alocispepraluger102

is that your favorite mahler 3. i have never found a recording to match a cleveland donanyi live i heard about 12 years

Right. The guy's entitled to his opinion about jazz. But what really annoys me is that somebody who apparently doesn't care enough to seek out the good stuff is the CEO of Verve. It's like having Dick Cheny in charge of Amnesty International. isnt verve a dinosaur? isnt the music business changing? wont performers be marketing and controlling their own product on the web? i would expect that certain artists might be releasing new concerts or performances even monthly. i would like to think that, if people heard some of the incredible musicians playing today, they would respond favorably. getting jazz into movies and sporting events would seem to be sensible marketing.

i have added your beautiful blog to my musical favorites list and look forward to enjoying many of the fine programs

My sentiments exactly. Henry Threadgill is a treasure. it is wonderful to be in the company of others who respect henry threadgill as i do. air , and the sextette, and very circus circus, and the awesome x-75(4 basses and 4 flutes and amina myers). what more can the man possibly have to give?

Industrial grade? this sam adams cream stout isnt a bad morning stout for the price, although i prefer the more substantial ones.

sometimes, when a cd wont play for me i copy it onto the hard drive with(e.g. realplayer) and then make a cd from it and it plays.

i use an effect called mp3 pro available from NERO which saves space in converting to mp3. the files take the space of 80 while sounding better than 128. one cheap conventional cd will hold over 20 hours of great sounding music. keep the program sections shorter than 3.25 hours, generally. i prefer total recorder version 5.2.

A recent "Live in Finland" CD on Cadence. thanks

You're welcome. the rava rhythm section of about a year ago was really beautiful.

one soundcard is fine with xp and total recorder. i use a $20 soundblaster live

what an absolutely gorgeous trio! what balance! most thoughtful, and, yet, exciting and new!

total recorder will do it for 10 bucks. have used it flawlessly for several years.

nur.org rules... So they turned off the transmitter and "stream" only? Thought we were talking about Chicago radio stations. No, no, no. WNUR still transmits over the air at 89.3 FM at 7200 watts from the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston. You can get the signal on the northside of Chicago (I live at 3200 N and get a clear signal). The Jazz show airs weekdays from 5am to 12:30pm Central (wnur.org for those out of transmitting range). And Chuck - if you're ever in Chicago, we'd love to have you into the station as a guest. -Jason NUR rules!

http://www.saintjohncoltrane.com/

The avatar is a bizarre cover of a French 45 single of Ayler's New Generation/Heart Love. You can find a big version here on this excellent Ayler site: http://www.ayler.org/albert/html/newgen.html. Speaking of covers, I'm with you on the original McPhee cover. With the exception of that brief phase of oddly cropped photos and split-sentenced type, I much prefer the look of the old hatArt 6000s. But if it's getting reissued, I can't complain... opinions on the shipp- mcphee combination?

he used to play jazz and really supports all the local jazz performers. .... he's just earning a living.........

Badland The Society of the Spectacle Emanem 2006 Badland, a trio comprised of Simon Rose on alto saxophone, Simon H. Fell on double bass and Steve Noble on percussion, has been conceived in a way that Rose lays out in his impressionistic liner notes. Rose offers a dead serious manifesto that defines the band’s mission: to subvert tradition; to develop and extend the language of collective improvisation; to examine the limitations of their instruments. If the musicians happen to touch on some of the qualities a listener may expect from jazz music, so be it. But since “File under: Free Improvisation” is printed on the tray card, Badland is going after a niche market. All of this may sound more militant than the music actually is. Badland often tends toward silence, in the style of early Wadada Leo Smith, as in the relatively brief and low-key “Kittiwake” and “Elka.” However, in the two-part improv that gives the disc its title and in the combustible “MIA,” Badland burns. Tracks: Kittiwake; Elka; Society of the Spectacle (Part 2); Nissa; Society of the Spectacle (Part 1); MIA; Snipe; Reeds in the Western World. Personnel: Simon Rose: alto saxophone; Simon H Fell: double bass; Steve Noble: percussion. Badland were formed in 1994, with Simon Rose, Simon Fell and Mark Sanders on drums. The group's activity centres around free jazz and the reinterpretation of elements of the modern jazz repertoire. Mark left the group in 1998, with Steve Noble taking over the drum chair for the 1999 tour. He's stayed ever since! Work since 1994 has included a UK Arts Council Tour in 1999, Leicester Jazz Festival and numerous club gigs; in October 2003 the group featured in a studio session for BBC Radio 3's Jazz On 3. Their first album Badland was released by Bruce's Fingers in 1995, and includes reworkings of pieces by Ornette Coleman and Duke Ellington, along with free improvisations. Their second album Axis Of Cavity was released by Bruce's Fingers in the Summer of 2002; the group undertook a UK tour in September 2002 to promote the album. Their third CD - The Society Of The Spectacle - was released by Emanem in September 2005. • "Put this alongside the most important trios in the jazz and improvised saxophone tradition." Francesco Martinelli IMPROJAZZ • "The musicians take care to construct free improvisations that are multilayered and rich with nuance, realised with a spiritual intensity that could liquefy steel." Hannes Schweiger JAZZ LIVE • "Vivid free-bop from a highly accomplished trio who venture gamely out into new and lawless territory, bringing new ideas and a freshness of diction to this challenging idiom." THE PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ ON CD

