marcello

OK, so it's 300 CDs for Fifty Dollars and Fiftynine Cents. That's Nineteen Cents each.

Same here and there is a sale now: $300/$59.96.

Not exactly what you're talkin' about here, but if you don't have this....git it!

I can tell you that he was playing in Italy last June, for sure.

I loved your story MG! I too have seen what gambeling can do to people; it's a sickness. Even with buying lottery tickets, it can get out of hand. I've see people buy them week end and week out when, if they put that $20 to $50 a week in a lost cost Mutual Fund, they would have a nice little nest egg when they retired. Spend a buck for fun only. And only a buck.

You can always play the songs in a alphabetical order. That will mix the shit up unless you have 20 versions of 'Round Midnight.

VSOP II video

Tony Williams: An Interview Scenario By Pat Cox (Reprinted from Down Beat magazine: May 28, 1970) Q: How do you identify yourself? A: I don't; I don't identify myself. Q: Not at all? A: No. I let other people do that. A: "What was trumpeted as progress was, it seems to me, an exclusive fashion, its immunity from plebeian emulation guaranteed by adherence to the dogma that pleasure, which all the great music in the past had given, was no longer admirable or even pertinent." He's saying that the composers were saying that progress had to be that way, so those things were no longer needed, you know, pleasure and so forth, to the listener. Q: In other words, it was composers composing for the sake of being ahead of the times. A: Yeah, keeping up with the-at another point, he's saying about composers-there's a lot in here. (Laughter) Q: Let's get into one thing. Tell me, how do you classify your music? (credentials?) A: I just think of it as the best of everything, I guess. I was born in 1945 and it was the post-war era; we all grew up in that post-war era. At the time, my father, as he still is, was very interested in music and he had all the records of the day, you know. Bebop had just started, bebop with Billy Eckstine-and all through that time I was subjected to the music. You know, my father was always playing the records, and television affected all of us; we grew up watching television and learning from television. (It feels stiff) I started listening to classical music at about the time I left the pop scene. For a long time, I wasn't listening to any rock and roll, any pop. I was into heavy jazz and really esoteric things. We'd have an ensemble on Sundays and the guys would improvise to a time watch, to numbers, on the wall. A guy would say, "Okay, we're going to play this phrase for two and a half seconds," and it was really out. So I was doing that for a long time, even when I came to New York. And then, after I was with Miles, I started feeling very uneasy because everything-I wasn't listening to anybody. The group that I was with, with Miles, was so great everything else to me was-there was nothing that I had any desire to be a part of. People had asked me to make records with them and I had to turn them down because I didn't want to make records just for the sake of making records, for the romantic feeling of being in a studio. Another reason was because I had played with about everybody I had wanted to play with. (to sound very vague) When I first came to New York, I was with Jackie McLean; he is one of the legends of a certain era in jazz. So I was working with him. I had played with Eric Dolphy. I was working sometimes with Cecil Taylor and hanging out with them. I worked with John Coltrane one night, at the time when he had the band with Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, because Elvin couldn't make it one night, so he called me and asked me to. All these things kind of propped me up. It was really a lot of things I went through, you know; that I haven't really covered. I just scanned over them. And on some of the records I made with Blue Note, everybody was on them. Like one time, there was a record: Lee Morgan was on trumpet, and Bobby Hutcherson was playing vibes, and Bob Cranshaw, bass, and these records were like all-star record dates; you know, everybody was on them. So later on, when they started asking me to make records, I had already done that. Q: Everything was below you. (It's still vague) A: Not egotistically. It was musically, because I had already done what these guys were doing, was on top of what was going to happen, so after that, when they asked me again, I said, I've already done that, you know. I've already made a record with you. Then I started feeling, well, there's got to be something else, because John Coltrane left such an impression, on not only the jazz scene, but the whole music scene with what his band produced. So it had to be something else. At this time, something started filtering in. I started hearing a lot of electricity. The first thing I can remember-it wasn't the first thing that hit me, but it's the first thing I can remember-was Jimi Hendrix's first record, and the sound of it, you know, with all that electricity, you know-I mean, not presence electricity, but the amplified electricity, the sound of the guitars, and that started to excite me, and I wanted to hear more of that. I heard all this stuff, and after awhile, I started saying-I knew that I was going to leave Miles because he was going in another direction. We'd get together; the band, like we were like this and Miles was like this, and we came together at a certain point in time, at a point like a "V". And we stayed at this point. It took us about a year to get there. Wayne Shorter finally came after a year of the rest of the group being together. We stayed together as a group, the four of us, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis, about four years, and Ron left. We started using another bass player, and then the "V" started going into another direction-like an "X", you know. So we started hiding. I knew it was coming to that. I said, well, I've got to do something. And the pop scene, I wasn't necessarily as interested in the pop scene as much as I was interested in the sound of what was happening, and so it wasn't a question of making money, you know, to get into it. It was a question of something that was going to stimulate me to go on, to do something that I hadn't done. Q: What caused the separation? A: It was just circumstances, just the way it had to be, because my ego is so that I have to do my own thing. Do your own thing, you know-(Laughter). That kind of thing. That is what it was. (You can transcribe it) Because white people, when they go and want to listen to something, they listen to it to identify with it, just like everybody does, so they have all the money, right? When a white person goes out to see a musical act, or any entertainer, they look up and they say, gee, that could be me. You know, they go into an audience, and they want to see something that they feel they could be a part of; you know, they could be up there singing, that could be them up there playing the guitar. If they go hear a black person, they can't do that, because they can't imagine themselves being black. So that's why the white musicians are making all the money, because they have the image of all the white people who have all the money, who support them, and give them $30,000 a night to play something. They won't give a black musician $30,000 a night who plays the same thing, because they can't imagine that, you know. Q: They can't imagine-identify- A: They can't identify. And like with my band, every time we move off the bandstand, if there's a lot of white people in the audience, all the white musicians will walk over to Johnny (McLaughlin), and really rap with him, and the people want to know how this white cat can do what he does, you know, and that makes them feel, well, gee, there's hope for me, you know, because they feel, well, he can do it, maybe-you know-we're all right, maybe we're all right. Yes, you can talk about it and experiment with it and I can hear things in my mind that I would like to play, but I have to play something else first. I have to feel good playing it. I have to want to go to work at night. If I don't want to go to work, then I don't want to play anything. Some things just don't make me want to play. Like bass players: there's a whole movement in jazz with bass players. I can't play with them anymore, because they make me play a certain way, you know, because after playing with Ron Carter and those people, they play the best of that style, and I don't want to play with them anymore. They play a certain way, they play out of a certain feeling for the bass, which is beautiful. But I don't want to be made to play that way anymore. Because if I play that way, I'm going to keep playing that way and I'm not going to play any different, you know. My whole background has been that every time I hear something, I want to play something better, I want to play something that's going to keep making me feel good. I guess that's ego, you know, because I like to feel good. I have no desire to communicate something to an audience that says that I'm above it all, that I'm above the decadence of rhythm. Everything is an influence. I can't go out and listen to a record, I play what I want to hear, to produce what I think other people would like to hear that they're not hearing. I've always been a romantic in the sense that I've always wanted to let other people feel things. Well, jazz is such a bad word, and rock is such a bad word. All those things are so limiting, and commercial music is such a bad word, all the words are really bad. And there's another sound that's going to