Dan Gould

Proof that you never venture outside of your Political Playpen. Why don't you go HERE and spend an hour or two seeing what's gone down lately.

Considering that at that point America was an oldies act, I'm not terribly surprised. I've never won anything but certainly gave away a lot when I worked in radio. The worst was probably at the last station I worked for, Mello 105. The owner decided to try to promote the station through a series of games for the Morning, Mid-day and Afternoon Drive shows in which the "jackpot" would grow with each wrong answer. The problem was, the owner was such a tightwad he made the base amount all of ten dollars and fifty cents-Mello 105, get it? So, the poor jocks had to sound excited when we were giving away enough to take yourself to the movies with! You can't imagine how many people never bothered to come by the station to pick up their stinking $10.50 check. We did try to run a series of contests that would be extra hard, to try to build up the jackpot, but even then the biggest jackpot was still less than $100. So, there we were trying to promote the station, $10.50 at a time, while other stations were running contests for new cars, thousand dollar vacations and everything else you can imagine. Just pathetic.

Gotta go looking for that Grant/Kenny/Billy Taylor side! Those Italian pressings (not these live ones, the other series) did include a great Sweets/Ben Webster Verve that wasn't out on CD until Verve did a two-fer a while back. It was the one wit "Blues for Piney Brown" among a string of "Blues for" tunes. I remember I got it for $2 very early on in my jazz collecting-I'd just heard the Columbia Ben and Sweets and was thrilled to find another one of those two together!

There was a Dex organist to begin with? What am I missing?

Good call, Ubu, I remember when I was stunned to stumble across that one. At the time, I think Dex and Ben were my favorites, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to find something with the two of them together!

Did you both include the gaps between tracks? And base 60 always throws me off ...

Ubu, don't forget One Flight Up. Love that Drew contribution to the date, "Coppin' The Haven"!

Well, they are surely great albums, but for me, Dex and Kenny Drew played so often, they really knew each other so well and the results were sublime. Hopefully the Dex contingent will agree (hey, maybe this will get Ed Swinnich out of lurk mode!).

I tried to stick with guys who made at least a couple of records with Dex. I always put Kenny Drew at the top, and I may get flamed but Cables is always at the bottom-not my kind of guy, sorry.

I would think that we've got more than a little hope; it seems as though Reece's BNs are perfect for the Select concept-too few for a full scale box but too obscure for a regular box set or really many regular reissues.

Great post, Peter, I can only wish that I might see Sweet Lou and the good Doctor someday. Now do you understand why I suggested "Whiskey Drinkin' Woman" for the Organissimo CD project?

Speaking of the good Doctor, I've got this coming from Cadence: Funny thing, too-this French website lists it as "Lonnie Liston Smith" but I think the turban gives it away!

Its very entertaining, and Dex is excellent. The question many had at the time was, was he acting or just being himself? I tend to think it was the latter, a perfect synergy of performer and character.

As I said earlier,

Also says that Brooks played and recorded with Jimmy McCracklin, whose AMG profile has me kind of curious about him. Wish I knew exactly what LPs Brooks is on.

Just took another look at the liner notes to "Smooth Sailing," the TCB release I have, and if nothing else, it shows that David and Tina Brooks were fairly close by each other at the end of Tina's life: "Then Brooks joined a group called the Soul Four which was booked for a two week gig, with a two week option, at a Long Island club. The Soul Four made quite an impression, because it played the club, on and off, for the next six years, from 1966 to 1972." (Didn't Brooks die in '72 or so?) Interesting fact, too-the organist in that group was Don Pullen.

Did anyone else know that Lou Mecca had returned to music recently? Certainly his single LP for BN is amongst the most obscure dates Alfred put out, but apparently after leaving the biz in the early '60s, Mecca has returned. Here's the link: http://www.jazzpromo.com/sections.php?op=v...ticle&artid=149 The sound clips sound pretty good, I might just order this one.

Hallleh-FREAKIN=Lujah!!!

Bev, Thanks for your answers regarding the "ignore" button. It was just as I suspected-for you, it doesn't matter if there is an "ignore" function, you will not engage it. If this is a common attitude, than it does not bode well for the idea that the future upgrade of this board's software to include an ignore function is going to save the day. Now let me get to your post I have quoted above. I don't get this at all. Look, people react differently to different people. Some people see Wingy's posts as, most of the time, a laugh riot. Some people take his posts way too seriously. And some are surely offended by him. But calling a failure to oppose him "cold moral cowardice" is simply a projection of your ideal world on the rest of us. Kindly dismount your high horse.

Bev, You seem to be among the very most "put out" members. You're obviously a regular at both AAJ and here. You say that "ignore" is usually the correct choice, but my question is, how exactly did you do this? Its been mentioned that within a month or two, this software will include an "ignore" function. AAJ already has it already-did you use it AAJ? Or did you continuously look at his posts as an accident scene that you can't turn away from? Did you read each of his posts and then decide whether it was worth the bother of responding or ignoring? Or did you have the Ignore option in use, but couldn't help yourself and clicked on the "see post now" button whenever a blank post appeared? I have to assume that you didn't do a lot of "ignoring" of DEEP's posts because you seem so knowledgeable about them, both here and at AAJ.

And now Schilling and the Sox have asked for and received an extra, extra 24 hours for Schilling to decide. How strange. In one way, you would think this is a good sign-probably, they're just hammering out details and they're so close that they just need a bit more time. OR, Schilling is just having a hard time making a decision and asked for more time. If its the former, I think we've got him. If its the latter ....

Thanks Jim!

Well, I am glad you guys got me reminded of David Brooks. I checked AMg and found an earlier release, called The Big Sound of Bubba Brooks. Looks real good, the first tune is called "Blues for Tina" and I am trying to remember if that's actually a Tina composition or his brother's. Anywhoo ... it got me on my internet search wagon and I think I've tracked it down at Crazy Jazz in the UK. Waiting to hear from them now. As for an interview, the question would be, how in the heck do I get in touch with him? I need contacts, gentleman, contacts! (Jim Dye-can you get in touch with TCB again? It was only a year ago that his second TCB release came out; maybe they could get a contact number?)

Scholars of Twang Track All the 'Y'Alls' in Texas By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Published: November 28, 2003 COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?" That was the idea. John O. Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what he said that interested them most. It was how he said it. Those responses, part of an ambitious National Geographic Society survey of Texas speech, with its "y'alls," "might-coulds" and "fixin' to's," are helping language investigators throw a scientific light on a mythologized and sometimes ridiculed mainstay of Americana: the Texas twang. Among the unexpected findings, said Guy Bailey, a linguistics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading scholar in the studies with his wife, Jan Tillery, is that in Texas more than elsewhere, how you talk says a lot about how you feel about your home state. "Those who think Texas is a good place to live adopt the flat `I' — it's like the badge of Texas," said Dr. Bailey, 53, provost and executive vice president of the university and a transplanted Alabamian married to a Lubbock native, also 53. So if you love Texas, they say, be fixin' to say "naht" for "night," "rahd" for "ride" and "raht" for "right." And by all means say "all" for "oil." In addition to quickly becoming enamored of Western garb like cowboy boots and hats, big-buckled belts, western shirts and vests, newcomers to the state — and there are a lot of them — are especially likely to adopt the lingo pronto. At the same time, the speech of rural and urban Texans is diverging, Dr. Bailey said. Texans in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio are sounding more like other Americans and less like their fellow Texans in Iraan, Red Lick or Old Glory. Indeed, Dr. Tillery and Dr. Bailey wrote in a recent paper called "Texas English," a new dialect of Southern American English may be emerging on the West Texas plains. It is not what a linguist might expect, they wrote, "but this is Texas, and things are just different here." The changes are being tracked by researchers for the two San Antonio linguists, who are working with scholars from Oklahoma State University and West Texas A&M in Canyon, outside Amarillo, under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society. They divided Texas into 116 squares and are interviewing four native Texans spanning four age groups— from the 20's to the 80's, in each. As part of the latest effort, two master's students in linguistics from the University of North Texas at Denton, Amanda Aguilar, 24, and Brooke Earheardt, 23, arranged recently to record Mr. Greer, 70, as he responded to an exhaustive 31-page questionnaire. Ms. Aguilar first probed some of Mr. Greer's attitudes toward Texas. Was it a barren state? "It's in the ahs of the beholder," responded Mr. Greer, who was born in Port Arthur. The state, he said, was "dee-vahded, you kin almost draw a lahn." Was it a progressive state? "Compared to who?" he said. "Califohnia? Baghdad? Ah'd have to say Texas is a progressive state." Distinctive? "Most are distinctive in their own way," he said, smiling, "with the possible exception of Ah-wah." (That was Iowa.) Next Ms. Aguilar quizzed Mr. Greer on a lexicon of Texas words and phrases. Had he ever heard the expression "y'all?" Of course. "Ah think `you' sometimes just duddn't work bah itself." Could you use it for just one person? "Ah would trah to confahn it to the plural," he said. "It's just like `youse guys.' " Had he heard "fixin' to?" Of course again. " `Ahma' often goes with it," he said. "Ahma fixin' to go." The questions and Mr. Greer's answers kept coming. A dragonfly? That's a "miskeeta hahk." A wishbone was a "pulleybone." A cowboy's rope was a lasso or a lariat, or just a "ropin' rope." A drought was worse than a "drah spell"; no rain, or "it haddn for a long tahm." You wait "for" a friend who haddn shown up, but you wait "on" someone who is nearby and delayed, perhaps upstairs putting on makeup. Afterward, Ms. Aguilar and Ms. Earheardt said that Mr. Greer, though white, employed some noticeable African-American and Deep South speech patterns. There were also Spanish influences, common in Texas, where Spanish was widely spoken for nearly a hundred years before English. Dr. Tillery and Dr. Bailey warned that it was possible to exaggerate the distinctiveness of Texas English because the state loomed so large in the popular imagination. Few speech elements here do not also appear elsewhere. "Nevertheless," they wrote in their paper on Texas English, "in its mix of elements both from various dialects of English and from other languages, TXE is in fact somewhat different from other closely related varieties." Perhaps the most striking finding, Dr. Tillery said, was the spread of the humble "y'all," ubiquitous in Texas as throughout the South. Y'all, once "you all" but now commonly reduced to a single word, sometimes even spelled "yall," is taking the country by storm, the couple reported in an article written with Tom Wikle of Oklahoma State University and published in 2000 in the Journal of English Linguistics. No one other word, it turns out, can do the job. "Y'all" and "fixin' to" were also spreading fast among newcomers within the state, they said, particularly those who regard Texas fondly. Use of the flat `I,' they found, also correlated strikingly to a favorable view of Texas. But they found some curious anomalies, as well. One traditional feature of Texas and Southern speech — pronouncing the word "pen" like "pin," known as the pen/pin merger — is disappearing in the big Texas cities, while remaining common in rural areas, Dr. Tillery said. Texans in the prairie may shell out "tin cints," but not their metropolitan brethren. Urban Texas is abandoning the "y" sound after "n," "d" and "t," exchanging dipthongs for monophthongs. So folks in the cities read a "noospaper" — what their rural counterparts call a "nyewspaper." They'll hum a "tyewn" on the range, a "toon" in Houston. The upgliding dipthong, too, is an endangered species in the cities, where a country "dawg" is just a dog. Why city Texans, more than country folk, should disdain to write with a "pin" is not clear, although it seems that some pronunciations carry a stigma of unsophistication while others do not. It was such mixed patterns that suggested the emergence of a new dialect on the West Texas plains, Dr. Tillery said. Other idiosyncrasies have all but vanished over time. Texans for the most part no longer pray to the "Lard," replacing the "o" with an "a," or "warsh" their clothes. How the interloping "r" crept in remains an especially intriguing question, Dr. Bailey said. Trying to trace the peculiarity, he asked Texans to name the capital of the United States, often drawing the unhelpful answer "Austin." The opposite syndrome, known as r-lessness, which renders "four" as "foah" in Texas and elsewhere, is easier to trace, Dr. Bailey said. In the early days of the republic, plantation owners sent their children to England for schooling. "They came back without the `r,' " he said. "The parents were saying, listen to this, this is something we have to have, so we'll all become r-less," he said. The craze went down the East Coast from Boston to Virginia (skipping Philadelphia, for some reason) and migrating selectively around the country. Other common Texas locutions that replace an "s" with a "d" — "bidness" for "business," "waddn" for "wasn't" — are simply matters of mechanical efficiency, Dr. Bailey said. "With `n' and `d' the tongue stays in the same position," he said. "It's ease of articulation." So even "fixin' to" becomes "fidden to" or "fith'n to." And fixin' to — where did that come from, anyway? "Who knows?" Dr. Bailey said.

Thanks for the link, ubu, I hadn't been aware that the second David Brooks CD is with the Doctor, Lonnie Smith! Gotta grab that one! I'll have to go through the list more carefully-I have alot of that "red" series but I bet there're more I'd want. If I recall correctly, David was older than Tina and I think as a result he tends a bit more toward the swing side of things; a big toned kind of tenor for sure. The fact that he's still alive has made me wonder if he's a source of greater info on his brother's life-someone ought to chat with the man!