Chrome

Mark Trail Gil Thorpe Mary Worth ← Brenda Starr Brooke Shields Calvin Klein

Chan Gailey Geraldine Page Rebecca Kilgore ← Kilgore Trout Nathan Zuckerman Ron Mexico

Bob Robertson Robbie Robertson Billy Williams ← Ernie Banks Ron Santo Fergie Jenkins

What happened?!?!

Mmmmmm ... Demon Dogs! I used to live just a couple of blocks from there ... I'll never forget the smell of Demon Dogs gently wafting through the air as I got off the El ... they were my introduction to the whole Chicago hot dog stand culture! One of the many, many things I miss about Chicago.

Okay, I haven't seen it in years, but that episode had a huge positive effect on me back when I was an idealistic young boy (I was 6 1/2 when it first came out) ... the scene where the aliens are explaining why they're fighting, and one says something like "Just look at him!" and you find out it's all about because one is black on the left side, white on the other, and vice versa ... in all seriousness, it brought home the ridiculousness of our own race relations in a way that, dare I say it, changed my life. ←

I'm not sure, but I think it was in Havana Bay, the one set in Cuba ... Smith is one of the few current "mystery/thriller" writers I'm still geeked on, it seems like he concentrates on the writing as much as the plotting ... I used to read a lot of Ellroy, for example, but American Tabloid really turned me off ... it seemed like he was phoning in a fair amount of that. Oh, yeah. I LOVE this series. There is a sort of formulaic quality to them (not as much as many others, though), but the attitude is just right for my taste: rueful. Do you happen to remember the scene where Renko watches a building burn or collapse and makes uses it as a metaphor to expalin his fascination with murder? I've been trying to relocate it for months. --eric ←

Anyone have any love for Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko books?

Is the implication that Gould wasn't? (Not trying to argue, just curious.) Also, as an FYI, David Quammen does the nature/science thing pretty well, too, especially in The Song of the Dodo.

All of that classic Jim Thompson stuff is excellent ...The Killer Inside Me, After Dark My Sweet (that was a decent movie, too), Pop. 1280, The Getaway (another pretty good movie [the Peckinpaugh/McQueen version]), A Hell of a Woman, etc.

New York Reunin is certainly not my fave Tyner disc, but I have to give a to it ... some of the playing sounds a little "sterile," but I kind of thought maybe the recording itself was part of the prob ... wasn't this some kind of specially mastered/produced/whatever disc or something? (I'm not much of an audiophile ... )

A little tangential perhaps, but I've often wondered where Clifford Brown would have taken his music if he had lived longer ...

Used the recent BMG clearance to get: Adderley and the Poll Winners EST - A strange place for snow Mark Shim - Turbulent flow Tom Harrell - The art of rhythm Cost: $20!

Something I do find interesting is that "Jesus" is a relatively common name among Hispanics, yet not among other groups ...

Boy, the possibilities are endless ... how 'bout: That's funny ... they don't look like brothers.

Red Grange ZZ Top AA Milne ... and a for Sylvia Kristel wearing a pearl necklace ...

