mjzee

TV studio with an audience, interspersed with interviews.

Basher is wonderful. His LPs were also great for all the throwaway songs that somehow were unforgettable. For instance, My Heart Hurts from Nick The Knife. And let's not forget the great albums he produced for his then-wife Carlene Carter.

Tune into CMT (Country Music Television) this weekend. They're playing an hour-long "Crossroads" with Plant and Krauss. Well done...it's more lively than the CD (which I find a bit of a snore). Great band, with Marc Ribot and Buddy Miller. It's a trip to hear Alison do a Led Zep song, and wait til you hear them croon and harmonize on "Black Dog"! Don't miss it.

Has anyone heard the 3 available on eMusic? Made By Maceo Dial M-A-C-E-O Funk Overload I've always loved "Southern Exposure," with Maceo doing that hip dance move on the cover. I love the tracks with the Rebirth Jazz Band (genuinely exciting), and he does a respectable "The Way You Look Tonight".

I ordered the Jimmy Smiths and the Ike Quebec from CDU.

Wardell Gray - Live in Hollywood Sandy Bull - Still Valentine's Day, 1969 McCoy Tyner - 4X4 Stacey Kent - Dreamsville Ray Bryant - Ray Bryant Trio Sun Ra - We Travel The Spaceways/Bad And Beautiful The Great Jazz Trio - Autumn Leaves Sam Jones - The Chant Frank Rosolino - Free For All

Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Himself Art Tatum Group Masterpieces vol. 5, 6, 7 Lester Young in Washington vol. 3, 4, 5 Hampton Hawes - The East/West Controversy

In looking at the Pepper discography at jazzdisco.org, specifically one of the Sonny Stitt dates ("Atlas Blues Blow and Ballads") that's part of this box, it lists two tracks that are not on the box: Autumn In New York and Lover Man. Does anyone know why?

Does anyone know this album? Just made available on eMusic, from Douglas Records: Brazil

Papsrus, now that you've had it for awhile, do you still love it?

Nabbed it from Deep Discount CD. Took the opportunity to also order from them "Louis Armstrong in Scandinavia" @ $29.99.

Listening to this now while transferring it to my computer. Excellent, swinging band, interesting arrangements...even the vocals are catchy! Good sound quality, too.

Aggie, don't remember if we've ever discussed this...have you heard this album? Bill Goodwin, "Solar Energy" 3 tracks are a trio with Sco and Swallow, recorded 3/10/79; the other 4 tracks are a quartet with Sco, Bill Dobbins and Steve Gilmore, recorded 9/14/80. Very tasty.

Lonnie Johnson w/ Elmer Snowden - Blues & Ballads vol 2 Roy Haynes - Cracklin' Lee Konitz - Spirits Grayfolded Phineas Newborn - The Newborn Touch Clifford Brown Memorial Kenny Burrell - All Night Long Joe Pass - Virtuoso 2 Bud Powell - Live in Lausanne

They've just added the Fresh Sound originals series; here's some of them: The Bad Plus: Bill McHenry: Chris Cheek: Reid Anderson: Ethan Iverson:

I just noticed that Amazon mp3 has added a number of Beefheart titles, including the long-unavailable "I'm Gonna Do What I Wanna Do:" Beefheart on Amazon

I just noticed that Amazon mp3 downloads has added a large part of the Tim Buckley catalog, including Starsailor, Blue Afternoon, and Lorca: Tim Buckley on Amazon

Steve Nelson - Sound-Effect John Lee Hooker - Boom Boom (song) Nick Lowe - At My Age Ron Affif - Ron Affif John Coltrane - Coltrane (Prestige 7105) Gerry Mulligan - Plays Mulligan Yazoo compilation - Memphis Masters Thad Jones, Frank Wess, Teddy Charles, Mal Waldron - Olio Bennie Green - Walking Down

Tim was great. I had the pleasure of seeing him a few times: 1972 at the Felt Forum (opening for Zappa), and 1974 (I think) at both the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park and at Max's Kansas City. Great voice, wonderful feeling to his records. Blue Afternoon was always one of my favorite records (what a mistake it was for him to go to Straight Records...imagine the promo push behind him if he had stayed on Elektra! I'd love to someday read a history of Herb Cohen and how he influenced the artists he managed). Lorca is wonderful (tho it feels cobbled together as an album), Happy Sad is great, and Starsailor is so mysterious and perplexing. The booklet to the compilation on Rhino was so interesting...I had no idea he spent time in Vietnam. He came back a changed man, and obviously on a downward spiral. I still remember an interview he gave Rolling Stone a little before he died, where he mentioned plans for an album with himself, Jackson Browne and Gregg Allman. I wonder if anything came of that.

