papsrus

I'm listening to it now, prompted by your post. I'd ordered it a couple of weeks ago and gave it a few spins straight out of the mailbox, but hadn't revisited it again until now. It's kind of free jazz party music. Swings like mad sometimes, and then it'll turn on a dime and head off down some rabbit hole full-throttle. They'll take the head and play it fairly straight, then spend the next five minutes tearing the framework of the music completely apart in a very excessive but gleeful way. They can crank it up and then take it way down low really fast, too. Lotta changes in tempo, intensity, volume, etc., that come at you suddenly. There's a little bit of Reptet in these guys for sure, but they're maybe a little more apt to take the music as far "outside" as it'll go, and just deconstruct the hell out of it to the point of being farcical -- but it works cause everybody's in on the joke. There's sort of a carnival flavor to the whole proceedings, like some free jazz minstrel show. Brassy and ballsy. It's what music would be if it were jumping out of bed an hour late -- half asleep but wide awake -- running to get dressed with a cup cold coffee in one hand and shirt tail hanging out and shaving cream behind the ears and hopping up and down on one foot while putting on a shoe while the kids run around in circles and the dog escapes out the front door then ... bam! ... suddenly it's the quiet of the car ride to work. ... Like that. Oh yeah, the album winds up with a fairly straight ahead version of Allentown. Everything about the album has something to do with Pennsylvania, apparently. I think the song titles use names for Pennsylvania towns. I guess they're from Pennsylvania.

This thread has all the elements of greatness: A new mysterious figure appears with a riddle, some detective work is launched, sudden hairpin plot twists, comedic relief, conflict, resolution, a happy ending where everything is revealed to gasps from the spellbound audience. ... Best of all you can digest the whole thing in the time it takes to cook a 3 minute egg. ... Masterful! Bravo. My favorite thread.

bump for super-duper discounts. FYI: Texier and Friedlander were the first artists with a large number of listings here to sell out (so to speak). Berne and Vandermark are trailing badly in that category. But I have hope! The Berne Winter & Winter Paris concerts ... I'm telling ya.

What's the peak in an undefeated season? Pats were playing their best ball midseason, but then other teams started playing their hearts out in order to stop them. Giants had a good deal of luck to win the Super Bowl game on the final drive. They had to survive a miracle non-interception, a miracle avoidance of a sack, and a miracle catch where the ball landed on the receivers midsection while he was flat on the ground. I blame the football gods for the Giants victory. The Giants victory was deemed from above. It didn't really indicate any particular Patriots shortcomings. Yes. You are right about the Super Bowl. But to their credit, the Giants hung in there and gave themselves a chance to win -- and they took it. Literally wrestled the championship out of the hands of the Patriots. But I do recall that the general consensus was that the Pats were not playing their best ball down the stretch of the regular season. Course, that's compared to them completely blowing other teams away earlier in the season. But their age at linebacker in particular began to show a bit. No doubt the Cards are peaking right now, yes? Steelers are rolling, too. The game's got potential to be great, and you'd have to think the Cards certainly have the weapons and the schemes (not to mention the motivation) to hang in there and, just like the Giants, give themselves a chance to win it.

I agree. This is going to be a real snoozer of a Super Bowl. That's the exact same thing they said about the Wild Card round, the Divisional Round and the Conference Championship game...guess who won all 3? I never heard that, but the 8-8 Cards as the NFC representitive there is no reason to get excited. Unless, of course, as and if the NFC West representitive actually wins....then it'll be a great game The Cards won their division at 9-7; they're now 12-7 and about as confident in themselves as any team could be. I wouldn't count them out. I agree. They look really solid to me. They look a lot better at this point in their season than the Patriots did at the same point last year. Yet the Pats were favored. And they should have been. They were unbeaten. But the point is, it's not what you did in week 8, it's what you're doing right now, and right now the Cards look pretty damn good. Kind of reminds me of the year the Bucs won it all. They were good, but not great. In the pack with the other top teams in the league. They just got on a roll late and had the good fortune of running into an imploding Raiders team. edit: I went back and checked, and the Pats did get through the AFC playoffs fairly easily, so I may have overstated things a bit referencing New England, but there was a general consensus that they peaked too early, if one can say such a thing about a team that was undefeated to that point.

