ghost of miles

I haven't been able to find the name of the alto player yet, Jim--but I did come across this: on this site: Fab4

And again today! I'm tellin' ya, don't bet on the Yanks in the playoffs. This is ridiculous.

Yeah, baby!!

So, between the two of them, Chuck and Chris have seen everyone but Buddy Bolden. I was born too late!

Yeah, same here. Just found out that I'm not getting any of the Hills ( ) and only one of the Holland/Rivers. At least the Air, Braxton/Roach, and Ivery titles are still coming. And I had been feeling guilty about blowing nearly 70 bucks--ended up spending half that much instead. Hey, that's 35 bucks I can spend somewhere else!

I know noo-thing... noo-thing!! It's the Japanese issue. We used to get a lot of cut-out imports, as I'm sure you well know. You're right about the sound. A new Sony re-issue could only improve it (one hopes).

Man, a very tough vote. I really leaned towards the Village Vanguard, but opted for the Atlantic set instead. I like the transition point at which it catches Trane.

Just got a review copy of this in the mail, and I am eager, to say the least, to give it a read. I've been waiting years for a companion to the Greil Marcus-edited anthology, PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG. Here's the description from Publishers' Weekly:

Lester Bangs has a great piece on ASTRAL WEEKS in his posthumous compendium PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG.

As that famous bard Paul Simon once put it: The sounds of silence.

Another great one from 1939, a real cult classic IMO, involving literary/Hollywood hands Nathanael West and Dalton Trumbo: FIVE CAME BACK. Here's an online summary: FiveCameBack It was out on VHS at one time, but I'm not betting on a DVD re-issue. Oh, and THE WOMEN--discussed in the "Now watching" thread.

Sonny Rollins Brad Mehldau William Parker Wayne Shorter (w/Danilo Perez/John Pattituci/Brian Blade) Peter Brotzmann DKV Trio Joshua Redman Greg Osby (w/Jason Moran) Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra w/Marsalis (hey, I got in for free) Smithsonian Masterworks Orchestra (just the other night--big band repertory, it was fun) Joseph Jarman Gerry Hemingway/John Butcher Killer Ray Appleton Jimmy Coe/Pookie Johnson David Baker Joe Lovano Liquid Soul Ballin' the Jack

I'd heard this was in the offing. Haven't caught much of his work in recent years, but I'm a fan, and I'm intrigued...

Chris, WDAS has eight listings in the index, and WHAT has six. I haven't gotten to any of the mentions yet, but here's the first one regarding WDAS: The first mention of WHAT refers to Ramon Bruce, a former pro football player who hosted a show called Ravin' With Ramon there.

All the leading ladies in the film (Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and others) were afraid of the 'glorious' Technicolor process that MGM was trying to push. The Technicolor system was still in its infancy at the time. The ladies who felt safer with the way they were photographed in black and white won. The MGM executives just threw in that Technicolor fashion show to promote their new system. Interesting talk about the Women and Technicolor....The Women (Recently on DVD with an alternate fashion show sequence, I haven't seen it, just read about it) Can't make up it's mind, early feminist tale, or women are animals, bitches, as Joan Crawford alludes to....but still a lot of fun! Speaking of Joan, she is in the "classic" The Ice Follies of 1939, which has a big Technicolor scene as well....Never really thought about it before, but MGM seemed a bit late on the bandwagon of Color...I think The Wizard of Oz was their first full length Technicolor film.....other studios had full length films earlier(WB with Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, the beautiful The Garden of Allah from 1936-which seems to be out of print already? )It was very expensive to shoot a film in Color...an interesting site I found on the web with lots o info on color and film in general.... http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/t...echnicolor1.htm Berigan, we've got the DVD, but we haven't watched the alternate black-and-white sequence yet. I'll have to check out that film-site--sounds interesting. As for Joan Crawford, I couldn't believe that the never-seen husband was cheating on Norma Shearer with her. Even putting aside the supremely-important issue of fidelity, I thought that Norma Shearer was much more attractive. The Crawford flick that I want to check out, though, is MILDRED PIERCE. I read James Cain's novel not too long ago, and I can definitely imagine her in that role.

Duke Ellington, COMP. RCA/VICTOR, discs 11, 12, 13. I never get tired of listening to this man's music. It never loses the power to move and astonish me. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Ellington.

