Lazaro Vega

Multiphonics....

Thanks for that insight, Larry. He quoted "When the Saints Go Marching In" on "Turnaround" during a performance in Ann Arbor.....

Branford said during that period his solos never came to the point, that while playing with Sting he had to learn how to say what he had to say in a much shorter space, to get to the point. I think that's evident in this video.

Ghost, yes, from that album "The Improvisor." Went with the duo with Jason Moran because of Sangry's suggestion elsewhere in these parts....If I Should Lose You is from that album, too....

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Italian Creative Jazz Musicians to Tour Midwest Acclaimed Italian creative jazz musicians Daniele Cavallanti and Tiziano Tononi will be embarking on a tour of the midwestern United States from October 18th – 31st. Tenor saxophonist Cavallanti and percussionist Tononi are longstanding members of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, a super-group of Italy’s finest improvisers. They also lead several projects of their own and play together as the duo Udu Calls. They have performed and recorded with several major innovators of creative jazz music including: Cecil Taylor, Dewey Redman, Andrew Cyrille, Roswell Rudd, William Parker, Muhal Richard Abrams, Walter Wierbos, Willem Breuker, Oliver Lake, Leroy Jenkins and many others. For this tour they will be teaming with the up-and-coming Chicago trio Ways & Means to form the quintet Chicago Udu Calls. The three members of Ways & Means are Dan Godston on trumpet, Jayve Montgomery on reeds and percussion, and Joel Wanek on upright bass. Although they are an ocean apart, these five musicians share a common affinity for American jazz, traditional African and Asian music, and European free improvisation. Together their music will embrace and employ instrumentation, melodies and rhythms from around the world as it creates its own identity. Each performance is sure to be a different journey than the next. Here are the main stops of their tour: Thursday, October 19 @ 10:00 pm Elastic Arts 2830 N. Milwaukee Ave., 2nd floor Chicago, IL www.elasticarts.org Saturday, October 21 @ 8:00 pm Mother Fools 1101 Williamson St. Madison, WI www.motherfools.com Sunday, October 22 @ 1:00 pm Madison Center for Creative & Cultural Arts 306 W Dayton St. Madison, WI www.mccca.net Sunday, October 22 @ 8:00 pm Circle-A Café 932 E Chambers St Milwaukee, WI www.myspace.com/circleacafe Thursday, October 26 @ 9:00 pm Velvet Lounge 67 E. Cermak Road Chicago, IL www.velvetlounge.net Friday, October 27 @ 9:00 pm Milo Elektric 617 E. 3rd Ave. Columbus, OH www.iceboxshows.com Saturday, October 28 @ 8:00 pm Parish Hall 6205 Detroit Ave. Cleveland, OH www.millerweitzelgallery.com Monday, October 30 @ 8:00 pm Kerrytown Concert House 415 N. 4th Ave. Ann Arbor, MI www.kerrytownconcerthouse.com For more information please contact Joel Wanek at saltherring@fastmail.fm or 773/782.3538

Here's a press release that came over the transom...cut and paste...our Von Freeman celebration is under way between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. edt from www.bluelake.org Of course his recordings on Nessa are key to Von's career. By the way, the Ping label recording and the cuts with an Andrew Hill Quintet, according to Chris Sheridan, with Hill on organ, Von on tenor, Pat Patrick on baritone saxophone, Malachi Favors, bass and Wilbur Campbell on drums...are they available anywhere? Many happy returns to the explorer from pan tonia, Von Freeman! LV HAPPY BIRTHDAY VONSKI! October 03, 2006, 10:02 AM posted by Mike Friedman Today, October 3, 2006, is the 84th birthday of Chicago tenor titan Earl LaVon Freeman, better known as Von or Vonski. Congratulations Von! There will be some serious celebrating tonight at the New Apartment Lounge so if you're in Chicago, try and make it down. We will certainly be there. As many of you probably know, Premonition Records, which shares the music store site, musicstem.com, with Greenleaf Music has released four Von Freeman recordings since 2001. Here's the short bio on Von according to Premonition: Chicago's most influential jazz elder Von Freeman has been playing his saxophone since the 1930s. He's worked with the best -- Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Ammons, Sun Ra -- and has fashioned an individual style that is instantly recognizable, especially if you're from Chicago. Think Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Bird if they had heard and absorbed the avante garde of the 1960s, especially as it was practiced by Chicago's AACM. Oh yeah. Throw in a little electric blues. Vonski worked with guitarist Jimmy Reed for four years and the great pianist Sunnyland Slim for over 13 years. Once again, Happy Birthday Von Freeman ! ... 84 YEARS YOUNG... "THERE'S GONNA BE A PAR-TEE TONIGHT" Send back your Birthday Wishes... and I'll make them into a personalized Music Directors from around the World card. - Kate. KATE SMITH PROMOTIONS of Chicago 1413 Dobson Suite 100 Chicago IL 60202 814.482.0010 katesmith999@yahoo.com www.katesmithpromotions.com