happen and that's what I want to be a part of. Because I basically don't like white people, you know, and that's basically what it is, yes. My father and mother-they never told me what to do, see, they never said I had to do this or I had to be that. They never told me how to act. They never told me to be polite. And I'm still learning how to act. In a way, I wish they had told me how to act; in a way I'm glad they didn't. Because the way I wish they had is because I'm having trouble adjusting to myself. And when I say I wish they did, it's because I wish I didn't have the trouble. I'm going to get it sooner or later. If you were left alone and grew up wild in society, pretty soon, things would start hitting you. My mother and father broke up. My mother had custody of me. And she was so intent on not going on welfare and on making her own way, that she went out and she was working two jobs, you know, for me and for herself. Most of the time, I was left by myself and she wanted to further herself, so she went away to school; she went away to school from Monday to Friday and she'd come back on weekends, so all that time I was by myself, you know. I entertained myself, you know, and so I spent a lot of time with my father; he was a bachelor at this time, and was making gigs and things, and so I'd go with him, on the scene, you know, with his friends. He had more or less to do with my seeing how not to be used by other people, because my father is a very easy-going guy, you know, and he always told me things like, "Don't worry about anything, whatever happens to me, don't worry about me, whatever happens to me. I want you not to have any bitterness." I would see him get-like I've seen him rise up to a certain position, like his day job, because he always had a day job in the Post Office, and then he lost that job and went down, and that hurt me very much. And these things always affected me, and I was never going to let myself get in that position of being at the mercy of other people. And so from that he rose up again to where he is today. He's got a really great gig, and he's in charge of people, and so forth. He's working for the Veterans Administration. I'm very proud of both my mother and father. He rocks around. We were like brothers. Sagittarius. I'm my biggest obstacle, you know, because I have an image of myself, you know, that image _____ me up sometimes. I got a friend who can roll his stomach. Q: Does it make a noise when he does it? A: When my mother would go to school from Monday to Wednesday, she'd leave on Monday morning, and Monday afternoon I was on the bus going away, to New York. And I'd be here 'till Friday morning; I'd come right back and she'd come in Friday night and she'd say, "How was your week?," and I'd say, "Oh-" When I was little, I used to count the cars that went by, and listen to the sound. The sound of everything makes it. I could spend a week in my apartment by myself, just doing what I have to do without communicating with other people, and that doesn't help a marriage. Q: What makes you feel good beside your music? A: Music. Q: Besides that? A: Besides music, watching two women make it together. That really turns me on. Q: Really? A: Oh, man. Q: You're serious? A: Yes. That's a gas when you see it. Q: What are your other interests? (Laughter) Do you have any hobbles? A: I like to cheat at pool while watching two women make it in a Ferrari. Nobody around, there's nobody I want to hear in person except Stravinsky. The only thing I like to see is ballet. That's what I like to do. The film I want to do would be like filming a ballet of something that someone has choreographed to something that I write. I had seen it, you know, and one day I saw it in a music store, a music book store, and I went in, and I started reading it, you know, because the guys in there looked so like "What are you doing in here?" So-I'll show them. I know something about-I can look studious. I started reading this, and no, just because- Q: Satyricon? A: Yes. This friend of mine, the guy who wrote a story, he was telling me that in the movie, everybody in the movie is a cartoon, you know, they look like characters, and so forth. The only true people in the film, the way Fellini did it, are the black people. Q: No kidding. A: No kidding. Satyricon. Q: I went to see that last night and they were sold out. I went right up to the box office- A: Right. But the only true people, and every time you see a black person's face, they're laughing as if to say, what the ____ are these white people doing, you know. This is what's happening, this is what I feel. But anyway, it's going to take somebody with a knowledge of the whole scene, of the past in classical, the past in jazz, the future in classical, the future in jazz, the future in rock, to put it all together, because all this ____ now is chaotic-I'm going to try. The thing that's happening now, it's all dominated by black culture. Everything on TV is black, if you really want to look at it, if you can really understand what I mean. Musically, it's all black. Some day, Otto Preminger might come and ask me to do a movie, and I'd say no. I don't like background music. And like many interviews, lots of times, the interviewer would ask a question and the person who is being interviewed would answer something else. I don't want to explain what I'm trying to do or get across. I found out something else when I was talking about how white people identify, can identify with something that they don't know anything about, that's the reason why performers, rock performers, make all the money and are more accepted, because the audience that has all the money is white. The white audience can look up, you know, listen to a record and say, "Gee, that could be me", right? Well, the thing is, what makes it like that is that those musicians and those performers got their thing with the people who are identifying with other black performers. If they didn't identify with black performers, if there was a color barrier, ethnic barrier, they wouldn't be as good as they are. You never hear a white performer say to a black performer, "How are you doing, boy?" Because they know a black performer doesn't like to hear that. You know, people in general don't know what offends a black person, because they never took the time or the patience to find out. But black people know what offends white people. They know everything about white people because they've always had to live in white surroundings. So a white performer would never say anything that would offend a fellow black performer because he knows what would offend him, and he doesn't feel funny about relating to a black person. When bebop first started, Dizzy Gillespie and all the guys were singing, you know, they were singing songs. They would sing a few phrases, you know, and then they'd play some more and sing something else. But today some of the jazz musicians are so bound up in ego, you know, that I can imagine when some of the guys hear me sing now, they say I'm copping out, you know what I mean? I'm not taking my lead from white musicians or popular things, but from my background, from Billy Eckstine. When Billy Eckstine first stated, he was also a trumpet player, a trombone player with a band, and his band was the first bebop big band. Nat King Cole-he was a fantastic piano player. He had classic trios in jazz; Ahmad Jamal and all those people are relating to Nat King Cole's group. He had a group with bass, guitar, and piano. He never said anything. It was fantastic. He never sang. He just played. I'm singing because I like to and because I'm developing as a performer. I'd like to see Cecil Taylor play the electric piano. You know, Johnny (McLaughlin) plays so fantastically; you know, I mean we play good together. I could find no other trumpet player that would make me feel like playing after playing with Miles, right? I could find no saxophone player that I like as much and who has as broad a scope as Wayne Shorter. I could find no other bass player in that style, playing like Ron Carter, or another piano player, so I had to find something completely different to throw myself into, instead of trying to carry on that kind of style. It would have been disastrous for me to try to get a group, a quintet, saxophone, and make nice pleasant records. I'd like to be able for people to say, yeah, that's great, you know, but I'm not going out of my way to do it. Any woman that tells you that she wants-wait a minute, any woman that tells you she wants to go out and work is not black because black women, all through history, have worked more than black men. They were the only ones that could get jobs. They had to bring home the pay and the man had to stay home because he couldn't get a job. Somebody came back to me and said, "What are you doing about white guys in your band?" That's such a drag, because like I told other people, it's such a thing now, I'm really in the middle of everything. On one side, I've got black militants, you know, and it should be all black, and the rock musicians don't really consider us rock. You know, we're not trying to be rock. They think we're trying to play up to them, and we're not. And I'm not trying to get away from jazz because I want to make money, and that's not it either. I've got all these things coming down on me. Oh, that's a thing. I like all kinds of food. I'm a food freak, all kinds of stuff, raw fish to Wheaties. I love playing the drums. Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, even my father. I'm not going to let them just be in vain. I'm not going to let the black experience be in vain.

