Lazaro Vega

George Lewis, Anthony, Muhal, Mark Helias and Charles Bobo Shaw live...now out of print. Anyone interested in parting with theirs?

Thanks aloc for alerting people to that program.

Jazz from Blue Lake begins tonight at 10 p.m. At 12 a.m. we'll broadcast the 1979 Willisau concert by Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton.

In the archive at the Jazz Institute of Chicago?

Tonight at 10 p.m. the Blue Lake Faculty Jazz Sixtet will be heard live from our studios until 11 p.m. After 11 and until 3 a.m. Saturday morning we'll be featuring Max Roach. Saturday morning from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. will include a more concentrated retrospective feature on first Benny Carter and then Max Roach. In the Max Roach segment: "JasMe," solo drums; "Woody N You" with Hawk in '44; "Salt Peanuts" from the summer of '44 Town Hall Concert with Diz and Bird; "Koko" from '45 and "Klactoveedsedsteen" from '47 with Bird; "Move" from '48 with Fats Navarro and Don Lanphere; "Un Poco Loco" with Bud; "Carolina Moon" with Monk; "Budo" with Miles's Nonet; "A Train" and "Cherokee" with Brown/Roach; "Drum Conversation" from a concert in Germany on Enja. Hope you can join us: www.bluelake.org/radio.html Lazaro Vega Blue Lake Public Radio WBLV FM 90.3/WBLU FM 88.9

Blurb from the Jazz Institute of Chicago: Join us Thursday in Millennium Park for Legends and Lions with Muhal Richard Abrams and Reginald Robinson! Legend Muhal Richard Abrams is a world renowned composer and pianist originally from Chicago, now residing in New York. He is one of the creators and foremost practitioners of creative improvised music. As performing musician, he has developed a highly respected command of a variety of musical styles both as a pianist and composer. The versatile Mr. Abrams and members of The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which he is co-founder, are responsible for some of the most original new music approaches of the last two decades. Reginald Robinson recently won the MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his brilliant and largely self-taught pianism. He is a young man writing contemporary ragtime compositions that are completely authentic in form, yet utterly contemporary and fresh to the ear. Launching a new direction in his career, Robinson will feature his original compositions with the Fulcrum Point Chamber Orchestra. Jay Pritzker Pavilion Thursday, August 16, 2007 - 6:30pm This is a free event. www.millenniumpark.org http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/47086,0...events.location

Currently sold out...re-pressing....

If anyone is up and reading this, Randy Weston's composition "African Sunrise" will air just after 7 a.m. this Satuday morning (today) on Blue Lake.

His sideman appearances with Billie Holiday in the 1950's often save sessions that could have gone south; and there's his own Verve appearances: "Cosmopolite" with Oscar Peterson as well as "3,4,5 The Verve Small Group Sessions." Favorites, though, include Coleman Hawkins All Star Jam Band in 1933 (the ensemble format further defined on Impulse!) and the incredible recordings by Spike Hughes Negro Orchestra. This summer the Blue Lake sextet played Carter's "Symphony In Riffs" on one of our live broadcasts -- most of the guys in the band hadn't heard the original. When they did they were flabbergasted by the precision of the band's ensemble playing and the rhythm (Teddy Wilson, piano; Big Sid on drums). His various editions of The Chocolate Dandies made some memorable recordings, too.

