Adam

The morning DJ on KKJZ in Los Angeles was playing Jimmy Smith in tribute, and said he passed away two nights ago at his home in Arizona. She said they would be playing Jimmy Smith songs through the day (but not only Jimmy Smith). That's 88.1 in Southern California. R.I.P. Mr. Smith

Playing in Los Angeles, at USC, on Feb 11.

Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. Another worthy mentioning is Bobby "Blue" Bland.

I think accidental superimpositions can turn out occasional beauties. I have one, from a roll that wasn't developed, in which a 12-year-old me with our family dog is superimposed under a 25 year old self.

I have some of all of the above recommendations. Yes, the Cowboy junkies fit, but not every song. I think I need to liten to my Stanley Bros & louvin bros discs more... It is a particular sound on the two songs that I mention - something spacier and more haunting than is the norm. Maybe someone can identify it in a more musical fashion - a particular sequence of minor keys, or something?

I worked at my father's flower store for many years, and you can imagine the sheer chaos of Valentine's Day. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth about the day still. IMy thoughts: 1. I would never send someone flowers on Valentine's Day. Too many arrangements being sent that one day. Send them 2 or 3 days ahead of time, so she can have them all week, and they won't get lost or damaged in the shuffle. And if anything does go wrong, there is still time for the florist to fix it before VDay (as opposed to sending the missing arrangement on the 15th. It's more problematic this year with VDay on a Monday - every florist's nightmare. Consider sending them on Friday. 2. Don''t go out to dinner on VDay. Prix fixe menus, crwods, etc - like Mother's Day. Go to a nice dinner on the 13th. Spend the 14th at home in each other's arms.

I'm currently enjoying two songs: "Alone and Forsaken" - Hank Williams "My Last Days on Earth" - Bill Monroe (even with the wacky seagulls at the start). Can anyone recommend others like these? They don't strike me as your standard country ballad. And I'm calling the Monroe a ballad, but feel free to correct my definitions.

RDK - we've probably been at some of the same shows in LA. Sun Ra Arkestra, post Ra, a couple of times Teddy Edwards Brass-String Ensemble - twice - at the Musicians Union And other big bands there as well, but I'm blanking on the leader. Los angeles studio people mostly fill up the bands, and they are good. Mingus BB, but not yet in a club. Seeing them again soon at UCLA. The Asian-American Big Band (I can't remember the exact name). Saw Vinny Golia's Really Big Band at LACMA - that was grand. Another couple of bands at some LA Jazz Institute conventions. There's a Big Band convention over Labor Day weekend every year here, but I've never been. The Jazz Bakery has big band Mondays every week - lots of chances to see various big bands in a club. And never made it to any of those yet. James Newton has a big band at Cal State LA that tackles interesting work, but I have yet to make it. I wish I had seen that Monk BB with Waldron that Chuck mentioned. Never even heard of it. Was that related to those "Interpretations of Monk" concerts that were released on CD?

F for Fake - marvelous!

I'm pretty sure he was just referring to the lyrics of some of the songs that they sang. They are, shall we say, "of their time." The "darkies" etc.

Congratulations! Phantom Tollbooth fans?

