Stompin at the Savoy

My set arrived yesterday and I listened to several tracks. Interesting and good and the sound was pretty good too. I keep getting distracted by the Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly Veejay set which arrived the other day but will get back to this soon.

Church, ballpark, skating rink, etc are all large venues. Organs and organ playing in those days were designed to reach a large audience with one loud instrument. They were loaded up with overtones and throbbing vibrato to create an all-encompassing sound in places where the acoustics might not be that good and audibility trumped subtlety. I remember in skating rinks it was like a wall of continuous sound. Very little space. You could barely make out the tune (and then it would turn out to be the Hokey Pokey) but there was a beat of sorts. That style does not work all that well in a jazz setting. It has to be toned down a bit or it overwhelms everybody else playing. All those overtones are muddy! For me the organ didn't really come into its own in jazz until Jimmy Smith.

I hesitated over this set for a long time because I had a lot of it on individual releases and the set ran a bit expensive used. Recently I came across a copy for quite a reasonable price and it arrived yesterday. I did not realize that this set had so much more material than some of the original releases! Very nice sound on the Malcolm Addey mastering, too.

I like that Berliner Jazztage record too and often play it. Hello to the Wind!

There is a relationship between heart rate and blood pressure. When cannabis lowers blood pressure - which it does - the heart speeds up. If you use it a lot the effect - lower pressure and faster pulse - diminishes.

The problem is organs are capable of putting out a lot of harmonic overtone series. So it can sound busy in the way a 12 string sounds busier than a 6 string guitar - twice as many notes. Depending on the organ settings one key depressed can cause several notes to come out. For some this doesn't matter but for me it sounds terrible. Overkill, confused and busy. And of course if you ever spent any time at a roller skating rink, and I did, the associations make this sort of organ setting sound really tacky. The organ on the 45 sessions is not as bad as some from the period, IMO.

I have absolutely no quarrel with that. Weed is not for everybody. On the other hand I have an 85 year old friend who has truly terrible arthritis. All over the place. Scary looking. Doctors asked him how he manages with this and he used to tell them he smokes weed every day. Keep doing it, they told him. Recently he had shingles and gout. The poor fellow is a mess and can't use cannabis as much but he told me how much he liked some blue dream I gave him.

I got a tracking number today!

The problem with that study is it did not separate out the risk of tobacco (and other drugs) and cannabis. So they combined all the data and found greater risks but it's unclear whether those risks are associated with cannabis or with tobacco or other drugs. In other words this study is deeply flawed. We know from other studies that tobacco is strongly correlated with heart attack risk.

When I started college in 1970 there was a sign in my dormitory which explained that marijuana had now become much more powerful than before and warning that the new super weed was causing 'bad trips'. 55 years and the supposed authorities are still trotting out the same canards and tropes! For some people, using cannabis is a problem and they get into all the same gyrations as people stuck in food addictions, etc. For most it's not that big a deal. My advice: stay away from those vape cartridges. You have no way of knowing what's in there and people adulterate them with things like vitamin E which is toxic to inhale like that. Dry herb vaporizers are good.

I love this and the Mosaic. Too many candidates.

It's a Blue Note album of his?

John, I like what you are saying and I just wish that were a true summation of what just happened. It is true except for one participant. Thinking of an old friend who is not in fact a 'bullshit person', just ignorant about jazz.

Really? OK you explain what he means. He says he refuses to talk to anyone about music unless they are up to his standards of music understanding. When it was pointed out that we talk about music here he shifts to oh I meant in the real world. So what does that mean? He's ok with us because he can always turn us off? In what world does it make sense to say I won't talk about music with you unless you are up to my level of understanding but nothing personal against you, I only do that when the person is in front of me? WTF? We are qualitatively different because we are not in close proximity? Please make it make sense. It's nonsense and I am done with it because the conversation keeps getting pulled into Jim's hangups and emotional responses to the word noodling instead of the Plugged Nickel sessions.

I discovered that I really like French TV. Just now I am streaming a series called "The Wagner Method" on PBS Passport. My French language knowledge comes from a brief class I attended in college decades ago in order to pass a test but I find it challenging to follow along in French and puzzle out the dialogue. I find myself admiring the way French women dress and their relative lack of makeup! The Wagner Method is a fairly ordinary police drama but the scripts are quite witty, full of comic relief, and constantly tease with sexual goings-on.

What you don't regard us as real people? Last I checked I actually am a real person who lives in the real world. And in that real world I communicate with other jazz fans on this board (whom I strongly suspect are real people too!). When we sell each other cd's they come in the mail in the real world and are real objects. Regarding us as internet phantoms who don't exist in the real world seems odd and very possibly disrespectful to me. As far as your feud with everybody in the in person 'real world' whose jazz expertise is inferior to yours - maybe it's time to take that chip off your shoulder.

