ghost of miles

Up for broadcast in just a minute.

I guess it would also allow someone else to win the AL East... right now Toronto proudly sits atop whilst the Yanks and Sox pound each other to a bloody pulp.

He sounds pretty A+ on that Dexter Mosaic Select... that's where I've been digging him lately. First heard him when I got into late 70's Art Pepper and immediately felt that this must be one of the "unsung" guys who probably never gets the credit that he deserves. Best wishes to Mr. Cables.

John, I've been listening to those solo discs lately, and they really are quite wonderful... Hoping more come out on CD in the future. In addition to what you listed, I would definitely recommend Sonny Criss' SONNY'S DREAM; Horace isn't on there, but it's his arrangements & compositions that are played. Also an OOP Novus called WEST COAST HOT, DISSENT OR DESCENT, and FLIGHT 17 (with the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra). And also check out Tapscott's autobiography, SONGS OF THE UNSUNG.

Here's a great one, purportedly from E-Bay's "Trust and Safety Department." Came replete with logos & everything:

Tonight on The Big Bands it's "Georgie Auld: 1940-1945." Georgie Auld, a tenor saxophonist (primarily--he sometimes played alto and even, on occasion, soprano) came to renown in the late 1930s playing with the big bands of Bunny Berigan and Artie Shaw. When Shaw stormed off the bandstand in November 1939 and fled from the music business to Mexico, it was the 20-year-old Auld who took over the orchestra. We'll hear some of the sides the Shaw-less Artie Shaw big band recorded under Auld's direction, as well as some of his own leader dates from 1944 and 1945, with a band that included at various times Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie, and Freddie Webster. (Auld's 1945-46 recordings will be covered in a future program.) The program airs at 9 p.m. on WFIU.

I'm asking the engineers to boost the volume in the SAW32 files during mixing. Evidently not anything we can do about shows already archived, but I'll try to ensure that they're louder going forward. Thanks much, guys, for the inquiry & comments.

Nothing new this week--we're re-broadcasting (wait, make that broadcasting for the first time ) "Let's Spring One." "Jazz Goes to The Cold War" will air next Saturday, and "Jazz Cameos" (pop-rock songs featuring jazz soloists) will air on April 30.

"Don't Smoke In Bed" used to be the Robison tune that damn near broke my heart... now it's the resigned melancholia of "Guess I'll Go Back Home Again (This Summer)".

I have a soft spot for Robison's work--check out Jack Teagarden's THINK WELL OF ME if you get a chance.

I'm on the same page as you, Chuck. Yeah, Triage came through here about a year ago, and they are indeed a fine band. If you liked Rempis in the V5... well, you get to hear even more of him here.

You've "thrown it out there" three times now. Which, coincidentally enough, is the total number of times you've posted here as well.

I was getting frequent "verification" e-mails purportedly from PayPal, using the PayPal logo and graphics. Very well done, but indeed a scam.

Interesting jazz-trivia note: the Newhart telephone gag dates back at least to Wonderful Smith's chat-with-FDR bit in Ellington's 1941 musical Jump for Joy. Not sure that that's where Newhart got it from (probably not) or if Smith was the first to do it... it's pretty funny (the full version is on the oop Smithsonian 1988 JUMP FOR JOY LP). You can hear about a minute of it in the special I did on JUMP FOR JOY, about 28 minutes in: Jump for Joy

Did the West Indian Orchestra (mentioned in the Ratliff piece) ever record? Lately I've been getting interested in British big-band history.

I wish there were more people like the people who post on this board... Not only would jazz sell more--the world would be a better place as well!

Is this where "muzak" (the music) originally came from?

Pretty sure Cuscuna has said elsewhere that those takes were considered unusable.

I just got the first two volumes of the Ellington Circle series, and man, you guys are right about the sound--amazing! Great version of "Summertime" with Al Hibbler on vocals. Think I'm going to have to build a new wing onto the house just to store the Ellingtonia...

New song "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food?"

The new one seems to be picking up some word-of-mouth steam--for better or worse, I think it's becoming the new "Norah Jones" album. My wife's church friends (young choir singers) who all loved the first Norah are going gah-gah over CARELESS LOVE... I think of them as an unofficial focus group. Not that CARELESS will match Jones' sales on the first album, but it has that same sort of crossover appeal. Another Billie link on the new CD: isn't "This Is Heaven to Me" one Billie did for Decca? One of the last things she did for Decca?

We're now posting programs on the Monday preceding broadcast, so there are two shows up this morning: the spring show "Let's Spring One," and "Jazz Goes to the Cold War," which will be broadcast next Saturday. Night Lights archives "Jazz Goes to the Cold War" is a program about the U.S. State Department's sponsorship of international jazz tours during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, as both the Cold War and the civil-rights movement heated up, the American government asked Dizzy Gillespie to assemble a new big band to promote the image of American freedom around the globe. Gillespie obliged, although he made it clear that he would not feel compelled to "promote racist policies." He was the first of a number of jazz artists to undertake such a tour, including Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. We'll hear music from all of those musicians (Ellington's FAR EAST SUITE, inspired by his 1963 State Department tour, Gillespie's live DIZZY IN SOUTH AMERICA V. 1, and Brubeck's THE REAL AMBASSADORS, a 1962 civil-rights musical that took an ironic look at bureaucratic sponsorship of jazz) and discuss Penny von Eschen's new book, SATCHMO BLOWS UP THE WORLD: JAZZ AMBASSADORS PLAY THE COLD WAR, now available from Harvard University Press: Believe it or not, this was one of the first program ideas I jotted down when I proposed Night Lights last summer... saw an ad for the von Eschen book in January and decided to get the show on the schedule pronto. Next week: "Jazz Cameos," a program of pop-rock songs featuring jazz musicians as soloists. Curtis Amy with the Doors and Carole King, Don Cherry with Lou Reed (a 12-minute live version of "Heroin"), Hugh Masekela with the Byrds, and more...

The "lost" spring show is now archived!

Brownie & Big Al, I'll forward your comments to our engineers and see if there's anything we can do on our end to improve the situation.

Folks, very sorry. Due to the time-change, Portraits in Blue was moved back to 10 p.m. (the station manager wants Night Lights to always be on at the same time); due to an internal computing error, Portraits was loaded in twice, for both the 10 and the 11 p.m. time slots. At midnight we went to overnight classical. Hey, it's a "lost" episode! Well, not really... should be archived tomorrow sometime. I was pretty bummed, as you can imagine.