alocispepraluger102

are you implying that pro football and human beings operate logically?

marty needs a nascar team to fall back on. i vote for pete carroll or bill parcells or lovie.

Thanks, I will! beautifully edited with stunning music. it was a 'ghostworthy' effort, if you get my drift.

Brecker and Coltrane Deaths - The Lessons of Legends By Howard Mandel Copyright © 2007 Howard Mandel It wasn’t until the very last hours of the International Association for Jazz Education’s 34th annual conference weekend, held in midtown hotels in New York City, that news spread of the deaths on Saturday, January 13, of saxophonist Michael Brecker and keyboardist Alice Coltrane. Nearly 10,000 jazz musicians, student instrumentalists, teachers, schools represented by chief administrators, non-profit arts agencies, television broadcasters, radio station directors and programmers, record company executives, website developers and jazz journalists had spent three days, morning past midnight, in special performances, scholarly papers’ presentations, instructional clinics, public interviews, panel discussions, web-site launches, personal networking and the commercial exhibition hall. Conference attendees could easily have had 20 or more quick, intense business and social contacts that Saturday without knowing the extended jazz family was down by two. But I bet we all left the conference sobered by the fullness of Michael Brecker and Alice Coltrane’s particular jazz lives. Michael Brecker, who died of leukemia at age 57, was a hero especially to the kind of high school and college kids who come to New York for IAJE, which brings them together to learn and sets them loose to party with peers from all across the country and the world (French jazz was a special focus of the conference this year, with a special stage, reception and honored profile). Brecker had the amazing finger dexterity, formidable breath control, steely tone, literacy and superlative consistency that can be acquired through the focused study and relentless practice that professional jazz education - if not the old school jazz life - has promoted as key to student’s success. Equal to his technical facility, Brecker had a genuine belief in jazz as art, inspired originally by John Coltrane’s early ’60s records, as well as a realistic sense of his own urban, urbane circumstances. Arriving on the scene at the right time, the late 1960s, from some of the right places (born in Philadelphia, he and his brother, trumpeter Randy, were enrolled in the early jazz program at University of Indiana), he flourished working in the pop-rock-jingle recording studios, playing chorus-length sax solos eventually for international stars like Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel and Aerosmith as well as in festival and concert hall collaborations with mainstream modernists including pianists Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, guitarist Pat Metheny and orchestra leader Claus Ogerman, among others. He and Randy co-owned the New York night club Seventh Avenue South, an electrically-charged jazz joint that hummed with exciting after-hours action. Michael was a crucial member of several cutting-edge ensembles, including vibist Mike Manieri’s all-star Steps Ahead, in which he played the Electric Wind Machine, and the Brecker Brothers Band, in which he updated rhythm ’n’ blues tenor licks with a hard, slick sheen and some tuneful, taut twists. He completed an album for the Heads Up! label just before his death, but his most recent release was Wide Angles, featuring complicated charts for Quindectet (15-pieces). I remember Brecker’s surprise appearance at the climax of Hancock’s Carnegie Hall JVC Jazz Festival concert last summer, in which he blew a super-compressed, energy-packed statement on “One Finger Snap” that must have used every note in every saxophone register three or four tmes, always in alternate sequence, prismatically, with rests and accents perfectly distributed. It was the kind of solo that leaves listeners tempest-tossed, yet enlivened, enlightened, refreshed. Brecker’s solos often squeezed a lot of information into a little space, and gave the sense that they would reveal secrets upon being unfolded. Brecker was in my direct experience (the encounter is reprinted in Future Jazz) was a modest, hardworking man. He’d struggled with his disease for almost three years. He knew his music had won him the love of strangers because thousands of jazz fans volunteered, during his illness, to be tested for the suitability of their bone marrow as transfusion matches with his. He was less appreciated by critics than by music buyers - he won 11 Grammy Awards, but many fewer polls, while his music got deeper over the years, But even those who didn’t ever like his projects respected Michael Brecker’s commitment and artistry. He was a jazzman for today. If the IAJE attendees perhaps thought of Brecker as an icon, idol and big brother, they may have considered Alice Coltrane (neé McLeod) a mother figure who’d been who’d once been the spiritual muse of a jazz giant, a musical god. Her 2004 album Translinear Light, on which she’d played piano, organ and synthesizer (but not harp, her other instrument) was fairly well received, yet she was mostly a legend. She had withdrawn from public performance in the late 1970s to concentrate on operations of a Hindu monestary she had founded in California; when she performed subsequently, it was to benefit her religious activities, or occasionally to accompany her saxophonist son Ravi Coltrane. She typically added serenity, timelessness and airy grace to his grittier, penetrating modal-melodic explorations, and this rare mother-son collaboration was a tender joy to behold. She was 69 when she died, the cause reported as respiratory failure. Of course, both Ravi and Alice were expanding upon the work of John Coltrane, her husband and the father who died when Ravi was two. She was Coltrane’s second wife, marrying him in 1966 after they’d already had two children together, also replacing McCoy Tyner in Coltrane’s touring and recording band. What she offered musically is evident on Coltrane’s ’66 Impulse! album Live at the Village Vanguard Again: waves of oceanic rubato rumbling in support of his relentless, sharklike drives through a ferociously abstract “My Favorite Things” and gorgeously lyrical “Naima.” After John Coltrane’s death in ’67, Alice sustained her career playing with Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Carlos Santana, Frank Lowe and others of Trane’s circle, but her interest in secular music waned until Ravi’s mid ’90s emergence. She did protect John’s legacy and served as executor of his musical estate; in that role, among Alice Coltrane’s great contributions to jazz was her daring decision to have Ornette Coleman compose string parts to dub under Trane’s solos for the posthumous album Infinity. She had a vision - like her husband’s and Coleman’s, too - that stretched well beyond worldly constraints, with enormous compassion. Alice Coltrane, like Michael Brecker, embodied aspects of jazz - values, and experiences -- seldom taught in any school, but essential for those who love the music to at the very least consider. Howard Mandel is president of the Jazz Journalists Association and author of the book Future Jazz.

