medjuck

I bought the book and the cd released to accompany it. I'm always interested in finding out about lesser known worthy musicians. The cd was good but I couldn't finish the book. Because he only talks about White musicians and (as far as I read) doesn't discuss influences or interactions with Black musicians I felt I had to keep referring to other books to get much sense of what was going on. It was sort of like reading a history of Europe that had arbitrarily decided not to mention France because the French had gotten too much credit in other books.

I used to never get early Stan Getz even though I liked his post mid-50's stuff. Bought the much lauded Storyville sessions and didn't see what all the fuss was about. Then last week I listened to it again and it was great!. I'm still waiting to get post '70 Miles. I do find I enjoy watching DVDs of thelater groups but don't enjoy just listening to them on cd. Similarly I've loved Cecil Taylor in concert but don't listen to him on record.

I think he quoes "Worksong" in both versions of Moanin'.

Check this out http://www.cmoa.org/teenie/info.asp Starting about photo 1100 there's a bunch of Billy Eckstine's band from '44 (with Bird and Dizzy) as well as photos of Mary-Lou Williams. Apparently there are also photos of Duke and Billy Strayhorn but I haven't come across them yet. Some of you guys could probably help the archive identify musicians. Just check the "comments" box. This is would be a wonderful site even without the jazz connection. If you're from Pittsburg this should make you proud.

Here in Santa Barbara we're lucky in that we have 2 jazz + NPR/PRI stations from which to choose. Actually one (KCLU) is based in Ventura and the other (KCBX), in San Louis Obispo but they both claim Santa Barbara as theirs-- probably to have a larger base for fund raising. I give to both because they're both pretty good. KCLU actually calls itself a "Jazz and NPR" station. KCBX plays classical music in the afternoons, but jazz most mornings and evenings. They both carry the same syndicated show in the middle of the night but I just noticed that one of the KCLU djs, Bonnie Grice, is included in that mix, so she might be a good contact. (I like her because she plays a lot of Pee Wee Russell.) None of the other djs on KCLU have impressed me. Strangely, Ken Borgers formerly of KJAZZ, announces traffic reports etc on KCLU but doesn't dj. The djs on KCBX for "Morning Cup of Jazz" and "Freedom Jazz Dance" are both very good. Neither station ids what they're playing often enough, but that seems to be true of all stations nowadays. (I listen in my car a lot and often arrive at my destination without finding out what I'm listening to.) But KCBX at least posts their playlists. Their website URLs are http://www.kclu.org/ and http://www.kcbx.org/. Good luck. I look forward to hearing some Organissimo on the radio.

I took the GREs nearly 40 years ago. In those days if you were good at multiple choice exams you did well. I scored very high in both math (which I hadn't taken since first year) and American Literature which I had never studied at all. (And about which I still don't know very much.) If they're still the same, take them if you're good at multiple choice exams.

In the notes David Ritz keeps referring to one of the performances as a "rehearsal". Does he mean the first one? Both seem to be live concerts to me-- though we don't see the audience in the first one. Maybe because of the mix ( the vocals seem a bit low to me) the 2nd concert seems hotter or is that just me?

Hey where'd you get the Slimer jpg? And what's it mean? (I'm curious because I was one of the producers of the Ghosbusters movies and tv show.)

Or maybe Bob's just jivin' us. Who knows if he even met Lonnie Johnson. BTW Johnson lived in Toronto at the end of his life. Some people got together and raised a fund for him which he banked where a friend of mine was a teller --she's now a University president!-- and he would always see her to withdraw money. One day he looked at his balance and mentioned that it was running low but it was ok because so was he. He died shortly thereafter.

Got it for my son for Channukah. He loves it. But then he thinks he should have been born in Seattle in about 1970 instead of LA in 1989.

As with any addiction, anticipation is part of the joy. I find I'm depressed when I peruse the upcoming releases on Jazzmatazz and don't see anything I lust for. I still remember how great it felt looking forward to both the Mosaic Mulligan Concert Jazz Band box and the Miles Jack Johnson box during the several months between the time of their announcement and their final release-- which as I remember it were almost simultaneous.