Are you referring to the Gato Libre listing? It is correct, a band consisting of: Natsuki Tamura, trumpet; Kazuhiko Tsmura, guitar; Satoko Fujii, accordion; Norikareu Koreyasu, bass ... (I think I have all those spelled right).

Thanks. I'll make the corrections. This is stuff I'm just not listening to anymore. I was excited about all of it at one point, but my tastes have shifted a little. I am holding on to selected discs by a good number of the artists who are listed. I still have a good deal of Douglas and Friedlander, for instance. Vandermark as well. And I'm holding on to about a dozen ECMs. That sort of thing. Most of this music that I've listed here, while very good (and some fairly rare), has been sitting on the shelf untouched for well over a year. The thing that really sort of spurred me to unload these was the "less is more" principle. I want to focus my listening a little more on the music that really interests me and lose the peripheral stuff. I realize that someday I'm going to say, "Damn, why did I unload that Berne Paris Concert stuff" (hint, hint). But if someone else can enjoy it, I'm happy.

Sorry .. lemme check. Been a bit busy with folks checking on stuff. Apologies. edit: PM sent.

Bump for some adds.

Yeah, if I were a Steelers fan, I'm not sure I'd be so confident.

Bunch of great stuff. It will take a long time to digest. Hope you live that long. Oh yeah! And this one's on the way, too.

Recent orders I've place over the past week or so that have yet to find their way to my door: Jabbo Smith & His Rhytm Aces -- "1929 The Complete Set" Jelly Roll Morton -- "Birth of the Hot" Charlie Shavers & Coleman Hawkins -- "A Famous Jazz Party 1958" Ruby Braff, George Barnes -- "Live at the New School" Teddy Wilson -- "Of Thee I Swing" Woody Shaw -- "Two More Pieces of the Puzzle"

I guess it's best to invite the neighbors. I read a similar article a while back about plays being performed in people's homes as well -- kind of an audience participation thing, where you would invite the performers to a gathering at your place, and at some point the performance would simply be underway, with the actors mingling about the gathering and doing their thing, and the story unfolding in amongst the guests.

OK. Round 1 is over. Thanks for everyone who showed interest. There's still a lot of nice music there for trade, or if you want to purchase make me an offer. Don't sleep on the Avital discs, or the Ehrich and Epstein discs. The Friedlander "Topaz" and "Quake" discs are a little jazzier/funkier than his more recent stuff, and feature Andy Laster on sax and clarinet, Stomu Takeishi on bass and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion. And the Braxton standards box sets are definitely worth considering, and somewhat rare I think. Amazon lists used copies of each for just north of $45. (you'll get 'em cheaper from me! And in excellent condition.) Also, Jewels and Binoculars is a Micheal Moore (of Clusone Trio) project focusing on the music of Bob Dylan. Pretty cool. They do a nice job. Two different discs of that stuff still there. Other than that, the Sclavis and Texier discs are all worth considering, as well as the Vandermark stuff. Version Soul is solid. And Amsterdam Funk is patterned after Jimmy Giuffre Free Fall disc. And there's still some Douglas discs available, as well as some nice ECMs hanging around. So ... if you have any music from the first part of the last century you wanna unload, lets trade! Also partial to selected blue notes, 60s avant, contemporary free-leaning stuff and anything with a tuba.