Oh, he wasn't shy in a article that was published in Musician!

No, I believe the fresh sound stuff was recorded by Howard Rumsey at the Lighthouse earlier in the engagement. I've listened to every note that Blue Note recorded for these sessions (32 tracks total I think) and none of the tracks are the same as what is heard on the Fresh Sound CD (or the prior LP issues on various label) I really should look this up, but I'm pretty sure that the FS cds are from the Both/And in San Francisco.

IN 1969 - the year of the Moonwalk, Woodstock, and the miracle Mets - music could still, in the quaint but somehow fitting parlance of the day, "blow your mind". For it was the music, not merely its packaging and technology, that was new. And nobody's music was more mind-blowing or barrier-breaking - or newer - than Lifetime's. With an instrumentation that had long been associated with mundanely funky organ trios, drummer Tony Williams, guitarist John McLaughlin, and organist Larry Young stunningly accomplished what a few other bands (notably the Free Spirits, with Larry Coryell on guitar, flutist Jeremy Steig's Jeremy and the Satyrs, and vibist Gary Burton's groups featuring Coryell) had rather timidly attempted before them - they truly electrified jazz. And though jazz's primer mover, Miles Davis, had used electric instruments and funk and rock rhythms as far back as 1967 (with Tony Williams on drums), Lifetime was the first to join jazz's spontaneity with rock's jolting energy. The original Lifetime was together less than two years, during which time they created a rapid-fire, mood-shifting, profoundly ear-splitting, sometimes silly, altogether unique sound. Each member was a risk taking virtuoso; Williams and Young had already expanded the vocabularies of their instruments, while McLaughlin clearly aspired to do the same. Beyond three galvanic but occasionally uneven and technically flawed records, the legacy of the original Lifetime was a new musical hybrid. Apres Lifetime I, le deluge of fusion, with John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, the idiom's first supergroup. At 23, and looking younger, the frighteningly gifted Tony Williams generated the power plant that was Lifetime, setting the pace and establishing the direction in much the way he had for five years with Miles Davis. Small, wiry, and handsome, he trashed his compact kit with heavy parade band sticks, thus making his small drums sound considerably larger. Driving the beat with his left foot (the hi-hat), he mixed single-roll fusillades with whip-lashing cymbal crashes while unleashing depth charges on his undersized bass drum. His feet danced on the pedals in heel-toe/heel-toe rhythm as he flayed his fast crash cymbal between the off-beats. In an interview with fellow guitarist Robert Fripp in the July 1982 issue of Musician, John McLaughlin recalled in awe his former leader's blurring cross-rhythms and their effect on his own playing: "Tony plays with the time like I've never heard anybody play with the time. You have to learn to think like he does, you have to learn his conception of time because it's impeccable...and very stimulating. Because one of the things I learned from Tony was about breathing, breathing in time. And Miles is a master of that way of playing." McLaughlin, then 27, wielded (if memory serves), a well-seasoned, psychedelically repainted Fender Jaguar. The burly 29-year-old Young (aka Khalid Yasin), sat imperiously behind his keyboard, sometimes sustaining white noise or piercing, Sun Ra-like chords in the canine register (devices he now and again overworked). Young's washes of colors and propulsive bass lines were a spur to McLaughlin, who culminated his long, singing, midnight-lightning runs (Tal Farlow meets Jimi Hendrix) by bending, then snapping, a blue note's spine. Less staggering were the leader's vocals. Wispy, off-pitch, and not a little affected - all hail Bob Dylan for "democratizing" pop singing - Tony's little-boy-lost renderings of his or McLaughlin's corny lyrics (which were not entirely devoid of a certain impudent charm) was populism at its most ill-advised. Happily, the vocalizing was quickly done and Lifetime was into another furious, extended Jam. A CHILD prodigy, Williams was born in Chicago (Dec. 12, 1945) and raised in Boston, the son of a club date tenor saxophonist. At age nine, Tony began studying percussion with the estimable Alan Dawson, by the time he was 13 he was a frequent sitter-in at local clubs, especially with organ trios like the one led by Johnny "Hammond" Smith. In a 1979 down beat interview, Williams told writer Lee Underwood: "Playing with those organ trios is where I originally got the organ-guitar-drums format idea for Lifetime." As a 15-year-old he broadened his musical horizons by gigging regularly in the Boston area with master multi-reedman Sam Rivers. A year later, Williams was in the house rhythm section of the Boston club Connelly's, where he backed, among other visiting headliners, Jackie McLean, the acid-toned hard-bop alto saxophonist. Amazed by the teenager's musical prowess, McLean brought Williams to New York in December, 1962. Williams played in McLean's group that supplied the music for The Connection; after the off-Broadway show closed, the altoist started putting together a new working band. In February, 1963, Williams made his first recordings. The Jackie McLean LP these sessions yielded, Vertigo, did not reach American vinyl until 17 years later, in Blue Note's short-lived "Classic" series. McLean's One Step Beyond had long been considered William's debut album. In May, Williams ascended to the most prestigious of drum thrones when he joined the Miles Davis quintet. During their five years together, Miles' tensible rhythm section of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Williams stretched supersonic 4/4 time with breathtaking ease. Like his storied predecessor Philly Joe Jones, Williams kept the quintet's engine in high gear - and Miles in the driver's seat. The link between Elvin Jones' polyrhythmic superimpositions and Sonny Murray's eruptively free style, Williams came up with an alternative system of rhythmic organization. Instead of maintaining a steady ching-ching-a-ching on his ride cymbal (which, with its absence of overring, was instantly identifiable), he crisply varied the beat with flair and fire. His bass drum work was equally innovative, in that he popularized a 14" x 18" model, the smallest available; more important, instead of feavily muffling the bass drum (which, given its size, would have rendered it nearly inaudible), he tuned it to sound as resonant as his tom-toms. Williams played the bass drum so adroitly that he soounded as if he had a third hand. During his tenure with Miles, Tony was also part of Blue Note's burgeoning stable of avant-boppers and free players, recording with such bellwethers as Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers and Grachan Moncur. He also cut two wide-ranging, experimental albums under his own name, Life Time (1964) and Spring (1965), which were among Blue Note's earliest forays into freer jazz. As the '60s drew to a close, the "rock revolution" was in full cry; suddenly rock 'n' roll instrumentalists, led by Jimi Hendrix, were being taken seriously. Having spent more than five years with Miles, Tony Williams was ready to front his own group - and rock figured prominently in his plans. Asked in a 1972 interview if Hendrix had influenced his decision to go electric, Williams told me: "Subconsciosly it was Hendrix, but counsciously it was the Beatles. I was one of the first of the people I know to dig them. Back in '64 people thought you were jive if you liked them but I dug their songs, their singing, and their crazy energy. I'd wanted to eventually go that way with other bands. You know, it's just knowing what you want and finding the best way to get it." What Williams wanted was a guitarist he had never laid his eyes on - John McLaughlin. In an interview with the German writer Joachim Berendt, which appears in The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion (1982; Lawrence Hill and Co., Inc.), McLaughlin recalled how he joined Lifetime: "In November, 1968, I got a call from (bassist) Dave Holland, (who) said, 'Tony Williams wants to talk to you.' Tony said he would like to form a band, and he would like to have me. Jack DeJohnette had played him a tape he had done with me a few months before, while he was in London with Bill Evans. So I said: 'When you are ready, just call me.' "In early 1969 he called again. So I left the first week of February for New York. Two days later I was in the studio with Miles (for the trumpeter's first fusion date, In a Silent Way ... afterwards Miles asked me to join his group. Imagine - I had to turn down Miles! Because it was more important for me to go with Tony Williams. I had compositions. And I realized, with Tony I would have more of a chance to play them than with Miles." In fact, McLaughlin was the ideal man for the job. Born in a small town in Yorkshire, England (Jan. 4, 1942), McLaughlin was encouraged by his mother, an amateur violinist, to begin playing the piano at age nine. Two years later, he took up the guitar after receiving one as a gift from his brother. McLaughlin's earliest influences were such vital bluesmen as Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, but it wasn't long before he was investigating flamenco and jazz - Django Reinhardt, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane were among his early favorites. Moving to London in the early '60s, McLaughlin became part of the more jazz-inspired wing of the British blues/R & B revival. He was a member of Georgie Fame's Blue Flames, the Graham Bond Organization (with future rock demigods Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker), and Brian Auger's Trinity. He also played on recording sessions for Petula Clark, Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, which McLaughlin found so onerous that he bolted for Germany to make free music with multi-instrumentalist Gunther Hampel. Back in England, McLaughlin met avant-garde reedman John Surman, with whom he recorded Extrapolation (Dave Holland was the bassist) shortly before setting out for America. Like his Lifetime colleagues, the late Larry Young had also been a leader. For nearly a decade he'd made records under his own name, first for Prestige, followed by a series of challenging LPs for Blue Note. Born in Newark (Oct. 7, 1940), Young studies piano as a child before switching to organ at 14, when his father opened a hometown club with an organ on its bandstand. The instrument was at the time enjoying great popularity, particularly in the urban black ghettos. Records by Jimmy Smith and a host of blues preachers (Brother Jack McDuff, Baby Face Willette, Johnny "Hammond" Smith) were jukebox staples, and organ trios, with either guitar or tenor saxophone plus drums, flourished. Young, however, had little use for the grits 'n' gravy school. If Jimmy Smith was the Charlie Parker of the Hammond, Young was, as Jack McDuff acknowledged, its Coltrane. Wrote Michael Cuscuna, "Larry had a sense for voicings and a touch that had previously been thought only possible on the piano. Yet he was a total organist ... He literally redefined the organ without denying an iota of its identity." Interestingly, just two weeks before Lifetime's first recording sessions, Young jammed in the Studio with Jimi Hendrix; eleven years later, "Young/Hendrix" made it onto Nine to the Universe, one of several posthumous Hendrix LPs on Reprise. ON MAY 26, 1969, Lifetime began work on their debut album. Two days later, they completed what would be the milestone double-set, Emergency!, reissued here in its entirety. For all its unharnessed power, Emergency! was badly botched, as McLaughlin lamented to Berendt in their recent conversation: "it was one of the shocks of my life when we made that first record...and when they mixed it and the sound was terrible...I realized they had no respect for the music and the musicians." Yet the poor balance and rampant distortion actually enhanced the trio's uniqueness. The inadvertent wall of distorted sound added a level of raw intensity that punk bands from the Stooges to the Sex Pistols only dreamed of. (As if to winkingly comment on the dearth of production values, all of Emergency! cover art was well out-of-focus, and an inside liner close-up bathed the leader in a sickly green half-light.) Emergency! was issued in the early fall to glowing reviews. If the four sides did not abound with indelible melodies, the energy was relentless. After tearing through the thematic material (all by Williams and/or McLaughlin - the latter used the pseudonym "A. Hall" - except for one piece each by Carla Bley and Dave Herman), Lifetime sprung into their patented overdrive. The title cut (with its savage coda - listen closely to someone, presumably the leader, whooping joyously in the left channel), and "Spectrum" (McLaughlin had previously given it a much milder reading on Extrapolation) were high-voltage improvisations. Best of all was an explosive recasting of Carla Bley's "Vashkar", which totally departed from Paul Bley's off-center, mysterioso 1963 original. Considering the theme and more than doubling the tempo, Lifetime lifted off into a space where the music wasn't about jazz or rock, but about pure electronics. Only the dauntless Hendrix had travelled here - and he had done so alone. Numbers that started at a less rampaging clip, like the three stabs at pop ("Where?", "Beyond Games", and "Via the Spectrum Road", plus "Sangria for Three", with its brief, eerie falsetto wailing), were inevitably kicked into double-time by the urgent CHIK-CHIK-CHIK-CHIK