medjuck

Anyone hear these? How are they?

So how good are these both sonicly (sp?) and more important, musically?

Good advice from Eric. Don't be shy. Tell everyone you know that you're looking for a job and just ask them to keep their eyes open for you. Tell them what kind of jobs you've had, what you're looking for and what your skills & knowledge are. Good luck. I'm sure we're all rooting for you.

We got a couple this week. Trying to get more for the rest of the office. I'm still learning to use mine but already find it better than my old Blacberry.

I finally finished Pynchon's Against the Day. Thought it was definitly worth the effort but made everything else seem easy and short, so since then I've burned through Ondaatje's Divisadero, Roth's Everyman, Tom Perry's Nightlife and am half way through Chaibon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

I heard Strozier and Mabern in the early sixties and they knocked me out. For years I gave their performance as an example of how a little known jazz group could have an amazing night. From what I heard from other jazz fans these guys had amazing nights all the time. I wished they'd recorded with Miles during the brief time they were with him.

No, but my wife is. I'm never going to hear the end of this.

I just got e-mails from CD Universe announcing Clifford Brown at The Cotton Club 1956 & Chet Baker in Koln with Dick Twardzik. Since they're both on Lonehill I have to ask: Have these been available before on another label?

Nothing wrong with the ending of Gun Crazy! Agreed!!! However, there is that strange scene where he asks Peggy Cummins why she has to kill people, "...Why can't you let them live?" Several commentaters have maintained that this odd, flat, frankly nonsensical little scene must have been imposed by the studio ex post facto, and I'm inclined to agree. I'll have to watch the film again. Kind of off-topic, but I just found out that the 1957 film Night of the Demon, directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Dana Andrews, also stars Peggy Cummins. I've been on the fence, but now I'm definitely going to get it. I should have taped it when TCM showed it. Oh well. BTW, as you probably already know, the studio forced Tourneur to actually SHOW the demon, which inevitably compromises the film somewhat. Night Of The Demon is a MUST HAVE. There are only a couple of shots of the "studio imposed demon"...it really doesn't have an adverse effect on the film as a whole. It's so much fun to watch Andrews be a skeptic of all things supernatural...while everyone around him (and the audience) knows different. I have a vague meomory of there being another title for Night of the Demon in Europe. Accordig to IMDB the only other title is Curse of the Demon but I vaguely remember something else. Is this just another of my acid flasbacks?

So I ordered them and they've already arrived. That's service!!

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Gun Crazy or the other great Joseph H. Lewis film, the Big combo. And no Sam Fuller fans here? How about Pick Up on South Street or the Crimson Kimono?

Odds Against Tomorrow was a big influence on Jean-Pierre Melville.

BTW I believe the late Jane Greer is the mother of Steven Lasker an Ellington scholar who amongst other things remastered and wrote the notes for the recent Mosaic Ellington small groups box set.

Wow. I think it was still listed as a pre-order yesterday. In fact this whole grouping seems to have been removed from pre-order now.

Singles! Are they shipping the Ellington?

I've had Cambridge surround systems for the last 20 years and am quite happy with them. Must admit however that I haven't bought anything new for the last couple of years and I have a (perhaps unsubstantiated) feeling that they have gone a bit down hill since Henry Kloss died.

HJappu b'day!!! And many more.

You guys are probably all too young to remember Muggsy Spanier singing Party Doll.

I once heard him described as somone who threw better when he was on his knees than any other third baseman in history.

I've googled it and skimmed the entry in Wikipedia but haven't read anything that suggests it offers better sound. Am I missing something and do I need to read more? (I have noticed that HD does not stand for High Definition and has nothing to do with HD TV-- which I love.)

Indeed, he did! Jack Lewis was the A&R man behind many of Victor's best jazz releases from the fifties. Yes, he did supervise the Jazz Workshop series, but judging by the nature of much of his less adventurous work for RCA, I think he essentially just OK'd the JW projects (for which he certainly deserves credit). The musical supervision, I'd bet, was pretty much in the hands of the respective composers-leaders: George Russell, Hal McKusick, et al. Again, I wouldn't mind having full access to the RCA/Jack Lewis jazz catalogue of the time and being able to pick and chose, but there was IMO an air of routine to the typical RCA date of the Lewis era. And when there was some welcome focus and spark, as on the Cohn-Perkins-Kamuca album, I suspect it came from the musicians taking things in their own hands far more than from Lewis. Another way to look at it is that the RCA/Lewis material was essentially a byproduct of the relatively flush NYC recording studio scene of the mid-1950s, when guys like Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Al Cohn, Nick Travis, Barry Galbraith, Bernie Glow, Billy Byers, Manny Albam, etc. were playing in and/or writing for a floating studio big band that found itself in whole or in part in recording studios on dates of all kinds as often as 16 or more hours a day. Thus an air of the routine was almost inevitable when those guys assembled, though it could be broken through. I would say that the vast majority of the guys who recorded for RCA were drawn from that pool of musicians, with the exception of actual Basie-ites like Joe Newman, Thad Jones, Henry Coker, etc., and the West Coast people that RCA recorded (who were of course drawn from the LA equivalent to the NYC studio scene -- though I don't know if Lewis was the A&R man for the West Coast material). As I remember it you can add Phil and Quill to that list of the NY studio guys; but I thought they did a lot of good stuff. Funny how in his autobiography (Bass Lines-- basically a great photo book) Hinton complains that he didn't get to play on many jazz dates.

Yes, it is essential.

I'm not a fan, but I get a little tired of the Oscar bashing that goes on. However I gotta say that Kelly's playing on this tour is nearly as strong as Coltrane's. He really stepped up to the challange. Miles is of course great, but he doesn't seem to me to have responded to Coltrane the way he did later to Shorter, Hancock and Williams.

The Third Man is my favourite film of all time. I highly recommend a book about the film entitled "In Search of the Third Man" by Charles Drazen. Just watched one of the 3 Criterion versions of Mr. Arkadin. Am curious to compare it to the other 2. Also rewatched the Criterion version of Renoir's wonderful French Cancan. Both films had intros by Peter Bogdonovich who I then saw on the Sopranos Sunday night.

Does one of these cds have the song that Gil Evans arranged?