Stefon Harris taps faith roots for jazz Sunday, October 01, 2006 By William R. Wood An agnostic jazz musician who is the son of a Pentecostal preacher will play an original musical work dedicated to a Kalamazoo Unitarian-Universalist church. Stefon Harris, a composer, marimbist and vibraphonist, will make a statement about his views on faith when he presents ``Portraits of the Promised'' on Thursday at Chenery Auditorium. Through ``Portraits,'' Harris makes an ``analogy about organized religion and how there are many paths to enlightenment,'' he said. The jazz suite will offer tonal impressions about discovering faith, following it, being deceived and swallowed by it, and living with it among the contrasting faiths of others, Harris said by phone recently from his home in Sayreville, N.J. Harris, 34, who is black and grew up in Pentecostalism, became an agnostic as an adult. He said he discovered that his current views about faith are not so different from the views of members of People's Church in Kalamazoo. ``I met with the minister and members of the church about what Unitarianism is and the history of the church,'' Harris said. ``It is broad and open-minded, and that's the way I am, and I felt a kinship. The way I perceive it, it's a group of people who come together and discuss the core issues of unity, the meaning of love and respect. Those things were always at the forefront of our discussions. ``It is ironic that I've done something for a church and don't get into organized religion,'' he said. Through a request from People's Church and a grant from the Gilmore Foundation, Kalamazoo's Fontana Chamber Arts commissioned Harris to compose and perform his jazz suite to communicate the church's history and commemorate its 150th anniversary. Harris first performed ``Portraits of the Promised'' on May 21 at the church for church members. Thursday will mark the first time the piece is performed for the public. People's Church members received more than the 20 minutes of music they originally hoped to get. Harris' piece, which took eight months to compose, is about an hour long. Harris is to perform it at Chenery with his band Blackout and several other studio musicians from New York. People's was doubly lucky that Harris was well-oiled to create a suite. His new CD, ``African Tarantella, Dances with Duke'' (Blue Note, 2006, $17.98), to be released nationally on Tuesday, contains another Harris suite, ``The Gardner Meditations,'' and re-orchestrations of two Ellington suites. Also, one of Harris' previous suites, ``Grand Unification Theory,'' received a Best Jazz Album Grammy nomination in 2003. ``You start to hear complete stories (in your head as a musician), and the best way to express them is in the suite format,'' said Harris, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music. Although he doesn't share his family's views about faith, he doesn't regret growing up in the Pentecostal church and attending three-hour services on Sundays ``and 12 hours on New Year's Eve,'' he joked. Church life gave him exposure to the history of musical expression in black culture. ``The core elements of jazz are very similar to what you are exposed to in the black church,'' Harris said. ``When you testify, you tell a story. Same thing when you play something.'' But more important, the church life gave him deep exposure to the culture around the church music -- black culture. It was common to see public emotional expression during services. Such expression is normal in African-American life, Harris said. ``If you feel something in a black church, it is expected that you call out, `Amen!''' Harris said. ``Oftentimes in teaching jazz, that element is not talked about, and people just play chords and scales. You don't need to be an African-American (to play with feeling), but you do need to have something to say.'' Tapping that core feeling is the trick, Harris said, adding, ``Everyone is unique and beautiful, everyone has something to share.'' http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/k...050.xml&coll=7

Sidran's radio series was cool. I actually enjoy him more as a journalist than a singer. That's pretty funny in this day and age to say a musician went on an avant band to make bread. That Threadgill Sextet record on About Time with Olu does well by him, "When Was That?" once known as "Fanfare and Celebration,"is a desert island "cut" for me. And Olu had much to add to the David Murray Octet's recording "Ming," which is otherwise dominated by the Chicagoans. Live he was wonderful, especially because he could put "the horn in the bucket," i.e. play with plunger mute, bucket mute, straight mute, pixie mute ("shrimp shandwich, shrimp bar-b-que, creole shrimp....") and open horn with a cornet warmth. His solo records from Atlantic were a huge disappointment after that. Thanks for the recommendations, especailly the Rollini. Need to find it. Noticed Bill Dobbins also has his act together as contributing writer to the Grove Dictionary of Jazz, which is a problematic work, but not for what he puts in it.

