ghost of miles

Just got this and started reading it today--thought it might be of interest to some other posters here: Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Symphonic Jazz It's part of the University of Michigan's Jazz Perspectives series, which Lewis Porter edits.

I'm pulling hard for MSU, but good Lord, NC's wiping the court with 'em so far.

Exactly. I'm not going to hit the panic button on CC based on a crappy April outing. Truth be told, the bullpen blowing NY's bid to take the game back bothered me more.

We could get a whole thread going on this subtopic, if there hasn't been one already at some point on the O--that Nashville Jumps box also has a Wynonie Harris side from the late 1940s on which Sun Ra plays piano. You can hear it about 7 minutes into this Night Lights show: Second Magic City: Sun Ra in Chicago

Been offline since Friday night and was very sad & shocked to see this news today. Shank hooked me the first time I ever heard him (the Mosaic box) and he's a musician whose work I've continued to enjoy hearing and exploring ever since--definitely consider myself quite a fan and had held out hope of perhaps catching him in concert sometime.

Hey Allen, re: a comment you made upstream about Memphis and a young Frank Strozier, Memphis/Nashville early 1950s seems to have had a lot of interesting crossover with local jazz guys (Newborn family, etc.) showing up on R and B/jump blues records. Do you have that Bear Family box, A SHOT IN THE DARK: NASHVILLE JUMP?

Jim, I'm in your camp on this one--I have the Sun disc and a couple RCA "best-of" compilations, but I've just never connected with Elvis Presley as an artist. For better or worse, I'm much more interested in him as a cultural phenomenon than I am in him as a musician, which is why I read both volumes of Guralnick's bio. Something obviously was happening, but this particular Mr. Jones still don't get it, really... again, no disrespect to the many, many who did get something from his work, and his popularity obviously cleared the way for later artists with whom I have felt a connection. For those interested, Lester Bangs wrote a fairly good eulogy to Elvis that appears in his book PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS.

We re-broadcast Trane '57: John Coltrane's Pivotal Year In Jazz this past week, and it is still archived for online listening.

I think Chambers' assertion re: "Bess" may be pretty much on the money. The Mariano record (with Twardzik on it, correct?) was a complete obscurity in its time; when was Burns' Decca recording made? Although certain songs such as "I Loves You Porgy" had been recorded by jazz artists before the mid-1950s, the score didn't really take off as a jazz vehicle until the late 1950s, after the Hollywood movie project was announced. Gratuitous reference on the topic: Porgy and Bess: the 1950s Jazz Revival I read Chambers' book in just a couple of sittings after it finally came out--well worth it for anybody who's interested in Twardzik, IMO. Re: "bone-fried hipsters," we've got a few around Bloomington...endemic to college towns, I think. Edit: oops, just noticed that it was "bone-fried BOPsters." A bit bone-fried myself, I guess...

I'm telling you, the very best house music (and it's waaaaaaay underground, btw) is so damn chock full of information as to be the only true (ok, "truest") "music of now" that I've heard. But it ain't about "songs" nearly as much as it is about sound, texture, and peacefully and prosperously populating multiple layers of a sonic landscape. Which more and more is how life is lived, not one thing in one place at a time, but several/many things in several/many places occurring simultaneously. Viewed from the outside (or by those who don't live that way, it's either chaos or noise or redundancy or whatever. But for people who live that way, it's pretty much natural, second nature. This music is constructed in the same way & should, I thnk be listened to for what it does, not for what it doesn't do, becuase although there is an overwhelming amount of the latter, there is a tantalizing and provocative amount of the former. "Songs" used to be the whole deal in popular/vernacular music. Then, as songs often became weaker but production techniques became stronger, records came to potentially matter as much as songs, sometimes more. Now, I think we're evolving to a point where a song is just part of the overall recipe, and an optional one at that. The evolution of sensory input capacities cannot help but influence the evolution of the direction of comparable sensory output . I believe you and anticipated such a post when I started the thread... I definitely need to check more of said music out. Music (in general, as a response to the circumstances around it) doesn't die; people do. That said, I'm old enough to still have a serious hankering for song form, at least in pop music--replete with tasty hooks/recurring and attractive musical motifs (which also certainly exist in "soundscape," to use my rough/crude term for what you're describing above).

Was he on the video w/Joe around '60 or so? There was a TV show and they played "The Song is You" and "Sonnymoon For Two". It turned up on a video called The Genius of Joe Pass, also including a lot of solo performances, something with Ella, and duos with NHOP. But those first two tunes are scary. On a little toy Fender someone gave him just so he could play. Burning, and no wonder he scared even Wes, who declined sitting in back then. He was that good. Sounds of Syananon is a jazz guitar classic IMO. It really doesn't get better---unless it's Django or CC. Every solo he plays is so joyful and swinging and his articulation and chops with the pick are on the highest level. Good band, too. fasstrack, check out the video posted on the Night Lights Resolution: Jazz From Rehab program page... Is this the one you're talking about?

Didn't he do a brief stint stateside with Glenn Miller's AAF?

Yes indeed--family feudin' aside, these are some of the best various-artist jazz anthologies ever compiled.

Reading a new book, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity, for an upcoming WFIU interview and came across this quote from Cash (taken from his 1997 autobiography): I think (I guess it's pretty obvious) that you could roughly translate that statement into commentary on all kinds of 20th-century music, from jazz to punk rock. And what kind of music is produced by a way of life produced by a certain kind of music? And what new music is emerging now, from the culture of hyperspeed interconnection and shard-strewn landscape of modernist/postmodernist texts? Beyond a fair-ish amount of new jazz (of all sorts) and a smattering of new indie-pop, I haven't really been paying enough attention. (Beware, Mr. Jones! )

Do any of you have experience with the Bear Family Johnny Cash box "Come on Ride This Train" with 8 "concept" albums of Americana? Eight complete albums plus outtakes, not a chronological order like the boxes. I'm not quite the completist, so I don't think that I need the other Bear Family boxes, but this one intrigues me. Same intrigue--I'm reading a new book about Cash from IU Press and feel an obsession coming on. Actually, all of the Bear Family boxes look pretty good to me...would be curious to hear from any who have one or all of them. I have the three-CD anthology that Columbia put out a few years ago, a single disc of Cash's Sun Recordings, and the Folsom Prison/San Quentin reissues.

Thanks for the mention, Bill--IJA, here's the link: Emily Remler: a Musical Remembrance Also check out this great Emily Remler website, which has rundowns on her dates both as a leader and as a side or guest artist.

David Baker has mentioned this program to me--I think he was listening to it in 1940s Indianapolis, partly because no radio station in Indy at the time was playing anything close to the music that you describe above. (If you're interested, IJA, I wrote a piece about Indpls jazz several years ago in which Baker mentions Randy's Record Shop.)

Thanks much, IJA... cool to hear from somebody who actually listened to Dick Martin's show--from southern Indiana, no less! PM sent your way.

"Tuppence a bag!" (From Mary Poppins "Feed the Birds"...that's how I know the expression. And I still dig Duke's take on the soundtrack.)

According to this post, Honeysuckle Weeks and Anthony Howell (Milner) will be returning for the new series as well. Anthony Horowitz has mentioned working on a new script in several of his Twitter tweets (one with a scene involving Foyle being chased by a Russian spy, so evidently there'll be some Cold War intrigue in at least one of the new shows).

Just got an e-mail from JazzLoft about this--apologies if news has been posted elsewhere: Sun Ra Complete Live at Slug's Saloon 1972

Tim Coffman, a Chicago-based trombonist and IU graduate, was just here as a guest on Just You and Me. He's a member of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, and I noticed while perusing their website that they're going to be performing music from Black, Brown and Beige and The New Orleans Suite this June: CJE to perform DKE works A ways off, but thought I'd go ahead and mention it for anybody in the greater Chicago area who might be interested in attending.

Interview with A.J. Albany

The book's at the office, but I think Ekkehard Jost says something roughly similar in FREE JAZZ, Larry--that the NYC musicians were offended by Ornette for some of the same reasons that you state above...something to the effect of "who does this yokel think he is, coming in and 'playing' like that?"

Well, that's kind of nasty, and both post more about jazz than I do... Seriously? I've never seen either post on a music thread. Maybe they haunt different threads than I do. Weizen pops into hardbop and TOJC/mini-LP threads, while Berigan likes to drop in on swing/early-jazz threads (not a whole lot of those here, generally speaking). They're both pretty passionate jazz fans--I can attest to that.