GA Russell

Greg Gumbel said she's been arrested for battery.

More kudos!!

Dr. Rat, I'm glad to see you put this one at the top of your list. I too enjoy it. I mentioned it in my thread on the Adventure Music label the other day.

I saw yesterday that Monk with Coltrane at Carnegie Hall is Your Music's #1 seller in the jazz category.

This morning's USA Today had an article which said that a third company, I think it was called Ondas, plans to have its satellite radio system with 150 channels going in 2009.

You guys have got me thinking that I should get them both! But if I do, I will have to put off spending the Christmas money earmarked for the DVD box of the first season of Remington Steele, the year that it was funny. Any of you TV DVD aficiandoes want to persuade me that the DVD is more important than the jazz? By the way, I met Stephanie Zimbalist fifteen years ago. She was very charming, and I must say one of the most beautiful women I have ever met - even prettier than on television.

OK, may I take it the group is generally in agreement with John L here?

I plan to get a copy. A few weeks later Concord/Fantasy will release the complete Miles with Coltrane on three CDs, so that's going to be a lot of Red Garland within a short timeframe.

Your Music has the K2 of that here: http://www.yourmusic.com/browse/album/Tony...ered-50578.html It's already in my queue!

Happy Birthday!

Welcome back Moose, Brass and Wesbed!

Guy, I have Coltrane's VV box. I don't listen to it very often because it is further out than I normally like. Would you say that One Down is as out as that? One Down has Afro Blue on it, and how far out can that be? I really enjoyed the movie The World According to John Coltrane, which I saw years ago. He takes an extended solo or two on that one as I recall. Is One Down more like that than the VV box?

I have a little Christmas money to spend. If I don't spend it soon on music, I will probably waste it on groceries. I have my eye on two items at Your Music: The IASW Sessions box for $18 and One Down, One Up for $12. I'm confident that I'll get both of them before the summer. Which should I get now? I have the IASW LP, which is lost in my LP stacks, and hasn't been played in years. The Coltrane is all new to me. Which do you recommend?

I have the Brilliant Circles LP, which I haven't played in years. It's somewhere in my LP stacks. My records show that it is on the Arista Freedom label. Do you think that they licensed it from Black Lion, or vice versa? We were talking maybe three months ago about Lloyd McNeal. I mentioned that I saw him in concert in the fall of '68, with Eric Gravatt on drums. As I recall, Steve Novosel was on bass. I enjoyed him. Wasn't Novosel married to Roberta Flack at one time? I may have seen him play with her too. I can't say for sure that he was with her when I saw her perform.

Lon, the obit in the other thread has him at 72, which would make his birth year 1933. That would make him 29 in 1962. It's not uncommon for entertainers to take two years off their age, and your ABC citation was probably based upon PR-sourced information.

BM, I think you're off by ten years. Rawls was born in 1932, I think, so that would make him 30 years old when he cut that record.

Happy Birthday!

My most pleasant discovery of the year just past was a small and relatively new record label called Adventure Music. It appears that nearly everything they put out is Brazilian. In July I was given a 2 CD set called Antonio Carlos Jobim - Symphonic Jobim, recorded by members of the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo. This was a concert recorded in December, 2002. All the songs were written by Jobim, but I was familiar with only a few of them. The album came out in Brazil in 2003, and in the US in 2005. The sticker says that it won a Latin Grammy award. When I saw it I thought right away of the albums Jobim made with strings for Warner Bros. and A&M in the 60s. This is not like that. This album's sound is more like classical music. The first time I heard it I didn't like it, but it quickly grew on me, once I got used to the idea of Jobim as classical music. This was one of my Top Ten most listened to albums of the year. I still listen to it almost every Sunday afternoon. In September I got an album by mandolin player Mike Marshall called Brazil Duets. I like it. It's not jazz. There is no improvisation. But it is very enjoyable to listen to. I did a search on Marshall at AAJ, and found a number of press releases. He has been around since the 70s, playing various types of music. He started the Adventure Music record company along with partners. Brazil Duets is made up of 17 songs, each of which is a duet with piano (Andy Narell), banjo (Bela Fleck), bass, violin, saxophone, or something called a cuatro. I am familiar with only one composer, Hermeto Pascoal, who wrote my favorite piece on the album, Spock on the Stairs. Marshall is quite good. If you're looking for something different and easy to relax to, I recommend it. Finally in October I got something by Modern Traditions Ensemble called New Old Music. This is a quintet, with the clarinet and the acoustic guitar leading the mandolin, piano and percussion. The album was recorded in June, 2003, but not released here till last year. Although the group is Brazilian, the music seems to me to be more likely something you might hear in Buenos Aires. Maybe that's just my ignorance showing. I don't think any of the nine songs qualify as sambas, which is why I don't think of it as a Brazilian sound. All instruments are acoustic; and like Brazil Duets, the album is easy to relax to. I wouldn't peg any of these three albums as jazz. I guess they should be considered world music. But I try to keep an open mind about music, and I sure do like what I have found in the Adventure Music record label. I look foward to hearing more of what they have to offer this year. 5/26/06 edit thread title and sub-title 6/20/06 edit sub-title 7/15/06 edit sub-title 8/11/06 edit sub-title 8/19/06 edit sub-title 12 14 06 edit sub-title

