GA Russell

Tempus fugit. I remember when he was 17, and "Stevie". The collection of his songs with Spencer Davis is in my Your Music queue.

If it had been Sangrey, I wouldn't have been able to guess who it might be. But since it was TTK, I figured right away it was Mathis!

Don Matthews has become associated with the group which has been granted the conditional expansion franchise in Ottawa! http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home

May 5 has come around again, and tonight I am listening to Solar Heat.

Happy Birthday!

Thanks MG! I never heard the Hello Dolly! album, but I wouldn't call that single a jazz recording. Strictly adult popular in my book. I've never liked George Benson, so I've never heard Breezin' either! Were most/all of the tracks vocals? I wouldn't call his vocal recordings jazz, just pop with a brief guitar line. But the world's mileage may vary on all of that! edit for typo

As I hope you have read elsewhere, the AotW for the last two weeks of this month will be Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd - Jazz Samba. I went to Your Music to see if they carry it (They don't.), and learned two things: 1) A new Stan Getz is forthcoming. 2) They now carry a Sadao Watanabe album from 1967 called Jazz Samba to go along with his album Bossa Nova '67.

I want to give you a heads up that the AotW for the last two weeks of May will be Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd - Jazz Samba. This was the record that started the bossa nova craze. I have read that it was the last jazz record to be #1 on the Billboard Top 100 Albums chart. I have a vague recollection of bossa nova hitting the scene, but perhaps someone else here remembers it more specifically. Jazz Samba was recorded Feb. 13, 1962. My recollection (and I could be wrong) is that Cannonball's Bossa Nova (with Sergio Mendes's group) was recorded in December of that year. So I am going to guess that Jazz Samba was #1 in the country around November of that year. Maybe one of you has a reference book of Billboard charts and can look it up. Jazz Samba is available from Newbury Comics for $9.79. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00...9684&sr=1-1

ECM has released an unusual duo album by pianist Ketil Bjornstad and electric guitarist Terje Rypdal called Life in Leipzig. It was recorded live in concert in Leipzig. Bjornstad sounds like a classical pianist who hasn't moved all the way to jazz yet. Rypdal is still doing his thing after all these years. I think my first ECM album nearly thirty years ago was a Rypdal album. He still plays long single notes, never chords. The mix of the two styles is quite startling. The two have been performing together for a while now, so they must enjoy each other's work. I would like to see a concert of theirs, but I'm not sure I would buy a lot of their albums together. They seem to be more interested in creating a work of art together than in playing music people would look forward to hearing often. I enjoy it, and would recommend it to someone who wants something different to add to his collection.

ECM has released an interesting album by a quintet I haven't heard of before led by guitarist Jacob Young called Sideways. Young plays both acoustic and electric guitar here. The electric sounds like a hollow body to me. I don't notice Young playing chords, only long lines of single notes, often in unison with the trumpet. The other instruments are trumpet, tenor sax (or bass clarinet), bass and drums. All of the songs are ballads, but the album swings more than the usual ECM does. It's an unusual sounding group.

Ghost posted the press release to the new James Carter album Present Tense on another Carter thread here: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...34082&st=15 I got a promo of this in the mail yesterday, and I like it so much that I think the CD deserves a thread of its own. Highly recommended. Every one of the ten songs is palatable. There is one I don't like too much, but the disc is 63 minutes long, so no sweat. A couple of the tunes remind me of Horace Silver. Only three of the songs were written by Carter. It would be a stretch to call the others standards, except Tenderly. Trumpeter Dwight Adams gets a fair amount of the spotlight. As the press release states, this is issued on the EmArcy label, which is now part of the "Decca Label Group" of Universal. Does anyone know of a reorganization within Universal? I wonder if the decision makers at Decca are different from those of the Verve Music Group, and whether the creation of the Decca division is a result of a decision to issue more jazz than they have lately (which hasn't been much). At any rate, this isn't a fancy production, but it does sound lilke major-label care went into it. I guess producer Cuscuna should get some credit for that. I'll be surprised if Present Tense doesn't get a fair number of votes for Album of the Year in the Readers Polls.

This morning's paper says that both Dick Dale and Ron Carter are 71 today. I went to see Dale in '96. At that time his group was a trio, with only bass and drums backing him up. He had a toddler son set up offstage with his own drum kit playing along to the band! After the show, Dale mingled with the fans and signed autographs. I got him to sign the tee shirt I was wearing!

Well Dave, if you're sure you are right, I guess a victory over the French can't be all bad!

As I understand it, Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday celebrating the Mexican army's victory over the American army in a particular battle. If that's the case, it should become more well known in the US that that is the case, and obviously it should be discouraged although not outlawed of course.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354086,00.html ST. CHARLES, Ill. — There will be no indoor smoking at a large convention for pipe smokers in Illinois. A new Illinois law bans smoking in public places. That's taken some of the steam out of this weekend's Chicagoland International Pipe & Tobacciana Show in St. Charles. The event draws 4,000 pipe collectors from more than 60 countries. Organizers tried to get around the new law by arguing their gathering was a private club meeting. Police and health officials said no. Instead, a large smoking tent has been set up 15 feet away from the Pheasant Run convention center. Convention-goer Al Shinogle of Denver likens it to a wine tasting without the wine.

Here's his AP obituary: http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...0,6146788.story From the Associated Press 8:01 AM PDT, May 2, 2008 BERLIN -- Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90. The German military said in a statement today that the former army major died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death. Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. The von Stauffenberg plot is the basis for the upcoming Tom Cruise film "Valkyrie" in which the American actor plays the aristocratic colonel. Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers but escaped the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force. Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire. Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager's name was never divulged and he was never found out. Still, he carried a cyanide capsule with him until the end of the war in case his secret was revealed. Von Boeselager, who lived in Altenahr, near Bonn, was first recruited by von Stauffenberg coconspirator Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow in 1942, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview three weeks ago that was published today. He said he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the Eastern Front with Russia and that he never considered declining taking part in the plot. By 1942, he said that "It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes," the newspaper quoted him as saying. Assigned to the army high command as an aide to Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, the plotters first arranged for von Boeselager to try and shoot both Hitler and SS-chief Heinrich Himmler at a meeting in 1943. Von Kluge, who committed suicide a month after the 1944 attempt on Hitler, called the assassination off at the last minute after learning that Himmler would not be at the meeting. Von Boeselager followed von Kluge's orders, but told the FAZ the decision to do so never ceased to haunt him. "I always see Hitler from here to the fireplace in front of me and think 'What would have happened if you had shot him?"' he told FAZ, describing a distance of about two feet with his hands. He also recalled when he joined the von Stauffenberg plot: his brother called him in the spring of 1944, asking for his help in providing explosives. Von Boeselager recommended English-made explosives as the best, and -- as part of his assignment to an explosives research team -- was able to acquire them without drawing suspicion. He delivered them to Maj. Gen. Helmuth Stieff, packed into a suitcase. Stieff was later executed for his role in the plot, and von Boeselager's brother was killed in fighting on the Eastern Front. Had the bombing succeeded, von Boeselager said he was assigned to lead a 1,000-man unit into Berlin to secure the capital. Von Boeselager told FAZ that in the years immediately after the war, he spoke with his wife, Rosa, about his role in the resistance, but otherwise said little else. "There was nobody one could talk with about it," he said. "They were all dead, and with others it would just have been bragging." There was also the fact that immediately after World War II, the July 20 plotters were widely viewed as traitors, a label the Nazis gave them that stuck for years. "For a long time, it was not believable to normal Germans that the government was criminal," he recalled. "And as soon as one thought they had pushed that out of the way, then people just didn't want to know."

I was over at Wikipedia today reading about the proposed United Football League which may have a team in Raleigh, and the links took me to the CFL. You might enjoy seeing what they have to say about the league and the history of Canadian football. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Football_League

The feet trick worked for me. Then I couldn't get her to go clockwise again. So I scrolled down until she was off the screen. When I scrolled back up she was clockwise again.

7/4, maybe being right-brained makes me a day late and a dollar short!

I see her going clockwise, and I can't make her go counter-clockwise. See for yourself! By the way, I suppose that the analysis is fairly correct for me, but I like to think of myself as logical too. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,2...281-661,00.html

I would have enjoyed that! All the time people tell me that I don't speak with a New Orleans accent. I used to try to tell them that there are many accents including a neutral one, but I gave up.

This is now available from BMG/Your Music.

Here's David Naylor's report on each pick of the first two rounds of today's draft: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...ory/GlobeSports

Happy Birthday!

Glad to hear you had a great time! I went twice and both times had a ball. But when I went there was plenty of jazz. Did you check out the gospel tent?