Has anyone compared this to the old Willam Baring-Gould "Annotated Sherlock Holmes". (Or is this a new edition of that one?) I found the conceit of pretending that Holmes and Watson were real people annoying. I would have much rather had annotations that told us about Conan-Doyle and the publication history of the stories.

I tried rubbing hard with a wet cloth and got rid of the glue but scratched the disc! (This was a disc from the new Miles 7 Steps set.) However I was able to fix it using one of those disc repar kits-- "Skip Doctor" from Digitial Innovations. I've used this on 4 or 5 discs and so far it's always worked.

What ever happened to the Freddy Slack Select?

How can I contact Mr. Tanno?

There was a thread about this earlier announcing its upcoming release. Has it appeared yet, and if so, where might I find a copy?

I saw his band in in London many years ago. Jack Bruce was on bass and I think John Surman was playing with him. My memory is that it was pretty straight ahead jazz. I liked it but not enough to run out and buy any records. I think he's done some music for films.

I saw his band in in London many years ago. Jack Bruce was on bass and I think John Surman was playing with him. My memory is that it was pretty straight ahead jazz. I liked ti but not enough to run out and buy any records. I think he's done some music for films.

I really enjoyed this but I have a couple of caveats and questions: I like listening to it in 5.1 surround-- puts you in the middle of the band. But it doesn't always match the image: when the camera changes angles the sound doesn't, so you can be looking at someone in the center of the screen but the sound of their instrument may come from the side or even from behind you. I guess I could watch it in stereo; or listen in 5.1 with the tv off. What's Keith Jarrett talking about when he says he played acoustic piano the first few months he was with Miles? According to Peter Losin he played electric organ on his very first date. Are there any examples of his playing acoustic piano with Miles? I was impressed by the way the film used old clips until they showed some doctored footage of Willie the Lion Smith to represent New Orleans whore houses! And finally: anyone know where one can obtain the complete clip of the 2nd quintet on the Steve Allen show?

Any chance of getting at least a listing of the Uptown re-issues? And does the Bird in Montreal count as a re-issue or would it be included in the discography?

WhaT#s wrong with that one? I don't have it yet and was thinking of picking it up soon. Cheers! "Picking it up" is the problem. When you do so the bottom drops out.

Which recording(s) would you recommend?

I think I read that there were supposed to be 46 survivors. Have we seen them all? Are some just extras? Do you think they'll start killing them off?