Thank you for posting this.

Sorry to say I've only read about Nas and not heard his music. Played Olu Dara the other night, though, as part of The David Murray Octet while presenting a radio feature on drummer Steve McCall. And saw Olu leading his own band back in the 1980's at the Michigan Union in Ann Arbor (he "warmed up" for Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society). Olu Dara sang about okra and had a giant plastic mixing bowl he used as a clownish mute as he sang/played, "Put the horn in the bucket." From the sounds of it Nas is an honest musician. Someday... Nate, sorry to mis-represent -- there was a link the Clemshell posted in the Scoop Yanow thread where you mentioned E.C. as a contributer to AMG, and it was I and I alone who wrote his insight was helpful, while Hodes, Stewart and Freeman strike me as timeless. Yes, there is much political posturing in music writing today. Musicians say such things as, "I like football, but a football player knows and understands the game better than I ever will." Yes, musicians do know music on an entirely heavier level, yet what Muhal has to say is an important way of understanding how fundementally different artistic human expression is from sports. It's a gift to humanity. The "only musicians know" faction seeks to limit artistic understanding, while many of the musician/writers listed here so far seem to me to treat writing as an extension of their music, i.e. another means of communication. Sure, Eddie Condon had his own agenda, clearly, yet he was entertaining as hell about it. And Ghost, yes, musician's autobiographies can be helpful, or absolutely confusing...Beneath the Underdog, Music is My Mistress, and Miles Davis's "auto-bio" (Art Blakey played on "Walkin'" according to that book)...the Pepper book is one of the great ones, though.....

Jim, Roscoe and George Lewis are also well represented in the article. Yes, it's too bad we live in an era when two giants of jazz tradition -- Ornette Coleman and Muhal Richard Abrams -- are nine years between recording projects. It may be true that is the way they wanted it, but then again.... There is no great body of work from he who weilds an electric rake, Clemocracy...I've just read a few things here and there which were insightful and helpful.

Turning to musicians for their insight about the music, whether in interview or reading what they've written, is often illuminating, often cliche busting, even when the writing is as turgid, muddy and loopy as Anthony Braxton's. Jazz criticism helps me with musical specifics. An author will often have access to a musician who will talk about a project in more musical detail than a press release, and those insights are often the keys one needs to unlock the mysteries in post-modern music.

