umum_cypher

Milton Babbitt? I hear he was into show tunes...no kidding. Yep. Alan Forte too. That says something ... not entirely sure what, but something

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7443651.stm In my wildest imagination I can't picture a composer whose music is less suited to the subject matter!

I'm with Porcy. 'In London, where at $6,191 the average price per square foot is the highest in the world, your $1.5 million would buy only a small studio in the smartest parts of town'. That may be true. But around my area (admittedly the cheapest bit of town, but still only a few miles from the centre) £700k would get you a grand (sorry, 'imposing') 4-floor Victorian semi. You'd pay almost the same on the train ticket into town every day, but that's another story.

Yes, and the 'Speak Like A Child' cover is of him and his new wife, I believe. You'd have to be a pretty unfortunate adulterer to be busted on a point of discographic detail.

Last night, went to see Tim Berne (well, Craig Taborn really) at the Vortex. Unfortunately I was a week early. Better than a week late. Sidewinder, please report back on Wayne ... first time I haven't been to the quartet's London show. Very much diminishing returns for me (tho admittedly starting from a precipitous height).

Is this the Belgium footage? I know he's lying on the sofa singing at some point in that. But I have a clearer memory of the part where he's playing darts with the locals in some grimy Ostend boozer.

Does anyone have (or know of) any film of Martial Solal recorded in the 50s or 60s?

A bit of an interview w/ Jymie Merritt 18 September 01, Warwick Hotel, Philadelphia JM: And I finally ran into [LM], I was living in Brooklyn and I ran into him one day on the street, and he said I’m forming a new group. By this time, we were down into the next generation of players. Because I had just come from rehearsal with Chick Corea, we were working, Chick and Joe Henderson. I was sort of working around with those guys at that time. And he said, Well, I’m coming back on the scene and I’m getting a group together. So I gave him my number and he said he’d call me in a couple of weeks. And we got together, and he had Harold Mabern, Mickey Roker, Bennie Maupin. TP: And you were on electric again. JM: Electric upright, yeah, Ampeg. That started earlier, when I came back to New York and I was working with Max Roach. The guy that had developed this instrument I had known for a long time. Hull, Everett Hull. I don’t know if he’s still alive, if he is he’s near a hundred (laughs). I was working one of those clubs on the East side, I think it was the Apartment, he sent somebody who brought me this rig. By this time the business had gone nationwide, and he sent me this custom made amp and this bass. Which I still have. So I was working with it, and I asked Max, what do you think if I take this overseas. We were always having problems touring with acoustic basses anyway. So he said OK, so that was the beginning of my using it. So when I joined Lee I told him what I was using and he, you know [didn’t mind], so I used that instrument for the entire tenure of my playing with him. We used it on the dates out in California, and then shortly after that, we got back to New York and he changed personnel. He got Freddie Waits and Billy Harper. Mabern was still on board. Then we started doing some things, and we recorded one album. He said, come down, we want to start editing the album, but we never got that far. In the interim, we went to work at Slugs in New York on the lower east side, and at that time … it was in February, cold, starting to snow now and then. And I’ll never forget it, it was Washington’s birthday, whatever year this was. 72, cause I had just moved back to Philadelphia to reorganise. I’d started a workshop, and I went back to get that hooked up. So I was commuting. And I was staying at one of the hotels on Broadway, and I came out of the building in the morning, I think it was Saturday morning ... (While we were talking Jymie spelled in English.)

Which tune? Not sure I see her. But one of the women present is supposedly 'the girlfriend'...

That's Robert Kenyatta, Philly hand-drummer, not Robin. Toured with the Beach Boys and Sonny Rollins in the 70s. Still in North Philadelphia.

'Sophomore effort'. Second album. Whilst we're at it, can we ban people form claiming their favourite word is 'serendipity', as some precious celeb did in a space-filling feature in the paper this weekend, following, I don't know, 3 million precious sods before him/her, as if it was in the least way clever, interesting, original, or true.

Female, very much so. Which is why it's so funny that gangsta rapper Ice-T's real name is Tracy. I suppose that's the 'T'.

Technically correct, even if it was a set-up.

Minimum qualification (though many practice without): ability to spell 'Thelonious'.

A few times I've been astonished by (really good) pianists telling me that they don't rate Herbie. The complaint has generally been that they find his touch is too uniform, perfect, pearly. I can see what they mean. But I love his touch!

This thread crosses the line

It'll be a nonstop Klavierstucke tribute party in my house this weekend.

