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Adam
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Posts posted by Adam
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Just now:
Blue Note board - Cannot find server
AAJ board - cannot find server
Jazz Corner - cannot find server
Plus everyone named John dying. Something weird is going on.
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Just now:
Blue Note board - Cannot find server
AAJ board - cannot find server
Jazz Corner - cannot find server
Plus everyone named John dying. Something weird is going on.
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"Hurt" is a Nine Inch Nails cover.
That whole album of his - his last - is really really good. Mostly covers.
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Congratulations!
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Well, I thought it might get political. I wonder if B3-er should move it to the Politics forum?
Or maybe I should delete the thread?
(No I won't)
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Man I would love to see a video. Let me know if you find it, please.
I guess the tapes are in Italy. We should just write Soul Note and ask for a box set. That would really be great!
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Well, this thread might get political, but I was just told that she passed away today.
Her official page:
http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/
LA Times AP report:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...a-home-leftrail
Hitler's Filmmaker Dead at 101
From Associated Press
BERLIN — Leni Riefenstahl, whose hypnotic depiction of Hitler's Nuremberg rally, "Triumph of the Will," was renowned and despised as the best propaganda film ever made, has died. She was 101.
Riefenstahl died Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside town of Poecking, mayor Rainer Schnitzler said.
Riefenstahl's companion Horst Kettner said she died in her sleep.
"Her heart simply stopped," Kettner told the online version of the German celebrity magazine Bunte.
A tireless innovator of film and photographic techniques, Riefenstahl's career centered on a quest for adventure and portraying physical beauty.
Even as she turned 100 last year, she strapped on scuba gear to photograph sharks in turquoise waters. She had begun to complain recently that injuries sustained in accidents over the years, including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000, had taken their toll and caused her constant pain.
Despite critical acclaim for her later photographs of the African Nuba people and of undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half her life trying to live down the films she made for Hitler and for having admired the tyrant who devastated Europe and all but eliminated its Jews.
Even as late as 2002, Riefenstahl was investigated for Holocaust denial after she said she did not know that Gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her wartime films later died in the camps. Authorities eventually dropped the case, saying her comments did not rise to a prosecutable level.
Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22, 2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.
"I don't know what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the Will' -- it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."
Biographer Juergen Trimborn, who wrote "Riefenstahl: A German Career," said she could not apologize because the Nazi films were the centerpieces of her career.
"One can't speak about Leni Riefenstahl without looking at her entire career in the Third Reich," Trimborn said. "Her most important films were made during the Third Reich -- 'Triumph of the Will,' 'Olympia,' -- that's what's she's known for."
The former president of the Goethe Institute honored Riefenstahl as an aesthetic model for many directors around the world.
"Now that she is dead, we can distinguish between the aesthetic Leni Riefenstahl and her political entanglements," said Hilmar Hoffman.
But Germany's Culture Minister Christina Weiss said Riefenstahl's life tragically demonstrated that "art is never unpolitical, and that form and content cannot be separated from one another."
Riefenstahl said she had always been guided by the search for beauty, whether it was in her images of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies with thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and enraptured civilians fawning for their Fuehrer, in her dazzling portrayal of the 1936 Olympic athletes in Berlin, or in her still photographs of the sculpted Nuba men.
"I always see more of the good and the beautiful than the ugly and sick," Riefenstahl said. "Through my optimism I naturally prefer and capture the beauty in life."
Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin on Aug. 22, 1902, she was the first child of Alfred Riefenstahl, the owner of a heating and ventilation firm, and his wife, Bertha Scherlach.
Riefenstahl's artistic career began as a creative dancer until a knee injury led her to switch to movies.
After she saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films set in the mountains, Riefenstahl presented herself to him as his new star, and he accepted, as much for her blue-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty as her daredevil spirit.
She climbed rocks barefoot for the camera and was buried in an avalanche for the death scene in the 1926 film "Mountain of Destiny." Soon, she was making her own films, fairy tales such as "The Blue Light" celebrating Germany's Alpine mystique, in which she was star, screenwriter and director.
