Mark Stryker

Read this is the Times' Sunday Magazine and found it fascinating: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Man, I've never even heard of this record! What does it actually sound like? Also, from the Eric Larrabee review in Harper's that Jim posted: "The normal emotional atmosphere of the jazz world is one of ferocity slightly tempered by paranoia ..." First thought: I wish I had written that. Second thought: Ouch, cutting kinda close to the bone ... Third thought: I might remove the word "slightly." Of course, to borrow an old line, just 'cause we're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us.

Thanks for checking. Mulgrew himself estimates the total at 500, which sounded high to me and as always with these things its better to have documentary evidence if possible. Still, if you figure his recording career dates back to 1980, that's an average of 17 recordings a year over the span of 30 years -- certainly possible for one of the most recorded musicians of his generation.

I keep looking for a hat like that. Most porkpie hats seem to have narrow brims. Getting tired of the parade of depressing news. Never met him but was told by many that he was a very sweet and classy guy and, of course, a brilliant photographer with such a sharp eye not only for personality but theater, governed by impeccable taste and sensitivity to jazz. William Gottlieb was really more about "capturing the moment" as a journalist, though his finest images ascended to the level of art in terms of defining personality and formal composition. But Leonard was an artist fundamentally, making portraits with a sharp eye not ony for personality but theater and drama and creating compositions that mixed myth and metaphor, including, of course, his trademark back-lit cigarette smoke. I'm very proud to own a large format Leonard photograph of Thelonious Monk (the familiar shot looking through the open piano as he's composing, pen in right hand, cigarette in left hand) that my wife bought me as a wedding present from a Chicago gallery 19 years ago. On the issue of the search for a porkpie hat with a wide brim, you almost surely need to go custom. I recommend Optimo Hats in Chicago. Graham and his team make some of the best hats in the country. It's not cheap (understatement), but you can get exactly what you want and the quality is second-to-none. Checking the website I see this model that would seem to be in the ballpark, though you can specify any brim size you want. http://www.optimohats.com/felt/flattop/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/arts/music/17jazz.html?_r=1&hp Edit to add posted audio clips: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/17/arts/music/savory-collection.html

I've got a favor to ask of anyone who might have access to Lord (or perhaps another source of current discography information). I'm trying to get a ballpark figure for the number of records that Mulgrew Miller has appeared on. More than 100? 150? Less? More? Online sources I've seen appear to be missing big chunks so I thought Lord might offer some accuracy. Thanks much.

Coda: Bunky Green, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Henry Threadgill (perhaps more as a composer, and from what you might call the younger generation, Kenny Garrett and Steve Wilson.

When I played, it was Jackie McLean's sound and conception that was the strongest voice in my ear, but the list of favorites is long and varied: Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Frank Strozier, Sonny Stitt (at his most inspired), late Art Pepper, early Charlie Mariano, Charles McPherson (the way he plays today), also with great appreciation for Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Lyons, Sonny Redd, Roscoe Mitchell, Arthur Blythe, some Lee Konitz, as lead players in a section: Marshall Royal and Jerome Richardson) ... many others

All: Thanks for the good wishes.

Seems as if the discography may well have it wrong. Interestingly, the LP I saw today (but did not buy) had a cover identical to that which Marcello's link produces, but Hayes was definitely listed as the drummer. I don't recall the label, nor whether a more specific recording date is given beyond 1969 in Milan.

Anyone heard this or know anything more about its provenance? Odd that Louis Hayes is here given the date but perhaps he rejoined for just a quick one-off gig. Nat Adderley (cor) Cannonball Adderley (as) Joe Zawinul (p) Victor Gaskin (b) Louis Hayes (d) live in Milan, Italy, 1969 The Scavenger Joker (J) UPS 2057 Sweet Emma - Ballad Medley - This Here - Manha De Carnaval - Walk Tall - * Cannonball Adderley - Alto Giant (Joker (J) UPS 2057)

With Harold Arlen: She sings in these clips: (obviously lip-synced) she doesn't sing in this segment, but there's a long George Carlin newscaster bit that captures his pre-counterculture style. interesting stuff, including an weirdly prescient joke about the Giants trading Willie Mays to the Mets (show was recorded in 1966), which in fact happened in 1972. also the fact that he's performing for an audience of uniformed soldiers in the context of a host stumping on various occasions for the Vietnam drives home the disconnect he spoke of often in later years between his material and his real feelings at the time.

