Face of the Bass

I felt it up here in Albany, NY. I was sitting at my computer when everything started gently shaking for about 15-20 seconds.

I have the following for sale. All listed prices include shipping to the U.S. Please inquire for international deliveries. Paypal Only. Thanks for looking! Jazz CDs: Stan Adler/Paul Chauncy/Jon Lloyd/Rob Palmer/Phil Wachsmann - Apparitions (Leo) $5 Anouar Brahem - Thimar (ECM) $5 Richard Carr/Mike Nord/Georg Hofmann/Art Maddox/Randy Kem - In Walks Art (Leo) $5 Ellery Eskelin - Ten (hatOLOGY) $8 Ellery Eskelin - Vanishing Point (hatOLOGY) $15 Ellery Eskelin - Forms (hatOLOGY) $8 Hermet Geerken/John Tchicai/Famoudou Don Moye - Cassava Balls (still sealed) (Leo) $5 Eric Harland - Voyager--Live by Night (Space Time) $7 Illinois Jacquet with Kenny Burrell - Desert Winds (Verve) $5 Franz Koglmann - L'Heure Bleue (hatOLOGY) $8 Yusef Lateef - Psychicemotus (Impulse!) $7 Misha Mengelberg - The Root of the Problem (hatOLOGY) $8 Wes Montgomery - Goin' Out Of My Head (Verve) $5 Richard Nunns/Evan Parker - Rangirua (Leo) $5 Evan Parker/Phil Wachsmann/Teppo Hauta-aho - The Needles (Leo) $7 Tim Trevor-Briscoe/Nicola Guazzaloca - One Hot Afternoon (Leo) $5 Weather Report - Mysterious Traveller (Columbia) $5 Cassandra Wilson - Belly of the Sun (Blue Note) $5 Experimental Music CDs Joe Colley - Psychic Stress Soundtracks (Antifrost) $5 Joe Colley - Desperate Attempts at Beauty (Ground Fault) $5 EKG & Giuseppi Ielasi - Group (Formed) $5 Ferran Fages/Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ruth Barberan - Istmo (Creative Sources) $5 Los Glissandos - Stand Clear (Creative Sources) $5 Lapslap - Scratch (Leo) $5 Alfredo Costa Monteiro - Rumeur (Creative Sources) $5 Julien Ottavi - Nervure Magnetique (Sigma) $5 Dion Workman - Ching (Antiopic) $5

Good afternoon everyone... I have the following box sets for sale. Prices include shipping to the U.S. Please inquire for international deliveries. Wes Montgomery - Complete Riverside Recordings, $125 (Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) Clifford Brown - The Complete Emarcy Recordings, $135 (See above. Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) ON HOLD Modern Jazz Quartet - The Complete Atlantic Studio Recordings of the Modern Jazz Quartet, $90 (Discs, box, and booklet all in like-new condition) ON HOLD Paypal only, please. These will ship no earlier than this Thursday. Thanks!

Right! But if I'm going to go, I want to go at least touting some good music.

Inspired from an exchange in another thread, I think it would be revealing for posters here to do the following exercise: You are sitting in your living room with your best friend in the entire world. A large man breaks in your front door, marches into your living room, pulls out a gun, and then asks the following question: "If you could only save all the recordings of ONE artist in your jazz collection, which artist would you save?" Taken aback by the shocking crudity of this question, you say, "Of course, that is an impossible question. I could no sooner choose one artist's recordings over another than I could choose one child over..." Before you are able to get out another word, the man walks over to your best friend, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger. Your friend's brains are splattered all over your carpet, all over your couch, all over the walls. Now he puts the gun to YOUR head. "Which artist?" he shouts. As you shake with fear and struggle to maintain control over your bodily functions, you give your answer. What is your answer? If you could only save all the recordings of one artist in your collection, with all your other recordings being taken away from you forever, which body of work would you save first? I would save the following artists, in the order listed: 1. Miles Davis 2. Sun Ra 3. John Coltrane 4. Ornette Coleman 5. Cecil Taylor 6. Charlie Parker 7. Steve Lacy 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Anthony Braxton 10. Pharoah Sanders If he denied me any of those ten, I'd tell him to just go ahead and pull the trigger.

That's one possible outcome, although my experience with child abuse also has taught me that it can have the opposite effect, that the abused person grows up and vows to never allow anything like that to happen to anyone that they love. Victims of child abuse can become hyper-vigilant about any form of abuse ever happening to their own children, or to other children they know.

