ghost of miles

Must be a magenta haze in the air tonight!

Up for Wes' centennial today: From Naptown To Paris: Wes Montgomery Live

Up in memory: Shorter Lee: Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter

We’ll be re-airing this show in another week or so—upping it this weekend in memory: The Wayne Shorter Songbook

Not sure if he posts here or not, but I have to put in a plug for the new Ramsey Lewis memoir that my friend Aaron co-authored:

Two short years later... 🙂 Happy 20th anniversary, Organissimo! 03/03/03-03/03/23 and counting.

When you think about the breadth and duration of his career--not to mention the talent--Wayne belongs in a very, very small group of musicians that includes Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, and Miles Davis. His legacy is immense. What a blessing that he stopped here on the planet for as long as he did.

PM sent re the Pharoah Sanders.

Here's the October 1986 Nottingham concert. Amazing performance from beginning to end: Final number of the night, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," with several young concertgoers invading the stage to dance around the 3:00 mark (a frequent occurrence at Smiths concerts, I gather), hanging onto Morrissey while he sings and dancing around Johnny Marr, who ends it all with a leap and final chord as the stage goes black. Wow! So wish I could have been there, but watching via YouTube at my convenience isn't a bad substitute: It's hard to put across sometimes just how much bands like the Smiths meant to a certain young contingent back in the 1980s. No surprise that Simon Goddard's book about their music (modeled on Ian MacDonald's amazing Beatles book Revolution In The Head, which my friend Pete and I refer to as "the Bible") is titled Songs That Saved Your Life, a line taken from Morrissey's lyrics for "Rubber Ring." I remember hearing the report on MTV in late summer 1987 that they were breaking up, and it felt like a 1970 Beatles moment to me... the sense that something more than a band had ended. I envy your having seen them.

Right?! 🙂 Oh man, in the mid-80s this was one of many bands I listened to obsessively for awhile, as did several of my friends. I had Treasure on LP and a tape made from my best friend’s collection of their 12-inch singles. Last night I rewatched a Smiths concert from Nottingham, October 1986, and was marveling all over again at the wealth of wonderful artists and albums that came out of that early/mid-80s college rock era, and how fortunate I was to see many of the performers in concert, often at small or medium-sized venues. (Never did see the Smiths, unfortunately, though they played Chicago twice in that period… but being able to see the Nottingham concert on YouTube now makes up for it to a large degree.)

Armstrong was definitely featured, on vocals and trumpet. I can’t recall the tune, but it was a 1938 broadcast from Chicago, and Ricky identified it as coming from a Catherine Russell closet find.

Oh man, Ricky Riccardi played one of these broadcasts at the 2020 Jazz Congress, and it was smokin’. Sound quality was OK—probably improved for commercial release, but I’d be fine with what I heard at Ricky’s presentation. Thanks for the heads-up!

We recently re-aired Black Composers In Hollywood: Duke Ellington and John Lewis, 1959, and it remains archived for online listening.