Article published Apr 19, 2006 Music mixing board mistaken for bomb at local shopping center By Mark Caudill News Journal MANSFIELD -- Sam Romagnoli's portable mixing board won't be of much use to him after being blasted with a water cannon. Romagnoli, a local musician, unwittingly touched off a bomb scare Saturday by leaving his mixing board in a box in the West Park Shopping Center parking lot. He had a karaoke gig at the China Club the night before. "It was just a crazy mistake on my part that set all this in motion," Romagnoli said. Police received a call at 7:10 a.m. about a "suspicious" case with duct tape on both ends. Police contacted the Ashland County Bomb Squad, which took X-rays of the case, then opened it with a water cannon. Mansfield police Lt. Dave Nirode explained the action. "It had some indicators (of being a bomb)," he said. "If you open it up, a lot of those have an anti-theft device." Police barricaded the scene and evacuated businesses. "It's just a result of the times," Nirode said. "It's better to be safe than sorry." Romagnoli didn't learn of the bomb scare until later that day when his wife called him. "I'm thinking that sounds a whole lot like my mixer case," he said. "One of the latches was bad in the case. That (duct tape) was the insurance that it wasn't going to open while I was transporting it." Romagnoli is out some money, but can laugh it off now. "You can look at it real serious, but it's a mixer, a piece of stuff," he said. "Thank God it was just a mixer and not a bomb."

i have loved the big broadcast for 20 years. it complements my punk jazz tastes.

i share your love for the very beautiful touchstone by the taylors and wheeler. i bought another copy of this record a few years ago and got a nice german pressing. also love conference of the birds, bley's open to love, towner's batik, a trio album with dejohnette and gomez, crystal silence, jarrett's beautiful staircase, aacm's nice guys, and the guiffre trio and metheny's chataqua, garbarek's dis, rypdal's after the rain, and many others.

I have. If WBEZ's programming was fairly vanilla, WDCB's is even less interesting. Then again, I'm a partisan of the far more cutting edge WNUR show. NUR rules!!!!! And how powerful is their transmitter now? When I lived in Chicago (5000 N - about a mile from the border) I had to drive to Evanston to get the signal. I taped a show for them once and had to ride around in my car to get the friggin' signal. nur.org rules... So they turned off the transmitter and "stream" only? Thought we were talking about Chicago radio stations. ...certainly valid and anticipated, but my 'radio' is now a computer.

I have. If WBEZ's programming was fairly vanilla, WDCB's is even less interesting. Then again, I'm a partisan of the far more cutting edge WNUR show. NUR rules!!!!! And how powerful is their transmitter now? When I lived in Chicago (5000 N - about a mile from the border) I had to drive to Evanston to get the signal. I taped a show for them once and had to ride around in my car to get the friggin' signal. nur.org rules...

I have. If WBEZ's programming was fairly vanilla, WDCB's is even less interesting. Then again, I'm a partisan of the far more cutting edge WNUR show. NUR rules!!!!!

