Lazaro Vega

Joe, listening to the program now. Thanks for the link. I see I had a few small facts wrong, but was in the ball park.

My wife and I put our money down on a Prius a couple of weeks ago. The waiting list in Muskegon is 10 months. The car was introduced in 1996, but last October they brought out the sedan which has "normal" tires, incredible safety features and is large enough for our family of four. So, this is their second generation. It prices between 23,000 and 26,000 which is not cheap, breaking out to around $400 a month. We've bought and have been driving used cars since 1992 and 1997 respectively, and my Celica has 245,000 miles on it. Going to miss that fuel injected power, yet the new Prius as the same horsepower as a Camry, which might be around 110 (does that sound right?) All kinds of folks are going to be coming out with hybrids in 2005, including Jeep. The Toyota dealership gets two a month and there are 11 people in line ahead of us. If someone in the line doesn't like the color or level of car that's come in, they'll give us a call. The dealer said Toyota is making 45,000 of these cars for the world wide market and they haven't even advertised them in the States yet. They're only being made in Japan because coming out of the 1970's, when American scientists and engineers put forward their plans to develop more fuel efficient cars, politicians said, No we're not, and challenged the wisdom of investing "all that money" in something that wouldn't see benefits for 30 years. Well, here it is 30 years later and it is the 1970's all over again: the Japanese are ahead of us, leading the way, while Americans aren't even aware of the failure of the marketplace. In other words, there's a giant subsidy to the oil and gas industry in America to help keep gas prices artifically low, and that has caused a failure of the market to drive innovation. If gas prices were actually $4 a gallon at the pump today, Detroit would be under seige. Instead, the oil industry continues to use "all that money" to keep the price artificially low, and now U.S. auto makers are having to pay the Japanese for their hybird technology to go into American cars. Very expensive either way you do it, but the Japanese win out for being smarter and more innovative. You just can't play these large scale issues on the cheap and fast, but that's politics -- mine and now. So, I'm buying a car from the Japanese, and looking forward to it. The new Prius is rated 61 city, 51 highway. Maybe I'll need to get on a chat room when we get ours. LV

There is, of course, the Lionel Hampton sessions where Chu is heard with Hawkins, Ben and Benny Carter, and that jam with Charlie Ventura on the Classics CD from 41 (?) is said to be from a club or concert -- but I was wondering if some Jazz Archives LP or some off small label had the session Feather was referring to. Anyone hear that long jam session with Pres, Hawk and Illinois Jacquet on Jazz Archive, I think the lp issue of "Jammin' the Blues" (not looking, but I think that's what it was on)?

Yes, Jim, and thanks much Mike. Leonard Feather heard those three at a jam session, wrote about it, and was just wondering if perhaps some recording of it ever came to light.

With Ben Webster and Lester Young. Is that on any recording you know of?

Is Jost available in English?

They wrote me back, too, saying go Safari or Mozilla, but Internet Explorer is out. I can use it from work, where we have dial up, but not on the I Mac, which in is only 6 months old, on the high speed home computer. I'm shocked to read you all having the same problems, though. They've made their site much less user friendly by limiting the compatability of browsers, bowser.

Thanks Larry -- I see what you were saying then. Hey, is the book out now? Roscoe added those elements of rhthmic variety to the energy school. What is amazing is that he did it in the moment. There are still musicians who don't "get" what was going down in that period of music, but Roscoe was there (actually past it into his own band concept) by '66 or '67. Over the 4th of July I was reading Frederick Douglass' speech about the 4th (http://afgen.com/douglas.html) -- in a sense the ideals of recognition he was enunciating came closer to becoming reality in the 1960's than at any other time in American history. That's like a giant social geyser erupting -- how many years of pressure finally finding release? While the romantic side of the jazz fan plays into hearing the music from that era in the social context, it is also the dramatic moment that calls for something other than a madrigal to get across the joy/pain/shock/hope and dignity the moment called for. And Ornette made that possible, too, the freedom to express it all. Nothing before contained the fullness of those emotions in music, but by re-interpreting the tradition, the music gave voice to the time. Duke "sang" about it, but musicians of the 60's became it, it being the drama and excitement at the birth of a new emancipation -- the civil rights movement -- and the confusion of war, riots, assasinations and poverty. So in some ways Coltrane was multi-faceted dramatically in his later period -- or at least able to capture the energy, ecstacy and simultaneous confusion of the time, a time that was not so much about reflection as it was going headlong into the future. By the mid-60's Sonny was sounding like that , too, don't you think? What a world it was when Malcom X and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were talking about real change. There's no contemporary equivilant. Today Martin would be arrested as a terrorist under the Patriot Act. No wonder music of that era sounds foriegn to so many folks -- it parallels ideas of social change that have just about disappeared or are under constant assault toward elimination. Sorry to take this so generalist -- I mean, thanks for the specific musical examples.

Larry Kart: "...Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane." Larry would you mind elaborating on that? Trane's later works (Ascension?) are examples of a musician who had wrung out all of the emotions possible in a one on one relationship to the material? I'm just not reading that clearly.

