Teasing the Korean

A very talented and prolific songwriting friend of mine thinks that Alfie is the greatest pop song ever written. Probably. I am obsessed with this track. And with this one, which sounds like the soundtrack to a travel montage in an early-70s made-for-TV movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpJwRy70xZM Speaking of made-for-TV movies, Bacharach's "Nikki" was the theme to the ABC Movie of the Week.

I'm saying, from a technical standpoint, that Burt's songs - and Jobim's songs - were more complex than what was typically heard in US pop music during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, if you took a songwriting 101 course and brought in "I Say a Little Prayer," you would get knocked for having too wide of interval jumps in the first few bars.

I wonder how he pulled that off. His tunes are deceptively complex, all sorts of strange melodic jumps, extra beats thrown in here and there, and chord progressions that don't necessarily go where you would expect. We take that complexity for granted now, because we have heard those songs for decades.

When I was a little kid, I thought the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stones were the sound of the '60s. But the subliminal soundtrack of my childhood was Burt Bacharach. So that is the real sound of the '60s. I thought Burt's music was perfect for the generation that was too old for rock, but too young for WWII. It was the sound of crying housewives whose husbands were having affairs with the secretaries. The secretaries operated huge keypunch Bendix or IBM computers, and wore mini dresses. RIP. ALSO: Burt Bacharach is great name to refute the argument that the general public likes only simple music.

That may very well be the one that I saw. Thank you!

Just letting you know.

Monk was. I'm sure that "Powerhouse" inspired "Epistrophy."

Agreed, and a perfect companion to the Raymond Scott Quintette!

Right, but weren't the Milt Jackson tracks included on your LP copies? They were on mine. Not sure if the track listing varied on the LPs through the decades.

Thanks, I have this, but I don't like the fact that those four tunes were left off the Monk Genius CDs. They were part of those albums for anyone who first experienced them that way, which would probably include you, me, and most of us on this message board.

Thanks. I do have the improved Monks, which were RVGs. They also included the original cover art, although they deleted the Milt Jackson tracks, unfortunately.

Thanks for this. When did the upgrade occur? Between the original CDs and the RVG editions?

Thank you!

Does anyone have a pdf of the book that came with this Mosaic set? I am specifically looking for page(s) listing the track titles, composers, and, if Mosaic included it, which tracks were on which albums. Thanks in advance!

It may have been. The text on the front cover was definitely red/maroon. Something led me to believe that it had music from both volumes, but I may be wrong about that.

Thank you both. I should have snapped a pic but I didn't. And it may have had 20 tracks rather than 16. If it is still there when I go back I will share details. Thank you!

I saw this CD. It apparently combines material from both volumes. Trouble is, the track titles were all in Japanese, and I don't read Japanese. Does anyone know what the content is? I think there were 16 tracks. Maybe they eliminated the alternate takes and combined just the master takes?

Nice!

I dreamed, rather vividly, that I was in a college music class and I had to write a paper on Latin jazz from the angle of the authentic vs. imitation. In the dream, I was jotting down notes with a red pen. I was writing that "authentic" is a problematic word when dealing with cultural traditions. I then started making a list: Machito, Chico O'Farrill... I also made a note about how the imitators often didn't get the bass patterns correct, and wrote down "Al McKibbon" to demonstrate an important exception. I was also going to explore how non-Latino musicians took what you could broadly call Latin Jazz into interesting directions. Finally, I said to the professor, "Do you know the album Chile con Soul by the Jazz Crusaders?" He replied "No." I said to him, "You have to hear 'Agua Dulce.' When I used to DJ, it was one of the tracks I reserved for the peak of the action." I then started going through my LPs, but I couldn't find the album. I then woke up. I was kind of disappointed that I didn't have to write the paper after all, and also disappointed that my dream professor did not get to hear that Jazz Crusaders track. Off topic, auto-correct just now tried to change "Machito" to "machete."

Just watched this on the Criterion Channel, in their Cinema Verite category. Did this group ever record?

I was just listening to "November Seascape" by the George Shearing Quintet, written and arranged by Marjorie.

+2

In some places, yes. I was in another city a few months ago. I walked into a record store and went straight to the jazz CDs. The proprietor was holding court with another employee and some customers. He was discussing a Zoom meeting he hosted about music. At one point, he said, a participant asked what shoegaze was. This elicited a roar of laughter from his entourage. "Dude," he said, "I could spend this whole call talking about shoe gaze." More guffaws. A short while later, I went up to the counter with a bunch of OJC and Connoisseur CDs, all for $2.99 a throw. The guy rang me up without saying a word. I walked out of there like I hit a jackpot.

On the very rare occasion that I waddle into a rekkid store, I always find very cheap OJCs, and not always the obvious stuff.

It would have been nice to be able to keep a thread like this for funny or bizarre headlines, but it couldn't last.