mjzee

How an effort to popularize classical music undermines what makes orchestras great. New Republic

I saw him once at Bradley's, in a duo with George Mraz. I was fortunate to sit close to the stage, because the crowd was conversing so loudly that I could barely hear the music. Why go to a place like that when all you want to do is talk?

Anyone remember That Was The Week That Was?

The White Album.

There's also this:

Excellent! Thanks.

Oh yeah, I was at this:

I do miss mix tapes. I thought they required a lot of creativity and ingenuity. Nowadays I can just create a playlist in iTunes and burn that to disc, but it's too easy - the romance of the endeavor is missing. A friend of mine made great mix tapes. This is one of them:

I remember that when I first bought cassette blanks, the cases came with two holes in them, one on each of the short sides. I never knew what they were for, until I went to a friend's house. He had a pegboard from which it was designed to hang cassettes: a rod was passed through the two holes in the cassette case. You would flip through the rods to see your collection.

Look, there are only so many musical notes, chords and riffs that a person can string together into a song. So over the course of decades, there's bound to be a little, er, borrowing here and there. Long before sampling made lawsuits the lingua franca that bonded so many disparate musicians together, artists were suing other musicians for plagiarism and copyright infringement. Lawsuits against hip hop groups are countless, but here are 11 rock groups who've been taken to court for plagiarism, from Radiohead to Coldplay to Avril Lavigne. More here: http://www.fuse.tv/2013/07/famous-songs-sued-plagiarism?campaign=dig|obr|cpc|lst#1

I was at the Jersey City concert. I remember being so surprised to see a clean-shaven Jerry, and I remember Seastones playing over the Wall of Sound during intermission. That was the last time I saw the Dead.

Listening now to the 8/6/71 portion of DP 35. Wow. More and more, I think Bill Kreutzmann is the unsung hero of the Dead. He is their propulsion, their energy center. His playing is easily the equal of the others in the band.

I think Bill Cosby will be seen as an historic figure. He's had a truly remarkable career, groundbreaking in many ways, has been in the public consciousness for close to 50 years, and, yes, he is a very funny fellow, right!

I like the Ella of the Songbooks. There, I like her for the sumptuousness of her voice - it's such a pretty thing. But even there, I think she strives to sing the songs accurately, not to give us her take on the songs. In that, I find her similar to Ronstadt. Other people seem to like her more; to each their own. But that's Ella at her best. I also own this: A 4-CD set on Pablo, it consists of selections from the following live albums: Montreux '75, Ella A Nice, Ella In London, JATP in Tokyo '53, Montreux '77, and Return To Happiness - Tokyo '83. You get the cute Ella, the crowd-pleasing Ella, the scatting Ella, the jamming-with-the-boys Ella, and most of it, to these ears, sounds conventional and not-very-interesting. I don't doubt or begrudge her status as a jazz icon, or as a pop-culture touchstone. Her audiences utterly loved her, as can be heard on these recordings. Perhaps Larry is right that she could bring emotional insight to a song (I haven't heard the Pass discs), but I don't hear it in this collection. Again, to each their own.

A lot also depends on what he can do to the tapes to make them sound better.

She was preceded by (at least) Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, & Carly Simon. Simon's Trust is actually a nice album if you can suspend disbelief about her vocals and just get into the accompaniment). Also, Motown had a thing about getting their bigger acts to do "standards" as part of the grooming for Vegas. Ronstadt has never struck me as a particularly bright person (but who am I to judge?) or singer (and although she got what was probably Riddle's most uninspired ever "high profile" work out of him and was by more than a few accounts more or less a total dolt about how to "get into" that material, hey, she had the desire and the money, and by god, she made it happen, so, good for her!)), but I always dug her for not letting that get in the way of her enthusiasm and curiosity (remember her doing "Pirates Of Penzance"?). I give a whole lot of the credit to her great run of great-sounding records in the 70s to Peter Asher (and yeah, the Greatest Hits thing is one of the fewer times where that's what I'd prefer over whole albums) but she had the chops to give him something to work with, right? Really, "harmlessly & pleasantly clueless" is perhaps the phrase that keeps coming to mind about her actual singing. She's always had, again, a good, at times great skill set to be clueless with. All of which is just to say that as a "singer", eh...., but as a "voice", somebody you couldn't miss no matter what the context, she's been there since "Different Drummer" and stayed there for all of my adult life, and even if I can't really take her seriously as an "artist", I still like her a helluva lot, and yes, this is sad news. I agree with this assessment of Ronstadt. I've always thought she was rock's version of Ella - nice singer, iconic, but brought little to an understanding of a song.

