ghost of miles

Love the Dream Syndicate kick! I've been listening a lot to Complete Live at Raji's lately, among other records of theirs. Right now, the Stones:

You know, I set it (The White Album) aside last night. Didion's obviously an excellent writer (and I've enjoyed other books of hers that I've read, such as The Year Of Magical Thinking), but there's some sort of cold, sour, and rather reactionary tone to her view that ultimately tends to put me off. Going to give it a break and resume reading in another week or two.

My visceral, intellectually-undeveloped opinion is that I loved it. Went with several friends last night and we're all planning to go see it again as soon as possible. It's trending around 90% right now on Rotten Tomatoes' critical-consensus meter (audience reviews around the same mark).

Up for Charles McPherson’s birthday—he’s turning 80 today: Charles McPherson’s Post-Bird Bop

Going to see this Thursday night:

1996 CD reissue:

Timely thread for me--I'm working on a "Great Encounters" Night Lights show for later this year that runs along this theme.

Blowin' in from the Windy City:

If any board member has a copy or copies they'd be interested in selling, please PM me.

We re-aired Goin' Up: Space Age Jazz this week in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and it remains archived for online listening.

Fucking awful and par for the course these days. That kind of hate has always existed, as any student of American or human history will know, but now it's got various social-media platforms and a certain current leader (cough, cough) to enable, embody, and empower it. Denouncing this kind of crap and mentality shouldn't be considered "political," but a large minority of the country either condones it, believes it, or does nothing to stop or condemn it.

JTaylor, are you involved at all with this set? Once it comes out, I think the only stretch of NKC’s career lacking a “complete” treatment will be the late 1940s through 1954 Capitol stretch, as we’ve discussed before (since Bear Family covered 1955 to 1964 and the Mosaic Capitol set omits recordings in which the trio plays no role).

Here's a press release that just went out, offering a little more detail about the set: RESONANCE RECORDS RELEASES FIRST COMPREHENSIVE BOX OF EARLY NAT KING COLE RECORDINGS ON NOVEMBER 1, 2019 Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-1943) Compiles Nearly 200 Pre-Capitol Records Tracks by the Great Singer-Pianist Deluxe Seven-CD/10-LP Package is First Comprehensive Collection of Cole’s Early Years Produced in Partnership with the Cole Estate Includes Extensive Booklet with Interviews and Statements by Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones, Harry Belafonte, Freddy Cole and Others! Resonance Records, the Los Angeles-based independent jazz label noted for its historical releases, will issue its most ambitious release to date, the seven-CD/10-LP Nat King Cole boxed set Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-1943) on November 1, 2019. Succeeding critically acclaimed Resonance archival collections devoted to previously unheard recordings by Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, and other eminent jazz performers, Hittin’ the Ramp offers the first in-depth survey of singer-pianist Cole’s work in the years preceding his long hit-making tenure at Capitol Records. “This is a really important project for Resonance,” says Zev Feldman, label co-president and the set’s co-producer. “We've done some pretty substantial packages over the years, such as our three-disc Eric Dolphy and Jaco Pastorius sets with 100-page booklets, but this Nat King Cole box is truly a definitive, king-sized set, clocking in at a staggering 10 LPs and seven CDs worth of essential early Cole material with enhanced audio.” The limited-edition 180-gram ten-LP set was mastered by Matt Lutthans at Cohearant Audio with impeccable sound restoration by Lutthans and Doug Pomeroy. The vinyl will be pressed at esteemed audiophile record manufacturer RTI (Record Technology Inc.) at 33 1/3 rpm. The set’s co-producer, writer and historian Will Friedwald – who received Grammy Award nominations for his work on Mosaic Records’ landmark 1992 box The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio and the 1989 album Nat “King” Cole and the “King” Cole Trio – points out in his comprehensive notes to the collection that Cole’s deep and influential jazz roots were often obscured by his towering reputation as a pop singer. “At the height of his fame in the 1950s and ‘60s,” he writes, “Nat King Cole (1919-1965) was primarily known as a popular singer — the biggest-selling artist of his generation, no less — who occasionally played piano. By that point, only a few older fans and critics remembered that he had been one of the greatest pianists in the whole history of American music, a true spiritual descendent of Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Art Tatum, and himself a huge inspiration for Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, Erroll Garner, and many others.” Beyond Cole’s brilliance at the keyboard, the Resonance set takes in his dazzling work as a vocalist, and includes a new interview with the master pop singer Johnny Mathis, who discusses his debt to and friendship with his great predecessor. “As a young boy, studying the art of vocalizing, Nat was everything I needed,” Mathis says. “All I did was listen and learn…And then I want [people] to remember that he also, also, also played the piano. Please, please, please remember that. Even as gigantic as a pianist as he was as a vocalist.” Co-produced by Zev Feldman, Will Friedwald, Seth Berg, Matt Lutthans, and Jordan Taylor, and executive produced by Resonance co-president George Klabin, Hittin’ the Ramp homes in on Cole’s prodigious early career, beginning with the debut sides he recorded with his brother Eddie for Decca Records as a 17-year-old piano phenom in 1936. The majority of the set’s nearly 200 tracks focus on the first work by the King Cole Trio, the seminal combo that put Cole on the map with a swinging combination of jazz, jive, and pop, with an emphasis on his simpatico creative partnership with the trio’s longtime guitarist Oscar Moore. In his notes for the collection, guitarist Nick Rossi notes that Moore’s synthesis of such influences as George van Eps, Dick McDonough, Django Reinhardt, and Charlie Christian led to his “groundbreaking style, one which provided a template for how the guitar functions in a modern jazz setting.” Hittin’ the Ramp compiles Cole’s recordings – among them the first versions of “Sweet Lorraine,” a staple of his ‘40s repertoire, and the R&B and pop hit “Straighten Up and Fly Right” – with his trio and in other studio settings (as sideman and accompanist) for Decca, Ammor, Excelsior, Premier, Mercury, and Philo (including a celebrated session for the latter label, founded by Norman Granz during the 1942 Musicians Union recording ban, with saxophonist Lester Young). The newly discovered selections include several performances that were not known to exist before research for the boxed set began. These include a privately recorded number, “The Romany Room is Jumping,” a homage to the titular Washington, D.C., club that hosted Cole’s group; the hitherto unheard Cinematone transcription “Trompin’”; and an unreleased 1940 trio rendering of Trummy Young’s “Whatcha’ Know Joe.” “Although nothing on this package can be described as ‘common,’ these are some of the rarest Cole items known to exist,” Friedwald writes. He adds, “Just in time for his centennial, we cover this quintessential American artist from his very first stirrings at the start of the swing era to the very precipice of universal fame during World War Two, with dozens of fascinating detours along the way. This, then, is the incredible but true origin story of a sound and a career that would change the world.” Here is Nat King Cole, just as he was hittin' the ramp.

Agreed, and happy that Will Friedwald will be doing the notes for this new set. I thought he did a great job with both the Mosaic Capitol box and the two Cole Bear Family sets.

I'm guessing that I already have a fair amount of this material, but I'll definitely be picking it up: Resonance releasing 7-CD box set of pre-Capitol Nat King Cole this November

I have both (?) of the Alfred Hayes NYRB Classics reprints, but haven’t read them yet. Trying to figure out a place in my house where I can group all of my NYRBs together. 🤔 News from another series I love, the Library of America: Forthcoming spring-summer 2020 titles Particularly excited to see that Robert Stone entry. Dog Soldiers is a classic.

Yes, they keep sending me email invitations to sign up for the book club. If I didn’t own a small house full of filled-in bookshelves and book-piles, I’d be strongly tempted to join. This is what I bought from their 40% off and free shipping sale: 1x Fat City - Paperback 1x Stalingrad - Paperback 1x Berlin Alexanderplatz - Paperback 1x Life and Fate - Paperback 1x The Gallery - Paperback 1x Everything Flows - Paperback 1x Nothing but the Night - Paperback 1x The Rim of Morning - Paperback 1x The Stalin Front - Paperback 1x The Road - Paperback 1x Slow Days, Fast Company - Paperback 1x Stoner: 50th Anniversary Edition - Hardcover 1x Black Sun - Paperback 1x Part of Our Time - Paperback 1x Conquered City - Paperback 1x Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn - Paperback 1x In the Heart of the Heart of the Country - Paperback Should keep me busy for awhile! ☺️ I already have a dozen or so other volunes from the series.

Inspired by my recent revisitation of the Jimmie Lunceford Mosaic:

Took advantage of a New York Review of Books sale and ordered 17 volumes from their NYRB Classics series, including several titles by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, in whom I’ve developed a strong interest. Reading the introduction tonight to a new translation of his novel Stalingrad, which is a sort of prequel to his better-known Life And Fate (also among the NYRB books I received today).

For arcane behind-the-scene reasons I won't go into, my radio station WFIU has been forced over the past year to convert all of its web content from the WordPress format that we used for many years to Cascade, a system used by the university that is less user and creator-friendly than WordPress. Our integrated media staff has been working to make the transition as easy as possible, but certain functions may not appear as readily. One such instance is looking for shows in the archives. To access the older, month-by-month and year-by-year version, you can still go to this page: Night Lights archives It's currently available through a small "older stories" link at the bottom of the archives page on the new site. There's also no longer an individual search bar for Night Lights itself (well, there appears to be through the link above, but if you search for anything within it, it takes you to the new home-page), so you have to use the general WFIU search box in the upper righthand corner of the Night Lights home page. You can also generally google "Night Lights" and the artist or approximate title/subject of a show and turn it up that way. I'm hoping we can soon get a new Night Lights-specific search tool to be present and working again. I'll be working with the integrated-media team in the next few weeks to try to get the new Cascades version of the website up to some level of convenience resembling the WordPress-generated site. For the time being, only posts from the last several months are going to be immediately visible when you visit the home page.