Has anyone here seen Pasolini's brilliant and horrifying film, Salo? This case is starting to remind me of that. And yet...I think these people, if they did what is being alleged, are very sick. It must be a terrible and dark compulsion that would cause someone to do these things, and I do know that in some cases, pedophiles feel relieved when they are caught, because they won't have to hide in shame anymore...their wrongdoings are exposed in the light of day. In one of the links to the Wikipedia article there was a story about a HS football coach in Virginia caught up in this thing who seemed to in some ways have been unburdened by his arrest. Now people know the truth, and there is nowhere left to hide. All the aliases, the secret encryptions, it's all falling apart now.

I'd like to think that they're monstrous human beings. It's not like being a human being and being really dangerous and fucked up aren't mutually exclusive qualities. OTOH, if we could round up all the monsters in the world (except the cute ones like Cookie Monster) and execute them at one place and at one time, that would pretty much fix everything, wouldn't it... Unfortunately I think if we did that we'd have to execute ourselves, because we would have become monsters...

I have it and I like it, but I actually prefer some of the material from the later 60s and early 70s, definitely including the Moog stuff. I love your list. It wouldn't be my list, but everyone should do one to get their bearings (would make a fun thread). Mine would not even include Sun Ra. Just off the top of my head: John Coltrane Steve Lacy Anthony Braxton Cecil Taylor Evan Parker Miles Davis Peter Brotzmann John Butcher Charlie Parker Art Ensemble/Roscoe Mitchell On any given day, the order might get reshuffled a bit, but it would be a while before we reached Sun Ra. As for the claims of prophet etc, I just don't buy that. There are some very interesting socio-political aspects to Sun Ra, but I think that aspect has been oversold. Nice list! When I made up mine, I kept changing it to get Steve Lacy higher and higher...I suspect in another month he will be higher than I have him listed. A number of other ones you listed here, particularly Brotzmann, Art Ensemble, and Evan Parker, would be close to making my list and might make it some days depending on my mood.

Maybe it is my ingrained prejudice against 80s music in general. I've never really tried to hear Miles's music from the 80s either, except for Aura. The few 80s discs of Sun Ra's that I have--At the Village Vanguard, for instance, which might actually be from the 1990s--were relatively disappointing to me when I first heard them, but that was now several years ago.

That's good stuff, Allen. I think that 1950s stuff ages really well...actually, all of Sun Ra's stuff from the late 1950s through the mid-to-late 1960s ages well. I don't think the band was ever quite the same after Ronnie Boykins left, but there are some good albums from the 1970s too. (I've never really been able to get into his 80's material, though.) Anyway, there is no doubt that there is a glut of Sun Ra recordings out there, but the man was an absolutely brilliant musician, composer and bandleader. In terms of critical recognition, he might be the most underrated American musician of the twentieth century. For those interested, I think Szwed's biography of Ra ranks as one of the best jazz bios ever written, IMO.

I'll put it this way: if somebody burst into my house, put a gun to my head and said that I had to get rid of every recording that I had by every artist, except one, I would save my collection in this order: 1. Miles Davis 2. Sun Ra 3. John Coltrane 4. Ornette Coleman 5. Cecil Taylor 6. Charlie Parker 7. Steve Lacy 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Anthony Braxton 10. Pharoah Sanders 11. Charles Mingus 12. Duke Ellington And so forth. Dude could have my Louis Armstrong recordings, as I've sold most of those anyway after an aborted attempt to make myself like something that I just wasn't digging. I keep the Hot Five & Sevens around out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. Everything else has been listened to and then resold.

I studied poetry throughout college, and was blessed to have a wonderful, encouraging mentor in the poet Jane Shore. Then I went to NYU and Levine was the exact opposite of that, and suddenly, without any encouragement or helpfulness, I realized I didn't really want to be a poet. I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to work in history, so that's what I did. So in a way I am grateful that my encounters with Levine convinced me to give it up, as there is far too much "navel gazing" going on in poetry for my tastes anyway. Levine's self-styled everyman persona is a joke, though. Butchers and factory workers aren't the ones reading his poetry or giving him prizes. It's the "ivory tower" academics that he is so disdainful towards that have nurtured and advanced his career.

To my ears he and Ellington produced the best big band music in jazz history. I think his Afro-futurist musings and costumes have caused many to dismiss him as a clown, but I stand by what I said. His music holds up as well as (and often better than) all the people I mentioned above. Further, his influence on the avant garde scene is considerable, to say the least.