Piano great Randy Weston can’t be stopped By TIM PERLICH RANDY WESTON'S AFRICAN RHYTHMS TRIO performing as part of JAZZ BY GENRE SUMMERFEST with CANEFIRE, JASON WILSON & TABARRUK, CHRIS BOTTOMLEY'S BRAINFUDGE, WALEED KUSH, KALABASH, KAREN RICHARDSON, TASA, SUNDAR VISWANATHAN & THE AVATAR COLLECTIVE and DJ GOLDFINGER at the Docks (11 Polson), Saturday (August 11), 1 pm. $35-$45. 416-870-8000, www.jazzbygenre.com. While many career musicians lucky enough to make it to their 80th birthday are content to reflect on past accomplishments and receive lifetime achievement honours, indefatigable piano marvel Randy Weston was too busy playing the music of his Zep Tepi (Random Chance) disc for huge crowds across Africa and Europe to look back and admire his work. When I catch him during a brief stopover at his Bed-Stuy home, he's only had a few hours of shut-eye since returning from a festival tour of France and Italy, yet sounds excited about topping Saturday's bill at the four-day Jazz By Genre Summerfest. With hundreds of pages of his eventful life story already committed to a forthcoming autobiography, and a new recording pencilled in for his first clear weekend, Weston hasn't given any thought to the "R" word. The mere suggestion inspires china-rattling laughter from the towering piano titan whose fingertips brush my elbows whenever we shake hands. "You mean... retirement?" cackles Weston, as though it's the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard. "Oh, no, heh heh, heavens no. There's no such thing! When I encounter a new hiphop song today, I hear Africa in the rhythms. You can't get away from the Motherland; I'm convinced Africa is the spiritual centre of our planet. There's still so much we need to need to learn about it that I could spend 20 lifetimes studying and absorbing without ever thinking about retiring. "Once you can listen to the birds singing and realize that nature was the first orchestra, you begin to understand how the music is in tune with our planet and the universe. The more connections you discover, the more you want to keep learning." Music has healing power, he insists. "When I go onstage with Alex Blake and Neil Clarke and look out at the audience, I see all the different colours and people of all ages, yet if the music is right, we all become one. To witness that every night is still very exciting." Though well schooled in the vocabulary of jazz music and its twisted history, Weston is primarily a storyteller who employs phrases associated with jazz to carry his colourful true-life narratives. He makes new discoveries every day and can't wait to share his latest revelations. As usual, he's got some surprises in store. "I think my next recording may involve banjo and tuba. I was recently involved in a production paying tribute to the great bandleader and composer James Reese Europe, concerning the period between 1911 and 1918. It showed the rich heritage and how those cats could swing at a time before the term 'jazz' was used," he says. "Many don't realize that back in 1912, James Reese Europe put on a concert at Carnegie Hall involving 150 African American and African Puerto Rican musicians and 10 pianos. "We think what we're doing today is so revolutionary and new, but when you look into the history of this music, you discover the truly incredible things done by our ancestors in the early 20th century. It's mind-blowing." In our drive to move forward, Weston claims, we neglect the lessons of the past. "There's a whole hidden history of music waiting to be uncovered, and the more you investigate what went on before, the more you realize how much you don't know. It's endlessly fascinating for me." timp@nowtoronto.com _________________

Doug Ramsey's site includes a link to Benny Carter performing with Red Norvo on vibes, Horace Parlan on piano, Jesper Lundgaard, bass and Ed Thigpen, drums http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/. A similar group was recorded in performance for Sonet (?) which was issued in America on Gazell (including drummer Ronnie Gardiner who appeared live on Blue Lake this year). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByLxlWiOjII...ted&search= Happy Birthday to Mr. Carter.

She all but admits that on her new one where she writes from the influence of the Peruvian "lando" (sp) which is a polyrhythmic native form. She calls her piece Aires de Lando, or something like "with the air of a lando." Not authentically original but her bit of the process of coming to terms with it. It's "Blue Rondo A La Turk."

