ghost of miles

Up for Bean's 100th. Trivia question: in the Tom Hanks movie ROAD TO PERDITION, what song is playing in the background when Jude Law confronts Hanks in a roadside diner?

This is definitely worth picking up, even if you already have the studio material--the live material is great, and the DVD soundies and shorts are a real treat. It's budget-priced, so you can probably find it for $8 or $9 if you look around online... although I'm wondering on what grounds Lasker withheld some of this material from the red RCA box (he states that he purchased some of the 1941 broadcasts in 1996). In any case, I've been listening/viewing with great pleasure today.

The December Spin with U2 on the cover is out; it includes a 10-page article on Elliott and the last year or two of his life. Jennifer Chiba was interviewed for it but doesn't elaborate much about what happened on the morning of Oct. 21, 2003. Some clarification, however, about what Elliott was going through with his mother and his stepfather just before his death.

Duh--how could I have forgotten that one? Thanks for the catch, Impossible! BTW, rumor is that Christopher O'Riley is working on an entire CD of Elliott tunes.

I assure you that I'm not!

Looks like it was a great show, Steve! I love "Straight Ahead" but had to drop it to fit everything into one hour... I envy you your five-hour time slot! Your playlist does great justice to Hawk--even at five hours, I'll bet that was a challenge for an artist whose career lasted so long and spanned so many stylistic changes in jazz.

Thanks, pryan. Yeah, isn't "Apache" nice? It was written by David Raksin, the same guy who wrote "Laura." That album--TODAY & NOW--was one that Hawkins was very proud of. According to Chilton, it's the one he usually referred people to when they asked him about the recordings he'd made in the early 1960s.

The next Pacers-Pistons matchup is on Christmas Day? Let us pray for peace!

Absolutely right, and courageous coming from an Indiana resident Curious, what's the buzz in Indiana? What's local opinion on this sorry incident? Haven't really checked--sheldonm up the Indy way might have more info. I'm sure the focus is more on Wallace's initial reaction to the foul and to the Piston fans' behavior, though, and to the performance fallout for the Pacers that will come from the suspensions.

Jim R, I'm beginning to listen to and research the Mastersounds as part of my Indiana jazz series and the anthology that I'm doing for the Indiana Historical Society, and I agree--in fact, if my IHS anthology comes off, I'm actually thinking of proposing a Mastersounds set to Mosaic with me doing the booklet. My jazz writing needs to take a leap before I sound them out on that one, though.

Whoops--WFIU's traffic director is out and so the decision to flipflop Portraits in Blue and Night Lights didn't get carried out this week. Therefore the show will be airing at 12:05 Indiana and East Coast time. That means 9:05 in California and 11:05 in Chicago. Hopefully we'll have the switch made by next week--and the program will be archived as well. Quick note: in 1962 Hawkins, a classical music fan, told Stanley Dance that he hoped to record an album of Bach pieces. It never came to pass.

The NBA has suspended four players--Artest, Jackson, O'Neal, and Wallace--indefinitely. Not much of a basketball fan anymore--I've lost interest in all sports except baseball--but c'mon, a player never goes into the stands. That should be pretty much sancrosanct. OTOH, any fans who throw anything at players should be hit hard, from a legal point-of-view. Really hard, like prison time and a fine.

Diana Krall does Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue" on her new record.

While doing some research on Shorty Rogers for Night Lights, I came across a reference to his involvement with Bobby Bryant's 1969 Pacific Jazz album JAZZ EXCURSION INTO HAIR. Is it any good? I'd love to hear it... think Cuscuna might be persuaded to re-issue this one anytime soon? B-)

Jim, Actually, it's probably a more recent reference that I've seen--should've said "is" (Something-Lite is a contemporary kind of phrase; I doubt such a saying would have been around in the late 1950s). However, I do believe the concept holds, that the Mastersounds were criticized for being derivative of the MJQ.

