mjzee

Great discussion, guys. I'd only hope that in the future, the same sort of civil discussion could be had about Oscar Peterson or Keith Jarrett.

I finally watched the Monk documentary "Straight No Chaser" last night. It mentioned Monk's losing his cabaret card and spending 3 months in jail for copping to drugs that belonged to Bud Powell. The film then cut to Monk playing "Evidence." Blakey called that same song "Justice." I never understood the meanings of those titles, but I wonder whether that juxtaposition in the film was no accident.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and we can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. - Thomas Hobbes

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Library of Congress widened the net and recorded Creek Indian lullabies and cowboy ballads and a host of other fresh sounds, from sad Cajun accordion waltzes of the Louisiana bayous to the chanteys of windjammers at the San Francisco docks. Whether for work, play or worship, here was a thriving folk-song subculture. Even so, when the Library of Congress issued its recordings in a landmark series, "Folk Music of the United States," the song texts remained the focus, exhaustively analyzed in the scholarly booklets that accompanied the albums, compiled by genre. For example: "Negro Blues and Hollers" or "Songs and Ballads of the Bituminous Miners." For the most part, the performers received scant mention. These elusive folk musicians cast a spell on Stephen Wade, who has spent decades searching for traces of the people who left behind the sounds that wooed him a half-century ago. "The singers and players who fill this book," he writes in "The Beautiful Music All Around Us," "bring together lore and life, drawing from mother wit and the mood of the moment to create in their corners of America their own varieties of street-joy." Full book review here: WSJ

"Honky Tonk" isn't on the box set (you'll have to get the Jack Johnson box for that one), but everything else is, including an alternate of "Mtume." Mixes are from the LP masters. "Calypso Frelimo" could use a remastering--it's always sounded partially submerged to me. I've always thought the mixes on Calypso and HLHM were dictated by the length of an album side: Both were over 30 minutes long, so they needed to compress the sound to fit. The moodiness/murkyness/otherworldliness of the sound contributes to the overall atmosphere of the compositions.

Brace yourself, music lovers: Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" has come to Greenwich Village. (Le) Poisson Rouge, an ultratrendy nightspot (superfluous parentheses in the original) that bills itself as a "multimedia art cabaret" seeking to "revive the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry," booked a two-night run of classical music's most overplayed masterpiece. Why? Because "The Four Seasons" has been refurbished by Max Richter, an avant-garde composer of minimalist inclination, and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon by violinist Daniel Hope, who played it earlier this week at (Le) Poisson Rouge. And before you bruise your eyeballs by rolling them, here's the real surprise: "Recomposed by Max Richter," as Mr. Hope's new CD is called, is a bewitchingly brilliant musical hybrid that manages against all odds to breathe life into an exhausted warhorse that a great many listeners—myself included—long ago ceased to find listenable. More here: WSJ

I agree with you; music should be heard in public.

I've been very impressed with the packaging of Uptown CDs, especially the booklets. This is one label where the CDs are vastly superior to the downloads.

Have they ever competed, i.e., released the same album?

(By the way, re all the empty graphics above: I checked, and they're currently missing from the eMusic website.)

I saw him once with Don Cherry. What a great groove, totally his own.

This new version of the Board software has a helpful feature, where tags can be added. This would greatly help searching. However, they can only be added by the thread's creator.

Some people pay their dues with their lives and lifestyles. If you devote yourself to this style of music, you're excluding yourself from other, better-paying gigs and communal respect. Didn't Ornette regularly get beat up for playing in this style before he went to L.A.? I'd give the same kind of props to the ESP guys. However, this type of respect has its limits. One could give Jandek the same sort of "respect," but like Ornette, Dolphy, and a lot of the ESP guys, I don't want to spend a lot of my time actually listening to it.

So David Friesen and Cary Grant were brothers-in-law.

Any relation to David Friesen?

I'm in the midst of a long-term project of digitizing my albums and tapes and importing them into iTunes. I rip a side at a time to my Marantz CD recorder, then transfer the disc to my computer. So it's usually importing one long file at a time. When I insert it into my computer, iTunes tries to match it to the CDDB database, and the results are frequently amusing. Many times the title it retrieves is a religious lecture, or some dance compilation; my favorite, when I fill the entire disc so the track is 79:51, is "Frank Zappa: D.A.R. Convention Hall." Anyway, today it retrieved the following: "Miles Davis with Mike Stern: Mastering The Zone." The name of the track was "Disc 4." This sounds interesting; does anyone know anything about it?

Happy birthday, Jim, and all the best.

eMusic has the Mosaic Horace Parlan box for $19.30: eMusic

A historic figure, and he made some damn fine music too. RIP.

That's cool that Rush got in. Not that I've ever liked them, but I love that a band so universally reviled by the critics got in, due to their devoted fan base. There's a DJ in the NYC area who insists that Chicago should be inducted. Maybe there's hope for them!