Hope I'm not breaking protocol here, but for any of you Braxton enthusiasts who are interested, I've got a few Braxton discs up for trade/sale, including a couple of standards boxes. Some other free-leaning stuff by other artists as well. thnx

The only issue I have with him is saying Jesus let him win and it was Jesus who brought him there. Did Jesus want the Eagles to lose? I'm a religious person however I don't like the evangelical overtures that Warner professes on national TV. Yeah, well, he doesn't come across as the sharpest pencil in the box, and his religious sound bites are pretty much just quick memorized phrases. And it's certainly not as though he's the only player in the NFL to share his religious convictions every time he wins a game. Dungy is the man they all ought to emulating on that score. His actions speak volumes louder than their words, IMO. And I'll still take a fired-up Warner over a giggling McNabb any day. I could just tell watching that game, with Warner it was all business all day. Not so much with McNabb, who was also not real accurate with his throws. And yes, he does have receivers who drop very catchable passes, too. Maybe that plays into what seems to me to be his "whatever" demeanor on the field. I like him. Maybe he should get out of philly.

Yeah, but ... I'd rather have his over-the-top intensity than the "aw shucks" nonchalance McNabb displayed today. I'm usually a fan of his, but I found McNabb really annoying to watch today. He was throwing badly and just walking around like he was some bad MF, laughing and yammering and strolling around like this was some preseason game. Not nearly as focused as he had been down the must-win stretch, seems to me. Warner sure was focused. Like a freakin' laser. He might be an asshole (might not) but he's a warrior. I'll take that at QB any day.

Sale over. Thanks everyone!

Great idea. Especially for folks out in the hinterlands, like me. I'll give it a whirl. Here's a calendar of what's going on in my immediate area over the next couple of months. (Notice James Moody coming to town in March, some dixieland jazz as well). I actually had my eye on the high school big band performances that are going to run all day Jan. 31. It's right up the street. ... Slightly more variety in metro areas to the north, which I'll now be investigating. Oh, and Ellington Orchestra with Buster Cooper in March.

On your enthusiasm, now have Shaw's "Two More Pieces of the Puzzle" on order. Thanks for the great insights.

When someone says "inside/outside" with respect to jazz, I usually think of Rivers. Maybe not "free" in the total sense, but "Crystals" is dense and harmonically adventurous enough to classify, I think, as much more outside than inside. I don't think I'd say the same about his more recent big band dates (Inspiration and Culmination) as those arrangements are as a whole less dissonant and, maybe due to the treatment of rhythm and the electric bass, a lot funkier--and probably more accessible--than the Impulse stuff. I think Sam's small group music is on the whole easier to digest than stuff like Crystals--but it goes both ways. The Tuba Trio stuff sounds like a cross between Ornette-style pianoless freebop and, for lack of a better comparison, burnout... but thanks to Sam's solo contributions, that stuff is pretty aggressively out there. On the other hand, his discs on ECM (Contrasts and Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds) and largely more reined-in technically, less sprawling, and somewhat easier to follow. But then you look at something like Portrait (solo, on FMP), which is at times as dissonant as the harshest energy music and at others as cerebral and pointillistic as the most abstract European improvisation, and the Tuba Trio music comes across as a lot less mystifying. Recently I've come to engage more with free improvisation as an element/device among or in the music of artists with strong compositional identities--and not so much as a procedural imperative (although the most thoughtful and "hard-won" music born out of this conception is almost uniformly brilliant--Derek Bailey for example)--and much, much less as a "genre" or "type" of music. I think Rivers is a perfect example of that--but hell, so are the Blue Notes, Roscoe Mitchell, Andrew Hill, Horace Tapscott, and even unrepentantly "outside" figures like Masayuki Takayanagi, Kaoru Abe, (later) Tetuzi Akiyama (who have all engaged in music with strong fixed elements). Thanks for those thoughts. Excellent, and had me scurrying off to see if I could find Sam Rivers Tuba Trio. And I agree fully with the notion of free improvisation as an element within strong compositional frameworks.

Happy birthday BT !

Yeah, that's bad news. I'm not a big fan of that tournament.

Good point Dan. They've done next to nothing to address the pen. They were right to add a bat or two first, but other than Nelson and a handful of arms signed to minor league deals, nada. And, according to them, there ain't much $$ left in the till. But the AL bEast should be one helluva show this year!!

Link and LINK Disturbing, although not surprising, to see all the anti-semitic remarks below the HuffPost entry.