Nice!

Sorry, I can't help myself...I took a class with Levine at NYU in 1999, as part of the MFA program there, and I really didn't like him at all. He was always putting people down, whether it be students or other famous poets, while projecting this image of himself as the tough everyman of American poetry. I was not a great poet, but he convinced me to give up on it altogether, and to pursue something else with my life (which I'm very glad I did, so I guess I can be thankful for that.) To me he was just an arrogant s.o.b., and I see that in an interview with the Times he talks about how he thinks the Library of Congress has named a number of really mediocre poets as the Poets Laureate. Well, as far as I'm concerned he can add his name to his own list of poets undeserving of the honor. Really didn't want to crap on this thread, but my experiences working with this man were so negative that I just have to take the opportunity to rag on him at least a little bit.

Yeah, I think there are probably more like 25-30 top-notch Sun Ra albums. The guy was just incredibly prolific, and an amazing musician. If there was a Mount Rushmore of Jazz musicians, I'd put him up there with Miles, Coltrane, Ellington and Monk in terms of guys who were incredibly prolific and who brought their own very unique visions to the jazz idiom.

Last night I was thinking about how I got to know Bill several years ago, through the Internet. I posted on another site and he sent me a pm, and then we were emailing each other. He sent me CD-Rs of the entire Roland Kirk Mercury set, and it really opened my ears to something new. I started listening to his radio program, and he was the one who got me into Sun Ra, after he played "Lanquidity." Last night I read a Sun Ra interview from the 1960s where he says the following: I don't know what else I want to say. I may be thinking about this too much...

Soul Trombone is really good; Cabin in the Sky is pretty awful, IMO.

Right, tonight my wife asked me how I would feel if this had happened to one of our children. I'd feel an anger and a hatred that would be difficult to control, I am sure. But the thing is, this didn't happen to my children, and I don't know any of the victims in this case. On the other hand, I do know Bill. So what I am forced to think about in this case is the possibility that someone for whom I had much respect doing something truly awful. And even though he didn't do anything to me, I think I am being called upon to forgive. Because when something like this happens, all of society reacts in horror, thus the responses that we've seen on here over the last couple of days. As I've said elsewhere, I think the worst kind of hell in the world has to be the one that you make for yourself. The worst feeling would not be to be wrongly accused of something atrocious, but to be justly accused. That is to say, to do something so vile that all the world rightly turns away in disgust, your friends abandon you, and you are truly alone. That, for me, is the worst kind of punishment I could possibly imagine. And that's something that he will have to deal with, assuming all this stuff we are reading about on the Internet is true. For me, the only meaningful forgiveness is the one that hasn't been earned, but that is extended anyway, because of the common bond of our shared humanity. That's what I have been thinking about today, not Bill as some monstrous "other" outcast from society, but Bill the human being. To be honest, I can't understand the compulsion for pedophilia; it makes no sense to me. But I think some of the other emotions that are probably prevalent in his mind right now--self-loathing, sense of doom, raw fear, anger, etc.--are emotions that I know only too well.

I have known two women that were molested as children. One is an alcoholic, the other killed herself. Forget him, and see what you can do to help out those that were molested when they were young.... Believe me, I know about the horrors of child abuse. But the reality is that we don't know what happened here, we can surmise based on reports in the newspapers, but we still don't know. The one aspect of Christianity that I most agree with is the fact that Jesus, during his time on earth, spent much of his time with criminals. I don't think it is right to just "forget" anyone.

Well, this is awful news. I've never met Bill but have considered him a friend since I first crossed paths with him many years ago. We traded CDs a few times, and he hipped me to the music of Rahsaan. If he did what they say he did then it is horrible, but he will still be my friend. I would write to him in prison if I could obtain an address.

Just about everything reissued on the Evidence label is worth getting. It's all good, although my favorites are Other Planes Of There, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, The Magic City, Atlantis, and the Heliocentric Worlds discs from ESP.

I don't have the liner notes for this one, but does anyone know why they decided to call their collaboration by this name? Was it purely an analogy, a commentary on their own musical gifts and legendary status, or did they also intend the music, such as "S & J Blues," for instance, to be a musical reflection on Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson? Thanks in advance for any help with this one.

Yes, because the idea that you would be stranded on a desert island with a cd player and speaker system that plugged into an electrical outlet was just far more realistic.