Well, what better place for my thousandth Organissimo post than my beloved "Now reading" thread? Jim Sangrey & I simultaneously came across this title one day after I put up a thread looking for books on black radio. I'm about 60 pages into it, and it's exactly what I was looking for--scholarly without being jargonistic or pretentious, a fascinating study of how the struggle for equal rights (cultural as well as political) intertwined with the 20th-century medium of radio. I'm diggin' it!

I voted for "Our Delight" because--I kid you not--I hear that tune in my head almost every day.

Eric Dolphy, OTHER ASPECTS Charlie Parker, BIRD AT THE HI-HAT Billy Butterfield, RECIPE FOR ROMANCE Duke Ellington, EARLY ELLINGTON (GRP set) Masada, LIVE IN JERUSALEM

KENTON TOO: TEUTONIC BOOGALOO, maybe? In any case, here's the review I wrote for the Bloomington Free Press. Feel free to pick it apart--I'm nothing if not a masochist for constructive criticism! (With thanks to Joe Milazzo for turning me on to Allen Lowe.) Faith Into Funk: Arthur Kempton’s History of Black Music, Boogaloo There’s a striking photograph of gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey in Arthur Kempton’s new book Boogaloo that connects the beginning and the end of the writer’s narrative at once. In 447 pages, Kempton sets out to tell the history of popular black music in 20th-century America, tracing a line from Dorsey, best known perhaps as the author of “Precious Lord,” to Suge Knight, the thuggish head of the modern-day rap label Death Row Records. The picture of Dorsey, taken when he was young, shows him in his other guise, as Georgia Tom, the bluesman who teamed up with guitarist Tampa Red to produce bawdy Depression-era hits such as “It’s Tight Like That.” The flame from a struck match about to light his cigarette, his coat collar coolly upturned, and his eyes brooding with a languid hint of menace, he suggests, as Kempton says, a caption tht would state Unsaved. Dump the knit applejack cap and he could pass for a contemporary hiphop hero. Dorsey’s story is the first in a series of biographical tales that Kempton uses to construct his ambitious project, the alpha to Suge Knight’s omega. His early conflict between whether to write popular or religious music eventually resolved into a gospel blues that profoundly transformed the culture of the African-American church. It also embodied the Manichean struggle that is underscored throughout Kempton’s book in other performers and composers such as Sam Cooke, who left the gospel milieu behind to become one of the first black singers to make deep inroads into the heart of white middle America. For Dorsey, though, as for Cooke, the lesson learned and applied was that music was a business; or, as Dorsey put it, “You got to know how to work your show,” whether it was in the name of the Lord or of more earthly powers. Much of the dramatic arc of Kempton’s story rides on the economic machinations of the entertainment figures, like Dorsey and Motown’s Berry Gordy, who brought black popular music to the forefront of American life. Kempton’s book has arrived this summer replete with glowing reviews from those twin towers of liberal culture, the New Yorkerand the New York Review of Books (to which Kempton is a frequent contributor). Don’t buy it—figuratively speaking, anyway. Boogaloo is a very mixed bag, a work apparently devoid of any original research, drawing heavily on the previous labor of titles such as Michael Harris’ The Rise of Gospel Blues and Rob Bowman’s Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. Given Kempton’s intent to create a panoramic saga of his subject, such a synthetic approach might not matter if it produced fresh insights, but it doesn’t. We already know, for example, from Daniel Wolff’s You Send Me that Sam Cooke had reached an artistic cul-de-sac before his strange and violent death in 1964 (and we’ll doubtless know more when Peter Guralnick’s biography comes out). We already know that Berry Gordy, like many other music industry magnates, was not an exemplar of virtue and loyalty in constructing the empire of Motown. Ultimately Kempton’s literary sampling yields a decent enough overview of the evolution of boogaloo, assembled in the time-honored manner of Great-Men-of-Music. The achievement isn’t to be taken lightly, whatever one thinks of his methodology, but even within these parameters there are curious oversights and errors: what, for example, is a reader to make of the omission of Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris and the jump blues they popularized, paving the way for both R & B and rock and roll of the 1950s? Kempton leaps from Dorsey to Mahalia Jackson to Cooke, using their involvement in gospel to generate his narrative link. In doing so he leaves untold the important tale of the post-World War II transition in black popular music. There’s also Kempton’s writing style, which works as jarringly as the tattered synapses of a dry drunk. It’s nearly impossible to make sense at first of sentences such as the following: “Jackson was on television enough to seem a presence when not much else her color was that had any purpose but easing older viewers into a new habit of leisure by serving them up comic stereotypes handed down from movies and radio, or selling fresh music to the consumer class being made of America’s young.” Come again? Or, “In its preparation the native cuisine that Wingate served didn’t filter out as much as Motown did the flavorings used in kitchens on the side of Detroit where Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin learned to cook.” For a book that celebrates the rhythm and groove of musical soul, this prose ain’t exactly dancin’. Kempton also treads clumsily in matters of racial terminology. He favors the archaic Harlem Renaissance term “Aframerican,” which doesn’t quite trip off the tongue; he euphemistically substitutes “N(egro)” whenever he quotes a black speaker using the more loaded word (sounding particularly fussy when said speaker is the pulp writer Iceberg Slim, whose book Pimp is employed tiresomely as a counterpart to the story of Motown founder Gordy); and he refers to white people twice as “crackers.” As Kempton himself might say, what street did this white boy grow up on? The academic discomfort suggested by these elocutions may also be indirectly responsible for the book’s larger failings. Kempton has attempted to write a comprehensive history, but by the late 1970s he starts to lose his way, veering back and forth between George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic ensembles and the first rumblings of hiphop, setting up connections that are never really fulfilled. Faced with the rise of first disco (funk on cocaine) and then gangster rap, Kempton seems uncertain of whether to damn or to praise. His liberal sensibility, at ease with the progress of both musical and social history for most of the narrative, distills less efficiently in the atmosphere of what we might call Late Boogaloo; the samples of hiphop are just fragments shored against the ruins, baby. Such is the result of the monolithic strategy that Kempton has chosen to use. It would be foolish to argue that black popular music—gospel, jazz, the blues, R & B, the oral toasting tradition, all of it—has not been a primary influence on American entertainment and culture. What’s missing from Kempton’s book is the complex cross-pollination that brought us to where we are today, the exchanges and adaptations of form and style tht continue to permutate throughout hiphop, techno, and mashing. Musician and writer Allen Lowe’s underground histories American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo and That Devilin’ Tune represent the roots of that evolution more thoroughly than Kempton’s (although Lowe so far has written mostly about the 1900-1960 era). Still, it would be remiss not to mention some of the many nuggets of reading pleasure that Boogaloo provides, such as George Clinton’s revelation that much of the inspiration for Parliament Funkadelic came from Ishmael Reed’s masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo, or Stax singer Otis Redding’s response to Bob Dylan when the icon of 1960s white American cool asked him to record “Just Like a Woman.” Redding demurred, on the grounds that the song had “too many fucking words.” It’s a funny and ironic moment, the author of the proto-rap “Subterranean Homesick Blues” being dismissed by one of the foremost poets of soul in terms that anticipate Johnny Rotten. Of such odd communions was American music made and unmade. --David Brent Johnson