of Williams' hi-hats. It should not go unnoticed that the closest thing to a drum solo over these four sides is "Something Spiritual" by Dave Herman, a 6/8 vamp over which Tony's razor-sharp phrasing and controlled juggling of the time recall his artistry on Miles Davis' "Nefertiti". But while Emergency! was snapped up by open-eared young jazz fans and some progressive rock enthusiasts, Lifetime's opening salvo failed to catch on in "Woodstock nation", where Polydor Records hoped it would reach. As fall became winter, Lifetime was booked into jazz clubs and rock halls alike. Althought many rock fans were generally positive about the group (notwithstanding the boos at Boston's Tea Party when Lifetime opened for the Who), it's fair to say that most rockers couldn't quite follow Lifetime's direction. For better or worse, the band was ahead of its time, which posed problems for their record company and management. As Tony Williams himself mused in a 1970 down beat interview with Pat Cox: "... the rock musicians don't really consider us rock. You know, we're not trying to be rock. They think we're trying to play up to them, and we're not. And I'm not trying to get away from jazz because I want to make money ... I've got all these things coming down on me." In February, 1970, Lifetime returned to the studio to begin cutting Turn It Over. Though the sound was cleaner (there was even a joking reference to its "mellowness" in the album credits), the tunes were considerably shorter and the repertoire and performances did not, for the most part, approach Emergency!'s peaks. The significant exception was "To Whom It May Concern - Them amd Us", a droning Chick Corea blues lick in charging 6/8 (shades of Mingus' "Better Git It In Your Soul") whose two parts dovetailed. Lifetime burned as brightly as they ever did here with McLaughlin's lower register statement of the theme suggesting a giant undertow. A hard-swinging "Big Nick", the Larry Young feature that often closed live sets, is also included (though a bit more stretching out would have been nice); as is McLaughlin's "A Famous Blues", with vocals by both the composer (the "trippy" sotto voce spoken parts) and the leader. When Lifetime performed this selection live in the early days, McLaughlin's recitation concerned being "lost in North Vietnam". By the time of this reading, however, McLaughlin's priorities had shifted to more spiritual matters, witnessed by such lines as, "See in the purple orchard of yesterday/the light of today". Williams' line was earthier: "Take me home with you," he implored. "Let's go to your house." (Sexual chess games were a favorite Lifetime pastime; e.g., Emergency!'s "Via the Spectrum Road", wherein a club owner is cuckolded, and "Beyond Games".) In the spring of 1970, Lifetime enlisted the services of bassist-vocalist Jack Bruce, McLaughlin's old mate from the Graham Bond Organization. Bruce, of course, had been one-third of Cream, rock's first "supergroup", which had flamed out the year before. The addition of Bruce was presumably seen as a means of attracting rock fans, as well as a way to give Lifetime a heavier bottom. The move did not succeed on either count. Though an adventuresome bassist by rock standards, Bruce's busy style was of little help to Lifetime. And, for whatever reason, he never lifted his famous tenor voice in song on Turn It Over, althought he did contribute an uncredited vocal on the pretentious "Two Worlds", which was included in the third Lifetime LP (and first sans McLaughlin), Ego. The quartet performs "Vuelta Abajo" (recorded in July, 1970), a ponderous, amelodic number redolent of Hendrix's "Purple Haze". (During this period Bruce also took part, as did McLaughlin, in Carla Bley's and Paul Haines' unprecedented Escalator Over the Hill.) IN late 1970, not long after the death of Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin's star was steadily on the rise. His playing had grown dramatically during his Lifetime stint, thanks in no small part to his being pushed to the limit every night by Tony Williams juggernaut. His confidence further buuoyed by encouragement from his idol Miles Davis to form his own band, McLaughlin left Lifetime in early '71, amid some rumblings of strained egos. Thus, the book was closed on the Tony Williams Lifetime, editions 1 and 1A. McLaughlin had recently embraced the teachings of guru Sri Chinmoy, who gave him the devotional name "Mahavishnu" - ergo, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which within a year was filling rock venues, indoors and out, around the world. Better drilled and even louder than Lifetime, but not nearly as jarring, the five-piece Orchestra drew heavily upon the blissfully droning timbres and complex meters of Indian music and the thunderous dynamics of rock. The unisons of McLaughlin and electric violinist Jerry Goodman soared, and drummer Billy Cobham, whose techniques surpassed Williams (though his overall musicality did not), was a powerhouse. But above all, the Mahavishnu Orchestra's leader was the charismatic frontman that Lifetime had lacked. Whereas McLaughlin sold records by the truckload during the '70s, Larry Young's attempts to crossover - two ersatz funk jobs for Arista - failed dismally. In November, 1977, Young made an enthralling duo album for Muse with drummer/pianist/composer Joe Chambers called Double Exposure. It was to be his final recording; four months later, Young died, at age 38. The Tony Williams Lifetime carried on in several increasingly rockish incarnations, none of which clicked for either Polydor or Columbia. After the demise of Lifetime V in 1977, Williams was a member of both V.S.O.P. (a reunion of four-fifths of the Miles Davis quintet of the mid-'60s, with Freddie Hubbard on trumpet) and the Great Jazz Trio (with Hank Jones and Ron Carter). He also recorded and/or gigged with Sonny Rollins, Weather Report, Michael Mantler, Terumasa Hino, McCoy Tyner, and Wynton Marsalis - and John McLaughlin. His last LP for Columbia, 1979's The Joy of Flying, included an eagerly awaited but ultimately disappointing duet with Cecil Taylor. Following a period of bandleading inactivity in the early eighties, during which he expanded his musical horizons by studying composition at the University of California-Berkeley with professor Robert Stine and Dr. Robert Greenberg, Williams re-emerged in 1985. Since then he has fronted a roaring, modern hard-bop quintet, featuring such youbger lions as trumpeter Wallace Roney, saxophonist Bill Pierce, and pianist Mulgrew Miller. While this band has recorded a series of worthy albums, none has had the same shattering impact as Williams first LP. But that was several Lifetimes ago - in 1969 - when the New York Mets ruled, and the Tony Williams Lifetime sounded like no other band in the world. Before or since. by James Isaacs Album Info: Emergency! Turn It Over