From today's LA Times: http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-et-ar...2,7667656.story POP MUSIC In a Mexico groove Arhoolie Records' owner will share his vast collection via a UCLA project. By Agustin Gurza, Times Staff Writer Chris Strachwitz, an avid music explorer, felt like a visitor in a foreign world when he started collecting Mexican records half a century ago. He had no music catalogs to guide him. No sales charts or trade journals to consult in an industry at times as transient as its migrant customers. Plus, he was a German immigrant and didn't speak Spanish. But Strachwitz had an ear for the grass-roots music he discovered in America — Cajun, country, gospel and the blues. And he heard a common quality in those rustic sounds of society's dispossessed, no matter what the language. "The first time I ever heard Mexican music was on a small station in Santa Paula, and I just loved it," says Strachwitz, owner of the respected folk music label Arhoolie Records. "God, it had this sound, and the way these two voices blended together. To me, that's the most soulful stuff I've heard. I mean, I heard it in blues. I heard it in hillbilly duet singing. It didn't sound to me all that different." Eventually, Strachwitz, 73, had amassed what is now considered the world's largest collection of commercially recorded Mexican and Tex-Mex music, more than 100,000 individual performances spanning almost 100 years and numerous styles, from norteñas to boleros and rancheras. Experts say it's the most comprehensive repository of Mexican vernacular music anywhere, including Mexico. Soon, the public will be able to access a digital archive of the collection through a special project sponsored by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in collaboration with New Mexico's Fund for Folk Culture. With the help of the university's Digital Library Program, the entire Arhoolie Frontera Collection is being digitally transferred, annotated and archived in the same way the records were gathered — one by one. Early on, Strachwitz understood the importance of this enduring rural music, not just as entertainment but as an oral account of a marginalized population. In the grooves of the thousands of records in his collection revolves the largely undocumented history of Mexican immigrants over the last century. The project is being funded primarily by the Los Tigres del Norte Fund at UCLA, named for the famed norteño group based in San Jose. Los Tigres, along with its record label, Fonovisa, established the fund to promote the study of the genre, historically disdained or dismissed on both sides of the border. By this summer, the public will have Internet access to the first phase of the project, all 16,000 78 rpm recordings from the first half of the 20th century. Each file includes a snippet of the song, an image of the record label and information about the record's creators, content and condition. So far, more than three-fourths of the digitized 78s are accessible at digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera. Still to come in the painstaking transfer process, depending on future financing, are Arhoolie's stockpile of 14,000 45s and 3,000 long plays, covering the 1950s through the 1990s. The collection contains rare recordings by major artists, such as legendary duo Los Alegres de Teran, Chicano music pioneer Lalo Guerrero, San Antonio accordion ace Santiago Jimenez and his son, Flaco, known for recent collaborations with guitarist Ry Cooder. One of the most important items is one of the oldest. The 1928 recording of "El Contrabando de El Paso" (The El Paso Contraband), a Texas tale about liquor smuggling during Prohibition, is considered one of the world's first narcocorridos, a precursor to the border ballads about drug trafficking that would become so popular half a century later. Although the song has been recorded dozens of times over the years, experts say the composer had never been identified — until now. True to the tune's first-person narrative, the man who wrote it appears to have been the man who lived it. Last year, UCLA Spanish professor Guillermo Hernandez, author of an upcoming book about corridos, traced the events that inspired the song, which tells the story of a group of smugglers being taken by train from El Paso to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kan. Old prison records identify one of the convicts as Gabriel Jara, caught with 90 gallons of illegal brew in the early 1920s. Hernandez knew he had found his man when he discovered in the archives that the 28-year-old Jara had written several letters to Leonardo Sifuentes, a resident of Ciudad Juarez. The prisoner's pen pal, as it turns out, happens to be half of the singing duo of Hernandez & Sifuentes, who made that historic recording. Professor Hernandez, no relation, believes the convict was transmitting his verses through the U.S. mail. The discovery won't change history or make anybody rich. But it shows that in this type of Mexican