Yeah, it gave me chills when I was 13! Last week my wife & I watched THE WOMEN (1939). Interesting comedy with an all-female cast, centered around the reactions of several women who find out their husbands are cheating on them. It's black and white, but during a fashion-show sequence it suddenly bursts into glorious Technicolor... for no apparent aesthetic reason that I could figure out, other than showing off. The ideology of it was kind of crazy, too--really progressive on occasion, really essentialist most of the time.

There's an article on this show in the current issue of Newsweek, and I read yesterday that Jay Leno's signed on for a makeover. I always thought that straight guys could only help their cause by appropriating gay men's generally higher standards. It reminds me of a card my wife & I once saw in a shop that said, "All of the good-looking, well-dressed men who know how to cook aren't taken--they're just not taken with women."

A later Columbia Duke that I happily came across recently is PIANO IN THE FOREGROUND. It's one of my favorite Duke piano records, along with the Capitol date and MONEY JUNGLE.

I vote for the 27-second Rolling Stones Rice Krispies jingle.

They've been on tap for some time. In fact, I heard that Phil Schaap played one of these in a newly-remastered form a year or two ago on the radio in New York. Evidently Sony's decided to bring these other titles out first instead. I'm just glad that they're finally starting to do more with the 1947-52 period; now, bring on 1927-40!