In a word: yes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUCe5OaKldM&feature=related Another fave in honor of this thread and July 4: "The Declaration of Independence" from Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Vol. 1" (Capitol) There's an unfortunate skip in the recording used so you loose a great line during the song. Per one of the comments, here's the missing text: Jefferson: Come on and put your signature on the list! Franklin: It looks to have a very subversive twist! Jefferson: How silly to assume it! Won't you nom de plume it....... today?!

http://comedyspace.punchlinemagazine.com/_Bob-Newhart-Abe-Lincoln-vs-Madison-Ave/VIDEO/114895/10058.html One of Newhart's classics and very prescient: "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue" from "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart"

Never knew this existed. Is Vaughn Meader in this picture? Always thought the First Family stuff was pretty lame, actually. No satire, just sitcom-safe jokes with Kennedy accents, though I always liked the distribution-of-bathroom toys bit and the punch line: "The rubber swahn is mine." This is a lot darker than that. Between '63 & '71, Meader...uh...."went through some changes"... To summarize the album, Jesus comes back, starts out being rejected as a freak by all but the hippies, then gets an agent who spies novelty appeal. Then he becomes a star, starts speaking his mind, becomes uncommercial, and finally gets killed/assassinated. More commercial potential dead than alive. And yeah, it is funny. Plot not unlike the film "Network" with Jesus as the Howard Beale character and Faye Dunaway as the agent. Not an exact parallel but interesting.

What would the words to "Fables of Faubus" sound like with a Boston-Kennedy accent?

Never knew this existed. Is Vaughn Meader in this picture? Always thought the First Family stuff was pretty lame, actually. No satire, just sitcom-safe jokes with Kennedy accents, though I always liked the distribution-of-bathroom toys bit and the punch line: "The rubber swahn is mine."

Lenny Bruce reportedly decided to perform his previously scheduled concert the night of Nov. 22 in New York and was left, of course, with the dilemma of what to say -- how to be funny -- in the immediate wake of the tragedy. The story is that he found his answer by digging into his hipster roots. He walked out, waited a few moments, shook his head from side to side in a sympathetic gesture and said, "Whew! -- Vaughn Meader."

I love this record! Anyone who hasn't heard it can sample here: http://www.howtospeakhip.com/ Del Close was something else, man.

Mark - I think much credit must also be given to the now almost forgotten Stan Freberg whose satirizing of hit records of the day, and tv shows like 'Dragnet' were such a break-through in the early 50s...even on 78 rpm! Although best known for things like ' The Banana Boat Song' and 'Sh-boom' his real genius was apparent in his short lived radio series, still available, I think on CD. His 'Incident at Los Voroces' based on the situation in Gaza at the time was obviously too much for his network. And then there's the politically correct 'Elderly Man River'.... Great stuff. To take nothing away from Freberg, I think of him more as an important precursor to the modern era of comedy recordings, because his hits were singles and not LPs and he wasn't a stand-up comedian in the sense of the new wave and thus was connected more to earlier parodists/satirists. Having said that, Freberg's masterpiece, "The History of the United States, Volume 1," from 1961, is loaded with inspired lunacy and brilliantly orchestrated by Billy May. Especially great is the duet between Franklin and Jefferson about the Declaration of Independence ("A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days") and "Take an Indian to Lunch"