The musicians as writers issue went a little too quickly under the rug in the Scott Yanow thread, a thread I guess is going away. At the end of the day "we" go to musicians for insight about jazz. Writers transmit that information, but straight from the source is often profound. Rex Stewart, Art Hodes, Bud Freeman, Kenny Dorham and, as Nate said, Chadbourne, gave timeless insights. Regarding the Jazz Corner debate that all posts are invalid is one of the biggest reasons jazz is in the toilet with a general audience -- there's this idea that the music is no longer a gift. Today, many people contend that the once it's born the only people it is intended for are advanced music scholars, or, at least, they're the only people with the resources to comment on it intelligently. That is a pin in the balloon of fandom. In a recent article for Signal to Noise by Howard Mandal, Muhal Richard Abrams holds there’s no privilege in his intentions as a creator. Muhal is inconclusive about whether sounds contain irreducible meanings, or whether meaning comes from context. But he agrees, surprisingly, to accept and welcome the responses and interpretations of any and all listeners. How fucking refreshing is that? He says free improvisation is a practice applicable to given situations, not a style in itself. “Most of the musicians I’ve known…don’t speak in terms of titles or headings. If they’re improvising, they’re improvising. If they’re writing it down, they’re writing it down. I put the pencil down and I just keep going – I improvise some. Then I pick the pencil up again and write some. It’s the same process, and the same flow….I think…a lot of people are seeking to address their individualism, and improvisation is on the continuum of our impressions of how we should proceed with our individualism, each in his own manner.” Muhal will finally have a new recording issued soon on PI records, with George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell. “It’s been my impression for many years that music itself transcends styles. Styles are created within music, but music itself is too vast to take in in one sip, or one drink of the information. And I think that when one realizes that, and realizes that there’s a duty to respect music itself, smashing these genres and putting different things together becomes a thing you do. Your respect is for music – there’s still a place for “Body and Soul,” a serious composition in the area that it’s in. But a single piece, or genre, may not be in terms of style what you want to pursue singularly. So out of it all, you extract what you personally feel fits your particular point of view.” Elsewhere in the interview he says it again: “Sound itself precedes what we think of as music. Music is a more or less formal organization of sound, organized by point of view or some individual rhythmic desire, however original the idea may be. Sound itself is the raw material. The sound of everything, the sound of the universe, even the sound of things vibrating that we can’t hear, but a dog or a cat might. “Well, when we come to making music we organize ourselves in order to produce a certain sound idea. And after many years of approaching sound through music, one gets to the point where one approaches sound itself. To listen to what is over there, that is not over here. Then you decide to use something that impresses you in the raw world of sound – and it becomes, again, what we might call music. Some people might call it noise,” and he laughed at that, “but it’s organized sound, coming from a particular point of view that we want to express.” Later still, “And when one assesses another’s act, or music, what a sincere and honest observer sees, and the conclusions they come to, are just as accurate as those of a person who sees it the exact opposite way. I’ll tell you why: Music, visual art and related phenomena that speak to many people is open to many interpretations. It’s educational. What you might say as a critic and observer, what the person in the audience might say, are things that might prove enlightening. Each person may have their own take on it, but never the final call. For me, that’s the beauty of it. “For me, it’s always been important that individuals do what they do. Because I think we are all educated by our differences, in the sense that what may occur to you may not occur to me. But it might enlighten me when you do it. And possibly your idea could be something that I can use, in the way that I could use it. It has always been and will always be important to me to observe individuals expressing their individualism, and it has been a great inspiration to be among people who each and every one of them express their individualism.”

"Only in this way can the study of jazz break free from its self-imposed isolation..." This is so much melting ice that a Kyoto Agreement is in order. Was jazz's isolation from the mainstream of America self imposed? Why, then, did it take Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley to bring black music to the American middle class? If the music is happening in some form of isolation, re: The Invisible Man, how could writers be working in the free and clear? Again, if jazz were to break through from it's popular/economic isolation brought on by a perceived aesthetic malaise, this critical/intellectual isolation would become irrelevant. But since jazz is in the doldrums, since the band business is at it's nadir, what's going down right now in the still isolated world of jazz criticism and the small world of academic jazz study takes on far too much importance for future generations, whether it breaks free or not.

"But the time has come for an approach that is less invested in the ideology of jazz as aesthetic object and more responsive to issues of historical particularity. Only in this way can the study of jazz break free from its self-imposed isolation, and participate with other disciplines in the exploration of meaning in American culture." LV: So, does the book include the Chicago writers witnessing the musicians of the AACM? L.K. No, not a word, except for mentioning that the late adolescent Howard Mandel went down to Hyde Park on weekends to hear some "head-changing" things. Then Mandel is said to have wondered "if the effect was all that different from when, during the same period, he took in concerts by the Jefferson Airplane, Vanilla Fudge, Jini Hendrix, Cream, the Doors, and other rock/pop acts." I guess when you attempt to replace the aesthetics of jazz history from the front of the conversation with the history you know best, or the one most prominent in the culture, it allows the dominant culture to be applied to anything. You can’t know Shastakovich’s music intimately without a firm grasp of Russian and Soviet history, but that was an aesthetic choice first -- the artist chose to respond to his particular historical circumstance. In jazz, perhaps, the artist found music as one way out of their particular historical circumstance and the aesthetics of the music were one of the proudest points in that flight from oppression, degradation, prejudice...or, especially, the pseudoscientific rationalizations for inferiority. It’s not hard to imagine Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker being to the creative imagination what Joe Louis, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson were to athletics, and all to the collective life of Black Americans. Their accomplishments were a big in your face to the historical particularity of their time. There are many ways to measure music’s impact on society, but it seems a wee misguided to give a back seat to jazz’s aesthetic evolution because that was one of the clearly understood strengths of it among musicians of every stripe and jazz music's fans. Economic response to music isn’t reliable, especially with jazz in America. But if you ever listened to old folks talk about jazz musicians -- there was an understanding that not everyone could do what Coleman Hawkins could do on a saxophone. And that understanding wasn’t casual, it was, “Brother, believe it.” Black men and women as radio listeners -- retired steel workers, janitors, engineers, dancers, musicians and teachers of the older generation -- are people who shared their enthusiasm for jazz with me, and all of them dealt with it from an appreciation of the aesthetic accomplishment jazz musicians achieved and were calling this nice kid to make sure I realized it. And if I fucked up and said something glib that lessened what they perceived as the image of their heroes, the phone became a weapon of mass humiliation. There is a place for jazz criticism to be “more responsive to issues of historical particularity,” but to me that seems as if it needs to be cued by the artist: Charles Mingus and Archie Shepp, the New York Art Quartet, Duke Ellington all made music that responds directly to their own historical/social and especially racial particularity. The type of work he’s advocating would seem appropriate there. But otherwise it appears to me without having taken the plunge into this work that he missed an important critical stream running through jazz while Crouch/Murray and company were getting most of the attention. But if you’re not going to deal with criticism from primarily an aesthetic point of view, then missing Mandel, Whitehead, Lange, Corbett (not to mention Figi, Martin, Litweiler and Kart) who witnessed, reported on and drew conclusions about the last major conceptual/stylistic upheaval in jazz is apparently not important.