Perhaps Maria Scheinder's music, according to the descriptions in her new CD, have a visual/emotional narrative driving her organization of sounds, though she surrenders great chunks of the story line to the improvisors in the orchestra.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- August 5, 2007 The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs By ANDREW PARK New Orleans ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina’s — arguably the most famous musical haunt in a city famous for its music — is eerily quiet. This ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas won’t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage. But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals; others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about who has found gigs and who is still struggling. Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of Tipitina’s three cooperative music offices. “I go in sometimes and all I’m doing is checking my e-mails,” says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues singer. For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists, grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The Tipitina’s Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5 million in aid; in all, Tipitina’s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster the music business here. But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans’s most important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country’s most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz Fest, is a mainstay of the city’s tourism business. In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business sector, including the energy industry. Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three. Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70 percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9 billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004. Compounding the music scene’s slow revival is the challenge of tracking musicians — who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs — in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is building what it describes as a “musicians’ village” in the Ninth Ward, initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants — just one instance of relief for artists failing to meet its mark. “It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” says Roland von Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina’s with his wife, Mary. “New Orleans musicians are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it’s not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.” Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise the efforts of Tipitina’s at a time when governmental resources are strained. “With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we’ve got to find a way to get people back to work,” says Lynn Ourso, executive director of the Louisiana Music Commission. “They’re putting these musicians to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute — they’re teaching job skills.” MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of Tipitina’s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed for a year in the mid-1980s. Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with Tipitina’s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club, facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000. He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run Tipitina’s properly — especially because he was a morning person. “It’s a different routine,” he says. “It’s working nights, and it just wasn’t very practical.” Intrigued by the club’s history and its intense following, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do with Tipitina’s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina’s Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale for holding on to Tipitina’s, even if it only broke even, and marked a return to the club’s early purpose of supporting the local music scene. Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La., opened later.) The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina’s devastation. Many of the city’s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina’s suffered only limited wind damage, and the foundation’s services were in demand. Many musicians lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager savings accounts were obliterated. After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation’s work. By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright issues and licensing agreements became a popular service. “Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,” says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. “You could see the look in people’s eyes: ‘This is all I have, this is my career, and I’m going to do everything I can to protect it.’ ” For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina’s, which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians, into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina’s operates on razor-thin margins: he says the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000. Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized performances. The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund, a charity started by the former dB’s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new instruments. For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable. Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded. Determined to stay, she found other housing — for twice what she paid pre-Katrina — went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the Tipitina’s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest. Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for her to depend on it for her livelihood. “You just get into as many projects as you can,” Ms. Perez says. “I’m in, like, five different bands and that’s kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.” Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans and daiquiri cups, musicians say they’re not seeing their incomes rebound. Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson Square, says the situation is still “as bad as it was after 9/11,” with his tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales. “They’ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so desperate they’d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,” says Kim Foreman, secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr. Foreman says. Katrina left as many as half of the city’s roughly 5,000 working musicians marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians. “A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can’t get from A to B,” Mr. Hirsch says. Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here, despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy’s cultural stew. “Right now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,” says the Hot 8 Brass Band trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for gigs and band business. IT’S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an indelible part of the city’s appeal. But the city and state historically haven’t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural sector of the economy. “People don’t think of artists as a category of workers,” says Maria-Rosario Jackson, director of the Urban Institute’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, which found that the city’s infrastructure for “cultural vitality” even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the country’s metropolitan areas. Figuring how “to translate that authenticity to economic development has been the challenge for all these years,” says Scott Aiges, who headed the city’s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, which owns Jazz Fest. Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy for developing what was described as the “cultural economy.” Since then, the state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived. But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn’t fair to other working people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the commission’s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await financing. New Orleans “needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,” says Holly Sidford, a principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations for the commission’s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “But without investment, really deliberate and coherent investment, that won’t happen.” Ernest Collins, the city’s executive director for arts and entertainment, says of the commission’s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: “That was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don’t have that money.” Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina’s say they are resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees, and put on a networking event for musicians during next year’s festival. Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians, which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses. Next month, the Tipitina’s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward. But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in Spike Lee’s documentary film “When the Levees Broke,” is concentrating on touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad — even if that might mean missing Mardi Gras — so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band members, seem to value them more than their hometown. “They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,” says Raymond Williams, a trumpeter for the band. “I feel like maybe the city should treat musicians in the same way.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118532323897176964.html July 25, 2007 MUSIC King Oliver in the Groove(s) By NAT HENTOFF July 25, 2007; Page D12 When I was in my teens, reading about the storied sites of early jazz, I envied the Chicagoans of the 1920s who were hip enough to spend nights at the Lincoln Gardens café where King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was in residence, recently joined by Oliver's young New Orleans protégé, Louis Armstrong. But the few recordings I could find sounded as if time had worn the music down and dim, including the clicks and scratches of those used early discs. Now, however, in a remarkable feat of sound restoration, "King Oliver/Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Re-Recordings" (archeophone.com, also at Amazon.com) makes it very clear to me why among the regulars in the audience back then were the young white jazz apprentices who -- according to Lil Hardin (the pianist in the band) -- thronged to hear King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band whenever they played in Chicago: "They'd line up 10 deep in front of the stand -- Muggsy Spanier, Dave Tough, George Wettling -- listening intently. Then they'd talk to Joe Oliver and Louis." (Also among them were Eddie Condon and 14-year-old Benny Goodman.) Drummer George Wettling described the excitement in the club in "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, Dover," a book published in 1955 that I co-edited with Nat Shapiro: "Joe would stand there, fingering his horn with his right hand and working his mute with his left, and how they would rock the place! Unless you were lucky enough [to be there], you can't imagine what swing they got." Now we can. David Sager (a recorded sound technician at the Library of Congress) and Doug Benson (a teacher and recording engineer at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md.) created their Off the Record label last year to bring King Oliver's Creole Band back to life. Working on rare original recordings supplied by collectors, Mr. Benson, writes his partner, "began to capture onto the digital domain clean, smooth transfers of the discs, using a wide array of styli." The actual music was deep in the original grooves -- though until now poorly reissued and reproduced. The 1923 sounds had to be excavated. While there were distinctive soloists in the band -- clarinetist Johnny Dodds, trombonist Honore Dutrey and, of course, the leader and the newcomer from New Orleans who would eventually swing the world -- this was essentially a dance band. In his exceptionally instructive notes, Mr. Sager explains: "That the Oliver band's sound was replete with marvelous invention, and a superior 'hot' sound, was the added premium. The principle, however, was rhythm." Joe Oliver never had to announce the next number. As trombonist Preston Jackson recalled, "He would play two or three bars, stomp twice, and everybody would start playing, sharing with the dancers the good time they were having." "After they would knock everybody out with about forty minutes of 'High Society,'" Wettling said, "Joe would look down at me, wink, and then say, 'Hotter than a forty-five.'" Years later, I would hear from musicians who had been at the Lincoln Gardens about the always startling, simultaneous "hot breaks" Armstrong and Oliver played. (A "break" is when the rhythm section stops and one or more horns electrify the audience for a couple of measures.) Among the 37 numbers in the two-disc set, these legendary "breaks" can be heard on "Snake Rag," "Weatherbird Rags," "The Southern Stomps," and "I Ain't Gonna Tell Nobody." Energized by joining the players and dancers at Lincoln Gardens, I remembered a night long ago at Preservation Hall in New Orleans where, in another "hot" dance band, trombonist Jim Robinson lifted me into joy. What Oliver and Armstrong brought from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to the rest of the planet, exemplified how Robinson also felt about his New Orleans birthright: "I enjoy playing for people that are happy. If everyone is in a frisky spirit, the spirit gets into me and I can make my trombone sing. If my music makes people happy, I will try to do more. It gives me a warm heart and that gets into my music." Oliver and Armstrong felt the same way. Since the members of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band were driven by the desire to keep the dancers and themselves happy, hearing them as they were at Lincoln Gardens provides a keener understanding that this music began in the intersecting rhythms of the musicians and the dancers' pleasure. And in all the different forms jazz has taken since, when it ain't got somewhere that makes-you-want-to-move swing, it may impress some critics with its cutting-edge adventurousness, but it's not likely to make anyone shout -- as King Oliver's banjoist, Bill Johnson, did one night at Lincoln Gardens -- "Oh play that thing!" In his deeply researched article on King Oliver in the Summer 2007 issue of the invaluable American Legacy: The Magazine of African-American Life and Culture, Peter Gerler notes that after Lincoln Gardens was destroyed in a fire on Christmas Eve, 1924, Joe Oliver brought a new band, the Dixieland Syncopaters, into the Plantation Café, which like Lincoln Gardens "was a 'black-and-tan' club, where crowds of blacks and whites mingled, danced, and enjoyed the music of top black bands." A Variety review of the new King Oliver band exclaimed: "If you haven't heard Oliver and his boys, you haven't heard real jazz. . . . You dance calmly for a while, trying to fight it, and then you succumb completely." Now that Messrs. Sager and Benson have brought us inside the Lincoln Gardens, their coming attractions on their Off the Record label include 1922 recordings by Kid Ory, the New Orleans king of the "tailgate trombone"; long unavailable sessions by Clarence Williams's Blue Five (with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet); and the classic Bix Beiderbecke sides on the Gennett label. There are more to come. Messrs. Benson and Sager have been friends since junior high school, where both played in the trombone section of the school band. Mr. Benson also plays bass and piano, and is a composer and arranger. They have now parlayed their lifelong enthusiasm for this music into a permanent sound library of historic jazz performances freshly retrieved from inside the original grooves. With regard to what's ahead on their label, Mr. Sager says eagerly: "It will be interesting to see what technology enables us to do in the coming years." I yearn to listen to Bix Beiderbecke directly, so I can hear what Louis Armstrong heard: "You take a man with a pure tone like Bix's and no matter how loud the other fellows may be blowing, that pure tone will cut through it all." Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal. URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118532323897176964.html