By Don Heckman, Special to The Times Ornette Coleman walked onto the stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday night to a resounding wave of applause. A slender man of 74 in a pastel suit, a hat jauntily perched on his head, holding a white plastic alto saxophone, he could hardly have been spotted as the revolutionary jazz figure he has been for more than four decades. There was a time, in fact, when a performance by Coleman at a venue such as Disney Hall would have been as unlikely as a speech by Che Guevara at the United Nations. And for the several dozen listeners who departed well before he had completed his set, Coleman's free-jazz alto saxophone, trumpet and violin playing was apparently still a bit too radical. That's how it's always been for Coleman. He was born in Ft. Worth, but first came to the notice of the jazz audience while living in Los Angeles in the '50s. In 1959, his quartet with bassist Charlie Haden (who also performed in Friday's concert with his "Land of the Sun" ensemble), trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins opened a run at New York City's Five Spot Café that became one of the legendary gigs in jazz history. Virtually every performance was attended by the crème de la crème of the Manhattan jazz community — performers, critics, fans. What followed was a schism comparable to the battles in the '40s between lovers of swing and advocates of bebop. Coleman was described as everything from a musical charlatan who was incapable of playing within traditional harmonic boundaries to the potential successor to Charlie Parker. In fact, he was neither. On the one hand, he was, like John Cage, a teacher, a transformer of perspectives, an advocate of sheer creative open-mindedness. But he was also an utterly fascinating player whose seemingly radical efforts (playing beyond metric and harmonic limitations) were rendered appealing by his gift for engaging melody and the creative intensity that was constant in his music. Coleman's music always brings to mind the Abstract Expressionist concept of action painting, of an event in which the work/painting is the result of a spontaneous, charged encounter between artist and medium. In Coleman's case, as with Jackson Pollock's, the seemingly random action is founded on an inner drive to, in effect, open the gateway to allow creativity to pour through. Initially described as "free jazz," his music was later labeled by Coleman "harmolodic music." The latter term is perhaps more apt, an invented word describing his belief in the interchangeability of melody and harmony. "Free," after all, is a multifaceted concept when it comes to making art, of whatever sort. From a musical perspective, playing freely can be a recipe for sheer anarchy. From another perspective, the desire to find — or to allow — coherence to take place in an environment of free improvisation can require even greater musical focus than the more familiar method of playing variations over a harmonic framework. Leading a quartet consisting of bassists Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen and his son Denardo Coleman on drums, he wasted no time digging into the heart of his music, instantly displaying its inner fire and fury. The first tune, "Jordan," was a bursting succession of notes, poured out in rapid succession across a tsunami of steaming rhythms. Once the disjunct theme was established, Coleman ripped into his solo, his lines surging across the length and breadth of his saxophone. Falanga and Cohen created whirling currents of sound, the former playing with a bow, his melody lines frequently following Coleman's lead, the latter playing pizzicato, walking-bass style, sometimes at brutally rapid tempos. Seated in his dressing room after the concert, Coleman — who speaks in a quiet, precise manner far different from his fiery musical excursions — explained the strategy. "I told Tony, who's used to playing in a symphony orchestra, 'Play your solo as if you're leading the orchestra.' And I told Greg, 'You play as if you're making your own ideas to fit the movement — not the chord changes, the movement.' And then I said, 'I'll take care of the rest.' " And he did. And any notion that the music was simply a random mélange of sounds haphazardly thrown together was dispelled when the quartet came to a sudden, unexpected halt, completely together. Although nearly all the works he performed Friday were new, many of them composed for a residency earlier this year at the University of Michigan, each was very much within the familiar Coleman lexicon of rapid-fire runs juxtaposed against striking lyricism — stunning examples of his capacity to find both emotional content and subtexts of structure within a free environment. Backstage Friday, he was asked about a comment he once made — that when he realized that he could make a mistake while playing in free style, he knew he was on the right track. "Well, yes, that's right," said Coleman. "A mistake is having to resolve something that's out of place. Tonight, for example, I decided to look for the mistakes while I was playing. What I mean by that is that, if you're a horn player, usually what you try to do is resolve what the bass player and the piano, or two bass players, are doing. Well, I don't try to resolve that way, I try to resolve everything in relationship to the key, and — tonight — that approach [brought everything together] between the two basses." He does so via a fundamental vocabulary of riffs, licks and phrases that are the building blocks of all jazz improvisers. For most jazz artists, that vocabulary primarily derives from the input of a lifetime of heard music, usually from admired players. Great jazz musicians like Coleman, on the other hand, create their own vocabulary — in his case based in the blues of his Texas roots. Coleman finished Friday's program by asking Haden to join the other two bassists in an encore version of his 1959 piece "Lonely Woman," one of his most intimately heartfelt songs. As Haden began the number's bass vamp, there was a rustle of applause from the audience — the sort of response one more often hears at a pop concert. But Coleman's rendering, far from duplicating the recorded version, took the number into myriad fascinating musical locations, galvanized by the remarkable textures of the three basses. "The way we played that was the way I always like to play," said Coleman, summing up his creative philosophy. "I want people to play what they know they can play without my approval. 'Make your own mistakes,' is what I say, and I have to make mine. Because I was trying to play an idea that affected everybody, including the listener. I wasn't trying to play the saxophone, or even the composition. I was trying to play the music."

Doctors are often uncommunicative. I would reiterate that you sometimes have to force them to tell you what they're thinking. You also have to make sure they have all the information: You might want to just copy out your postings and hand them to a doctor. (Have you told them about the metallic taste?) I wish I could be more helpful. Thinking about you and hoping for the best.