She heard Hitler speak for the first time at a 1932 rally and wrote to him -- again offering her talents. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl describes her first impression of Hitler's charisma.
"It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt quite paralyzed."
Though she said she knew nothing of Hitler's "Final Solution" and learned of concentration camps only after the war, Riefenstahl said she confronted the Fuehrer about his anti-Semitism, one of many apparent contradictions in her claims of total ignorance of the Nazi mission.
Likewise, she defended "Triumph of the Will" as a documentary that contained "not one single anti-Semitic word," while avoiding any talk about filming Nazi official Julius Streicher haranguing the crowd about "racial purity" laws.
Many suspected Riefenstahl of being Hitler's lover, which she also denied. Nonetheless, as his filmmaker, Riefenstahl was the only woman to help shape the rise of the Third Reich.
She made four films for Hitler, the best known of which were "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia," a meditation on muscle and movement at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
She married once, in 1944 to army Maj. Peter Jacob, but the couple split three years later. She had no children, and her only sibling, Heinz, was killed on the eastern front during World War II.
Riefenstahl spent three years under allied arrest after the war, some of the time in a mental hospital. War tribunals ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing but suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator stuck. She was boycotted as a film director and sank into poverty, living with her mother in a one-room apartment.
She reclaimed her career in the 1960s when she lived with and photographed the Nuba.
"I've never laughed so much as I did when living with the Nuba. I became reconciled with myself," she said.
She next turned to underwater photography, diving in the Maldives, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and off Papua New Guinea. She learned to dive when she was 72, lying about her age by 20 years to gain admittance to a class.
Around this time, she met Kettner, a fellow photographer half her age who became her live-in assistant and companion.
At age 100, she released a new film based on her dives, "Impressions Under Water."
She said she hoped she would be remembered as "an industrious woman who has worked very hard her whole life and has received much acknowledgment."
A funeral was planned for Friday in Munich.
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Don't know; not at home. But very few have been upgrades - maybe just the Monks.
I have a vague recollection of the original plan being that they would make only 60 titles as RVGs. Does anyone else remember that, or am I confused? In any case, it looks like that idea went out with the wash.
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Don't know; not at home. But very few have been upgrades - maybe just the Monks.
I have a vague recollection of the original plan being that they would make only 60 titles as RVGs. Does anyone else remember that, or am I confused? In any case, it looks like that idea went out with the wash.
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I once spent a summer at archaeology field school in Payson. Had my first legal drink at a bar there that is now an auction house - how times change.
Anyway, my opinion is to do more in the northern half of the state, above the Mogollon Rim, at higher than 5000 feet. The Hopis mesas are wonderful, as are all the other National Monuments, etc. in the northern half of the state. I also like Meteor Crater near Winslow, but it has its cheesy tourist elements.
And there's always Biosphere in Oracle, just outside of Tucson.
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I was bored at work. Rhapsody Films still has it:
http://www.cinemaweb.com/rhapsody/other.html
Scroll down. It's only $20, direct from them. It's under "Other," not "Jazz."
"Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. Kirk plays three saxes at once, switches to flute, incorporates tapes of birds played backwards, and finally hands out whistles to his audience and encourages them to accompany him, "in the key of W, if you please." Cage, on the other hand, is preparing a work for musical bicycle with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at the Seville Theatre in London. Cage meets Rahsaan's music in an echo chamber, and he ends his search for the sound of silence in his favorite spot -- the anechoic chamber -- where it turns out to be the uproar of "your nervous system in operation.""
Actually, Rhapsody has a great many jazz related films.
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"Sound" is great, intercutting Rahsaan with John Cage.
Once upon a time it was being distributed by Rhapsody Films, whom I believe were in NY. I do not have a copy.
I think Mystic Fire Video was a retailer that sold it - also mostly a catalogue. Not sure if they still exist, but I think so.
Search for both. Please let me know what you find. Good luck!
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Here's the LA Times article on it:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cdpr...a-home-leftrail
Notice the deal about shelf space in the middle of the article.
Top Label Cuts CD Prices to Fight Net Downloads
Universal Music's move to increase sales could benefit consumers but squeeze retailers.