Jessica Williams My 3 nights with Tony Williams Anthony Tilman Williams played drums for Miles Davis in the '60s. The group also featured pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassist Ron Carter. Tony went on to lead his own trio featuring John McLaughlin on guitar and B-3 organist Larry Young. He died in 1997 at the age of 51. I played with Tony for three nights at a club in San Francisco called 'Bajones'. It was in the Mission and I think it was on Valencia. Our bassist for those three nights was Wyatt 'Bull' Reuther, a fine musician. I think the bill was called something totally contrived and silly... 'Williams versus Williams' (how embarrassing). But that wasn't the band's idea. I was very blonde and very scared, but I think I did OK. It was certainly not my best work. I was physically too far away from him (and Bajones was not known for its great acoustics). Tony was clear across the stage from me, and I really couldn't hear myself at all, because he was, well, a bit loud. But he was 'good' loud, if that makes any sense. And, if my memory serves correctly, he was using a 22-inch bass drum, and pretty hefty sticks. I do remember that he was using a lot of 'matched-grip' techniques. Half the drummers in the Bay Area were gathered at his end of the stage. He was trying out new things on those nights, and some of the tempos fell. That usually drives me crazy, but it's sometimes hard to tell who (if anyone) is responsible. It could have been (and probably was) me. I just know it was a great honor and the thrill of a lifetime to play three entire nights of music with the great Tony Williams. He was such a fine man, a very soft-spoken gentleman. His work with Miles, for me, is pure genius. I have never heard drumming like that, ever. It'll never happen again. Tony was a supernova. A giant. One day shortly before we played together, he asked me to come to his house (in Marin County, CA, I think) for a short rehearsal. He told me he wanted to play Coltrane's Moment's Notice. He said he had always wanted to play that tune. I said that I'd do my best to accommodate him (it wasn't exactly my favorite type of tune). Fortunately, I had the Coltrane album Blue Trane, and I knew the tune and the changes. So we worked on that for a while on his upright. His silver pearl trap set was in his living room. At one point, I mentioned to him that I was fascinated by a particular effect he had gotten on the Miles Davis album Filles de Kilimanjaro.. I said it sounded (and somehow looked) like birds all flying together out of the bush on the plains of Africa (it was a very visual sound to me, achieved by the hi hat alone, and it was just brilliant... it had always left me stunned). He sat and showed me how he had done it, with his left hand. It wasn't a lick. Tony didn't play licks. He couldn't quite duplicate it because he wasn't playing. For him, playing was like it is to me; you can never tell others what it is you're doing because it's somehow not you doing it. In that living room, just him and I, a moment came into existence for me that would never ever leave me. It was late afternoon, the sun was coming through the leaves and dappling the walls and floor with a serene movement of light and shadow. Tony was relaxed totally, and he made me feel totally relaxed too. He carried all this Music in his soul and in his every movement, just like I do. I don't know if he knew how great his gift was. I sure didn't know back then how great my gift was, and I think most of us only 'get it' later in life. I just know I remember this one slice of sunlight and shadow, of Tony, sticks in hand, a smile on his beautiful face, sitting there in his house and just being. After we played that three night engagement, I only saw him once face to face before he passed away. He was with the great Bobby Hutcherson at Kimball's in San Francisco. He sent me Christmas cards every year, though. I wanted to make a CD with him when I was working for Jazz Focus Records, and Tony intervened during the negotiations with his agent, offering to do the date for half his usual fee, just because he 'wanted to play with Jessica'. The hotshot that headed up that (now defunct) company said that it was 'too much money' (it wasn't), and so the date never happened. Maybe it's just as well. I have nothing but the memories, and they are enough. (Said hotshot went on to get into serious trouble with the law, and was a criminal of the worst sort. My tenure with him is happily over, and my Music is healthier now that I'm away from such negativity. I'm glad that Tony wasn't exposed to that.) I loved Tony. I deeply loved him, and not a day goes by that I don't miss him and think of him. One more miracle in my life, a life full of miracles. There are moments like this and they are frozen forever in amber for me. These are the moments of my life, and I wonder at them sometimes; I have difficulty believing that they really happened. They did, though (thank goodness there were witnesses, or I'd doubt my own memories!) and I am eternally grateful for the opportunities. Copyright © 2007, Jessica Williams. Design by Andreas Viklund.

