Guy Berger

I liked the audio clips on Dark Side of the Moon (and, I guess, on "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast"). After that, like a lot of other features of PF's music, they became progressively more gimmicky. I also like The Final Cut - it has very little of what I like in PF's music, but brings other stuff to the table and also avoids most of The Wall's severe shortcomings. As far as AMLoR, I think Rooster nailed it - quite a bit of good stuff (though I think only "Sorrow" really gets close to great), but the 80s production is a downer, and generally it has a feeling of "trying too hard". TDB feels a lot less forced/contrived; just a bunch of middle-aged musicians making music they like. I'm fine with that.

Anything can be stultifying if the creators let themselves be stultified

Enjoying this discussion. Jazz at this point is a mature art form. I'm not sure the "linear"/"teleological"/"progressivist" intrepretation of jazz history ever had much merit, but it certainly doesn't now. There's something worthwhile left to be said in each jazz "sub-style" and there are also likely to be musicians in each of those sub-styles that are producing uninteresting music.

I don't feel an urgent need to pick this up, but will probably get around to it eventually. It's interesting that this one is getting a fairly positive critical reception, unlike The Division Bell which was (to my mind unfairly) panned upon release.

The original is a very schmaltzy tune.

Some friends and I saw Houston and his quartet last night. Very good, as you would expect. My wife was amused by the fact that he played "The Way We Were".

I'm planning to pick up the Gustav Mahler bio because I've always been interested in whether he was actually a mainstream (bop) jazz guitarist before he became a big-time composer/conductor.

They really are terrible compared to other smartphones

Yeah, I love that rating system. Sorry for starting the new thread - I just wanted to ask about this specific reissue

Hey guys, I was finally going to get around to picking up the reissue of Pharoah Sanders's Thembi and realized the late 90s reissue has gone OOP. Amazon instead offers this import: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000024Y5J?pc_redir=1413733105&robot_redir=1 Is there any reason I should avoid this? It's not a CD-R, right?

Whoever did that, well-played. I think it's certainly possible for this to simultaneously be bad music and good conceptual art - and I thought that was DTM's point. I am not sure critics of this recording have really addressed this argument. Love this cover. It looks like he is on a giant celestial slip and slide. I wonder whether the detached piano keyboard looked more incongruous to 50s listeners - my first thought was "yeah, NBD, he's holding a Casio keyboard".

Nice to hear someone say that. I put it on last week too and was pretty unmoved, as usual. It's a one-of-a-kind album no doubt but it never totally pulls me in. "All Blues" remains the highlight to me while the slower tracks like "Flamenco Sketches" and "Blue In Green" just come off as dull. I'm not trying to suggest the album doesn't deserve its status-- but it does take up too much space. In a discography that encompasses Walkin', Milestones, In Europe, ESP, Nefertiti... I guess I get why this one rises to the top, but I also don't. So this is obviously a matter of taste, but I've found that these tracks grew on me a lot over time. I'm a big Coltrane fan and he's magnificent on these - "Blue in Green" is one of his best performances on record, "Flamenco Sketches" not far behind.

RIP JB

I enjoyed both of these.

The album PEACEFUL WORLD is a good one.

In retrospect not many other bands of that era did broad-yet-seamless eclecticism as well as Santana. Also, though CS's "brand" came to dominate the band in later years, the early lineup was much more democratic. Collectively these guys were exposed to lots of different music. And they covered Gene Ammons.

Though Santana was obviously influenced by John Coltrane during the early 70s (and drummer Mike Shrieve even more so), I don't think that's the predominant jazz influence I hear in the opening trilogy of albums (1969-71). Jimmy Smith, Les McCann, Gabor Szabo, Willie Bobo, Chico Hamilton, other artists lying in the mid-60s nexus between jazz, pop & latin music - those are the jazz influences that mostly crop up before Caravanserai (though the opening of Abraxas is clearly a nod to electric Miles). Since nobody asked me, here's my scoring of Santana albums I own: Fillmore West '68 (B) Self-titled (A) Abraxas (A) #3 (B) Caravanserai (A) Welcome (B) Lotus (A) Love Devotion and Surrender (B) Borboletta © [sorry JSngry!] Amigos (B) Festival © Moonflower © The Swing of Delight © Blues for Salvador © I have also heard a few of the other albums. Supernatural was fine for what it was - a well-crafted Santanabot. The late 70s albums are pretty dire but often hilarious.

I haven't heard the recording in question, though I do like a lot of "late" Coltrane, but it's certainly possible for it to be simultaneously true that (A) the recording is "not great" (or even "not good"!) and (B) Dyer pooped out a turd. Also - and I can't believe I didn't make this point pre-edit - there is a WHOLE OTHER THREAD DEDICATED TO THIS RECORDING in which people say positive stuff about it, whereas this thread is dedicated to Dyer's review. Ergo your observation.

Is Dyer a board member? I don't understand where this comment is coming from or why it's relevant.

I'm embarrassed for the NYRB.

In general I love bassists so am fond of nearly everyone mentioned on this thread. Great to see people mentioning Jimmy Garrison who I feel is sometimes overlooked relative to the flashier bassists of that era, but is absolutely brilliant. However, I have to say that I am hit-and-miss on Ron Carter (sometimes great, sometimes incredibly boring) and to a lesser degree Paul Chambers (his arco playing sounds like he's sawing away in the garage, albeit in an extremely swinging fashion). p.s. I'll admit Carter's absurd comments on Garrison in an interview by Ethan Iverson are probably influencing my opinions:

Granted, maybe the O-Forums are an unrepresentative sample of people who have actually heard of this project, but describing the negative reactions as "horror" seems melodramatic and straw-mannish. Moreover, none that I've noticed seem to have the premise "OMG THEY DESECRATED KOB".

This is not a coincidence - it's a key feature of the project. (Again, anticipated by JL Borges.) Brian Eno: When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context? Another way of saying that is, 'What would you be hearing if you didn't know you were listening to Miles Davis?' I think of context as everything that isn't physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he's great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he'd been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, Aren't you also 'listening' to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you' re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?

He's awesome and I'm glad he's still with us.

Wish I had been able to go to one of these. As Colin said, hopefully this stuff makes it onto record - and if it DOES end up on ECM, that it sounds like SHADOW MAN rather than the first SNAKEOIL album (though I liked that one too).