spring training begins this week!!!!

i dont know, but, damn. my starbucks is closed for the night. first thing in the morning!

the damned dont cry is very interesting music, and little shirley scott on piano! thanks!! i enjoyed this show especially because it covered a very short beautiful(musically) time span, and unfotunately didnt span several generations.

...the artists reflect the times rhey live?

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/496332p-418242c.html

any jonathan schwarz fans here? wnyc saturday afternoons (i enjoy hearing Fred Astaire with Oscar Peterson, Charlie Shavers, Flip Phillips, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown and Alvin Stoller) or (mildred bailey singing alec wilder) or (feinstein with maynard ferguson) :rsly: (barron-haden ruminating on body and soul) http://www.samuelfreedman.com/articles/cul...yt09052003.html

johnny richards and his orchestra-walk softly, run wild

Ohio students accused of faking 'snow day' From WKYC/Cleveland TRENTON -- Two high schoolers are accused of hacking into their school's computer system and canceling school for a snow day. The announcement Sunday night read "Edgewood Schools Closed" when it was really just a one-hour delay. At first school officials thought they hit the wrong button. When a cross check of authorized email addresses exposed two that didn't belong, district officials knew then that their web site had been hacked. District bosses are taking this case very seriously. The two girls, ages 16 and 17, are expected to be formally charged with the hacking incident.

you are being featured tonight. what a beautiful, beautiful player! an instant personal favorite!

the media fawn over sensational people, chew them up and spit them out. then their cameras appear to photograph, and deplore the gore they have in large measure created. the way it is... ...and our rabid eyes pore over every scintilla of it. :rsmile:

a worthy mantler effort on the watt series is the wonderfully depressing 'no answer', the poetry of samuel beckett, with jack bruce, i think, doing the vocals.

for you old-oldtimers, mike francesa on wfan interviewed moose skowron about his close recently deceased friend, hank bauer. i am sure wfan will put it up on the website. if you go back to baseball in the 50's, this interview will move you. (for the first time in 50 years i am looking forward to sitting in the stands on this summer's lazy summer afternoons watching the beautiful game of baseball)