My review in The Wire 271, September 2006 The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets, Ed. Anthony Elms and John Corbett (Chicago: Whitewalls). Proselytisers, preachers and demagogues dotted the sidewalks and crowded the storefronts of Southside Chicago in the early 50s, the speakers variously espousing Christianity, Islam, Marxism or proto-Pan Africanism; quieter thinkers deprived of any institutional outlet aside from the street also engaged in public scholarly discussion. Sun Ra was known in the area not only as an idiosyncratic swing-to-bop bandleader, but also as one of those intellectuals, and while this activity of Ra’s has always been known about – his musicians have reported how Ra’s writings circulated among the national jazz community – little was known of their content until a few years ago, when a cache of Ra ephemera was retrieved from a skip and the 46 pieces collected in this book were discovered. The torn, yellowed, crayon-marked original scripts are presented here in facsimile and followed by typeset transcriptions somewhat easier to read. Somewhat, but not much. Ra’s investigations of biblical interpretation, which form the basis of every text, are rhetorically oblique to say the least; further, removed from performance and so deprived of the verbal and gestural persuasiveness that the performance of good talk guaranteed, however they sounded, the pieces read strangely indeed. Ra’s ambiguous and sometimes-inconsistent attitude towards his chief subject doesn’t help. The musician betrays a Nietzschean distaste for Christianity which he seems to have seen – like many black discontents of the time – as part responsible for a perceived black social docility: ‘To be CHRISTLIKE is to be meek and led to the slaughter without protest. The AMERICAN NEGRO HAS DONE ALL THESE THINGS’. The Bible and the religion, Ra polemicises, are not things for ‘negroes’; behind much of this is an intense (and rather Protestant) suspicion of institutional authority, and a relentless questioning of authoritative interpretations. ‘Who would you rather give you freedom and all the happiness that life can bring: NAACP, Democrats, Republicans, Churches and Religion, Communism, or the true God?’ For Ra the Bible does contain that true God’s true word – but that truth is not the truth the book purports to contain. ‘THE CONCEALED TRUTH’, Ra types with one finger on shift, ‘IS THE ONE OF MOST IMPORTANCE TO THE NEGRO. THE BIBLE IS WRITTEN IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT HAS ONE MEANING FOR THE NEGRO AND ANOTHER MEANING FOR THE WHITE MAN’. And many of Ra’s texts are devoted to the uncovering of this true meaning, through outrageous hermeneutics, endless language gaming, operations squarely at the centre of African American talk culture. Words are for Ra not symbols given meaning when linked by grammar or in argument, rather, Nommo-like, material repositories for the very thing they name. Words are plastic things, and the skill of Ra the sculptor reveals hidden unities, as in the game that tracks back from a contemporary black cultural anonymity to a glorious past: ‘JOHN DOE, OD, OUD, SPODE ODE, DRINKIN’ WINE SPOITHE OITHE, ETHIOPS’. Much of Ra’s etymological bullshitting (in English, Cantonese and Latin) is in this way illustrative of thought and language in motion, bearing more metaphorical and creative meaning than literal. But sometimes that elucidating is overcome by autodidact obfuscation: ‘In the English Alphabet 2 is ten (X) from Z which is a non curved 2. Z then is equal to 2 because the first is the last’. ‘Truth is Frank. Frank is French. The French language is the Truth language. The mind of every Frenchman is a key to ETERNAL LIFE in the TWO world.’ Ra could be a disingenuous man, which is perhaps how after all this verbal play he can chide: ‘TOO MUCH MOUTH IS THE CAUSE OF THE AMERICAN NEGROES CONDITION TODAY’. Indeed, his attitude towards his audience is continuously provocative, and while mentions of music are rare, it is once introduced as a pretext by which to chide black people as uncultured for not subsidizing the arts, specifically – surprisingly – symphony orchestras, ballets and opera companies.

Actually, Roll Call is a Mobley composition. Whoops - I misread. Thought is was one artist - one performance. Otherwise, Blakey isn't going to crop up much. And that Youtube Naima really is my favourite Coltrane performance

Actually, Roll Call is a Mobley composition. Whoops - I misread. Thought is was one artist - one performance. Otherwise, Blakey isn't going to crop up much.

Coltrane: http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=p_ywkpVJ624 Bird: Blues for Alice Blakey: Roll Call Hank himself: The Vamp Lee Morgan: The Gigolo

Lotus Flower (Enja, 1982) is a cast-iron masterpiece.

Yep. Web 2.0 can swivel, Organissimo notwithstanding.

I sold my paper round-funded Golden Age hip hop collection (150 albums and 12"s) for about £100 when I was 15. It was to finance various things (including Fats Waller records). MC Lyte, BDP, Juice Crew, all bought on import. Schoolboy error. I've seen a couple floating round local record shops since for about $35-40, but the money's not the thing. It's now a cardinal rule of mine as it is of all right thinking people NEVER to sell music. Unfortunately that means that my house is full of crap CDs, but a rule is a rule.

OHdeen