Thanks for that clarification, Larry. Iron John meets Cecil Taylor. While we're on the subject, the estrogenated world of Kid Beauty Pageants has a higher degree of weirdness associated with their homosocial activity than jazz record collectors. Let's see 900 pages on that, using notations with direct access to Mattel's promotional archive and police blotters, propping the door open. Then we can nudge about playtime. And Church Craft fairs ? They have woodworkers, anyway. My response was colored by the anti-music bias of upper management at NPR when they pushed through their talk agenda by saying music was a solitary activity and talk generates water cooler responses and is therefore more social. I read it in one of the many articles circulating at the time. Yes, what small, tiny places Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Orchestra Hall, Davies Symphony Hall and Royal Festival Hall are. Sure glad they didn’t waste too much money on making them large because music is such a solitary preoccupation. It irks me no end that no one put the lid down on that toilet.

Good band! Love the way they've arranged the horns to comp, the various instrumental combinations to keep the textures varied, the cross genre rhythms, and the energy. Original compositions, original approach. Here's to collective improvisation! Best of luck with the tour, opening for the Claudia Quintet, the Raymond Scott project for Earshot and, especially, those CD SALES!!! Great to hear the band and meet everyone. Especially that Republican drummer. (emoticons don't work with this browser, insert goofy one here LV

First of all “like all homosocial activities” is wrong on its face. When the NPR news model came in, this is the sort of argument it was premised on, too, and it was used to push aside music programming. It is false. Music is not a mono-social activity. Record collecting is anything but a homosocial activity. In the day of retail the record store was a hive of social interactions, and as I think back across the record shelves there are social stories connected with many of the acquisitions up there. Moreover, as jazz fans especially know, the record is a snapshot of ongoing artistic activity which happens in performance. To reduce the experience of record collecting to a “homosocial” activity is to reduce the record to a commodity, to a thing as an end in itself when in the real outward and inward life of the collector the record is a door to something these author’s are not pursuing with sincerity. For instance, last night going to hear the Reptet at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids...the band needed a baritone saxophone, I was able to provide one, and the bookstore gave me Ornette’s “Sound Grammar” and Dexter’s “Our Man in Paris” as an appreciative token of helping out at the last minute. That web of social story is now attached to those recordings. When I put them on the radio and thousands of people hear, particularly, Ornette’s recording for the first time there is the potential for an explosion of social associations. Though today the social activity of collecting is becoming more virtual it is no less social. How man "hits" at Organissimo.org? Music is best experienced with groups of people. Records are memories of those times, and a window into the musical evolution of the artists they capture. Secondly, about the Downbeat quote, again, the supposition that Downbeat’s insights and motives were pure and therefore bedrock for new research is blind to the distortions of commercialism in the magazine industry, especially then. And, moreover, the new authors looking at that material are compounding the problem by pulling the story further away from the music and it’s creative, aesthetic evolution. Which Larry already mentioned yet it bears repeating. The single most important societal, nonmusical, force profoundly influencing music is economic. From the b.s. that Larry hilariously just quoted I can think of several more effective ways to invest in the economy of music than encouraging these high toned shuck n jive men. (Edit to change "Out Man In Paris" to "Our Man In Paris").