Thank you Larry Kart. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/ente...ent/6927534.stm Free jazz pioneer's awards honour One of jazz's great innovators, Ornette Coleman, has spoken of his feelings after receiving two major music awards at the age of 77. Coleman has won both a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Pulitzer Prize for music in recent months, the latter awarded for his latest album Sound Grammar. The saxophonist told BBC World Service's The Beat programme that although he has often had a prickly relationship with critics, "I can't say it doesn't mean anything." "It makes me aware of the growth that I have achieved," he said. "I do honour people that know more than I do, and tell me if it's good, if it has meaning. "If I have found a way to share what I do, to inspire people to go even further than what I don't know yet - that idea is the most supreme form of expression in culture." Ideas Coleman is known as one of the great jazz innovators, pioneering improvised "free jazz." In 1960, his album Free Jazz split the jazz world. By discarding jazz elements such as fixed chord changes, Coleman was hailed as groundbreaking by some. And he remains unapologetic about how he has pushed at boundaries through his career. "I've had people say, 'you can't play like that' - and I say, 'what do you mean - I've already played it.' "I'm not trying - I'm playing." However, early 1960s acclaimed jazz musicians such as Miles Davis regarded Coleman's music as a direct affront to their years of training - something Coleman rejects. I have taught myself everything I know Ornette Coleman "I wasn't thinking of insults, I was thinking of ideas," Coleman said. "Imagine - if you don't have ideas, what are you going to do? "They weren't playing movements, they were playing changes. I was playing ideas, changes and non-transposed notes." He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy. "I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said. "I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that. "I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that. "I am not that sensitive or that weak to believe that because someone says I can't do something, I haven't done it. "I have taught myself everything I know. I have written symphonies, and no-one has taught me. Because I realised that the human being is all there is." Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/ente...ent/6927534.stm

