tracks, which will knock your socks off.] and Odetta [Yes, Odetta]