Quote
'We're not blind to the fact that [file-sharing] services have ravaged our industry....We have to take steps to try to deal with it.'
-- Zach Horowitz, Universal Music Group president and chief operating officer
Times' recent coverage.
By Jeff Leeds, Times Staff Writer
In a step that could shake up the economics of the record industry, Universal Music Group said Wednesday that it would slash the wholesale price of its CDs by 25% in a bid to revive an ailing market and discourage piracy.
The move by the world's biggest record label — whose acts account for nearly one-third of new music sales in the United States — upended years of industry orthodoxy. Before Wednesday, music executives had fiercely resisted cutting prices, contending that they were justified by the enormous costs and risks that record companies assume when investing in often-unproven talent.
Consumers may be the biggest beneficiaries of Universal's action, while retailers could be among the biggest losers.
The Vivendi Universal Inc.-owned giant — home to such artists as 50 Cent, Limp Bizkit and Jay-Z — cut the suggested retail price of most new releases, which have gone as high as $18.98, by as much as 32%, to $12.98. Many stores traditionally have sold CDs for even less than the suggested figure.
"This is like a bombshell," said Don Van Cleave, a Birmingham, Ala., music retailer who heads a coalition of about six dozen independent record stores. "People are like 'Oh my God, are you kidding?' "
Although stealing songs off Web sites obviously carries the cheapest price of all, Universal said consumer research has shown that people could be motivated to rush into record stores when the retail price of a CD drops to about $13. One Universal executive called this "the sweet spot."
Doug Morris, Universal Music's chairman, said the price cuts were intended "to reinvigorate the music business in North America." The company said the lower prices, expected to kick in Oct. 1, would be maintained at least through the year-end holidays.
By cutting prices, Universal is offering consumers a carrot, precisely as the Recording Industry Assn. of America is wielding a stick in the form of subpoenas and threatened litigation against those who take songs without paying via the Internet.
Only days ago, the trade association disclosed that U.S. music shipments dropped 15% in the first half of the year, twice the rate of decline of a year earlier. By the end of last year, overall shipments had fallen about 15% from their peak in 2000, triggering an industry-wide crisis that has spawned mergers, layoffs and widespread record-store closings.
Executives from Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, the Bertelsmann Music Group and EMI Group declined to comment on the Universal move Wednesday. But it appeared that none was immediately ready to follow Universal's move.
Privately, several competitors characterized the price reductions as a short-term solution intended to bolster Universal's holiday numbers at the expense of the industry's waning strength. They predicted that the gambit would be abandoned before long.
Competing executives also suggested that Universal could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and find itself hard-pressed to impose higher prices if the cuts don't draw customers back into stores in huge numbers.
What's more, if sales don't rise sharply, the plan may trim the paychecks of many Universal recording artists, whose royalties are based on their albums' wholesale price. Nevertheless, several artist managers expressed support for the move.
"As a company concerned mostly with overall artist development, we feel anything that increases consumer appetite for music — as a price decrease should — is good for the artist," said Jeff Kwatinetz, chief executive of management giant the Firm, whose Universal clients include such top sellers as Mary J. Blige and Limp Bizkit.
The new Universal policy would reduce the wholesale price for most albums to $9.09 from $12.02. Albums by its biggest artists, including Eminem and Shania Twain, would be pared slightly less, to $10.10. The new pricing schedule doesn't include Latin or classical recordings.
In a conference call late Wednesday, Universal told several retailers that in exchange for the wholesale price cuts, the record label expected the stores to guarantee that at least 25% of their shelf space would be devoted to the label's acts.
Meanwhile, Universal also jolted retailers by disclosing a plan to halt discounts and "positioning" fees for prominent shelf placement — two long-standing industry customs. Instead, Universal wants to redirect its efforts toward its own radio, TV and print advertising campaigns. Many record store owners have been earning more money from fees than they do from selling CDs.
Van Cleave, of the independent retailer group, questioned how successful an advertising blitz by Universal would be. "I don't think the industry's ever been that great about promoting a record outside of radio and MTV," Van Cleave said. "How are they going to use those funds to motivate the consumer?"