I'm putting together a Night Lights program based on JAZZ THEMES FROM THE WILD ONE and am looking for more information about why Leith Stevens was picked to do the score for THE WILD ONE over Shorty Rogers. Rogers recorded four of Stevens' compositions for RCA in July 1953; in August a smaller group that included Rogers & many of the same players (Shank, Giuffre, Cooper, and other West Coast leading lights) recorded the same compositions and eight others by Stevens under the moniker, "Leith Stevens' All Stars." Rogers was involved with the film evidently at the insistence of Marlon Brando, who had been quite taken with Rogers' MODERN SOUNDS Capitol record. Supposedly he wanted Rogers to write the score, but the studio insisted on Stevens. Can anybody point me to a more elaborative source, either online or in a good oldfashioned Guttenberg kinda device? The Bear Family CD, btw, which compiles both the Stevens-led recording and the Shorty Rogers date for RCA, is excellent (but the liners are't very helpful--simply a reprise of the movie's plot). I'm going to feature it along with dialogue from the movie and a couple of tracks from the MODERN SOUNDS record.

Agree w/all of the comments above, both the praise and the cautionary note about listening in small doses. Check out Milburn's early-1960s Motown work as well--it's actually quite good IMO:

Did I miss a thread anywhere? My apologies if so... but tomorrow (Sunday, Nov. 21) will be the 100th anniversary of Coleman Hawkins' birth. Hats off to the Hawk! Long may his music continue to fly. I'm devoting tonight's Night Lights program to his early-1960s recordings, and I'm sure there will be radio tributes on jazz stations around the country this weekend as well. Tomorrow I'll be dusting off the Keynotes and some other classic Bean in celebration of his life and work.

Ironic if true, since his brother's band (the Mastersounds, with whom he recorded once or twice) was sometimes labeled "MJQ-Lite."

This week on Night Lights it's "The Hawk Heads Home: Coleman Hawkins in the Early 1960s," in honor of the Hawkins centenary this Sunday, Nov. 21. The early 1960s were Hawkins' last great period, and we'll hear music from his TODAY AND NOW lp, his bossa nova effort (DESIFINADO), and his collaborations with Duke Ellington, Max Roach ("Driva Man" off WE INSIST! FREEDOM NOW SUITE), and Sonny Rollins. The show airs Saturday at 11:05 p.m. on WFIU (8:05 in California, 10:05 in Chicago, 11:05 in NYC); you can listen online at WFIU. Next week: "The Jazz Workshops Pt. 2," featuring music from Charles Mingus and John Carisi. A happy Thanksgiving and safe traveling to everyone.

Some of the Impulses seem to be going OOP without much notice or alert... I had a surprisingly hard time tracking down the Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison ILLUMINATION reissue a couple of months ago. Blue Note's warning list has spoiled me, and I no longer work in a music store, where we regularly got pull inventories that had "D*" beside them to indicate that the label was deleting the title.

David Tegnell posted to the Coltrane list that Downbeat reports McCoy Tyner has nearly completed writing his autobiography with a co-author and is currently looking for a publisher.

My wife goes through a couple of cartons a week.

Thanks, Mike--I sent him an e-mail. I imagine the lines were fairly nebulous, but there does seem to be a slight distinction between Mingus' Jazz Workshop and the JCW.

I'm doing some research for a Night Lights program devoted in part to Charles Mingus' 1954 Savoy session that was released under the title JAZZ COMPOSERS WORKSHOP and am trying to discern what the evolution of the various so-called Jazz Workshops were. Santoro's Mingus bio is of little help (the references are vaguely allusive-I'm going to run down Priestly's book at the library tomorrow), but was the Jazz Composers Workshop a separate entity--a name for a collective that included Mingus, Macero, John LaPorta, and some others who were performing around NYC under that name in the early-to-mid 1950s? As opposed to the Jazz Workshop that I associate with Mingus and Debut. (The Mingus Debut liners don't offer much clarification either.)