PAS Hall of Fame Tony Williams By Rick Mattingly Relaxing in his Knoxville hotel room after his PASIC '83 clinic, Tony Williams reflected on what he hoped he was giving to other drummers. "I would like to be able to give off the same things that inspired me to really love the instrument and love music," he said. "That was one of the things that impressed me when I was a child and saw the people I thought were great. One thing I noticed was that they inspired others. If you can do that, that's a lot." In a life cut tragically short in February 1997 by a fatal heart attack, Tony Williams inspired countless drummers to strive for excellence and find their own voices, as he had done throughout his remarkable career. Born in Chicago in 1945, Williams grew up in Boston and began studying with Alan Dawson at age eleven. "Mr. Dawson went out of his way to encourage me, help me and see that I had opportunities to develop my meager skills," Williams said last year when Dawson was elected to the PAS Hall of Fame. "On Saturday nights he would drive one hundred miles out of his way to pick me up in Roxbury, drive to Cambridge to let me perform with his trio and gain valuable experience, and then return me safely home. I was twelve years old." Williams spent his early years studying the great drummers who had defined the art. "When I was a kid, I would buy every record I could find with Max Roach on it and then I would play exactly what he played on the record - solos and everything," Williams said in Knoxville. "I also did that with drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, Roy Haynes and all the drummers I admired. People try to get into drums today, and after a year they're working on their own style. You must first spend a long time doing everything that the great drummers do. Not only do you learn how to play something, but you also learn why it was played." While in his teens Williams was gigging with saxophonists Sam Rivers and Jackie McLean. When he was seventeen, Williams was hired by trumpeter Miles Davis, becoming part of a quintet that included saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter. Even in his early performances and recordings with Davis, Williams proved that he had not only mastered the jazz drumming vocabulary of the masters who had preceded him but that he was ready to take jazz drumming to the next level. Among his stylistic characteristics were the freeing up of the hi-hat from its traditional role of maintaining beats two and four and a more pulse-oriented approach to the ride cymbal, which foreshadowed the use of straight-eighth rock rhythms in jazz. Many consider Williams the first "fusion" drummer. Williams recorded several albums with Davis that are considered classics, including Four & More, Sorcerer, Nefertiti and In A Silent Way. During the six years he was with Davis, Williams also released two solo albums, Lifetime and Spring, on which he revealed his affinity for the avant-garde style of jazz. During those years Williams also appeared on Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch albums. After leaving Davis, Williams formed the band Lifetime with guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young, releasing the album Emergency. Combining the technique and finesse of jazz with the energy and volume of rock, Lifetime paved the way for such bands as McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea's Return to Forever. Lifetime endured through several personnel changes, and on albums such as Believe It and Million Dollar Legs Williams became increasingly involved with rock and funk rhythms. But as with his jazz playing, he was never merely imitative. "On those first records with Lifetime, I was just trying to do something that no one else had done," Williams said in 1983. "I had been hearing things that other people had done, and I thought, 'Wow, if they can do that, then I can do this.' Also, I didn't want to repeat what I had already done." Whatever style Williams was playing, he sounded totally convincing. "That comes from an aggressiveness, and a willingness to be a part of the music," he said. "I'm not playing a role. Whatever style I play, I play the style rather than attempt to play. It's two different sounds. You can hear when jazz drummers attempt to play rock, or rock drummers try to play jazz. It's not quite there. You have to really work at that." In the mid-'70s, Williams returned to his mainstream jazz roots with VSOP, which reunited him with Hancock, Shorter and Carter, along with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Soon after, Williams assembled The Great Jazz trio with Carter and pianist Hank Jones. During the early '80s, Williams devoted a lot of time to studying composition. The results of that study were revealed on a series of albums on the Blue Note label beginning with Foreign Intrigue in 1985 and continuing with Civilization, Angel Street, Native Heart, The Story of Neptune and Tokyo Live. Williams maintained a working band that featured such "young lions" as trumpeter Wallace Roney, saxophonists Donald Harrison and Bill Pierce, and bassist Charnett Moffett. Williams' final album, released just weeks before his death, was titled Wilderness and featured Hancock, saxophonist Michael Brecker, guitarist Pat Metheny and bassist Stanley Clarke, along with a full orchestra. It was his most fully realized statement as a composer. But it is his drumming that Williams will be best remembered for, and drummers such as Terry Bozzio, Bill Bruford, Billy Cobham, Vinnie Colaiuta, Peter Erskine, David Garibaldi, Steve Jordan, Jim Keltner, Michael Shrieve, Steve Smith, Charlie Watts and Dave Weckl have named Williams as an important influence on their playing. Williams himself always looked for ways in which he could improve. "I've always been a student," he said in Knoxville. "Learning has always been exciting for me. "Drummers spend a long time not feeling good on their instruments because of the things they don't want to do. Everyone has prejudices and fears. But anyone with experience knows that if you take a couple of years to study something, several years later you will be very glad that you spent that amount of time improving yourself. Sometimes you don't realize how much good something has done you until years later. "It seems to me that playing jazz gives a drummer more sensitivity for the drumset and much more of a rounded concept. It's hard to explain that without someone feeling like I'm trying to say that I want them to play jazz. I'm not. I'm saying I want them to play the drums better. It just so happens that if you learned a lot about jazz, practiced it for two or three years and really tried to be good at it, you would become a better drummer."

Sons of Miles TONY WILLIAMS: Finding His Beautiful Vase by Mike Zwerin 20 November 1998 After considering the question, he says he never had to earn money making music he did not want to make. Sometimes music forced him to be with people he did not want to be with, but he won't hesitate to tell you he's fortunate. Without sounding pompous, he would even say he's blessed. Tony Williams of Pacifica, California, is not the starving artist type. It's a two-way blessing. He wants people to feel that drums are the most beautiful instrument in the world, as romantic as violins, heroic as trumpets. It's not a matter of style, of who plays what how. The role is more important than the actor. Drummers with "style" can produce noises that make people hate the drums. When he started to play seriously in Boston at the age of 12, he tried to sound like Max Roach, Art Blakey and his other heros. Exactly like them. When he joined Miles Davis at the age of 17 (sic!), he was still trying to sound like them. He was still doing it at the age of 50. He would not be who he is without those he learned from. It's a matter of universality. As he learned technique, he also learned that the drums are more important than he is. He compares the learning process to a dusty living room. You're comfortable there, it's home, but one day you see something in a corner that attracts your eye. You never saw it before. To get to it, you have to move everything and clean the dust. Williams cleaned and cleaned and found his beautiful vase. Improvising is about being able to clean your dust, to find the vase and recognize that it is beautiful in itself. Williams was in Paris to record a string quartet by and with Michel Petrucciani (with Dave Holland on bass). If you take what he says at face value, and there is no reason not to, Williams should be the perfect choice to play your jazz string quartet. He knows what you want, no matter how unusual, and how to get it maybe better than you do without imposition and still sound like the one-and-only. A short man, he somehow manages to tower over you anyway. Confidence can be measured. Music exists in time, which should not be killed. Killing time is like spare time, a waste of time. Williams relates to time as value. The first time he played a real drum kit was as a pre-teen with his father Tillman, a saxophonist, in a Boston club. This was a child who played an instrument in public the first time he ever touched one. He firmly believes that whatever you want, you can make it happen. The first time he ever heard Miles Davis live, he asked him: "Mr Davis, can I sit in with your band?" Miles suggested the child just sit and listen first. Jackie McLean had asked Tony's mother for permission to bring him to New York. He was 16. One year later there was this dreamed-of call, I don't believe there was ever a jazz musician before 1991 who did not fantasize it: "Miles is calling. He wants to talk to you." Williams, who was back in Boston, took the call, and....zap! He played on "Seven Steps to Heaven," "In a Silent Way" and many others advancing the vocabulary of the rhythm function by leaps and bounds along with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter. In 1965, he had a great idea. "Miles," he said. "Why don't we open for the Beatles?" Miles said something like "What??!!" Williams had a Beatles poster on his wall. T O N Y W I L L I A M S In 1969, he formed Lifetime, one of the first fusion groups, bringing John McLaughlin from England for the purpose. With Larry Young on organ, the band was so far ahead of its time it got left behind. Forming an organ trio might at first seem like a step backward but Young was no ordinary organist, and Williams could not see forming another Miles Davis band because it could not be any better. People did not understand. A bitter undertone surfaces when he talks about Lifetime. He'd have "done it differently" today, kept more authority, been less democratic: "It was my vision, and I let other guys take control. And I learned something else - people are not necessarily affected by excellence." But in general he does not believe that a sound psyche is necessary for excellence. He has known people who were "as crazy as loons, who thought that the locusts were coming," make excellent music: "Music can transcend such things. It's magic." However that's not the case with him. If he's not happy and "comfy," he just sits and stares at walls. At times like this, he won't even listen to music. Music he hasn't made irritates him. It's not a matter of style here either. There's room for all styles; he's a U2 fan. Unfortunately - and here he becomes grim and caustic - there are "musical fascists who deal in fear, who tell people that this or that music is dangerous." He could name names but he won't: "There's a clique in New York who are trying to rewrite history because, although they are famous, it's a marketing gambit and they don't really play all that well. They just know how to look and talk a certain way. They go around rewriting history by preaching and telling people what to listen to and not listen to. They have no talent of their own so the easiest way for them to attract attention is to say outrageous things. 'Did you hear what he said?'" An optimist by nature, Williams does not believe in the good old days. He will not hold on to the past, he can envision the day when he will no longer play the drums. The drummer never stops playing back there - there are aching feet, ankles, thighs, hips and elbows. He cannot imagine himself doing that forever. Plus, he loves being in his home south of San Francisco, even when he's staring at the walls. He's mounting a campaign to build a career as a film-music composer, something that has fascinated him ever since he saw "Gunfight At The OK Corral" at the age of 12 (he saw it seven times). How do film composers make music that remains cohesive through love scenes, chase scenes and murder scenes so that it still sounds like the same piece of music? How is it possible to enhance images with music? He started composing when he was with Miles Davis, who encouraged sidemen to contribute to his repertoire. He has written the music for the six Blue Note albums he has made under his own name. When it finally hit him that Miles was gone, something changed. It was going to be tough for him to live in a world without Miles Davis: "When I was like 13, he was already teaching kids like me about self-esteem, to fight for our rights. That was his real genius, as much as the music. He was really the first one. He was doing it before that woman on the bus, before Martin Luther King. When some cops beat him up in front of Birdland - when was it, 1959? - he took them to court and won the case. Self-esteem. That's what he represented to kids like me. He carried himself like he was king of the world. "Miles was the point man. You know, in the army, when the scouts go out, there's always one guy 20 or 30 yards up ahead who makes sure the coast is clear. Then he waves the other guys to move up, he tells them it's safe. Miles was the point man who took all the heat. Before I even knew what the term meant, he was my role model." P.S. All hats off to Tony Williams. RIP. Photo: Tony Williams. Credit: Christian Rose

This thread gives me a chance to post this photo I took:

Jon Benitez plays with my buddy, vibes/marimba player Christos Rafalides, in Christos' group : Manhattan Vibes: Manhattan Vibes

Luisito Quintero has played in Jeff "Tain" Watts groups. One group had Tain, Quintero, Paul Bollenback, David Budway, John Benitez and Joe Locke on vibes and Marimba. With the addition of Quintero, the whole band , especially when the marimba was included, took on a whole different approach and direction.

From what I gather..... what Jim said. These are the kind of questions that you should be asking on thevibe.net Nice bunch of serious vibes geeks there!

Sure, no problem.

At Tommy Smith's website, you can now download Free Sheetmusic

I've never heard them and don't think I want to. His book, "There And Back", is a strange read because after the very early 50's, his music is all very commercial and there's not much of it at that.

Have a good day!

Do you listen to KJZZ. Blasie Lantana?

Whenever I have a friend or associate who has made a recording, I always buy it out of my pocket. Usually I do it online before it is "released". I mean if a friend can't gladly buy a copy, who will? Same goes for club dates mostly, but if I take a comp, I make sure I spend my money at the bar or restruant and tip big as I can. A oldtimer taught me that lesson a long time ago. If you don't spend, they will not come.