Some industry observers voiced concern that Universal's move would validate arguments that CDs have been overpriced — a common rationale among computer users who download music for free from file sharing networks such as Kazaa.
But Universal executives characterized the price shift as a bold effort to rescue music in the U.S., the world's biggest music market, from devastation.
"Music has always been a great value. It just got better," said Zach Horowitz, Universal Music's president and chief operating officer. "We're not blind to the fact that [file sharing] services have ravaged our industry, which has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying value of the music. We have to take steps to try to deal with it."
Universal Music — which wasn't part of this week's proposed deal to merge parent Vivendi's entertainment assets with NBC, a unit of General Electric Co. — didn't say how much the move might affect its earnings. But analysts were preparing to slash their profit forecasts.
Drew Borst, an analyst at Wall Street firm Sanford C. Bernstein, said he had projected that the music unit's earnings would slip 15% this year to about $900 million, but now he would probably trim his estimate further. "It's going to be pretty painful," Borst said. "It's pretty unrealistic to think that, in the short term, they'll be able to make up the lost revenue with an increase in the number of units sold."
Still, Borst added, he could see the logic in Universal's strategy. "Long term," he said, "I think it's the right move to get this industry in a position where it can have a healthy demand" among consumers again.
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How is the rest of teh Lester Bowie album on which "For Fela appears? - African Children
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I'd like to see more posts from Vic, Swingin' Swede, Jim R., two posters from Australia that I can't remember the handles of (argh!), and two posters from L.A. that I also can't remember the handles of (Adam was one?). This is why I needed that location information!
I'm here.
Just not posting as frequently. Have the same name on AAJ and Speakeasy as well. -
Excellent!
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I've been looking for that European SOUL EYES for years with no success (but my search hasn't been very rigorous.)
I think also noteworthy is that this is a Palo Alto release on CD. Not many have made it, unless I've been missing something recently.
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New release. Prime Archie Shepp from 1981. Lost recording.
hatOLOGY 598
Archie Shepp
I Know About The Life
I Know About The Life is an excellent example of Shepp's methods in this endeavor. They prove to be equally effective whether the vehicle is the jaunty «Well, You Needn't,»
the athletic «Giant Steps» or the alluring «'Round Midnight.» On the uptempo Monk tune, Shepp veers between the bellicose and the gleeful with raspy honks, smeary bent notes, and strategically placed dips and surges in intensity. In running the daunting harmonic gauntlet of the Coltrane classic, Shepp frequently skids across the bar lines with textures that growl and chortle, while his hollers and snorts are crucial to his blistering duo exchange with John Betsch. His sighs and moans on the Monk ballad bring the piece's sub-text of yearning into bold relief. In each case, Shepp makes the post-modernist concession that nothing is new, even as he reinvigorates decades-old aspects of the tenor tradition. Bill Shoemaker
Archie Shepp tenor saxophone
Ken Werner piano
Santie Debriano double bass
John Betsch drums
1 Well You Needn't 8:50
by Thelonius Monk
2 I Know About The Life 13:51
by Archie Shepp
3 Giant Steps 8:08
by John Coltrane
4 Round Midnight 12:11
by Thelonius Monk
Total Time ADD 43:00
Recorded by Phil Sheridan at McClear Place Studios, Toronto on February 11 1981;
Mix, CEDAR processing and CD master by Peter Pfister, January 2003;
Cover photo by Hal Rammel; Liner notes by Bill Shoemaker;
Graphic concept by fuhrer vienna;
Produced by Bill Smith & John Norris;
Executive production by Werner X. Uehlinger.
Special thanks to Patrick Kaiser, Bill Smith & John Norris. Reissue of the Sackville CD 3026.
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Atomic Records is very nice. I work one block from it, which used to be problematic for the bank account, but I have learned restraint.
Second on Musso & Frank's. Then 1/2 block away is Miceli's, an old time Italian place which often has live jazz as the entertainment - usually solo piano or piano & singer, but I've caught a trio in there - horn, bass, drums.
