Chrome

I found a copy of "Turkish Women at the Bath" from 32Jazz and it's fantastic ... some really distinctive drumming.

For jazz, it would probably be "Jazz Brothers" with Howard McGhee, Charlie Rouse, Barry Harris, Lisle Atkinson and Grady Tate ... kind of obscure, but I used to listen to alot while walking my middle daughter to sleep when she was first born ... nice memories. Non-jazz (but not exactly rock): Joan Osborne's cover disc "How Sweet It Is" ... love her voice and interpretations here. For rock, it would have to be my remastered copy of the Stones' "Hot Rocks" ... the sound on this is fantastic.

I was recently spinning Bud Shank's "This Bud's for You" ... a pretty fine CD from a pretty fine alto player who doesn't get mentioned too much.

Inspired by discussion of Jim Carrey's acting in the Movie thread ... plenty of comedians take dramatic roles to prove their acting chops ... anyone have any favorites? Mine probably goes back a ways ... Anyone ever see "Blue Collar" with Richard Pryor? Kind of an auto-workers-against-corporate-management type crime movie, and Pryor was brilliant ... channeling the anger that made his standup routines so funny/true back in the day.

Ralph Moore - Images Don't hear much about Moore, but this is a great disc: Moore, tenor Terence Blanchard, trumpet Benny Green, piano Peter Washington, bass Kenny Washington, drums

Supposed to be some kind of anti-Bush song ... I've heard a lot about it recently, but it's not the kind of thing I usually have in my CD player ... any comments on this?

I've always like the start of the version of St. Louis Blues on the Armstrong/Handy disc: I hate to see that evening sun go down, I hate to see that evening sun go down, 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm on my last go 'round ... and Key to the Highway by Bill Broonzy I got the key to the highway, and I'm billed out and bound to go I'm gonna leave here runnin', cause walkin' is most too slow I'm goin' down on the border, now where I'm better known Cause woman you don't do nothin', but drive a good man 'way from home Now when the moon creeps over the mountain, I'll be on my way Now I'm gonna walk this old highway, until the break of day Come here, sweet mama, now and help me with this heavy load I am due in West Texas, and I've got to get on the road I'm goin' to West Texas, I'm goin' down behind the farm(?) I'm gonna ax the good Lord what evil have I done

I agree with you about the language, but not about this ... at this stage in the music game, Simpson (or maybe her family) has to take responsibility for turning herself into a "pop star."

Regarding Joshua Redman, his "Elastic" CD is pretty nice ... kind of a different, innovative take on the sax/organ/drum setup ... 'course, having Sam Yahel and Brian Blade along helps matters.

Does anyone (besides me) remember when they were on SNL? They were playing, well, I don't remember what, but in the middle of the performance Elvis stopped the band and launched into a different number, a blazing version of "Radio Radio." I'll never forget it, because it got me totally hooked on his music. ----------- Also regarding Kenny G., I've always been curious: Does he fuck pentatonic fairies or does he fuck regular fairies but in a pentatonic manner?

From www.dustedmagazine.com via disinfo: Jandek On Corwood: Defiant Ambiguity and Psychological Projection Compared to singer/guitarist Jandek, Swans are Doves and Charles Manson is a poor man’s Leonard Cohen. The mysterious Houston performer has pumped out dozens of albums over the last few decades, each profoundly devoid of structure. Like a gifted, isolated adolescent fresh from having his palm pressed to a hot stove, he bangs artlessly on his mistuned instrument and freestyles the loneliest lyrics in the world. His music is incomparable. It’s also some of the most abysmally depressing shit I’ve ever heard. Among oddity-drunk hipsters, it’s his persona, or lack thereof, that gets him most of his meager attention. Until recently, he never performed live. Although he’s always been super-cordial to anyone who mails his enigmatic label Corwood Industries, he’s never been at all forthcoming with background info. He doesn’t elucidate his creative process. When rock writer Katy Vine successfully sought him out in his hometown, he behaved so strangely that the resulting profile only doubled the stakes. Through its first two acts, the elegantly spare but laughably pretentious documentary Jandek On Corwood does likewise. Seldom have I seen a film that strained to hard to be moody. We get extended shots of beaches, bombed-out shacks, and all the other hallmarks of the quietly creepy world the filmmakers imagine for Jandek. All the while, his lack of input – or any presence at all – rings out like a scream. At one point, our absent hero’s face appears in a full moon, and it’s hard not to groan aloud. Music nerds are masters of psychological projection. As his music bears no kinship with anything else out there – and as he’s little more than a blank screen in public life – Jandek is perhaps the most apt performer for this treatment, ever. So long as the man himself remains AWOL, the film revolves around interviews with DJs, critics and record store clerks eager to smother Jandek in their own half-formed ideas and theories. Some posit intriguing thoughts on what attracts people to music as inaccessible as this, but whenever talk turns to the artist, no one has much to say that applies outside his or her head, but it’s all slapped straight onto Jandek. Would you sit through a movie that consisted of drunks talking about how much that one Bob Mould record helped them when they got dumped? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. After awhile, the chats descend into some conspiratorial “Paul Is Dead” type shit. When one guy describes phoning a woman in Indiana he thinks might be Jandek’s ex-wife, I want to punch him. Then, near the end, Jandek appears, via telephone, to wipe away a lot of his mystique. He comes off as well-adjusted and self-aware, if inexplicably reluctant to pass along some seemingly minor details. He gladly spills what beans he has on Corwood’s history an sales figures. (They’re practically non-existent, which makes me wonder if there’s a single Jandek “fan” who doesn’t get all his albums gratis.) However, he offers nothing on his rotating cast of collaborators, which might be more polite than disturbing. Oddly, the man behind some of the world’s emptiest music doesn’t seem nearly as hung-up on art or suffering as most of his fans. All the sadness and weirdness and sundry psychic shit on a Jandek record comes from inside the listener. No matter how blatantly the man’s whole scheme waves this in front of them, most of the talking heads in Jandek On Corwood confine their fascination to the shadowy creator, and seldom pause for introspection or own up to their own roles in the symbiosis of fandom. The most soulful thing on this DVD is a special feature: A long interview with Songs In the Key of Z author Irwin Chusid, conducted by a pair of sadistic college radio jocks as they play Jandek records, back to back, for hours on end. Chusid both dismisses Jandek’s music and makes the strongest, most honest case for its appeal you’ll hear here, as he describes isolating himself during KoZ’s writing process and feeling his “inner outsider” emerge, to his horror. The average “outsider music” wonk should be so blessed. By Emerson Dameron