Donald Byrd's "Long Green" on Savoy with Frank Foster, Hank Jones, P.C. and Kenny Clarke is a favorite date, not just for sentimental reasons. Jones's Teddy Wilson in bebop approach is a contrast to the heated solos, but it is more as an ensemble contributor, intros, comping, that he significantly adds to the sound. Take him out and it is not the same record. Hawk's "Disorder at the Border" (Called "Hawk's Tune") from the 1950 JATP concert at Carnegie Hall...Hank's in fast company. Hawk eats everyone alive because Roy's not there to put up a fight. The Frank Wess/Hank Jones thing, with the Basie overtones -- I'll listen to that for Gus Johnson, the writing by Thad. Too organized to be earth shattering but not exactly bland. Frank Wess. Here in the twilight of Hanks Jones and Billy Taylor...Brubeck...

The way she uses soloists to bridge the story line played by the ensemble, and the way she vizualizes that in the liner notes, gives the individual musician a more important role in her music than "merely" playing a solo on changes. Her use of the warbler recordings -- what did Dolphy say?

I don't think it is a censorship issue as much as a competitive one. And you're right: these hogs have made regulation of television, radio and newspapers by the same owners all but non-existent. Now that they've made their bed all nice and comfy they don't want to get up and answer the door. "Huge difference and minus all the local hype." See, that's what makes radio great: localism. Not syndication. Syndication is a good addition to local programming yet the advancements in computer technology have made possible the consolidation of radio ownership centered around a profit motive that cuts personnel, removes the station's content from the location it is coming from and replaces it with audience tested "product" that's proven commercially viable, especially as manufactured nostalgia. That's commercial radio in a nutshell. Then there are the people yelling at you or otherwise being as entertaining as a room full of tired toddlers on "talk radio." I don't know why Clem's hearing what he's hearing on NPR affiliates, though the news push so many stations went with opens the door for all kinds of "coverage." In any case, many channels broadcasting from a hard drive whirring quietly in an air conditioned room is a central reason why people aren't listening to commercial FM radio. No one's taking chances in that model. Local, stations, however, are another story. WGN radio in Chicago (which is as professional as radio can be IMHO) has been a country wide "local" station for years. Local hype in Ann Arbor means WEMU promoting live jazz and blues shows across southeastern Michigan. There's a cheesy local FM station in Grand Haven, Michigan that combines canned music with local ads and obituaries, farm reports and nautical "notes" which the town listens to. My wife listens to a local station from Martha's Vineyard everyday. Localism is where radio thrives. That's the reason I've been here 24 years: no oversight! Well, from a programming point of view this push towards "day parting" is ever present, which is why you often here jazz shows like somanex because the professional programming philosophy, and these consultants are expensive, have observed people sleeping at night, so logically the way to reach your largest audience in that day part is to help them to it. Brilliant! So the Evan Parker is on after midnight. At least it remains a choice. Ah, compromise. Letting me or Werf loose at XM would be, who knows, their death knell? We're from the Great Lakes where Chicago's "ancient to the future" point of view is to be emulated. It is the philosophy which counteracts all the "professionalism" of not taking chances. It's God and the Devil all over again. Not that the sat stations aren't taking chances. The whole endeavor is a chance, as is waking up and driving into the Manistee National Forrest to see if the audience cares if I play "Moon Ray" by vibraphonist Herb Gibson before returning to a set featuring Roy Eldridge, this time with the Artie Shaw Orchestra and Gramercy 5. As for hearing the same thing all the way across the country, how different is that, really, from the almost identical programming on commercial radio coast to coast? (Read of one person driving from Louisiana to L.A. and counting something like 400 times he heard "Yellow Submarine"). Ruminations.

Last night Cootie Williams; tonight Johnny Hodges; tomorrow Roy Eldridge. 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. est www.bluelake.org (Tonight at midnight 'Out on Blue Lake' features the Evan Parker Trio with George Lewis).

No doubt -- and you see the results of unchallenging music programming: it goes away. The biggest problem with public radio is that is was supposed to pay for itself, that the grant trough was only for start up, and the radio stations would be giving back to the culture as in the European model, i.e. creating performances, comissioning works, paying artists to do so, and dissemenating it to the public. Unfortunately many of the stations never got the "good stuff" but scrapped and whored to just keep afloat. The question, though, is what does sat radio offer that you can't find other places? Though commercial radio is a dust heap the sum total of net radio offers as much or more diversity than the sat stations, which, by the way, I listen to at family and friends' homes. The advantage of sat radio is that each station is pretty much "on demand." You don't have to wait for anything to come up, you go to a place it always is. Terrestrail radio is starting to be able to do that with the incoming digital stations, but "on-demand" programming via the web is, by law, verbotin (and no on pays attention, they just do it).

And sorry Lazaro, with much respect I have to say I disagree with you that the Republicans are all in favor of this and helping big business. If anything it's big business such as Clear Channel and Infinity that have their hands on the strings of politicians and are maming this a very difficult process with still no decision. Take a look at how long this merger talk has been going on. I know you're in the business and I admire the programming you do, but for the most part standard commercial radio in an inferior product. Once you listen to satellite you'll never go back to the dozens of "morning zoos" and "two for Tuesdays", and " it's a Def Leppard, block party weekend!" type of listening experience. Yes, the commercial radio world is a bilge pump. The original bill establishing sat rad had 70 co-signers: should look at that list before making sweeping generalizations, yet -- the deregulation of government in the service of corporate greed continues.

When they applied for these special frequencies it was with the proviso that the two stations would never merge, that competition would be the watch word. They also said there'd be no local weather, no local traffic. Went back on everything. "Oh, the marketplace has changed, it's all different now." The only thing that's changed is the doorman holding out their hat. If they can't make it with their multi-million dollar budgets, to hell with them. What do they offer that's different than "terrestrail" radio, especially if web streaming moves into automobiles? The rest of us down here on the ground are trying to make it on far less. See, the Republicans are coming to the rescue of big business, again. They're all about free market until the rubber is warming up to hit the road and then they're like, "Wait, I have STOCK in that!"

Ha! During Dolphy's bass clarinet solo on "Fables" Mingus starts to play "Ysabel's Table Dance."

That would be cool. Ever see their performance studios?