J.M. Synge J.M. Barrie Johnny Depp

Homey Shakes Shakira

Lauren Bacall Lauren Hutton Ralph Lauren

Roger Waters John Waters Divine

Danny DeVito Tennessee Tuxedo Chilly Willy

From the New Yorker online ... The Jazz Giant Issue of 2005-05-09 Posted 2005-05-02 This week in the magazine, Stanley Crouch writes about the jazz tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who, at seventy-four, is in the sixth decade of his remarkable career. Here, Crouch discusses Rollins, jazz, and improvisation with Ben Greenman. BEN GREENMAN: Where does Sonny Rollins rank in the jazz pantheon? STANLEY CROUCH: No. 1, along with Roy Haynes and Hank Jones. BG:You open your article by saying that a Sonny Rollins concert is a drastically hit-or-miss proposition. Is it hard for him to approach each show as an entirely new experience? SC:Improvisation is about a new experience, a new way of hearing something, a different perspective, a reimagining. That’s how the music works. And Sonny Rollins is almost always remarkable, which makes him a phenomenon. His is the sort of talent that we have almost no ability to address in this time, because musical performance and musical skill have dropped to such a low level. Rollins is a vital artist of this moment, but he is also a summation of all of the victories of American performance in the twentieth century. Like Armstrong, he is jazz, and jazz added a new level of performance sophistication to Western music. That addition is about all of the ways of creating order within, almost always, a harmonic structure, which is what separates it from so-called “world music,” which is never about harmony of any substance or swing. That is a Western invention and addition to music. Swing is an addition to the rhythm of the world. BG:In his less focussed performances, Rollins sometimes switches into calypso mode. Caribbean rhythms have always been important to his music; are there other jazz players who put lots of island music into their playing? SC:No, but there has always been a tendency to make use of what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Spanish tinge”—music from the islands, or South America, or the Iberian Peninsula, transformed to fit the Western Hemisphere. BG:At one point, Freddie Hubbard says that one of the main differences between John Coltrane and Rollins was that Coltrane took a very analytical approach to harmony, whereas Rollins was more spontaneous. Rollins and Coltrane recorded together only once, on “Tenor Madness,” in the mid-fifties. Did their approaches mesh in an interesting and exciting way? SC:It was O.K. I was never that impressed by “Tenor Madness.” It’s too bad they didn’t get together and do an entire album, maybe with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. That would have put something on all of us. BG:How hard has it been for Rollins to outlive most of the other jazz luminaries of the fifties and sixties? SC:Well, Sonny Rollins is one of the brightest lights in the history of the music; his talent is up there next to that of Armstrong, Young, and Parker. He is a true natural and a great synthesizer. In improvising, he does the same thing that Ellington did when composing: he reinvents the entire tradition, because he understands all of the differences and all of the connections. BG:Are there younger players who have the same kind of power as Rollins, or has jazz changed in ways that make this unlikely? SC:I think that Branford Marsalis has the talent to expand upon Rollins and become a master of intimidating quality. BG:Much of your article discusses the mercurial nature of Rollins’s live performances, and the problem of capturing him on a studio recording. Is this problem less acute for other jazz artists? SC:Perhaps, yes. Sonny seems less confident about recordings than other musicians are. He more or less slid into the problem. But he seems more capable of living with a memory of a great performance than he does with the artifact of a recording. BG:Has Rollins ever been a big commercial success? Has most of his earnings come from live performance? SC:I think his 1966 recording of “Alfie” was a jazz hit, which means it sold a lot for a jazz record but might not have done much to shake up his record label. When Rollins was a master at full strength, as a man in his middle thirties, there was not much big money to be made in jazz, unless one was lucky, the way John Coltrane was with “My Favorite Things,” or had the power of a big label behind him, the way Miles Davis did at Columbia. He now says that there was not a lot of work to be had in the sixties; I saw him often and he seemed to be doing well enough, although we didn’t talk about his finances. BG:Most jazz novices own “Saxophone Colossus” and “Way Out West.” What other records are essential for understanding and enjoying Rollins? SC:“The Bridge,” “Our Man in Jazz,” “The Standard Sonny Rollins,” “Alfie,” and “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” which contains the masterpiece “Silver City” and his mostly solo version of “Autumn Nocturne,” which many writers like. BG:Rollins has retreated from studio recording and live performance a few times in his career. How has this affected his work? SC:He always returned to the scene a better player. I think Sonny Rollins is a contemplative man, and he sometimes needed to get out of the rat race of touring, the smoke-filled rooms, the temptations of drug abuse, and all of the elements that made working in those little clubs as abominable as the intimate setting could be beautiful on a good night. As a health-conscious man, Sonny Rollins also was able to recharge, work out, do his yoga, and come back in championship form. BG:If, as you say, an artist like Rollins “has realized his talent almost exclusively on the bandstand,” does this mean that most of his performances will be lost to history? SC:Not at all. The collector Carl Smith has more than three hundred bootleg performances, stretching back to Rollins playing an alto in a music store in 1949. Someday they will all be out. Hopefully, Sonny himself will benefit as much as possible. BG:You mention that Milestone Records is releasing one of the recordings that Smith has collected. With the way the record industry is changing—decreased sales for all genres, and an increase in online downloadable music—will there come a day when there’s a huge online archive of Rollins’s recordings available for posterity? SC:Why not? We know what will happen. If it all appears online, the writers will go through them and, eventually, there will be the hundred best, followed by the fifty best, followed by the twenty-five best, followed by the ten best. You know how the public is. With so many choices, it wants someone to tell it which are the best, so that time and money can be saved. At some point, the relationship of quality to money becomes the issue. Perhaps, in some utopian time, the availability of quality will be the central issue. But, then, no one can imagine that. It sounds too much like heaven.

Thanks ...

Quinn the Eskimo Maggie Mr. Tambourine Man

Just saw this documentary over the weekend ... it was pretty cool ... interviews w/Davis (a little), Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Dave Leibman, Joni Mitchell, Carlos Santana, etc., on Miles "going electric" ... plus the uncut video of Davis' Isle of Wight performance. Not really in-depth, but it was cool to hear directly from the musicians about what they thought about the music ... I was surprised that two or three compared the (literal) electricity in the music to the bodily electricity necessary for life ... they made it seem specifically natural and life-affirming because it's electric ... most critics I've heard say the exact opposite. Speaking of critics, they did have Stanley the Grouch on complaining about Miles selling out, etc., but he was really the only dissenter. Recommended This is the Netflix write up: Filmmaker Murray Lerner deftly traces the evolution of visionary jazzman Miles Davis, who in the late 1960s began to enhance his sound with amped-up keyboards, guitars and funk rhythms, resulting in a seminal change in the musical genre. Lerner supplements the narrative with an uncut performance of Davis' awesome gig at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Included are interviews with Davis and contemporaries such as Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock.