mjzee

From an interview with Robbie Robertson in today's NY Post (https://nypost.com/2020/02/19/the-bands-robbie-robertson-on-his-adventures-with-dylan-dali-warhol-and-scorsese/): As a founding member of The Band — which recorded classics such as “The Weight” and “Stage Fright” — the guitar player and songwriter born Jaime Royal Robertson, now qualifies as rock royalty. But some 60 years ago, when he was just a teenage guitar prodigy in the hot rockabilly group Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Robertson, now 76, simply wanted to get his due on a songwriting credit and attendant royalties. To that end, Hawkins brought him up to see Morris Levy — a record-label boss with a habit of adding his name to songs his label put out, whether he contributed to the music or not. Remembering that Levy was flanked by “rough-looking guys in black mohair suits,” Robertson tells The Post, “Morris looks at me, looks at Ronnie and says in a gravely voice, ‘He’s a good-looking kid. If you ever have to do time, it’d be good to have him with you.’ I was, like, ‘Holy s–t!’ I figured that I would forego this problem with the songwriting thing.”

Great ideas; thanks!

Is "Wax Time" really in partnership with Amazon???

My Pro-ject Carbon seems to have a little audible rumble. Is there anything I can do about that, or does it need to be serviced? Also, any thoughts on other turntables? The Pro-ject is the first "audiophile" turntable I've owned, but perhaps a more commercial brand (Panasonic, Sony, Audio Technica, etc.) might actually do a better job?

I went for: Ted Brown with Jimmy Raney - Good Company, Clifford Jordan and Junior Cook - Two Tenor Winner, One For All - Live At Smoke, Reeds & Deeds - Cookin', and Grant Stewart - Downtown Sounds.