From Slate: It's a Shame About Ray Why must biopics sentimentalize their subjects? By David Ritz Posted Friday, Oct. 22, 2004, at 3:54 AM PT Foxx stays true to Ray Ray, the new biopic directed by Taylor Hackford, satisfies in some wonderful ways: Jamie Foxx miraculously embodies Ray's soul; Ray's own musical voice sounds bigger and better than ever; and several of the supporting performances—Sharon Warren as Ray's mom and Regina King as Margie Hendricks—are heartfelt and powerful. The problem, though, is that Ray is a saccharine movie while Ray himself was anything but a saccharine man. He was a raging bull. Sentimentalizing his story may make box office sense, but, to my mind, it trivializes the compelling complexity of his character. For example, the film focuses on Ray's relationship with his mother, Aretha. Yet the truth is that Ray had two mothers. According to what Ray told me and insisted we include in Brother Ray, an autobiography that I co-authored in 1978, two women dominated his early years: his biological mother, Aretha, and a woman named Mary Jane, one of his father's former wives. "I called Aretha 'Mama' and Mary Jane 'Mother,' " wrote Ray. After her 6-year-old son went blind, Aretha fostered his independence, while Mary Jane indulged him. For the rest of his life Ray was as fiercely self-reliant as he was self-indulgent. Two dynamic women, two radically different approaches to his sightlessness—you can imagine the impact on his character. Ray ignores this phenomenon completely. Ray tries to explain Ray's blues—the angst in his heart—in heavy-handed Freudian terms. At age 5, Ray helplessly watched his younger brother, George, drown. The film insists that the guilt Ray felt for failing to rescue George is responsible for the dark side of his soul. Once the guilt is lifted, the adult Ray is not only free from his heroin habit but is liberated—in a treacly flashback—from his emotional turmoil. George's death was certainly traumatic for the young Ray, yet the only time Ray suffered what he termed a nervous breakdown had neither to do with the drowning nor the loss of his sight a year later. "It's the death of my mother Aretha," he told me, "that had me reeling. For days I couldn't talk, think, sleep or eat. I was sure-enough going crazy." That the film fails to dramatize the scene—we learn of Aretha's death in a quick aside from Ray to his wife-to-be—misses the crucial heartbreak of his early life. It happened when Ray was 15, living at a school for the blind 160 miles from home. "I knew my world had ended," he said. The further fact that Ray fails to include a single scene from his extraordinary educational experience is another grievous oversight. It was at that state school where he was taught to read Braille, play Chopin, write arrangements, learn piano and clarinet, start to sing, and discover sex. Ray shows none of that. Such scenes would have been far more illuminating than the unexciting story, which the film does include, of Ray changing managers in midcareer. The minor characters are another major problem. Take David "Fathead" Newman, the saxophonist who, for over a decade, was Ray's closest musical and personal peer. In Ray, David is portrayed as little more than a loudmouthed junkie. While drugs were part of the bond between David and Ray, the key to their relationship was an extraordinary musical rapport. In real life, David is a soft-spoken, gentle man of few words. As Ray was boisterous, David was shy. Both were brought up on bebop. Like Lester Young/Billie Holiday or Thelonious Monk/Charlie Rouse, they complemented each other in exquisitely sensitive fashion. We neither see nor hear any of this in Ray. And while Hackford features a great number of Ray's hits, he ignores the jazz side of Ray's musical makeup. There's virtually no jazz in Ray, while in real life jazz sat at the center of Ray's soul. If Fathead is painfully misrepresented, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, owners of Atlantic Records, suffer a similar fate. Among the most colorful characters in the colorful history of the music business, they are reduced to stereotypes. We don't get a glimpse of their quirky sophistication, sharp intellect, or salty wit. Same goes for Mary Ann Fisher, the first female singer to join Ray's band. Mary Ann was an engaging character—sometimes endearing, sometimes infuriating. In Ray she's just a manipulative tart. Finally, though, Ray is about Ray, and its attempt to define his character. In many ways, the definition is accurate. Foxx brilliantly captures Ray's energy and contradictions. Yet those contradictions are not allowed to stand. The contradictions must be resolved, Ray must live happily ever after. The finale implies that, for all his promiscuity, he is back with Della, the true love of his life, and that, with his heroin habit behind him, it's smooth sailing ahead. The paradoxical strands of his life are tied up into a neat package, honoring the hackneyed biopic formula with a leave-'em-smiling Hollywood ending. The truth is far more complex and far more interesting. Ray's womanizing ways continued. His marriage to Della ended in a difficult divorce in 1976. And while he never again got high on heroin, he found, in his own terms, "a different buzz to keep me going." For the rest of his life he unapologetically drank large quantities of gin every day and smoked large quantities of pot every night. While working on his autobiography he told me, "Just like smack never got in the way of my working, same goes for booze and reefer. What I do with my own body is my own business." Ray maintained this attitude until his health deteriorated. In 2003 he told me that he had been diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease and hepatitis C. "If I knew I was going to live this long," he added with an ironic smile, "I would have taken better care of myself." Whatever Ray was—headstrong, joyful, courageous, cranky—he was hardly a spokesman for sobriety. The producers of Ray make much of the fact that Ray himself endorsed the movie. That's certainly true. He wanted a successful crossover movie to mirror his successful crossover music. He participated and helped in any way he could. In one of our last discussions, Ray reminded me that the process of trying to sell Hollywood began 26 years ago when producer-director Larry Schiller optioned his story. Since then there have been dozens of false starts. It wasn't until his son, Ray Jr., producer Stuart Benjamin, and director Hackford stayed on the case that cameras rolled. "Hollywood is a cold-blooded motherfucker," said Ray. "It's easier to bone the President's wife than to get a movie made. So I say God bless these cats. God bless Benjamin and Hackford and Ray Jr. Weren't for them, this would never happen. And now that it's happening, maybe I'll have a better chance of being remembered. I can't ask for anything more." David Ritz is the co-author of Brother Ray with Ray Charles, and Sexual Healing with Marvin Gaye, in addition to memoirs with B.B. King, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and the Neville Brothers.