FYI, for Costco members, they have $50 iTunes gift cards for $44.99 online and in their stores.

There was a guitarist who opened for Hips Don't Lie; his name is Scott Dercks. I thought he was good, but only heard 1 or 2 songs. As for Rossi's steaks, all I can say is, they're no Manny's.

Just a short mention. When I was in Minneapolis in October, I caught this jazz trio at Rossi's Steakhouse (not a great steakhouse, btw - stick to drinks). Three women, playing good, thoughtful jazz. Lots of interaction between them. Sort of like Keith Jarrett's trio, but more modern tunes. Bassist was especially good. If you're in the area, check 'em out.

TWO! I value both of you guys and wish you would reconsider and stay. Please! And I make it three, please. The good voices are good to read. And, remember, you can always ignore someone you don't like to read. Just like in the real world, you don't have to interact with everyone you meet.

Does anyone know this album? eMusic's just added it: Nina's Back

Make that 14, from the WSJ: Oscar Peterson: A Jazz 'Behemoth' Moves On By NAT HENTOFF December 27, 2007; Page D7 Only when it was absolutely necessary, Oscar Peterson wrote, would he go on stage before a concert to check out the piano, because doing so "might lead to preconditioned ideas, and they can in turn interfere with the creative process so essential to a creative jazz concert." For Peterson, who died on Sunday at age 82, his full mastery of the instrument enabled him to keep striving for what to him was his ultimate reason for being. In his equally masterful autobiography, "A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson" (Continuum, 2002), he said of the "dare-devil enterprise [the jazz experience]" in which he engaged for so many years that it "requires you to collect all your senses, emotions, physical strength and mental power, and focus them totally on the performance. . . every time you play. . . . Uniquely exciting, once it's bitten you, you never get rid of it. Nor do you want to; for you come to believe that if you get it all right, you will be capable of virtually anything. That is what drives me, and I know it always will do so." He wrote that after a stroke in 1993 that, at first, limited the use of his left hand. But "the will to perfection," as he called it, kept driving him, and as a result he regained much of his customary skill, and with it the satisfaction of continuing to surprise himself. Born in 1925, Peterson was mandated by his father to practice piano at a very early age; but it was hearing Nat "King" Cole that fired his enthusiasm, and he won a talent contest at the age 14. By the 1940s, Peterson was already a presence on the radio in his native Canada and in Montreal clubs. But his audience began to greatly expand when jazz impresario Norman Granz heard him and brought him to New York's Carnegie Hall in 1949 for one of Granz's "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts, where the competition was so intense that many careers of the participants were enhanced. Granz became Peterson's manager and close friend as they toured Europe and other continents. Also a producer of records on his Verve and Pablo labels, Granz extensively featured Peterson, not only as leader of his own trios but also as an accompanist for a wide range of other jazz masters whom Granz recorded. Among them were Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington and Roy Eldridge. As classic jazz players used to say of extraordinary peers, Peterson had "big ears." In all the varying contexts of these Granz recordings, he remained himself while also being completely consonant with the diverse stylists on those sessions. A fascinating section in his autobiography describes what each soloist required of Peterson as an accompanist. For instance, Eldridge "would slide over to me and quietly ask, 'Can I get my strollers, please?' By this he meant that he intended to start simply with a mute aided by Roy Brown's bass in the lower register. "He trusted the remaining members of the rhythm section not only to sit out and allow the excitement to build between him and Ray, but more importantly, to anticipate exactly where to re-enter and move him up a few notches emotionally." Moreover, as a writer from the inside of the music, Peterson's profiles of other longtime associates prove him to be a master practitioner of jazz history and criticism. As he wrote: "To have played for these and other behemoths of the music world certainly served to educate me in areas in which that type of education just isn't available [and] served to deepen my true realization of the immensity of the music we know as jazz." Because of the scores of albums Peterson recorded, it's difficult for me to select any as the best. So, subjectively, two that make me rise and shout are, "The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival" (1956) and "Night Train" (1962). (Both are on the Verve label). Another autobiography that matches Peterson's in moving the reader into the life force of jazz is Sidney Bechet's "Treat It Gentle" (Da Capo Press, 2002). He writes of growing up in New Orleans: "That music, it was like waking up in the morning and eating. . . it was natural to the way you lived and the way you died." And for Peterson, the pleasures of being inside that music recalled, he wrote, "the joyful exclamation [guiarist] Barney Kessel produced after [the] first evening in my trio. He came over to me after the last set, shook his head, and said with that Oklahoma accent, 'Oscar, that was better than sex!'" Wherever he went around the world, Peterson's effect on audiences demonstrated the truth of Art Blakey's invitation to extreme pleasure: "You don't have to be a musician to understand jazz. All you have to do is be able to feel."