Dan Gould

Your confusion lies in the fact that neo-traditionalist refers specifically to the movement spawned by Wynton: blues and swing - no fusion, no AG, etc. Neo-traditionalist refers to the "young lions" who followed Wynton or were mentored by him. Some neo-traditionalists have moved beyond that initial base, like Chris McBride moving into funk and Roy Hargrove doing his recent projects. But anyone coming out of the "tradition" of the AG or drawing on european folk musics or anything other than blues and swing are not usually identified as "neo-traditionalist."

I wouldn't call Dave Douglas a neo-traditionalist.

No one hit fifty in the last two years. As to the philosophical question asked above, it can be measured by the players who used to hit long outs and then suddenly hit loads of dingers. Those loads of dingers is the exact measurement of how much more is steroids.

For my money, there best work from the first hitch with BN.

This is an excellent point. Anyone else ever notice how many frickin' babes shop at Target and how few seem to make it into Walmart? Maybe that's the secret of their success: There are far more arfs than there are babes. they're sellin to the masses ... and those with masses of asses.

If I remember correctly, his album for Nagel Heyer, Fields of Gold is pretty nice. Solid, mainstream guy. I enjoy him.

I'm sure I'll get slammed, but yes, I have recently used the download service. This is the way I looked at it: While working in commercial radio, I found myself enjoying a small but not insignificant fraction of the music I played in both country and soft AC formats. Before leaving, I used the CD libraries to make cassettes for myself. Wanting to be able to play that music on CD (I don't have anyway to hook up the cheap cassette deck to the CD burner), I recently downloaded quite a few of the tunes I used to enjoy. The way I looked at it was that to pay 88 cents per tune and packing a compilation CD with the tunes I like is damn sight better than finding used copies of CDs, even well picked compilation CDs will only have 3 or 4 of the tunes I want. This way, I paid for what I wanted and got only what I wanted. MP3 sound was fine overall, especially since I'll mostly listen in the car. Annoyances: contrary to what the website says, I had to use Windows Media Player in order to burn CDs. It says you can use any program, but the fact is that even after Windows Media "adds" them to your playlist (goes to the site and confirms that you are licensed to use them) my audio editing software, Goldwave, and my regular burning software, Nero, continued to identify the MP3s as protected and would not access them. However, once I successfully burned them, I am now able to extract the CD files to wav or mp3 and do whatever I want with them. but I didn't like using Windows Media to burn, I think it does a crappy job. I've had to reburn a couple of discs. So, go ahead and slam me for giving money to the Evil Empire. Or slam me for actually liking some country and AC tunes from the 90s. Makes no never mind to me.

Excellent news, Mike!

I see where you're coming from, Matt, but I think the testing process that's now in place is strict enough. And over time, the changes that MLB put into the minor leagues (with much more stringent testing and much closer to a zero-tolerance policy) is going, admittedly after probably another ten years or more, a clean game. No one will make it through the minors as a steroid user, and the testing is strict enough in MLB that I don't think players could adopt to using it too readily. Granted, there are masking agents and all that, so someone driven to cheat may get away with it for a while. But I do think MLB is headed in the right direction. It will be real interesting to see how many positive results there are in the coming season, because it does now result in an immediate penalty. Meanwhile, did anyone catch Sports Center this morning? I saw the tail end of a report about a boxer who abused steroids in order to bulk up, and ultimately lost both legs due to blood clots caused by the steroid use. God how I wish that would happen to Canseco. That right there would be the end of his "steroids are great, used properly" spiel.