Sorry I wasn't more clear: the material I was copying was from a 1974 lp re-issue of Gemini II called Gemini, spelled on the cover "Gem-in-eye" but on the spine Gemini. It is the same music.

Any further confirmation of this?

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=14191

Oh, he didn't mention my favorite "cut," "Third Rail." If you want to get on the mainstage at the Chicago Jazz Festival, you need to get on the club stages around town first. Doesn't that make sense? I don't know how politically difficult that may be, but it would seem there's a natural progression to playing from level to level. And the Chi jazz fest is a top level.

Amen to that. On further consideration (and listening), Wilbur's dynamic range and attack behind Freeman is more provacative than the smooth and swinging Jimmy C.

For what it is worth, Sam Rivers toured with Dizzy Gillespie in the 1980's and they came through Grand Rapids -- a club date, two hours of music, at least. Impressions? Rivers looked like a needle wrapped in brown leather -- he's rail thin. Musically, he played himself, but didn't play at the extremes of register he's capable of, just really fit with the band. It was cool. (Ed Cherry was on that group, maybe Will Lee on electric bass, but can't remember for sure).

I just read the last line of Sachs review and concluded he got it right: Charles Lloyd really comes on like Ornette at times, minus the plaintive blues cry. This is a fascinating recording and throws open a whole 'nother window on Higgins as musician. Then I wrote this -- The Islamic overtones of the entire disc, too, would seem to be a political statement at a time when jazz is really lacking in that sort of activity, Ted Sirota notwithstanding. So, "world music" plus the Islamic overtones -- some of the singing sounds more like prayer -- and this is a spiritualist recording, which might be said about a lot of Lloyd's music, but this one isn't trite or lifestyle or merely 'California' -- this is looking over the edge of life. -- before reading the rest of Lloyd's review. He, of course, wrote with more clarity and specificity, but the point is, whether you live in Mayberry or Chicago those spirit vibes come through strong in this recording.

Henry Johnson has a new record out called "Organic" with Nancy Wilson. It is at work, and since All Music switched their site, the iMAC with Netscape doesn't work there anymore so I can't go hunt it down for you, so I can't confirm who's playing the '3. Good record, though. I believe it is on A-440.

Need to get Anthony Braxton back to Chicago. Times a-wastin'.

Re-read that at work tonight...

I have, and the original is much longer - a wail fest. There's really no comparison. The new one is, what, 9 minutes shorter? yet perhaps further outside the changes -- Von's playing has permutated, but this new album attests to the principles he was working on when Nessa first woke a sleeping world up to the radical individualism that is Von Freeman (that unique synthesis of Bird, Pres and Hawk). CHICAGO, baby! And as far as rhythm sections go, Jimmy Cobb/Wilbur Campbell -- I'll call it a draw, if not leaning to Wilbur's side (he was much younger after all). John Young, especially on the blues/ballad Freeman album on Nessa, has more quirky blue collar funk goin' on than the wonderful Richard Wyands. None-the-less, we should all be so uppity at 80-something! Von Freeman!!!!

Hey, you guys are correct, it was Charles Lloyd. Sorry about that. My bad.

By the way, at the end of the day, Davis was right to hold out for Shorter. Maybe it was Shorter's approximation of Coltrane's sound during that time, or his incredible writing. Haven't you ever had a woman in your life that you just "had to have," that is, be close to? And whenever the chance came around, no matter who you were with, it was an "if only" idea in the back of your head whenever you saw her? Seems like Wayne was that kind of musician to Miles. Just had to have him in his band.

In the new Andrew Hill Jazzpar Octet Cd, Hill mentions Rivers was to have been the saxophonist on "Point of Departure."

While waiting it might be a good time to try and define in words what is meant by "inside" and "outside" playing in the context of the band. Inside the chord changes, or staying near the melody? Swing time, rubato or pulse rhythms? Where does blues expressiveness end and freer expressiveness begin? Since Miles band in this period was also going towards modes as a primary means of organizing the improvisations, may it have been that was too "lean" on musical material for Rivers to fully realize the sounds he was hearing and trying to get out the horn? Miles mid-60's bands were not THAT commercial. 15 minute versions of "My Funny Valentine"? The "time, no changes" feel of that classic rhythm section? Questions for discussion.

"Happy Reunion" from Newport in '58 with Mex and the rhythm section, maybe a chorus and a half...Lovely...I don't think it is the same take as on the double CD of that concert -- the version which came out on the LP "Jazz Critics Choice" is a tighter performance, very succinct interpretation of the melody, just beautiful. David Murray talks about Gonzalves in the new Down Beat and says the D&CinB solo was a starting point for his appreciation of Gonzalves as a rhythmic artist, and someone who could place a ton of information in a phrase and have it come out sounding musical. That's a paraphrase. That long Newport solo is so singable, though, and swinging. Over rated? Well, one could say the whole trip in the 50's was over rated because of Columbia's great promo machine and that it is Duke in the 30's when he was at his height as a composer, and in the 1939-41 period as a bandleader. But really, you have to dig it all -- taking apart Ellington by decades misses the large picture, the way that certain pieces changed over time or were re-interpreted. Such as "our 1938 vintage,..." you know the rest.