music, art doesn't imitate life — it documents it. As former head of the Chicano Studies Resource Center, Hernandez was instrumental in bringing the Arhoolie collection to UCLA. He was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s when he first met Strachwitz and got engrossed in his collection. Strangely, Strachwitz says roots music was largely missing from his own rural boyhood in what is now Poland, where country folk "listened to Nazi music, mostly marches, and pop music which was horribly schmaltzy." Strachwitz was just 16 when his family came here after World War II. He started collecting records almost as soon as he hit these shores. He studied math and engineering at Pomona College and UC Berkeley, then briefly taught German in high school. In 1960, he founded his own label to capture the folk music that so fascinated him (www.arhoolie.com). Mexican country music has provided the soundtrack to rural life since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which sparked the first big waves of immigration. But most of the early recordings were made in the States, not in Mexico, says Strachwitz. There was no market for the music in its homeland, he explains, because Mexican peasants earned too little to afford records, even if their homes had electricity to play them. On the U.S. side, however, major record labels catered to an immigrant workforce earning dollars. Evidence of their growing buying power can be found in customs documents which show that the most common items being taken back to Mexico are records and record players acquired here, according to research conducted by Hernandez, the UCLA professor. During World War II, a shortage of shellac forced U.S. labels to concentrate on American pop music, says Strachwitz. Mexican labels started taking up the slack in the late '40s, once they realized the market's potential. In considering the fate of his collection, Strachwitz wanted to make sure the music wasn't just stored in a corner, even in some place as prestigious as UCLA. He knew of other bequeathed collections that "simply go into a dark hole someplace and they'll never be heard again." UCLA's Digital Library Program was a high-tech way to keep the music alive. The work is being done at Arhoolie's El Cerrito, Calif., headquarters by Antonio Cuellar, a paid employee who listens to each song as it's being digitized. Cuellar, who played in a Latino punk-rock band, keeps a running index of various themes contained in each lyric — "Love, unrequited," "Boasting, sexual," Execution, firing squad," "Strikes and lockouts," Murder at dance or celebration" and "Tragic triangle." Many of the old corridos, including "El Contrabando de El Paso," were so long they were recorded in two parts, one on each side. Over the years, Strachwitz picked up every two-part corrido he could get his hands on. Many of those original versions contain lost verses. Even Los Tigres, says Strachwitz, were surprised to discover in his collection a two-part rendition of "El Huérfano" (The Orphan), recorded 50 years ago on the Okeh label in San Antonio. "They were just amazed that there were so many more verses than they had heard," says Strachwitz. "Nobody had ever seen these old records, and they finally began to realize that all this music had been documented since the beginning of the last century. So they were really impressed." A collection for the ages Title: "Ezequiel Rodriguez" Artist: Ortiz y Maldonado con el Dueto Abrego Label: Orfeo This corrido, or narrative ballad, is one of the earliest recordings featuring two artists who would later become the famous duo Los Alegres de Teran, the first superstar group in Mexican regional music. The duo was composed of Tomas Ortiz, on the 12-string guitar known as bajo sexto, and Eugenio Abrego, who's backup accordion on this record. Their big hits from the '50s are on the Falcon label, based in McAllen, Texas. Their early recordings on the Orfeo label, based in Monterrey, Mexico, are very rare. Title: "El Contrabando de El Paso" (El Paso Contraband) Artist: Luis Hernandez-Leonardo Sifuentes Label: Victor Recorded in 1928, this corrido about booze-smuggling during Prohibition is considered an early precursor to the narcocorrido, the drug-smuggling ballads that became widely popular in the 1970s. This 78 rpm is the original version of a song that has since been recorded dozens of times, though later versions use the Spanish contraction "del Paso." It was recorded in the Texas border town by the New Jersey-based Victor label, which did field recordings in hotel rooms. Title: "Amor del Bueno" Artist: Miguel Aceves Mejia Label: Peerless Aceves Mejia was one of the great mariachi singers of all time, famous for his thrilling falsettos. But he started his career singing tropical music. In this famous bolero, written by Abel Dominguez, he's backed by the orchestra of Noe Fajardo on Peerless, one of the major Mexican music labels. The record illustrates the breadth of styles included in the Arhoolie collection.