Thanks to the guys of Organissimo! I particularly enjoy reading comments about albums new and newly reissued. When I get a new album I like to share my thoughts with the group here; and nearly always the thread receives informative comments by posters who know more about the artist than I do. Thanks to the recommendations of the group, I have purchased albums, particularly from Your Music, that I would not have otherwise, and have yet to be disappointed by the recommendations of the people here. That is not the case with recommendations from other boards, whose posters I no longer trust. (I'm sure they're sincere, I just don't trust their judgment anymore.) I hope that 2006 will be as beneficial as 2005 was to me! And I hope that my contributions are of value to others as their contributions are to me.

Stern has his fans, and that won't change. However, I wonder if this situation will take some of the fun out of it for them. I think part of his appeal was saying what you couldn't say on radio - that constant testing of the line of what is permissible. Now on satellite radio everything is permissible. It won't be long before the shock value goes away, and Stern is left with the requirement to be funny. I remember first seeing the Lifetime cable TV channel in a motel room, about 1982. I saw a soap opera with above the waste nudity, and dialogue which included lines like "Aww, bullshit!" and "Jesus Christ!". As you can imagine, these contributed nothing to the show, which was pretty stupid anyway; they were just doing it because they could. As far as I know, you don't see such stupid things on cable today, because the audience doesn't value vulgarity for its own sake. I have seen Howard Stern on the David Letterman show, and thought that he was a funny guy when he wasn't being gross. So I can imagine that he will succeed in his new gig. But after the initial 2006 purchases of Sirius by his fans, which I expect to be plenty, I don't see people willing to pay to listen to some guy just because his language is uncensored.

Happy Birthday, and Cheers!

There was quite a large obituary of Lou Rawls in yesterday's Raleigh News & Observer. Its headline referred to him as "R&B Crooner". I had never thought of him as R&B, because I think of R&B as music aimed at high schoolers; i.e., Fats Domino and The Supremes. Even when he had hits on the radio in the 60s, I thought of Lou Rawls as aiming for an adult audience. I haven't heard this album with Les McCann, but I remember it in the stores. I suppose it's a good example of what I mean.

Happy Birthday!

I don't have an mp3 player, and don't expect to ever get one. I must say, the devotees of iPods seem to be the most tolerant consumers on earth. I haven't been keeping a close watch, but just from reading here and in the newspaper, I see problems like batteries dying prematurely, "repairs" that mean loss of what's on your hard disk, scratches on the screen, and inability to withstand dropping, just to name some. Yet the iPod has been the Christmas gift of the year for two years running, and apparently has many repeat customers spending hundreds of dollars to move up when a larger capacity or lighter weight model is released. Steve Jobs has the Midas Touch, that's for sure.

This week is the first anniversary for most of us signing up for Your Music! I don't remember who it was who posted the news about its $4.99 offer, but I thank him! My selection this month is Monk with Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. I held off on getting this one because I felt that the chances were pretty good that I would be given it for Christmas. As it turned out, I wasn't; but Your Music, which you knew would get it sooner or later, got it in right on time! I remember on the thread for the album that Chuck said that he had been told that Blue Note had set a sales target of 100,000 copies. I wonder how close they are. That seemed like an impossible figure at the time, but it has been a best seller at the websites and on the Billboard jazz chart, so now that Your Music, is carrying it, I imagine 100,000 is within reach.