Rabshakeh

Am I a culprit? If so, my deepest apologia. Go on then, we want the finest lines drawn. What I really want though is Sim City soundtrack keyboard jazz. A hard one to find.

Buddy Collette Quintet – Buddy's Best

😎

These are some that I enjoy: https://instagram.com/today_in_fat_wax?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://instagram.com/resonant_spaces?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://instagram.com/jazz_peasant?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://instagram.com/merzbo_derek?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://instagram.com/the_analogarchive?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://instagram.com/eriksjazz?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

A dystopian proto-fascist organisation created by someone with precisely no imagination either. Even 2000 AD could have come up with something less dire for it's bad guys.

Given the recent discussions on James Reese Europe etc, I wondered whether we have a thread for discussion of older blues and roots music.

Must say, coming back from holiday to find Twitter rebranded as X is a bit of a final straw for me. The number of users is pretty clearly collapsing and, whilst it is still better than it's rivals (Threads is just dire, and Mastodon is a bit of a ghost town), it is increasingly not worth really carrying on with it. The users whom I like are now spread across three platforms and rarely posting at the rate that they used to. Probably time to call the old micro-blogging a day. Still going to keep a lurking insta site, since it does have some good jazz vinyl accounts that I learn a fair bit from.

What's the cover?

The series is great. I don't know all of these specifically.

I don't hear that for Nelson at all. He seems to my ears to work very hard to sell the melody.

Really?! What do you mean?

Emphatically not a jazz album, but I wondered what the forum members' views, if any, are on Paul McCartney's 'Kisses on the Bottom', his Great American Songbook record. I am really not a big Beatles guy, and certainly not a Paul fan, but I found it an interesting record. He goes full Noel Coward on these well-known American tunes that we typically associate with the cultural rise of the more self-assured American style in popular art, along with jazz itself. The emotional and lyrical content of the tunes is turned on their heads so that they sound like sing-along British parlour songs. The closest parallels are Mel Torme and Blossom Dearie, although that is overselling Kisses. Unlike them, the delivery and treatment is pop in it's very bones, with not even a residual trace of jazz (despite some serious jazz firepower in the credits). I find the reciprocity of the treatment interesting. That Edwardian music hall side to the Beatles' music is deployed against these show tunes, but in a way that suggests that they may in fact themselves be the true origin of that side of the Beatles.

Okay. I have listening to do. Those Willie Nelson records are the ones I don't really like. I just don't like his voice. It is a personal thing. I am aware that I am probably wrong.

I don't really know Ray Price. Which way do I go?

Some classics

Are there other Nelson honky tonk records? I like this a lot more than I normally like Nelson (whose voice I seem to otherwise be a bit allergic to).

Not sure whether this will make me unpopular here, but the Stones' had their country rock period. I like those albums a lot. Obviously, less soul than the US real deal, but making up for it by being brattier. Crucially, they did have the songs. Also, don't miss Gene Clark's No Other, which has been bubbling up through reissues and algorithmic recommendations for a while now. Absolute favourite country rock song is this Gram Parson / FBB outtake: I think originally a Merle Haggard track.

Birka still has the excellent online database of jazz album covers. I could look at that all day.

I guess the question that I was trying to put across with the initial post is this: what is it that Armstrong invented and how was this form, and the form adopted by his successors, different to the surrounding non-jazz ecosystem? I think that we can all hear what you are describing with respect to Armstrong, but I personally have a hard time analysing why it therefore feels natural to put Armstrong in a bag with e.g. Chris Connor and Joe Turner, and not with e.g. Al Green. This is obviously true for all genres, where relationships between artists can sometimes be merely taxonomic or completely accidental. But it is perhaps more problematised here, because of the unusual split within the genre between vocal and instrumental forms (assuming that one believes vocal jazz is a genuine form of jazz, which I think we all do), which you don't find in most other musical genres. The best analysis I can come up with is that Armstrong and Holiday, whether improvising or not, are capable of horn-like phrasing. I think that I would posit that, rather than ability to improvise, as the clearest marker of a top tier jazz vocalist. That's a personal view though and I don't think it fits most jazz singers that well.

I just mean from a marketing perspective, really. The two terms have diverged. One refers to a certain kind of jazz education concept and the other refers to a pop marketing concept. But they're often the same songs. As people in the thread have noted already, jazz standards increasingly doesn't actually mean the older showtunes, though, so maybe the divergence is not so interesting. The showtunes have been ceded to the grim supermarket jazz vocal records and aging pop musicians looking to cash out. How large does it have to be? Esperanza Spaulding and Cecile McLorin Salvant are doing well and engaging. Crucially, like Wilson, they know not to get too hung up on the "jazz" side of things. I'm not sure either has the jazz quality and ability to shape a song that Wilson has/had but they make up for it by being decent and omnivorous pop songwriters.

I find it interesting, from a conceptual point of view, that "Standards" and the "Great American Songbook" increasingly mean something quite different, even if they might be the same songs.

Two great records, but poor description on discogs. The Sykes in particular is in very poor condition.

Conjoint – Berger / Hodge / Moufang / Ruit (1997)