Miceli's is actually on Las Palmas, just south of Hollywood Blvd. Musso & Frank is on the north side of Hollywood Blvd, 1/2 block east of Las Palmas. This is all two blocks east of the Hollywood & Highland train station, so you can take teh red line subway. And that is also next to the Chinese Theatre and across from the El Capitan. I recommend seeing a film in one of those two (but in the original Chinese, not in one of teh other 6 screens) if you haven't had any good "movie palace" experiences back home. "Pirate of the Caribbean" is at the El Cap.
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In Salon:
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/200...3/07/29/carter/
Farewell to a jazz cosmopolitan
Benny Carter wasn't dark or depressed and didn't die of a smack overdose. Instead, the saxophonist, composer and bandleader had the longest and most varied career in jazz history.
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By Jay Weiser
July 29, 2003 | "It's better to be a legend than a myth." So said Benny Carter, the Apollonian of jazz, who died on July 12 at age 95. Carter had a 75-year career as an instrumentalist, arranger, composer and big band leader. Almost unbelievably, he began recording in 1928 and didn't stop until 1996. Raised in New York's San Juan Hill neighborhood, near what is now Lincoln Center, he was a founding father of the swing era, and remained in the jazz elite for the rest of his life. Nobody in the history of jazz ever did as many things as well. His music and life had a balance among lyricism, serenity and drive.
Carter was a peerless technician with a fluid sound. Along with Duke Ellington's sideman Johnny Hodges, he created the template for the jazz alto saxophone in the 1930s. Unlike Hodges, he also turned himself into a major jazz trumpeter, recorded on five other instruments, sang the occasional vocal and wrote more than 200 tunes -- and sometimes the lyrics for them. Carter was mostly self-taught. As a young player, he bought stock band arrangements and laid them on the floor to figure out how scores were put together. By 1930, according to jazz historian Gunther Schuller, he was the man that other jazz arrangers were following. With the rest of the swing generation, he helped change the clunky Western sense of musical time into something lighter and more surprising, and did it with a sophistication matched only by that other master of broken rhythms, Fred Astaire.
His arranging style, displayed on "Symphony in Riffs" (1933), laid down the big-band template of contending reed and brass sections. The saxophone section charts were based on his solo alto style, featuring long, sinuous lines played in harmony. Unlike Ellington's early arrangements, which focused on color at the expense of rhythmic movement, Carter's swung. And he anticipated later harmonic trends, like bebop's famous flatted fifth chord interval.
Carter's influence may have limited his success as a big band leader, since variations on his work were everywhere. But that iconic swing sound meant that his composing and arranging talents were in demand, from the BBC dance orchestra, during a mid-'30s European sojourn, to the American big bands when he returned before World War II. Hollywood called, beginning with his arrangements for the all-black musical "Stormy Weather" in 1943, and Carter became one of the first African-Americans to integrate the Hollywood studios. There's a glimpse of him in "An American in Paris" (1951), performing an alto solo on "Someone to Watch Over Me" during the cafe scene where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron first meet. In addition to arranging for 33 movies and 20 TV series, Carter wrote huge numbers of vocal arrangements for top singers. In big-band settings, Ella Fitzgerald was often imprisoned by the soporific pop sound of her "Songbook" albums; in "30 by Ella" (1968), Carter's shifting medley arrangements freed her to improvise. Sarah Vaughan, whose two Carter albums are available as "Sarah Vaughan: The Benny Carter Sessions" (1962-63), once took a blindfold test to identify a recording. She couldn't identify the singer, but instantly recognized that it was a Benny Carter arrangement.
To keep up with the latest trends for Hollywood, Carter needed a capacity to change. Many star swing-era bandleaders, such as clarinetist Benny Goodman and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton (and even Louis Armstrong in his trumpet work), remained wedded to the styles that had made them famous -- they played for the nostalgia market. While the big stars sounded dated after bebop arrived in the mid-1940s, major swing soloists with less pop success, like Carter, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and trumpeter Roy Eldridge, adjusted. To remain relevant to jazz audiences, they incorporated bebop's offbeat rhythms and more dissonant harmonies into their swing base, producing a hybrid that let them work with younger players, and that remains fresh 50 years later. Even in his last years, Carter remained open to new sounds. He liked avant-garde trumpeter Dave Douglas, and once telephoned the innovative post-swing singer Lea DeLaria out of the blue to compliment her on a radio performance.