Did anyone see ESPN.com's fact checking analysis of his tome? There actually aren't a lot of facts to check, but they had about half a dozen which were easily demonstrated to be completely false. One of them related to his claim that he got to second base in an exhibition game in 2001, took one look at Brett Boone and knew he had been juicing, and claimed that Boone all but acknowledged that "fact." Yet the fact is that in the entire exhibition season, Canseco never reached second base and never even passed second base when Boone was in the game. It was a complet fabrication. Canseco is a joke ... but that doesn't mean that there weren't other steroid users. Its just impossible to believe anything he says because its so obvious he's got another agenda: making money, and to the greatest extent possible, crapping on Mark McGuire's reputation. But if you want to talk about another joke, I nominate Barry Bonds and particularly that press conference he gave on Tuesday. What a gigantic, juiced up pile of crap that man is. I don't think it will happen, but I hope that Hank Aaron takes a stand against cheaters and refuses to attend when Bonds is equalling and breaking his record. As far as I am concerned, the home run champ will always be Hank Aaron ... unless A-Rod or Pujols or someone honest breaks it. But Barry Bonds is a lying pile of shit.

I aim to please.

Considering that I grew out of rock before I discovered jazz, I suspect I'd be listening to blues, although it is also true that I did not discover the blues until I had started listening to jazz, so if there were no jazz, would I have known enough to get into the blues independently? Maybe not, so in the absence of the blues, I'd probably still be listening to the last genre I listened to before getting completely away from pop/rock: Oldies (50s-60s, and some 70s out of a sense of personal nostalgia for the AM radio I grew up on).

I'm glad we're not talking about this Gilad: He scares me.

Like Rooster, early on I bought some Best of comps. Best of Kenny Burrell was the only way at the time to hear, if I recall correctly, a track off the Freedom release, and also D.B. Blues from the album he did with Hank Mobley. I also had the Horace Silver Best of, and way back when, probably about 1990, long before the Blue 'N series, they had a comp of funky jazz that was really good. I also bought the Best of the Three Sounds because at the time, a number of those tracks were not available on CD, and I only had them on Japanese vinyl, with no capacity at the time to do transfers. In the last few years, I've also bought the Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins OJC compilations. They were used, so the price was right, and both were probably 80% things I didn't have, so I had no problem making that purchase.

Moral of the story: Never make your lady think of you this way: Or you may end up looking like this man:

Thanks also for giving the CAPS a rest and posting your summary. Now if we could just get you to understand when caps are necessary and when they aren't ....

Thanks for the report, Marty.

Yeah, this seems like an odd category: the music has to be played and recorded by lots of people to become a standard in the first place, doesn't it? "I Won't Dance" was recorded on one of the Ella & Louis collaborations, btw. "I Should Care" is a personal favorite, I don't think its been over-recorded, though. Mobley's version is definitive, for me.

I vote for Percy France's version of Stanley T.'s "Sugar" from the Black & Blue album, Oliver Jackson Presents Le Quartet.

UA, There's a big difference between ongoing differences of opinion/personality conflicts and letting people know about transactions that are not satisfactory. How would a "Feedback" Forum work? As Brad says, it is not the function of this board. These kinds of threads are the only way to find out about people who have questionable selling/trading practices. I think the complainants here have every right to bring it to the attention of the board in general if they have gotten no response to PMs or emails. Funny how pryan appears to defend himself so quickly when he apparently can't be bothered to respond to multiple PMs. That being said, I have no idea where the fault lies here, but if it is true that he has agreed to transactions, not lived up to his end, and does not respond to private messages, then by all means, that should be brought to the attention of the board.

Refresh my memory (maybe I'm completely offbase here) but weren't you involved, as complainant or complainee, in one of these threads in the not-too distant past?

What's irked me about him is just the whole marketing army that Concord put behind him. Being that young-I mean, you can emulate Sinatra, but is there any chance at all that you can have lived enough to "occupy" the songs the way Sinatra did? I would be curious to hear about his piano playing though.

I have to agree with Jim Dye that people will follow you since they come to shake their booty to the band. I hope the rest of the group is willing to take a stand with you. Even if there are other bands who'd take the gig, do they bring in the audience? I'd also call ASCAP and BMI to inquire about the legality of what he's doing as far as the agreement he's signed with them. I would doubt that anyone has the right to explicitly pass that cost onto the bands, so I'd inquire with them as to what their position is.

Great story!