Noj

Go Braves.

Well, I bought it a few weeks ago, after knowing it since the sixties. I wonder if we've caused a surge in sales for this album? Hopefully so! Just got done listening to it for the first time. Outstanding disc!

Postman just dropped off: ...bolstering my somewhat weak Adderley section.

Noj 9 Soulstation1 9 Aggie87 8 Edward 7 jazzmoose 7 vajerzy 7 Van Basten II 7 Conn 6 Brutal week as SS1 and I topped the group with nine correct picks. I took the honors by being closer on the points, thanks to Miami's special teams play (or lack thereof).

I'm in the process of transferring a bunch of reggae 45s directly from a Jamaican DJ courtesy of a friend of a friend. I'm using my Numark TTUSB with Audacity. It does a reasonably good job, though I find none of the noise removal tools are worth fiddling with. At most I'll pump up the volume a little. Often I'll just google the track and see if someone else has uploaded a clean version before I bother to transfer.

Hip hop/rap doesn't really lend itself to serious discussion, because it isn't serious (for the most part). I guess one can be serious about it, but it's music that is supposed to be fun (for the most part). There's this whole generation that grew up on it, and they LOVE the lyrics. So, literary significance...according to whom? Musical significance...according to whom? I go to a hip hop club here in LA, and it's as "significant" as it gets to some. I mean, how "significant" are most top ten hits? How significant are jazz musicians to classical snobs? Rock musicians to jazz snobs? Classical musicians to hip hop snobs? Funny thing, to crate diggers like (real) hip hop producers...just about any record can be "significant." Four seconds can be "significant." The DJs love music like few others love music.

Hmmm, I happen to like Sonny Still, Booker Little, Phil Woods, Frank Zappa, and Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, so I'm not really catching that as much of a slam--not that I really follow the comparisons at all. Madlib's got some super cool crates, that's for sure. The Quasimoto and Loot Pack albums have damn good beats. I'd rank him lower than guys like Prince Paul and Shayeed, but it isn't like falling short of those guys is anything to be ashamed of. Hip hop is dead for those who say it is. I take blanket statements like that just like ones about who is "overrated." Overrated to whom? Dead to whom? I'll decide for myself, thanks.

That's really cool! Wonder if it will make it to the Classic Sports channel.

Well, from what I understand the term "House Music" has come to mean something different from its original meaning, which was "whatever records were in the house at a house party." This yielded DJs playing around with the available records and manipulating them. At least that's how I heard it from my friend who was a Chicago DJ. Regardless of the sequence, it still speaks to DJs meeting the demands of the dance crowd.

As clear cut as we'd like the genres to be, for me hip hop is part of the organic relationship of music and the dance floor, as well as music and politics. Rap was born specifically out of reggae and so-called house music, and contains elements of funk, soul, and the improvising spirit of jazz. Consider the dub movement in reggae, wherein the rhythm is looped and extended, the drums are electronically manipulated, and the "toaster" keeps the crowd moving on the microphone. This translated over to "house music," where disco DJs realized that certain portions of certain songs were much more danceable than the rest of the song. So, loop that portion of it up and the crowd will keep dancing. Then the DJ would act like the reggae toaster and urge the crowd to keep dancing. This is the birth of rap. One can really trace the motivation behind the birth of rap by following what people liked to dance to, much the same way you can follow jazz falling out of popular favor by not being what people liked to dance to. Concurrently, add the influence of James Brown and Gil-Scott Heron and other spoken word artists, and one can see how rap departed from simply being dance music into social commentary. In jazz there was the "cutting contest," pitting the chops of two players against each other, in rap there is the improvisatory "battle rapping" (this is how Eminem rose to fame and is really his biggest talent). Music as sport. It seems like there's some sort of appalled reaction to rap, with folks wondering, "how the hell did this ever happen to music?" But really it was a natural progression and it happened exactly the way it was supposed to happen.

I take it a "bogaloo" is just a typo...

Fixed. Chasing Ed again.

I'm betting your Giants will fold up like a cheap tent come playoff time, Goodz. The Dodgers have been mailing it in for weeks now.