andre previn---a touch of elegance---the music of duke ellington

TIM BERNE ON JULIUS HEMPHILL An interview with Tim Berne by Duncan Heining, from AVANT/England +++++++++++++ Julius Hemphill formed the World Saxophone Quartet with David Murray, Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake in 1977 and was its most significant force as a player and writer. It's for this group that he is perhaps best known. He was one of the coterie of players on the seventies' New York loft scene. But where musicians like Murray and Chico Freeman went on to build careers, Julius Hemphill was more often spoken of then heard. Hemphill died in 1995. For saxophonist Tim Berne, he was a mentor and friend. A couple of years ago, Berne reissued Hemphill's lovely Blue Boye on CD. When he was in England on tour with his trio Big Satan, we talked about Hemphill's influence on him and the scene in general. Berne paints a picture of a genuine one-off, a man with an original but restless mind with little time for the business side of the music. Though he never really fulfilled his promise, Hemphill did leave behind a remarkable, if in some ways incomplete, body of work. It was Hemphill's ability to reconcile different aspects of various musical styles that made him special for Berne right from his first contact with his music. :His album Dogon AD bridged all these things I'd been listening to. I was able to reconcile the R&B side of me with the side that listened to Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell. Somehow he managed to do everything in the same package without anything being idiomatic. And he had a really soulful sound that I could relate to from listening to guys like King Curtis and Junior Walker." When Berne moved to New York in 1974, he'd only been playing saxophone for about a year. He took a few lessons with Anthony Braxton, but as Braxton's success grew, he had less time for teaching. He suggested Berne give Hemphill a call. At the time, he hadn't even realized that his idol lived in the city. "I'd seen him before but I didn't know it. I saw a Lester Bowie concert at Studio RivBe and I saw this big guy playing and I thought, 'Wow! Who the hell is that?' I had no idea because I had never seen a picture of him. I saw him again at a Lester Bowie recording. Julius was conducting because it was his tune and there was this big guy in a suit. I thought it was Oliver Nelson (laughs)." The relationship was more like an apprenticeship than a teacher-pupil thing. "We'd have these three hour lessons. Sometimes I'd just play long tones for three hours while he massaged my back and taught me how to relax. Sometimes we'd just sit around and bullshit." Berne would help him promote gigs and work the door. At the time no one was interested in Hemphill, although he as something of a legend amongst fellow musicians. According to Berne, he only did maybe two or three concerts a year. "If you weren't a self-promoter, you weren't going to be anywhere and Julius was the furthest thing from that you could be. He didn't pick up the phone. He had no time to bullshit with people." The experience of working with Hemphill served him well when he came to start his own career as a musician. "I sort of apprenticed the whole business with Julius. I helped him put out Blue Boye. I used to make flyers for his gigs. That's how I learned to do all that. He turned me on to the distribution thing. That's what I do to this day, if I do a gig in New York. I'm sure I wouldn't have started a label, if it hadn't been for him." People like Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens would write about David Murray or Chico Freeman or Sam Rivers but to Berne's disgust never about Hemphill. "I don't really know why. It just didn't happen for him until the Saxophone Quartet and even then he wasn't really recognized. In the 20 years I knew him, I bet he didn't do five tours with his own band. He just had no time for the business side of music." For someone as far ahead of the game as Hemphill, you wonder what he might have achieved with a manager who knew what he had. His attention to detail was astonishing. He couldn't just play a gig. He had to build a whole new set of music stands or get the band to wear different outfits or use weird lighting. And no two concerts would contain the same material. "He was always thinking how it looked and he'd make the guys wear certain things. He was just way ahead of everybody else in that regard. It really inspired me to find my own way. Not copy him but to get my own ideas." Talking to Berne, you get a sense of Hemphill as a man who got bored when there was no challenge to confront. Maybe he just had too much talent. "He told me that he used to go to jam sessions and purposely not learn the tunes just because it challenged him. He was always contrary. He was just a really independent thinker. Being around someone like that gives you the confidence to have your own ideas." Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and according to Berne a cousin of Ornette Coleman, Hemphill grew up to the sounds of Gospel and R&B, and the blues would never be far away in his music. "He grew up near those juke joints and he heard music coming out of these places all the time. And of course he played with Kool & the Gang in the seventies. He had a band with Cornell Dupree and Richard Tee and he played with Ike and Tina Turner. All the way to the end Julius could evoke blues or jazz without resorting to cliches because he didn't follow any rules. He could write a blues and it didn't sound like anybody else's blues. He could write a gospel tune for six saxophones and it sounded like the real deal. I can't think of anybody else who could do that so convincingly." It's been suggested that Ornette was quite an influence of Hemphill's music but Berne dismisses this. "If they're from Texas and knew Ornette and they're not playing chord changes, then they're going to say he sounds like Ornette. His first influences were really Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz—he had a band that used to play Gerry Mulligan arrangements—and he was totally into Cannonball." I think that's influence as an inspiration. It's actually hard to imagine Hemphill sounding like anyone else. That sense of being your own person and having your own voice was something that Hemphill didn't have to talk about. It was, by Berne's account, simply central to the man and matched by a generosity to those still trying to find their own voice. "There's always these guys telling you you'll never have your own voice. Julius never said anything like that. It was always, 'You wrote some music, let's look at it.' It was never, 'You can't do that.' It was inspirational. It would be so easy to dismiss a 25-year-old guy trying to play the saxophone, but he never doubted that I could do it if I wanted to." The story Berne tells is a touching one. Hemphill comes across as a slightly cranky, crotchety but playful character. Like how he invented this alter ego, Roy Boye, just for fun, and would do these solo things with tape wearing a silver lame suit. Blue Boye came out of that and was like the blues version. It's a wonderful record, quite pastoral in its feel and full of wit and invention. Toward the end of his life, Hemphill's health had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't play. Open-heart surgery was to prove a means of merely prolonging his life a short while. He could still write, and Berne was terrified to be asked to take his place in a couple of projects. The first of these was the recording session that produced Five Card Stud. The second was a piece for a chamber orchestra. "One of the pieces was this alto solo over these shifting chords on the track called 'Lenore' and he asked me to solo on it which just blew my mind. That was the first time I worked with him as the leader and it was pretty scary for me. It was like that and the tribute record (Diminutive Mysteries) were my final exam." Diminutive Mysteries was a labor of love for Berne, but the only way he felt he could to the tribute was if Hemphill wasn't there. When Berne took the tapes up to Hemphill's house, he was nervous as hell. "I was shaking. I had to get stoned, which I don't usually do. I really wanted his approval and I got it in his typically understated way. It was one of the most important things in my life." When Berne tells the story you know that it is still so important to him that Hemphill liked the record. "So, I played him the first tune and he's smiling and really digging it. Just every once in a while a little comment and I'm gaining confidence. So, I think he's heard one cut and liked it. I'll quit while I'm ahead. And he says, 'What else you got?' Then the next cut and he's getting really excited and listening intently for an hour. Then we went out and had dinner and I couldn't have been any happier." Sometimes the trouble with having heroes is that they let you down. Tim Berne is really blessed that his never did this to him, and Hemphill clearly remains an inspiration to him. "When I get too caught up in all the business shit, I try to remember the most important thing is the music and not worry about all that other stuff. He was just a great role model in terms of creativity. In order to grow you have to fail. You have to have a bad concert, or write something that doesn't work, so you can find out why. I realized that that's why you make records. It's not so you can sell them. It's really just so you can develop. He really embodied that. That's why he did it—to express himself." Duncan Heining