In a music that often venerates tragedy, angst and pretension -- think Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, respectively -- Carter's sunny spirit stood out. The bubbling "Pick Yourself Up" on the album "Cosmopolite" (1952) transforms his knotty rhythms into a clarion call celebrating resilience. Carter's ballad work was reflective, as on his composition "Blue Star" on "Further Definitions" (1961), where the tension between the solos and the lush saxophone choir communicates loss and yearning. But he rarely plumbed the depths of despair.
Carter's restraint led to the cliché that his playing was suave. This had a measure of truth -- he did albums titled "The Urbane Sessions" (1952-55) and "A Gentleman and His Music" (1985). In his personal life, he was erudite, overcoming, through force of will, an eighth-grade education. Carter developed an eye for African and African-American art, with a special fondness for Romare Bearden, though he characteristically denied any special expertise. Frighteningly sharp until the end, in his last months he was working through David McCullough's biography of John Adams. Carter's aplomb was unfailing. When a longtime fan talked of enjoying music by "you boys" back in the 1930s, rather than acting offended, Carter deflected the comment by asking, "And how much older am I than you?" (The answer turned out to be several years.)
As gracious and warm as Carter was, he was also driven. He needed to be, to deal with life on the road during segregation, spearhead the integration of the black and white musicians' unions in 1950s Los Angeles and succeed in the studios. An arranger had to be fast and service-oriented -- if you turned down one assignment, the client might not give you another. A tenor saxophonist and arranger from a later generation, Benny Golson, said that when he quit the studios to return to jazz, it felt like manumission. Given the press of Carter's arranging work from the late 1940s through the 1960s, he limited his public appearances to occasional Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, but continued to lead some albums as an instrumentalist and composer. In later years, when he visited New York as a performer, he was always scrambling to complete arrangements for the next concert or recording session.
His move back to performing was partly Hollywood-driven. Studio work began to dry up in the 1970s, as rock displaced jazz and singers like Fitzgerald lost their mass-market record sales. Successful enough to have a house in the hills above Los Angeles, Carter could have gone into comfortable semi-retirement. But while jazz often ignores performers in mid-career, it promotes players over 70 as "legends." For the first time, Carter had hit a P.R. sweet spot, and he made the most of it. In the early 1970s, Princeton professor Morroe Berger organized a series of workshops and concerts for Carter at the university. By mid-decade they had morphed into a touring schedule that would take him around the world.
In 1976, as he approached the magic age of 70, Carter did his first album as a leader in 10 years. Playing what he liked, and acclaimed by the jazz public for it, he went on to lead 26 more big band and small group albums before retiring in 1997 at age 90. Few jazz musicians were as prolific in those years. In the late 1940s, it looked like bebop revolutionary Charlie Parker had passed him as the leading alto man, but Carter's resurgence made him more current than Parker, who had died young and recorded few LPs with modern sound quality. Ironically, the one Parker album that has remained central to the repertory, judging from radio airplay on WBGO, the New York metropolitan area's leading jazz station, is "The Charlie Parker Jam Session" (1952), a head-to-head-to-head between Parker, Carter and Johnny Hodges that displays their distinct styles at a peak.
Carter's playing retains its youthful buoyancy on "Central City Sketches" (1987), which marked his first American big-band album in 20 years, updating arrangements of older compositions and including the shimmering new six-movement title suite. He thickened his tone and simplified his rhythmic filigrees, which may have been concessions to both the newer hard bop sound and his distaste for long hours of daily practice. (Like Boston Celtics great John Havlicek, Carter had the gift of getting into playing shape quickly.)