WAY TO GO, NOJ!!!! THAT IS CORRECT!!! This is the one song that I thought that no one would identify. It is written by the Cuban trumpeter Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros, who plays the trumpet solo. Eddie Palmieri plays the piano solo. I first heard it on the recent Eddie Palmieri career retrospective anthology on Fania. The liner notes are interesting as they state that Eddie Palmieri would from time to time leave salsa music for the much less interesting genre of Latin jazz, before coming back to the real music, salsa. It is not said quite that bluntly, but almost. The notes state that within the Latin jazz genre, "Chocolate Ice Cream" is one of his best recordings. Noj, you have surprisingly wide tastes, rap, now this! A good friend of mine has connections with the Fania label, and he gave me a whole bunch of 'em so I was on a salsa/latin jazz kick for a bit. "Chocolate Ice Cream" is just sublime by my tastes, and has been in my Overall Favorites playlist for about a year. So good. I was useless at identifying any of the other tracks, so I read everyone's posts. I knew I'd heard #2 before, and I have this mountainous Sun Ra collection including the album this song is from that I haven't been able to spend all that much time with yet. Very enjoyable compilation, Hot Ptah. Thanks for putting it together.

Haven't read any responses, but I can identify one track right away since it is a favorite of mine. Track #13 is Eddie Palmieri "Chocolate Ice Cream" from the album Super Imposition.

My sister-in-law is Lebanese, and she works at a restaurant that makes amazing hummus and all the traditional dishes. Love the stuff. Chicken shawarma, lamb kebab, garlic paste, fatoush salad, warm pita...yum.

Posted on another board...

Great to see you Bruce, and beautiful playing!

When provoked, it is preferable to react like The Dude, rather than escalate the negativity: Lighten up, gentlemen.

You make a very good point. Now if only Clemens and Bonds had the courage to say the same thing. Strongly disagree. First of all not all of the players from the "steroid era" were on PEDs. So far only 128 players have been caught or implicated for using PEDs. Math isn't one of my strong suits but that seems like a pretty small % out of the total numbers of players who have played in the MLB in the past 20 years. So not everyone was guilty. Not even close. But regardless of how many players took PEDs my main point is this - you can't let those steroid records stand because if you do, it's the same thing as saying it's OK to cheat, which is clearly wrong. Furthermore what about the guys whose records were broken that didn't take PEDs?? Is that fair to have some juicer in the books instead of them?? Hell no. While I'll sympathetic to the let's "MOVE ON" sentiment - because frankly I think we're all getting tired of hearing about steroids at this point - it would be wrong to turn our back on what happened and pretend there are no consequences for one's actions. That's not how life works. In my mind MLB did say "it's OK to cheat," while it was happening. So MLB is in no position to punish the players whose enhanced abilities it cashed in on at the time. An average Joe like me knew McGwire was juicing without even knowing a test result. The guy had forearms like calves and was hitting 500' moon shots. While the stadium was being packed, and no one was blabbing about it, MLB had no problem with it. Once it became a public issue, now they're right to throw those guys under the bus retroactively? Some of the stuff which is now banned/illegal/known to be dangerous could be had OTC. I knew guys who were using stuff like Creatine. They bought it at GNC and blew up into musclebound meatheads in no time.

My problem with the Steroid Witch Hunt is that there was a culture of steroid use which was ignored if not endorsed by the owners and coaching staffs. MLB had no problem cashing in on the Steroid Home Run Derby, and fans packed the stadiums to watch the balls fly out of the yard. The hitters were juiced, the pitchers were juiced, AND they tightened up the strings on the balls to make sure they flew extra far. To put this at the feet of the players, and not include the trainers, coaching staffs, FANS, and owners who looked the other way, is bullshit. And we heard about it as fans. Now everyone is all up in arms and crying about the "sacred" records and all this nonsense. Well, I say it's crap. The baseball world should collectively accept responsibility, let all the records stand since nearly everyone was guilty to a certain degree, and MOVE ON. Get over it. It happened. It wasn't Barry Bonds' fault or Roger Clemens' fault. It was damn near everybody's fault.

Listening and loving this set. What a labor of love! Disc 1 is in my stereo and the CD-Rom is in my computer, my ears full of sounds more than a century old. Dinwiddie Colored Quartet and Bert Williams just sent me for a loop. Thank you for putting this together, Allen. I'd buy the other three volumes in a heartbeat.