The Reptet....and I'll be bringing them a baritone saxophone as their's was lost in transit.....

Damn, what the hell was that? They need a prophylactic for the mind to keep their seed off of me! What of the major corporations and record labels who assemble complete sets, what about their constant state of want? The CD player is a sex bot! Headphone me the surrogate! That's my new pickup line, "Quarter inch or RCA?"

Portraits of the Promised STEFON HARRIS, marimbist, vibraphonist & composer with Blackout and Friends Thursday, October 5, 2006 | 8:00 pm | Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo Musicians Anne Drummond, flute Mark Gross, clarinet Tim Warfield, tenor saxophone Jeremy Pelt, trumpet Roland Barber, trombone Derrick Hodge, bass Xavier Davis, piano Terreon Gully, drums Fontana Chamber Arts commissioned five-time Grammy Award-nominated composer, marimbist and vibraphonist Stefon Harris to compose, publish and perform a jazz suite. The resulting work, Portraits of the Promised, is a full-length work written for marimba and vibraphone, and an ensemble of eight accompanying artists. The world premier of this work, as well as music from Harris's new Blue Note CD "African Tarantella, Dances with Duke, a Tribute to Duke Ellington" including excerpts of "The Queen's Suite" and "The New Orleans Suite" are featured on the program. Tickets: Adult $30 Zone I, $22 Zone II, Students $5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jazz Underwriter: Kalamazoo Gazette Funded in part through Meet the Composer's Creative Connections. Presented in cooperation with the People's Church of Kalamazoo. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To request a season brochure, or for tickets, call (269) 382-7774. www.fontanachamberarts.org Touring schedule: 10/2/2006 Residency, Fontana Chamber Arts Kalamazoo, MI 10/3/2006 Residency, Fontana Chamber Arts Kalamazoo, MI 10/4/2006 Residency, Fontana Chamber Arts Kalamazoo, MI 10/5/2006 Residency, Fontana Chamber Arts Kalamazoo, MI 10/5/2006 Chenery Auditorium, Kalamazoo, MI 10/6/2006 Residency, Fontana Chamber Arts Kalamazoo, MI 10/10/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/11/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/12/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/13/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/14/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/15/2006 Jazz Showcase Chicago, IL 10/16/2006 Michigan Council Foundation Kalamazoo, MI 10/18/2006 Carnegie Hall New York, NY 10/20/2006 The Egg Albany, NY 10/26/2006 San Francisco Jazz Festival San Francisco, CA 10/27/2006 The Jazz Bakery Los Angeles, CA 10/28/2006 The Jazz Bakery Los Angeles, CA 10/29/2006 The Jazz Bakery Los Angeles, CA 10/30/2006 The Atheneaum La Jolla, CA

Recently finished this. Thanks for the recommendation. He's really in love with Chet's Tokoyo 1987. Been checking that out. Also, Hal Galper just released a new trio album this month including the piece, "Waiting for Chet." Recently spoke to Hod O'Brien about recording with Chet. The way he laughed and said, "Yeah, an album called "Blues for a Reason"" will stay with me forever. Glad this author commented on Chet's focus on the low register, and generally steered the story back to the music. Nessa sold the Steeplechase albums in the States during Chet's prolific time in Europe. This writer does well by those records. But I think he misses the boat on Chet Baker, Boston, 1954 (Uptown).

Thank you, Larry. So, does the book include the Chicago writers witnessing the musicians of the AACM?

Thanks Allen. You know until this discussion I thought putting music in context meant to place music in the historic AESTHETIC continuum. This other stuff is interesting, but the center of the discussion is the music, a discussion which is also swinging the other way now, too, in that unless you have a phd in music pedagogy with an emphasis on theory then what you write as a reviewer is discarded as mere opinion... Re: Minton’s, Milt Hinton often talked about how he and Dizzy went up on the roof of the Cotton Club to work out different changes to “I Got Rhythm” to keep the lesser musicians out of the jam sessions. That's a story you can count on, and it is based, in his account, more on aesthetics than race or class. And about the Creole Jazz Band book -- there are recordings by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, but perhaps we’re talking about the group Oliver led before Armstrong joined which didn't record?

Ballin the Jack is about going fast? Working hard?