After he turned 80, he used fewer fireball tempos and more sustained notes, which he shaded dynamically and tonally to convey emotion and build rhythmic tension. Carter avoided the modern tendency to play chord changes like a sewing machine -- the melody still shone through. The Grammy-winning "Elegy in Blue" (1994) vibrantly reworked the signature tunes of departed jazz greats, but it depressed Carter, by reminding him of all the contemporaries he had outlived. In the final years of his career, his tone became drier and his phrases shortened, but he remained adventurous. His last CD, "Another Time, Another Place" (1996), features an up-tempo, nearly unaccompanied alto duet with Phil Woods on "Speak Low" that would have made many younger players implode. At age 89, he flew to Thailand to play a command performance for King Bhumibol (an amateur jazz saxophonist).
Carter lived for whatever he was doing next. His Los Angeles house had a wall full of awards that spilled out onto nearby tables, including the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts, but he resolutely refused to dwell on the past. I talked with him regularly in his last years, and everything I learned about his era I learned from books. (These included the excellent Carter biography by Morroe Berger, Ed Berger and James Patrick, who somehow got him to reminisce.) Once, at a Lincoln Center tribute concert, Wynton Marsalis dredged up a 1930s Carter composition that its author couldn't remember. "At my age you start forgetting things," Carter said. "It's the things I want to forget and can't that are the problem."
Carter is an immortal in jazz, and by living to 95 in good health he even came close to that in the real world. But while mortality catches up with all of us, Carter's wit, elegance and propulsion live on, burnishing the American spirit.
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Rhino is still there, except they moved a little south on Westwood. I was there yesterday. It's between Santa Monica Blvd. and Olympic.
If you go there, then go south on Westwood to Pico and go West. A little bit past the 405 is the Record Trader.
Jane Bunnett is good at the Jazz Bakery.
Also don't forget Rocco's
Grand Performances is having some good shows for free downtown
http://www.grandperformances.org/
For some new music check out line space line
And free shows at the Santa Monica Pier on Thursdays, so that's a good day to go to the beach and all the fun stuff on the pier:
And really you should get Mexican food, Thai food, and Vietnamese food while you are here. Can't do better at any of them elsewhere. Lots of Thai places in Hollywood. Vietnamese in Orange COunty, with some miscellaneous pho in downtown. Cheap. Mexican - try El Cholo for the full experience and the green corn tamales and margaritas; Guelagetza on 8th street near Normandie for moles, La Serenata de Garibaldi in East La or Santa Monica for everything.
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Cadence's center section catalogue is organized by label one month, by last name of artist the next month, and back to label the next month. And so on.
Granted I don't know when anyone looks up things by label, but I just figured someone has a reason.
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when was the last time there was a countdown thread?
seems like a long time ago....
the good ole days?
good idea shrugs...
I've done the leg work (or in this case, finger work) of compiling a list of all of the currently available Mosaic sets --- someone could be responsible for the list and keeping the set counts up-to-date based on information posted by fellow board members.
So for example - thread 1 would have the list:
Artist, Title, Available Sets, **highest know set number provided by board members**
and thread 2, would be for members saying they just bought the Horace Parlan set numbered 2017
when someone else bought the Parlan set, they could QUOTE the previous post of 2017 and say their set was numbered 2024
We would need a couple of things to make this work:
1) someone willing to scan the thread 2 posts and update the master list in thread 1
2) some assistance from the BM to allow HTML formatting so that the list in thread 1 was legible
(I tried to post the list in simple text format with poor results)
I don't know if thread #2 is relevant because Mosaic doesn't send them out in order.
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What Dan Gould said was good.
Also, read through your questions, and make sure none can be answered by a simple "yes" or "no."
And LISTEN to their answers. Don't be afraid to ask follow-up questions based on their answers that are not on your question list. People will tell half a story and go off on a tangent, and forget to finish the story. Give a gentle reminder to bring them back.
Also, be sure to tell her exactly what it is for, send her a reminder a week before it airs, and SEND HER A COPY. You'd be amazed how frequently I'll arrange an interview for a show, and the subject will say "I did an interview for [CNN, PBS, A&E, etc) and I never got a copy." It's only polite.
What has happened to AAJ?
in Miscellaneous - Non-Political
Posted
Jazz Corner is back.