Rabshakeh

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)

I'm not sure I have ever seen the essays and booklet going for sale on their own in contrast to Mosaics where you sometimes do.

You flagging this record has made me revisit it. I realise that I had completely confused this record with the Seikatsu Kojo Iinkai album with Doc Umezu, William Parker and Rashied Ali. This is such a killer. Abe (a lifelong obsession of mine) and Kondo playing second fiddle to Graves at his best. I can’t believe I had basically ignored it until now.

I'm sadly post-CD these days, but I've always dreamt of owning this set - one of the few box sets that I really lust after. I've had a lifelong obsession with Patton's music, but most available sets and literature are pretty lacking. I'd love to get my hands on those accompanying notes and essay. Here's my favourite Patton track: Jim Lee Blues, Pt. 1:

What's the Britschlager?

Really enjoyed these two this morning.

I recently came across this interesting snippet from an interview with British husband and wife Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine: "The pair will bicker good-humouredly about the minutiae of their biographies. When I suggest that their role in British jazz goes way beyond that of their contemporaries, Cleo immediately says: "John more than me really. Anybody that plays an instrument, and writes music, is much more historically important." "On the contrary, John interrupts, "vocalists draw bigger crowds." "That's got nothing to do with the evolution of a music," Cleo responds, "unless they're iconic figures." "So, strike off Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and the rest from American jazz history," John replies. "You can't win like that." "All right, dear, I concede, Cleo responds unconvincingly. "You're more important than you think, that's what it amounts to, darling," says John, now turned peacemaker" (Jazz UK, 2008e, interview by Heining). I thought it was interesting in the light of the above discussion. What I make of it is that Cleo Laine did not really see jazz vocalists as part of the jazz tradition: more a non-jazz accretion from Jazz's days as pop music who continued to be useful to the music from a commercial perspective only. Essentially, the vocalists who sing in a jazz setting (save for a very limited handful who have adapted what they do to jazz) are essentially *doing* pop or show tune style singing over jazz backing. It is a provocative view with which I do not agree at all. But it interested me because, if adopted, it would explain the difficulty in categorising jazz vocalists in any coherent tradition of their own, and also go some way to explaining why so many jazz fans don't like vocal jazz. The main reason I don't agree with it is I think it adopts value judgements about importance / quality with which I disagree, and because it reflects a view of genre and evolution that I think is restrictive.

This one has Stanley Turrentine on, though.

I am interested that noone has mentioned the occasional run of Great American Songbook records by more recent pop musicians. Perhaps because very few people have been "surprised by the results". Also, no Frankie Laine? Jazz Bonanza is the first record that popped into my head here.

For anyone interested, this Instagram account often posts interesting looking jazz records from Argentina, Brazil and around: https://instagram.com/today_in_fat_wax?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

My little brother bought me a Casiopia record for my birthday. Not sure why but it is a sweet gesture. I put on another Casiopia record that I own, and my sister in law laughed and said it sounded like "shopping music".