i think that generally the ncaa goes after the smu's and the louisiana tech's. how could it possibly step on one of its cash cows?

...i can live with the excesses of any label that gives me getz and dailey, 2 volumes of bill evans paris concerts, and the hemphill big band.

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.d...0355/1011/SCENE Actor will bring jazz great to life 'Monk' to be at U of L Sunday By Andrew Adler aadler@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal When actor Rome Neal brings Laurence Holder's one-man show "Monk" to the University of Louisville School of Music Sunday night, his performance will focus on one of jazz's most celebrated -- and some would say oddly behaved -- pianists and composers. Thelonious Sphere Monk, who died in 1982 at age 64, had a career marked by such touchstone creations as " 'Round Midnight" and "Straight, No Chaser." Jazz greats from Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane worked with him. Yet while specialists have long admired Monk, more general audiences have sometimes wondered what to make of him. "Monk was such an interesting personality," School of Music professor Jerry Tolson said. "He went through a period where people ignored him and his music, and then had a resurgence." Tolson met Neal, who has performed "Monk" off-Broadway in New York, last year during a jazz convention. "He's been taking this show to college campuses across the country," Tolson said. Sunday night's performance at U of L is part of the African-American Heritage Institute going on this week at the School of Music. A persistent issue with Monk was whether his onstage behavior worked for or against his music. "In his live performances he would often dance on stage; he'd seemingly talk to himself -- you can hear him in recordings singing his lines to himself." So what was going on? "A lot of people believed he was merely eccentric," Tolson said. "Other people (said) that it was him being so into the music, that was how his relating to the music came out." Monk "would lock himself away and practice for long periods of time. Whether that strikes one as being eccentric, or very into their artistic endeavor, is hard to say." Regardless of those mannerisms, Monk's works have endured. "In the late 1950s, his music was rediscovered as a more avant-garde style of jazz was coming into practice," Tolson said. And "because people have rediscovered his music and understand the complexity that his music represents and the contribution he made, I think he stands in a much higher stature than he may have when he was alive and playing." StoryChat

heady stuff inside, too: http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Labels/musician.htm

Dumb rule, IMO. the ncaa has done a splendid job preserving the sanctity of student athletes and college athletics. bravo!

wow! thanks the hawes comment really hits hard.

the sleeve indeed. i have corrected the misstatement. that was a 'keane' observation.