Interesting topic. In the early '90s, when I was working for the South Bend Tribune, my first newspaper job, I wrote a story about comedy records that was prompted by a rash of reissues from Robert Klein, David Steinberg, Eddie Murhphy. National Lampoon, Lenny Bruce, Brooks/Reiner and some others. It was more or less a result of the compact disc boom and not a precursor to a renaissance of any kind, but it was an opportunity to look at the development of the genre. Some of the details below are cribbed from that story from (gulp) 1992. As Jim suggests, the modern era started in the '50s with Sahl, Bruce, Berman -- the result of an interesting confluence of the emergence of the long-playing LP and a new wave of sophisticated comedians of various stripes that captured the stirrings of a backlash against the social and political conformity of the era. Sahl's "The Future Lies Ahead" (Verve) from 1958 was ground zero, the first spoken-word comedy LP taped in front of a live audience (the hungry i in San Francisco, of course) -- though I think a bootleg Sahl recording may have been released previously. Berman had the first true hit, "Inside Shelley Berman" (Verve) entering the Billboard Top. 40 in April 1959, peaking at No. 2 for five weeks and staying in the top 40 for 46 weeks and the top 150 for more than two years. By July 16, 1961, there were more than a dozen comedy albums in the top 150, half of them in the top 40. I talked to Bob Newhart, one of my great heroes -- never forget how slyly subverse and prescient early pieces like "The Retirement Party" and "Abe Lincoln" were or the inspired brilliance of, say, the one-sided phone conversation with Abner Doubleday about the invention of baseball. Anyway, Newhart said some interesting things about those days, starting with the fact that the take-my-wife-please aesthetic of the earlier generation of comedians didn't appeal to the college crowd who bought records: "They'd buy our records and they'd get pizza and a six-pack and they'd sit around somebody's living room and that was their nightclub. And we were all dealing with areas they were concerned about. They always called the '50s the 'dead '50s' but I always thought there was a lot of revolt and anti-system feeling. I don't think everybody rolled over and played dead. God knows Lenny was dealing with issues and Mike and Elaine with the telephone company routine and other larges monoliths and I was attacking the corporation -- we were talking to their concerns." Newhart's "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart," released in early 1960, was a pop culture landmark, selling more than 700,000 copies, holding the No. 1 spot on the Billboard pop charts for 14 weeks and winning the Grammy for Album of the Year. Newhart told me that it was selling so fast at one point that Warner Bros. ran out of record jackets and sold thousands in plain white sleeves with IOU's for the jackets. As an aside, Newhart famously had never worked a true club until the week in Houston where the record was taped. He was a real neophyte. The only material he had was what was on the record, so on the first night, when he finished his first set and the people were cheering and going nuts, the MC/owner at the club told him, "You gotta go back out there and do an encore" and Newhwart said, "I don't have any more," and the guy practically pushed him back on stage and Newhart looked at the crowd and said, "Which one would you like to hear again?") When "The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back" was released later in 1960, it reached No. 1 and for a while Newhart held both the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, a feat not equaled until Guns N Roses did it in the early '90s. Newhart later was quoted saying, "Well, you always hate to lose a record but at least it went to a friend." The intensity of the comedy record craze cooled after the Kennedy assanation but the genre remained a force until the late '70s and early '80s, a key part of the public profiles of Cosby, Pryor, Carlin, Klein, Steve Martin (first to achieve platinum sales for "Let's Get Small," Cheech/Chong (ugh). For folks like Pryor and Carlin it was a way of documenting material that they, to paraphrase Carlin, couldn't say on televison. What killed the genre was the rise of stand-up shows on cable TV, which became ubiquitous in the '80s, and the HBO concert specials in which comedians could world uncensored. Still, some folks continued to do well in the CD era. Dice Clay (double ugh), Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and the Blue-Collar guys like Jeff Foxworthy sold a lot of product. and records were still an outlet for an underground guy like Bill Hicks. I mentioned in another thread recently a book called "Laughter on Record: A Complete Discography," by Warren Debenham, published by Scarecrow Press in 1988. http://www.amazon.co...74614800&sr=1-1 It's quite remarkable. 4,367 listings -- from A&P Players' "I Love Jimmy Carter, Jimy Carter" (A&P AP-1001) to Ziegfeld's "Ziegfeld Girl." (C.I.F. 3006; two comedy cuts). It's also indexed by subject, which is interesting. The book doesn't include CDs and it's not annotated, but if you're interested in knowing what's out there, it has it all. Anyway, onward.

Beethoven, 32 Piano Sonatas (complete). Claudio Arrau, piano. Philips, 14 LPs. Mint condition. $8 (57 cents per LP!). Dearborn Music, Dearborn, MI (suburban Detroit).

Horace Silver, "That Healin' Feelin'" (Blue Note). Mint condition, $6, vintage cothing/emphemera store, Royal Oak, MI (suburban Detroit).

Like I said, similarity is not the same as direct influence. Sure, Herbie's relentlessly linear, a cappella right hand lines here may rhyme with Tristano, but the sources of Herbie's playing by 1967 are so integrated and include, as much as anything, four years of nightly experimentation with these players in this repertoire, that to draw a straight line to Tristano as an unacknowledged prime influence, in the absence hard evidence, is fanciful speculation. If looking for a direct link, it makes more sense to tie this to earlier Bill Evans solos where there's a similar linear quality and where he leaves his left hand at his side for a while -- "Oleo" from "Everybody Digs Bill Evans" comes to mind. On another front, Herbie's approach here certainly arose in the context of playing in such a harmonically ambiguous universe, where marking harmony/form with his left hand makes little sense. If you want to argue that Tristano helped create a sound that entered into the bloodstream of jazz and that at a certain point became so much a part of the DNA of the music that it filtered subconsciously into all kinds of places, including Herbie Hancock, well, that's a different issue -- though I'm not sure how far down this road I personally would take it. But that's more plausible than saying that Hancock's prime influence was Tristano, but he has never acknowledged it because he has selective amnesia, stemming largely from a personal/psychological hang-up over the fact that Tristano was a white SOB. Plus, even if there's a link of any sort, it only rears its head in this one area of Hancock's playing. It doesn't account for his approach to harmony, the blues, bebop, comping, funk or anything else. Did Herbie ever hear Tristano live? Did he ever listen to the records?