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medjuck

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Posts posted by medjuck

  1. Buy! Buy! Buy! 'til you're 50.

    then:

    Sell! Sell! Sell! 'til you die!

    Hey! Hey! I'm over 50. I'm not ready to do that yet. What do you think, that 50 is OLD or something?

    I can see it at age 90, though. When I am 90 I may feel quite differently.

    Well, I'm being 12.9% funny boy, but only that much 'cause I'm moving in that direction myself...sincerely so.

    I'll be 49 next month and I'm already experimenting with various harddrive combos and ideas for keeping "soft" files and

    stepping up the eBay selling again of the hard copies.

    It's not physically messy 'round here, but I'm surrounded by all of this - what I'm beginning to see as - detritus.

    No complaints from my sweetheart here at home about quantity - she knew who/what she was getting.

    I'm just feeeeeling the weight of it all. It's gone from about 26 or 27K to about 32K titles in the past 9 years.

    ...and you realize that just building an add-on to the house or carting them to some external storage facility doesn't pare things down -

    it just moves it out of sight. Ideally, it would be nice to get it down to what the Buddhists refer to as the "Ten Thousand Things."

    Now if I could just somehow store all of these books and manuscripts on disc - short of scanning... :ph34r:

    32K!!?? Are we talking albums here?

  2. * What is your dream of happiness?

    Perfect happiness is something which doesn't exist in this life. The goal is never to be too happy or too sad.

    *What is your greatest fear.

    Not getting close enough to my aspirations.

    *Which living person do you most admire?

    I'm afraid I don't admire people that much. Maybe my plumber.

    * What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

    Not always being resolute enough.

    * What is the trait you most deplore in others?

    Slovenly personal traits.

    *What is your greatest extravagance?

    Overindulgence in good food.

    *What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

    Probably thriftiness.

    *On what occasion do you lie?

    When I'm absolutely forced to by one of life's stupid entanglements.

    *Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

    Probably "You dig?"

    *What is your greatest regret?

    Not saying some things to departed associates.

    *What or who is the greatest love of your life?

    Of course my late wife, Lucille.

    *Which talent would you most like to have?

    The one I have.

    * What is your present state of mind?

    Peaceful but active.

    *What do you consider your greatest achievement?

    Listening to my inner consciousness and summoning the strength and determination to acat on it.

    *If you could come back, as what would it be?

    A more evolved, intelligent being.

    *What is your most treasured possession?

    When I lost so many prized possessions on 9/11, I learned a lesson: possessions are not "where it's at."

    *What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

    Being in the belly of the beast in a straitjacket.

    *Where would like to live?

    Wherever I can be left alone.

    * What is your favorite occupation?

    Music, or whteer conbtributes to the edificatino of of others.

    * The quality you most like in a man?

    Listening more than talking.

    *What do you most value in our friends?

    Loyalty.

    *Who are your heroes in real life?

    Anyone whose life is lived giving more than taking.

    * What is your motto?

    "Do unto others," and secondly, one I made up watching TV: "Images and lies, and bad for your eyes."

    The intro says this month (they mean September) he turns 77 and plays his first concert at Carnegie Hall.

  3. Speaking of that Ornette quote from "If I Loved You" at the beginning of his "Turnaround" solo, I just checked out how Hammerstein's lyric continues:

    "If I loved you,

    Time and again I would try to say

    All I'd want you to know.

    If I loved you,

    Words wouldn't come in an easy way

    Round in circles I'd go!"

    "Round in circles I'd go" on "Turnaround" -- pretty neat if that's part of what stirred the allusion into being in Ornette's mind. Also IIRC (I don't have a version of "If I Loved You" at hand, so I can't be sure), what's happening musically in the phrase "Round in circles I go" bears a fairly intense, at once circular and somewhat off-center, resemblance to what's happening musically in "All I'd want you to know."

    The If I Loved You quote is hard to miss, but I thought Larry was pushing it a bit with his reference to the lyrics. But I was just listening to Turnaround on Tomorrow is the Question from nearly 50 years ago and at about the 5:12 mark Ornette quotes If I loved You! Since the songs have nothing in common melodically (at least as far as I can hear) I presume that Larry is right and Ornette uses it because of the lyrics. BTW Are there other versins of Turnaround that quote it?

  4. From the LA Times.

    Art Davis, 73; known for mastery of the bass, also was a psychologist

    By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Times Staff Writer

    August 4, 2007

    Art Davis, the renowned double bassist who played with John Coltrane and other jazz greats, was blacklisted in the 1970s for speaking up about racism in the music industry, and then later in life earned a doctorate in clinical psychology and balanced performance dates with appointments to see patients, has died. He was 73.

    Davis, a player whom jazz critic Nat Hentoff once described as "an astonishing player" and "beyond category," died of a heart attack Sunday at his home in Long Beach, said his son Kimaili Davis.

    "He was adventurous with his approach to playing music," said pianist Nate Morgan, who played with the elder Davis intermittently over the last 10 years. "It takes a certain amount of integrity to step outside the box and say, 'I like it here and I'm going to hang here for a while.' "

    Known for his stunning and complete mastery of the instrument, Davis was able to genre-hop comfortably. He played classical music with the New York Philharmonic, was a member of the NBC, Westinghouse and CBS orchestras, and played for Broadway shows.