No, no, that's a bris ... and there's only one cut, but you'll never forget it!

Has anyone heard any music by the Yankees outfielder? I imagine he'll have plenty of time to work on his chops now ...

Band Aid song to be re-recorded Wed 20 October, 2004 15:08 LONDON (Reuters) - Twenty years after the release of one of the biggest singles of all time, leading artists are set to re-record the Bob Geldof-inspired charity hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Geldof and Ultravox singer Midge Ure created Band Aid, a supergroup of 40 artists, in 1984 and with the hit single raised over 10 million pounds for famine relief in Ethiopia. A spokesman for Coldplay said the band had been approached by Ure and were awaiting further development on the project. The Sun said rockers The Darkness and Scottish group Travis had also signed up to re-record the single and bookmakers immediately tipped the song as a favourite for the Christmas number one. "It's definitely going to happen," Ure told The Sun. "I'm very excited. This project is not just about raising money -- it's about putting the focus back on Africa and the problem of famine which has not gone away." Geldof, who travelled to Ethiopia earlier this month as part of the British-sponsored Commission for Africa, became the public face of Band Aid and the subsequent Live Aid concert which raised over 60 million pounds. U2 frontman Bono, George Michael and Queen were all part of the first Band Aid but The Sun said Ure and Geldof would talk to Robbie Williams, Jamelia and Noel Gallagher about joining the 2004 line up. The "Do They Know" song has already been re-recorded once, in 1985.

To me, the "sellout" part comes from the singer/group/whatever making a big deal about his/her artistic integrity, etc., and THEN letting a song be used in a commercial. It's the hypocrisy angle I don't like.

That move by A-Rod was unbelievable ... I know he's got a ton of talent, but I never could quite get behind him ... yet I still never would have guessed he'd try something like that.

You can't exactly fault Strummer, but this is the interviewer commenting on his (Strummer's) comments later in the article: While Strummer's reasoning was perfectly sound, there's little doubt that the Strummer of 1977 would have blanched at such rationalizations and probably skewered them in song.

Anyone else remember the weird Canadian game they used to play on ice with sticks and a hard rubber disc of some sort?

For me, it's got to be the Clash/Jaguar ads, although Led Zeppelin/Cadillac and the Who/CSI are pretty close ...

"Surely"? Remember, we're dealing with the Cubs here ... and seriously, except for Zambrano, their rotation strikes me as being on the fragile side.

John Cougar Canadian Anyone try the other name generators? My taxi driver name is Qwìktungja Mitchell!

I recently realized something ... we're really not that far away from the 2008 season, meaning there's a good chance the Cubs may actually go a FULL CENTURY without a World Series win.

I saw something about Woody and his New Orleans Jazz Band going on tour, and I know about his interest in jazz and the movie "Sweet and Lowdown," etc., but can he actually play?

I'm not familiar with that ... but I'm always looking for a good read.