Of course, the first one was this (in the LT series): Of the two you showed, the second one is the "original" to CD. I never saw the first one.

It was Mary Lou who insisted on Cranshaw and Roker? I'd of thought it was Norman Granz. I'm surprised he didn't make them do Sweet Georgia Brown.

Uptown strikes again! I just noticed this on Amazon. Release date September 17: If it's from Baltimore, can we assume it's from the Left Bank? Here's the description from Amazon: The Duke Pearson Big Band of the late 1960s featured great soloists Donald Byrd, Burt Collins, Lew Tabackin, Frank Foster and Pepper Adams. Drummer Mickey Roker propelled the 16 piece band with fire. All this is on display at the April 1969 Baltimore concert issued for the first time on this CD. Where the studio recordings featured relatively short pieces, this concert presents the band stretching out in full force. Even 44 years later, this is big band jazz at its finest and a clear demonstration of Duke Pearson's great talents as a leader, pianist, composer and arranger.

Curious why you went to the concerts. To hear Mary Lou and Max? As I recall, Cecil was all over NYC at that time. Gary Giddins praising him to high heavens, the New World releases getting wide acclaim, all these Japanese Trio releases hitting our shores (like Akisakila), etc. I kinda knew what Cecil was about, but it doesn't hurt to experience it for yourself. At least I thought it wouldn't hurt. The Cecil/Max concert was the worst. Max is a great drummer, and I could always focus on him when the going got rough, but I thought Cecil's music was pure aggression, sort of the piano pummeling my head for however long the concert lasted. It felt like punishment. I remember when the Cecil/Mary Lou concert was announced, Mary Lou saying there was enough common ground in their music and in the jazz tradition to make for an enjoyable, enlightening concert. I kinda suspected it would be a train wreck, albeit perhaps an enjoyable one. It was even more of a hoot to see Bob Cranshaw and Mickey Roker as the rhythm section. This would make sense as a Mary Lou rhythm section, but they had no insight, affinity, connection with what Cecil was playing. It was so weird to hear Mary Lou w/bass and drums playing something traditional, only to hear Cecil chattering away concurrently, almost like Unit Structures and Earl Hines played at the same time. It was nice to see and hear Mary Lou; that's about all I can say. The recording's around in case anyone wants to check my impressions. It's still remarkable to me to see how many people profess a love for Cecil's music; the most recent one is in the Bill Cosby article I posted. Perhaps someday I'll "get it"; that why, every so often, I'll try again. But I think I'd rather bash my head against a wall than hear another Cecil concert.

I just looked at her Wikipedia entry (I thought I had read somewhere that she came from Mexico and was looking for confirmation; she didn't), and found this fascinating: Her mother Ruth Mary, of German, English, and Dutch descent, was raised in the Flint, Michigan, area. She was the daughter of Lloyd Groff Copeman, a prolific inventor and holder of many patents. Lloyd, with nearly 700 patents to his name, invented an early form of the toaster, many refrigerator devices, the grease gun, the first electric stove, and an early form of the microwave oven. His flexible rubber ice cube tray earned him millions of dollars in royalties.

Oh yeah. I was at this one: What a silly concert. Was also at this one: I do not like Cecil Taylor.

Thanks! So Lester isn't even on the last 4 tracks? Wow.

I was at this; still have a cassette recording I made at the concert: Was at the Avery Fisher portion of this:

What's the best way to get this music now - still the Fresh Sound CD? It doesn't have the alternates.