    The most intense and enriching experience of Davis' career was his collaboration with John Coltrane. Described by Hentoff as Coltrane's favorite bassist, Davis performed on the saxophonist's albums including "Ascension," Volumes 1 and 2 of "The Africa/Brass Sessions" and "Ole Coltrane." The two musicians met one night in the late 1950s at Small's Paradise, a jazz club in Harlem, where Davis was playing with drummer Max Roach. Coltrane invited Davis to play with him the following morning at one of his legendary grueling practice sessions.

    A few years later, when Coltrane was building his quartet, he invited Davis to join. By then he had become averse to touring and so declined, although he periodically played with the group.

    Davis viewed his instrument as "the backbone of the band," one that should "inspire the group by proposing harmonic information with a certain sound quality and rhythmic impulses," Davis said in an excerpt from So What magazine posted on his website. "You let the bass do the talking. A bassist cannot be satisfied with playing straight." By following his own advice, Davis' career flourished. He played with a long and varied list of artists: Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, John Denver, the trio Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan.

    Pianist Ahmad Jamal once dubbed Davis the "forgotten genius" because the outspoken bassist had been blacklisted for many years. Davis' decision to take a stand against racism was born of his experiences in music.

    Davis began studying piano at age 5 in Harrisburg, Pa., where he was born Dec. 5, 1933. By sixth grade Davis studied the tuba in school simply because it was the only instrument available, he said.

    By 1951 he decided to make music his career but chose the double bass, believing it would allow more opportunities to make a living. At age 17 he studied with the principal double bassist at the Philadelphia Orchestra. But when he auditioned for his hometown's symphony, the audition committee was so unduly harsh and demanding that the conductor Edwin MacArthur questioned their objectivity.

    "The answer was, 'Well, he's [colored]' — and there was silence," Davis recalled in a 2002 article in Double Bassist magazine. "Finally MacArthur burst out, 'If you don't want him, then you don't want me.' So they quickly got together and accepted me." After high school, Davis studied classical music on scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School of Music. At night he played jazz in New York clubs.

    "It all sounded good to me — and I felt I could do a number of different fields," he told Double Bassist. "I was of one the first to switch back and forth from jazz to classical."

    But the switch was not always an easy one. Davis encountered situations where race was more important than performance. In the 1970s, his fortunes waned after he filed an unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic. Like other black musicians who challenged job hiring practices, he lost work and important industry connections.

    "As a person, he had enormous integrity," Hentoff said in an interview this week. "He wouldn't bend to accommodate bias or the ignorance of some of the people in the music business."

    With less work coming his way, Davis returned to school and in 1981 earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University. Davis was for many years a practicing psychologist while also working as a musician.

    "I went up against the big power people and lost 10 years of my life. I feel vindicated [through his court case], and I wouldn't be a Dr. Art Davis if it hadn't happened," he told Double Bassist.

    As a result of his lawsuit and protest, Davis played a key role in the increased use of the so-called blind audition, in which musicians are heard but not seen by those evaluating them, Hentoff said.

    The accomplished musician also pioneered a fingering technique for the bass and wrote "The Arthur Davis System for Double Bass."

    Davis also wore the hat of university professor; for two years he taught at UC Irvine. Most recently Davis was a part-time music instructor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. He could be regularly heard on Sundays at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. Among musicians, Davis was highly respected for his work and his role in the Coltrane legacy.

    "And he always had a great attitude, no matter what kind of music we were playing or how difficult the circumstances were," said Jan Jordan, the pianist who played with Davis at the Ritz.

    "He always reached out to people in the audience."

    In addition to his son Kimaili of Oak Park, Davis is survived by son Mureithi Davis of Tustin and daughter Taisha Jack of Culver City. Davis' wife, Gladys, died in 1995.

    --

    jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com

  5. This business of destroying original stereo or 3 track masters to create mono issues seems to have happened often. There's an RCA

    George Russel cd where the originally released tracks are in mono but the alternate "bonus" tracks are in stereo. And say what you like about Phil Schaap (and I've said my share of nasty things about him) I'm forever grateful that he found a way to release a stereo version of Miles Ahead.

  6. Those 'Strayhorn' sides were included in the Cuscuna-produced release of the Roulette double CD 'Live at the Blue Note' in 1994:

    60949.jpg

    Malcolm Addey remixed the date.

    I've got to get this!

    I hope you don't want it because of Strayhorn. He he's not on it and had nothing to do with it.

  7. i've just now watched my copy of the tati film 'playtime' for the first time in over a year.

    if any readers here are unfamiliar with tati, as many americans are, do yourself a favor and see this film.

    a masterwork in 70 mm...

    This might be my favorite film ever. I'm very glad to own the Criterion edition. I do wonder what someone who hasn't seen his other films would make of Playtime, especially on a small screen at home. I highly recommend seeing this in a theater first if at all possible. I was lucky enough to see this for the first time at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston projected in 70mm.

    My memory of seeing it in 70mm was that he used the verticality of the screen more than any filmmaker in history (ie he compsed shots from top to bottom as well as from side to side.)

  8. I found his Diabeli Variations in the classical section of Border's. Didn't know anything about him so was surprised when I got to some stride piano variations. I like it.

  9. Someone posted that The Sonny Rollins site was selling downloads of the bootleg Sonny in London cds. The Monk Zone is offering downloads of grey market European releases including the Classics series offerings. Some of them contains Bluenote material and others have the Mintons/Monroes material that is probably not even Monk.

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