OK I get it, you are just gonna keep flogging that horse because this is a pet peeve and hobby-horse for you. I don't like it because it condemns people for ignorance, which is curable, and it divides people into your categories of reality-based vs bullshit people. This is a defensive, blame-dealing approach which is almost always doomed to failure because people like being condemned even less than being educated.

Haha. Well, I can see that the word 'noodling' presses a button for you. I get what you mean but this isn't really the issue here. My friend listened and heard something to him very abstract and hard to get into for him at that point in time. How he described his difficulty and how people who don't listen to jazz interpret what they hear is perhaps a subject for another day and tangential to the argument that this music may not have been reissued for 30 years because it is difficult for the average person to connect to. And I would contend that it is demanding listening even for somebody in awe of it; it is not background music.

To me the Plugged Nickel sessions operate on a number of levels. On the one hand this is a band playing mostly some standards. You can just enjoy the performances as such. From another point of view there is a sort of meta message: a commentary on the playing of standards. This way of playing a standard is different from before. Previously the time might change once, into double time or something like that, and back again. Here tempo and time change suddenly at will. Instead of theme, solos, restatement of theme in five minutes, the pieces wander around and stretch boundaries for 15 or 20 minutes. This is already exploding the way that standards were mostly played at the time. Now some inexperienced listeners will take the whole thing as it comes to them and enjoy the performance without any awareness of how this is a development in the genre and I have no quibble with that. Others are aware of groundbreaking aspects of the performances in the context of the development of jazz. Just as a young person might read something that satirizes another piece of literature and only see the surface story, others who are familiar with what is being satirized might see deeper meanings and humor. As far as the request to define noodling - this is asking the wrong question. If you are reading this discussion, 'noodling' is not really part of your critical vocabulary. 'Noodling' is a term typically applied by people who are not jazz aficionados. My friend used this term when confronted with Plugged Nickel. I suppose I understand it to mean soloing in way which is casually playing around with notes that fit, conventionally, but are idle and do not cohere into a bigger pattern that feels like a story. Dinking around, fooling around, exploring as you might in practice. I am trying to explain what I believe people mean when they use this term, not how I approach the Plugged Nickel Sessions. To me they are revolutionary, serious music which is exhausting, like the over-stimulation of spending a lot of time in a big museum or art gallery.

I hear the drums and cymbals fine on the 95 legacy box. I often find myself focusing on the cymbal work. I do tweak the mids and treble frequencies upward a bit with an equalizer to compensate for old ears.

I remember that business about the defective disk. 30 years ago so I am not positive it was the plugged nickel set but there definitely was a set with one cd defective, they sent replacements and eventually fixed the unsold boxes or something like that. Then when you bought it you were hoping this particular copy had the updated cd.

I was wondering why this set has been out of print for 30 years. I mean Miles Davis - they are reissuing him over and over all over the place! And yet this sat for 30 years. I was listening to it yesterday and it occurred to me that that this set is somewhat challenging for a novice jazz listener. Most of the studio stuff is fairly short tunes with theme statement, solos, theme statement, coda. But this set is sort of for the advanced class. Sometimes the melody doesn't appear till way into the tune and in a mutated form, the solos are abstract and experimental - without some background it could be hard to grok. I was very impressed with this when I got it back in the nineties but I have listened to it less than other miles. I think everybody should hear it at some point but it maybe is not the best set to play to a jazz newbie. Yes, I have had better luck bringing newbies to a live jazz performance than playing a record for them. You are there, watching them play, picking up cues from the audience - it's exciting.

Jim, that is a really dumbass attitude. Sorry but true. Your argument boils down to if somebody doesn't understand this music the way I do, they are stupid, insensitive clods. Brilliant Jim, and dumb.

Yes, the perception was based on ignorance. Congratulations, you understood what I was trying to say! How about you? If you listen to northern Indian classical music are you able to pick up all the nuances? Do you understand the different sections and different rhythmic breakdowns of the piece? Are you able to appreciate it as well as somebody who is into that? (Or substitute any other music form which you don't happen to be familiar with). I'm pretty sure there is some music somewhere which will sound like nothing to you and fail to do anything for you and you will think to yourself it all sounds like much of a muchness - ie noodling. Not because you are unthinking or the music is bad, but because you have no background. Peking Opera. Music in Japanese drama.

Well Jim I disagree completely. If one has no structure upon which to hang the sounds coming at you, if you are unable to anticipate anything or see any regularity or pattern, it becomes noodling. It can't be that for me because I have a background from listening to this music. But it absolutely can for someone who doesn't recognize what tune it is, when the piece ends and repeats, what the musicians are trying to do etc. They have no way to organize the data they are receiving. I recommend you listen to the set for a few minutes and place yourself in the position of a pop music listener who has never heard the tune.