I just finished reading "This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession," by Daniel J. Levitin. (Good book, btw.) In it, I found a discussion about Joni Mitchell and Jaco that I found fascinating: Joni Mitchell had sung in choirs in public school, but had never taken guitar lessons or any other kind of music lessons. Her music has a unique quality that has been variously described as avant-garde, ethereal, and as bridging classical, folk, jazz, and rock. Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. This doesn’t mean that she plays notes that other people don’t—there are still only twelve notes in a chromatic scale—but it does mean that she can easily reach with her fingers combinations of notes that other guitarists can’t reach (regardless of the size of their hands). An even more important difference involves the way the guitar makes sound. Each of the six strings of the guitar is tuned to a particular pitch. When a guitarist wants a different one, of course, she presses one or more strings down against the neck; this makes the string shorter, which causes it to vibrate more rapidly, making a tone with a higher pitch. A string that is pressed on (“fretted”) has a different sound from one that isn’t, due to a slight deadening of the string caused by the finger; the unfretted or “open” strings have a clearer, more ringing quality, and they will keep on sounding for a longer time than the ones that are fretted. When two or more of these open strings are allowed to ring together, a unique timbre emerges. By retuning, Joni changed the configuration of which notes are played when a string is open, so that we hear notes ringing that don’t usually ring on the guitar, and in combinations we don’t usually hear. You can hear it on her songs “Chelsea Morning” and “Refuge of the Roads” for example. But there is something more to it than that—lots of guitarists use their own tunings, such as David Crosby, Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke, and Jimmy Page. One night, when I was having dinner with Joni in Los Angeles, she started talking about bass players that she had worked with. She has worked with some of the very best of our generation: Jaco Pastorius, Max Bennett, Larry Klein, and she wrote an entire album with Charles Mingus. Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to the different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings. While we were waiting for the main course, she went off on a story about how Jaco Pastorius was always arguing with her, challenging her, and generally creating mayhem backstage before they would go on. For example when the first Roland Jazz Chorus amplifier was hand-delivered by the Roland Company to Joni to use at a performance, Jaco picked it up, and moved it over to his comer of the stage. “It’s mine,” he growled. When Joni approached him, he gave her a fierce look. And that was that. We were well into twenty minutes of bass-player stories. Because I was a huge fan of Jaco when he played with Weather Report, I interrupted and asked what it was like musically to play with him. She said that he was different from any other bass player she had every played with; that he was the only bass player up to that time that she felt really understood what she was trying to do. That’s why she put up with his aggressive behaviors. “When I first started out,” she said, “the record company wanted to give me a producer, someone who had experience churning out hit records. But [David] Crosby said, ‘Don’t let them—a producer will ruin you. Let’s tell them that I’ll produce it for you; they’ll trust me.’ So basically, Crosby put his name as producer to keep the record company out of my way so that I could make the music the way that I wanted to. “But then the musicians came in and they all had ideas about how they wanted to play. On my record! The worst were the bass players because they always wanted to know what the root of the chord was." The “root” of a chord, in music theory, is the note for which the chord is named and around which it is based. A “C major” chord has the note C as its root, for example, and an “E-flat minor” chord has the note E-flat as its root. It is that simple. But the chords Joni plays, as a consequence of her unique composition and guitar-playing styles, aren’t typical chords: Joni throws notes together in such a way that the chords can’t be easily labeled. “The bass players wanted to know the root because that’s what they’ve been taught to play. But I said, ‘Just play something that sounds good, don’t worry about what the root is.’ And they said, ‘We can’t do that—we have to play the root or it won’t sound right.’ ” Because Joni hadn’t had music theory and didn’t know how to read music, she couldn’t tell them the root. She had to tell them what notes she was playing on the guitar, one by one, and they had to figure it out for themselves, painstakingly, one chord at a time. But here is where psychoacoustics and music theory collide in an explosive conflagration: The standard chords that most composers use—C major, E-flat minor, D7, and so on—are unambiguous. No competent musician would need to ask what the root of a chord like those is; it is obvious, and there is only one possibility. Joni’s genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that could have two or more different roots. When there is no bass playing along with her guitar (as in “Chelsea Morning” or “Sweet Bird”), the listener is left in a state of expansive aesthetic possibilities. Because each chord could be interpreted in two or more different ways, any prediction or expectation that a listener has about what comes next is less grounded in certainty than with traditional chords. And when Joni strings together several of these ambiguous chords, the harmonic complexity greatly increases; each chord sequence can be interpreted in dozens of different ways, depending on how each of its constituents is heard. Since we hold in immediate memory what we’ve just heard and integrate it with the stream of new music arriving at our ears and brains, attentive listeners to Joni’s music—even nonmusicians—can write and rewrite in their minds a multitude of musical interpretations as the piece unfolds; and each new listening brings a new set of contexts, expectations, and interpretations. In this sense, Joni’s music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I’ve heard. As soon as a bass player plays a note, he fixes one particular musical interpretation, thus ruining the delicate ambiguity the composer has so artfully constructed. All of the bass players Joni worked with before Jaco insisted on playing roots, or what they perceived to be roots. The brilliance of Jaco, Joni said, is that he instinctively knew to wander around the possibility space, reinforcing the different chord interpretations with equal emphasis, sublimely holding the ambiguity in a delicate, suspended balance. Jaco allowed Joni to have bass guitar on her songs without destroying one of their most expansive qualities. This, then, we figured out at dinner that night, was one of the secrets of why Joni’s music sounds unlike anyone else’s—its harmonic complexity bom out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored to a single harmonic interpretation. Add in her compelling, phonogenic voice, and we become immersed in an auditory world, a soundscape unlike any other.

Surprised that audiophiles haven't yet addressed the weakest link in the chain: the air. After all, music has to travel through the air to reach your ears, and there can be all sorts of qualities in the air in your home that could degrade the signal and give you a sub-optimal listening experience. What you need is a hermetically-sealed listening room with audiophile-quality air pumped in and constantly monitored to insure peak transparency. You don't want air that's too excitable, nor air that's too flat; humidity, ozone, ions, particulates and air pressure are all factors to consider. Someone should start working on this.

About a year ago, I bought Pro-Ject Damp it High-End Damping Feet to put underneath my turntable. I could still hear the effect of a washing machine's spin cycle down the hall; I was recording an LP to CD and could see the rumble on the VU meters. Recorded again with the washer off and the rumble was gone.

I found this interesting: https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2020/02/06/ray_noble_englands_greatest_melody_maker_483671.html

I subscribe to BBC Music Magazine; between the ads and reviews, they seem to cover a lot.

Found some time to listen to this BFT. Assiduously tried to not read prior comments. 1) Is this an episode of Seinfeld? Watermelon Man. Could be playing to a rhythm track; it's funky, but not responsive to the soloists. Is the drummer Idris? 2) (What's the name of this tune??? Classic BN tune.) Pianist: muscular clarity. Ray Bryant? Sax: strong yet querulous, indeterminate tone. Reminds me of Von Freeman. 3) Basie from the early '60's? Jimmy Forrest on tenor? Dueling tenors. Busy arrangement, but driving. I liked this one. 4) Things Ain't What They Used To Be. Sounds like some swing musicians. Audience - club. I hear clarinet and bari. Not very distinctive. 5) Trombone, trumpet, tenor. Again, older form. Pianist is funky, throwing some more modern stuff in. No clue. One of those '50's Columbia sessions? 6) A little more modern - recorded in '70's? Tuba - Bob Stewart? Guitar, alto...meh. 7) Bossa nova! (Or is it a boogaloo?) Saxist play with tone and personality. Is this Griff and Lockjaw? Billy Higgins on drums? 8) High energy. Another tune I've heard a million times but can't tell you its name. The tenor is good. My guess is this is from the'80's from the way the bass is recorded. 9) Another tune I know. Chick Corea composition? The pianist plays it pretty close to the chord changes. Left hand is kinda perfunctory. Should've thought to reorchestrate it a little. 10) Bird tune. Two tenors. Or is the one on the left an alto? Plays pretty low for an alto; probably two tenors. No idea who they are, but this would be a pretty good night at the bar. 11) Dizzy's "Tin Tin Deo." Private recording. Nothing really distinctive about the performance. 12) Well You Needn't. Funny how, from the first bar, the drummer brings a party atmosphere to this - he just swings! Alto sounds like Art Pepper. 13) Old R&B tune. Night Train? Listened to the first 3 minutes or so - nothing distinctive going on. Can't name the soloist. 14) Easy Living. Someone who loves Ben Webster. Maybe Lockjaw.

Release date February 14:

Release date March 20: Seasoned veteran Houston Person joins Keith Oxman’s quartet for his latest outing, Two Cigarettes in the Dark. The pairing of these two great tenor saxophonists from different generations is a wonderful merging of styles to create a uniquely warm sound. Person is on 6 of the 10 tracks which are the standards on this release. Also making an appearance on 2 of the tunes is vocalist Annette Murrell. She brings her sultry voice to Everything Happens to Me and Crazy He Calls Me. Oxman contributes 3 of his original compositions and pianist Jeff Jenkins penned one of the tunes.

Release date March 20: Sporting a resume that hearkens back to the glory days of the Chess Records empire, Sugar Pie DeSanto at 84, is still recording and occasionally performing, having outlived many of her peers. She was legendary for her incendiary stage performances. Creative A & R man for Chess, Roquel 'Billy' Davis once declared, Sugar Pie could outperform Etta James, with whom The Sugar sang a handful of duets. Having written well over 100 songs, Sugar Pie has a new release on Jasman Records entitled, Sugar's Suite a 4 song EP produced by James Moore, Sr. , with arrangements by three-time Emmy Producer/Arranger Bill Jolly. In addition to the 4 song EP in CD format, The creative design and packaging are skillfully augmented with images from one of Italy's top photographers, Gianni Grandi. Liner notes are by esteemed music journalist, Lee Hildebrand.

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At one point he had downloads available on his website. I bought quite a few of them, and thought it was an elegant solution.

Miles more than made up for it by recording Gingerbread Boy.

I am very sad to hear this. RIP to a true giant. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2020/01/19/535609079/jazz-saxophone-legend-jimmy-heath-has-died

Cecil McBee seems like an outlier. Can he cook?

It helped me; I would not have located this music otherwise. Also, it's hard to debate the ethics of this release considering that the original source was Boris Rose recording them off the air. Mingus and his estate never received a dime from either Rose or Solar. Neither has Sonny Rollins received royalties from that Village Gate box (which is also fascinating and essential).