Maybe he accidentally swapped the cases? Are the spines correct?

Here's the event: Jazz Mass Another unique night of jazz and classical sensibilities that will feature a new commision: a Jazz Mass with choir, soloists, and full orchestra. Artists: Los Angeles Philharmonic; William Henry Curry, conductor; Dianne Reeves, vocals Billy Childs, piano; Greg Hutchinson, drums; Reuben Rogers, bass; Terence Blanchard, trumpet Hubert Laws, flute; Paul McCandless, oboe; Paul Smith Singers; Northridge Singers of California State University, Northridge Program: Gutiérrez del Barrio: Misa Justa (world premiere) I subscribed to the jazz series, and so got two tickets for it, but I have other commitments. Any other Southern California board members interested in buying the tickets, at cost or less? My seats are on the side. $42 each. Please PM me. Thank you!

WTF? Actually, I think I would be most interested in the home movies. Things like that are wonderful.

Still smaller than the Spruce Goose!

Got this from another email list: ---------- > I am an editor and publisher of books on the > cultural history of film > and media technology here in Germany and I was > tracking the folding of > BASF/EMTEC and Quategy quite a bit, not only for the > reason that we > have a book about the "history of magnetic tape" in > the making. > > Today I received good news that fresh magnetic tape > will be coming soon > from new European sources. What I understand from my > sources is that > coating and production of 1/4 inch tape according to > German studio tape > quality standards has started this week, further > that test and research > is currently ongoing to expand this program in order > to launch also > audio tape manufacturing in 1 and 2 inch gauges for > multitrack analogue > audio recording (as a direct reaction to Quantegy > filing chapter 11). > Sources say that the production and marketing of > magnetic audio tape > for studios and mastering was and and could/will be > profitable and that > EMTEC and Quantegy folded due to other reasons. It's > all a question > about downsizing and marketing into niche markets. A > public press > notice on this topic naming manufacturing company > and people involved > should be expected within 2 - 3 weeks, sources say. > > hope this brings new hope, > Joachim Polzer > www.polzer.org >

I think the criticisms of Ken Burns "style" are quite valid. Basically, he found a method of presentation and a set of experts back in The Civil War, and he sticks with them every time, even though they don't work for most of his shows since then. They worked splendidly for The Civil War, IMHO. When watching Baseball, I didn't care what Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Jay Gould had to say (beyond perhaps one nice anecdote about seeing a game somewhere. And Gould has his statistical study about hitting .400) There weren't enough baseball players in Baseball, not enough musicians in Jazz, and it sounds like not enough boxers in Jack Johnson, Burns is loyal to his experts and advisors, but to the point where he shortchanges the possibilities of his topic. I also think there are better voices on "Race in America" who could be repeated in show after show besides Stanley Crouch. But Burns might easily be seeing this all, essentially, as one long series on race, with each shorter show being a different tangent or episode. And in a show it is important to have some regular faces & voices that the audience gets to know and like. I think that's why he keeps turning to the same intereviewees. Also, when he knows they are "good TV," he'll go back to them. That's what I've done. But they need to be experts on the topic. But, I'm working on my third show with archaeologist Shimon Gibson, for example.

Also, most every decent public library in the USA has one. They aren't really rare; it would be more of a desire appeal.

A mock order of the following set up at DVD Planet and at CriterionDVD: M. Hulot's Holiday Orphic Trilogy Branded to Kill 3 Women Free shipping at each Total: DVD Planet (including CA sales tax): 125.94 CriterionDVD (no sales tax): 130.16

The Third Man is $25.97 at DVD Planet. They are cheaper, but no free shipping, so maybe it balances out. And I'm in California, so I also have tax at DVD Planet. Complete Monterey Pop Festival: $51.96 at DVD Planet; 56.97 at CriterionDVD. Cassavetes Box: 81.22 at DVD Planet; 89.98 at CriterionDVD Suzuki Youth of the Beast: 19.47 at DVD Planet; 22.23 at CriterionDVD

Universal finally is issuing THE PALM BEACH STORY in a couple of weeks, but in a simple cheap version. They are still sitting on all the rest of the Sturges & Lubitsch films. I've been told by David Shepard that Universal is currently not licensing anything to anyone, so we probably won't see any more Sturges films done by Criterion, alas. And Unievrsal doesn't seem too concerned with doing nice editions of most of their older catalogue titles. A simple reissue on DVD of the Lubitsch laserdisc box set would be more than sufficient. Sigh I also wish Delicatessen would make it to NTSC DVD. There's a PAL version in Europe; I guess I should just get that. LAURA is finally coming out, 'tis true.

The Suzuki film are really splendid. The homages by Tarentino to Suzuki are really obvious in Kill Bill. Los Angeles Filmforum did a Suzuki retrospective for a week at the Nuart in Los Angeles 4 or 5 years ago. Tarentino helped pay to have Suzuki come over. They are splendid on the big screen, and it's wonderful that Criterion is getting a few of them out. I just asked Criterion if they were going to do box sets of Godard or Fellini, given that they have the discs now. He replied that they have no plans to do so.

I guess they are pretty forgotten. Anyone? I'll check out the reprinted book and read it to let you know as well.

Ah, gotta love Taschen. The price will even probably be reasonable.