ghost of miles

Today Whitehead's reviewing the new Mary Lou Williams Collective release, ZODIAC SUITE: REVISITED (which we have a thread about here).

I'm on the board twice a week during this show, and yeah, I'm generally a fan... they use a lot of jazz for the breaks and music beds as well. K. Whitehead reviewed the Ayler box when it came out; not too many large national-audience forums where THAT'S going to happen these days.

PM sent re: Cohn/Brookmeyer.

Mine just came the other day--I've been listening to disc 1. The music sounds beautiful, esp. with all the windows in the house open for the first time this year (we're enjoying spring-like weather here in Bloomington). Yeah, you're sure right about that piano--that's from the Argo session. Kenny Berger says in the liner notes that it sounds "as if it had recently been salvaged from the wreckage of the Titanic" and calls it more suitable for a saloon scene in a grade B Western. Hope this set results in Nelson getting more praise for his big-band work.

Tranemonk, 1. Bear Family (out of Germany) is not a rip-off label. AFAIK they license all of their material properly (pun kinda intended, I guess). As specialty labels go, they're respected and liked as much as Mosaic... more so, by some folks. 2. There should be very little overlap between the Mosaic & the Bear Family--maybe a disc's worth, I'd wager. The trio was all but dissolved by the mid-1950s, and Mosaic included only sessions that featured the trio and had a jazz quality to them--so there is some 1955-61 material, but not much. 3. Sound quality on most Bear Family boxes has been fantastic.

Yeah--I got the sense from reading the AMG entry on her that this probably isn't representative of her work in general.

Yes! What's Gioia up to these days, anyway? I interviewed him over the phone a few years ago--great guy, generous with his time, enthusiastic about his subject.

West Coasters have more sun.

A name I've often come across, but haven't listened to until today--the one CD we have in the station library is WELL KEPT SECRET. Any other recs?

"You Better Go Now" is now archived. Coming up this week: "Queen of the Organ: Shirley Scott."

This week on Night Lights it's "You Better Go Now: Jeri Southern." Pianist and torch-jazz singer Jeri Southern recorded half a dozen albums for Decca in the 1950s, scoring hits with songs such as "When I Fall in Love," "Joey," and "You Better Go Now." Her intimate, near-speaking approach to vocals won her a following, but shyness and increasing difficulty with public performances drove her to an early retirement at the age of 36 in 1961. We'll hear selections from her Decca LPs and singles, as well as her late-1950s albums for Capitol and Roulette. For more information about Southern, you can visit this website. "You Better Go Now" airs Saturday, March 11 at 11:05 Eastern p.m. on WFIU and at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNINev. The program will be posted to the Night Lights archives by the following Tuesday morning.

Tonight on Afterglow we'll be featuring the music of Dick and Kiz Harp, a husband-and-wife piano/vocal duo who ran their own nightclub, the 90th Floor, in late 1950s Dallas. Kiz Harp, whose singing style was compared to Anita O'Day's and Sylvia Sims', came from South Bend, Indiana; she died at the age of 29 from a cerebral hemorrhage, shortly after the Harps' first album had been released. Another, posthumous LP was subsequently issued; we'll hear music from both albums, which have been reissued on CD by Bruce Collier, the man who founded 90th Floor Records in order to record the Harps (they spurned offers from several major labels because the labels wanted to record them with a heavy orchestral backing). (This autumn I'll be doing an entire show about the Harps for Night Lights, and it will include an interview with Bruce Collier.) We'll also have our usual mix of jazz, jazz ballads, and American popular song. Afterglow airs at 10:05 p.m. Eastern time tonight on WFIU and tomorrow night (Saturday) at 10 p.m. Central time on WNIN.

Late to the party, but it's a great one... I'll have to track down some of the titles mentioned above. Listening right now to ART AND SOUL and just pulled TAKE YOUR PICK from our station library.

Thanks, man! I think another board member is going to be able to help me out with both of these titles.

Hey all, If anybody has a copy, in any form, of either Stanley Turrentine's DEARLY BELOVED (Blue Note) or Shirley Scott's ONE FOR ME (Strata East), could you contact me via PM or e-mail? I'm working on a Shirley Scott Night Lights program and have been unable to track down either one.

Review:

Posted on Songbirds this evening:

Thanks for the rec, Joe--I came across that one recently while reorganizing the jazz library here at the station. I do like the newest one too, quite a lot... just played "A Time to Go" on the air.

Pretty much hearsay, but a DJ friend of mine who writes liner notes says that they are none too happy about "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer," for starters. I don't know enough about estates and publishing to have an idea of what kind of sway the Cole folks could hold over what BF does... and much of that 1960s material has come out already on the British EMI twofers, hasn't it? In any event, glad if there's solid word that there will be a sequel... I love quite a lot of that material myself, favoring both the "jazzy" Nat and the "popular/EZ" Nat (and all points in-between).

I'll bet mine was in the "Stupid Questions" thread. Another thread that went south...

The Big O keeps on a-rollin'... long may it do so. Happy b-day to the best jazz forum on the Internet.

Lon, both of those Nashville boxes are great. The r & b one, in particular, has some interesting jazz crossover tracks featuring a young Phineas Newborn Jr., the alleged Coltrane tracks with Gay Crosse, etc. I've been reading the not-so-great Cole bio that came out about six years ago and re-visiting the Mosaic... I don't have as much of the 1955-59 material as I thought I did, so I will definitely be going for this new BF collection. I think my friend's new record store can pretty much match the CD Wolf price (sans shipping), so I'll be getting it locally. I hope BF does a sequel, though I hear rumors that the Cole family/estate is not too keen about some of those recordings seeing the light of day again.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key!! Hang 'em high!! Now if we could only formally bust the G-meister for the desecration he visited upon Louis' "What a Wonderful World."

Yikes.

"Ghosts of Yesterday: Billie Holiday and the Two Irenes" is now archived. Mentioned at the end of the program, but I'll say it here again: special thanks to Chris Albertson and Chuck Nessa.