Mister Waller’s Regrets Terry Teachout Thomas Wright Waller, born in Harlem in 1904 and subsequently known to all the world as “Fats,” is one of the few great jazz musicians to have been widely popular with the public at large. He appeared often on radio, and the small-group recordings he made between 1934 and 1942 sold well—several were hits—and were heard frequently on jukeboxes. In addition, he wrote the music for such standards as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” and at the time of his death in 1943 he had a successful show on Broadway, Early to Bed. Though Hollywood was slower to catch on to his potential, Waller’s appearance with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Stormy Weather (in which he performed “Ain’t Misbehavin’”) was favorably noticed, and he would surely have made more films had he not died shortly after Stormy Weather was released.1 Perhaps inevitably, Waller’s popularity caused some to doubt his musical seriousness—though it never led anyone to question his talent. As a pianist he was universally admired and immensely influential, and he left behind ample recorded evidence of his formidable gifts. He was no less accomplished as an organist, the first to play hard-swinging jazz on that cumbersome instrument. But what made Waller a celebrity was not his instrumental prowess but his singing, which he usually (though not always) played for laughs. Most of his hit records were of Tin Pan Alley ballads like “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” and “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” whose sentimentalities he skewered with satirical asides. That Waller was primarily known as a comedian and entertainer rather than as a musician is a continuing source of discomfort to many critics. Gunther Schuller spoke for them in his 1968 book Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development: Waller was ultimately unable to reconcile the conflicts in his musical personality: a natural gift for effortless improvisation[,] . . . the opposing pull toward commercial and show-business success, and finally his unswerving respect and love for “classical” music. Deep down the latter undermined his convictions about his professional career as a pianist-singer-clown, and the clowning was in turn an attempt to conceal his inner confusion.2 This appraisal would be less convincing had it not been shared by Waller himself, who played Bach, Chopin, and Debussy privately for his own pleasure and studied with the legendary piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky.3 He told numerous colleagues that he regretted the turn his career had taken, and he both admired and envied his friend George Gershwin for writing both popular songs and jazz-influenced concert works, something the less disciplined Waller was never able to do. His sole gesture to conventional musical respectability, a 1942 Carnegie Hall recital appearance, was a fiasco. By then he had become a full-fledged alcoholic—he was drunk on stage at the recital—and it was this, coupled with his chronic obesity, that led to his death from pneumonia at the untimely age of thirty-nine. Fats Waller, then, died a disappointed man. But how disappointing is the body of work he left behind? Did he fail to live up to his creative potential, as Schuller and countless other critics have argued? To appreciate the reservations of Waller’s critics, one must first consider his achievements as an instrumentalist. The son of a lay preacher, Waller started out as a church and theater organist, and for the rest of his life he preferred the organ to the piano. “I can get so much more color from it than the piano that it really sends me,” he explained. Fortunately, the Victor studio in Camden, New Jersey, where he made many of his early recordings, was a converted church that housed a well-maintained pipe organ, and in the late 20’s he recorded a series of solos that reveal him to have been an imaginative, technically adept player capable of drawing a marvelously diverse array of tone colors from the instrument.4 Even so, it was as a pianist that Waller made his name. He played “stride” piano, a style that evolved out of ragtime, the musical idiom created at the end of the 19th century by Scott Joplin and other black composers. In classic ragtime, which is always written out, heavily syncopated right-hand melodies are superimposed atop “oom-pah” patterns played by the pianist’s left hand. Stride, by contrast, is a fully improvised style in which the right-hand melodies are more complex and wide-ranging and the left-hand accompaniments thicker in texture and less rhythmically regular. It is more technically challenging than ragtime—so much so that comparatively few pianists have mastered it. Waller studied with James P. Johnson (1894-1955), a Harlem-based pianist and composer who was one of the originators of stride.5 The younger man’s huge hands (George Shearing recalled that shaking hands with Waller was like “grabbing a bunch of bananas”) were perfectly suited to its demands, and he quickly developed into one of New York’s top jazz pianists. By 1929 his style was fully formed, and the solo recordings he made in that year of his own “Handful of Keys” and “Numb Fumblin’” are among his most fully realized achievements. The first is a bustling up-tempo showpiece à la Johnson, the second an easy-going twelve-bar blues whose airy textures epitomize Waller’s uniquely individual approach. “Keep the right hand always subservient to the melody,” he once told an interviewer. “Trying to do too much always detracts from the tune. . . . You got to hang onto the melody and never let it get boresome.” He lived by those words, with results aptly summed up by the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin: As a jazz pianist he stands between James P. Johnson, who taught him, and Art Tatum, who learned from him, but it is he who has the greatest variety of mood, from feather-light whimsicality to the solid springing tenths in the left hand that never let the rhythm falter for a moment. Had Waller never sung a note, he would still be remembered for the recordings he made on piano and organ in the late 20’s, as well as for the popular songs he wrote in collaboration with the lyricist Andy Razaf. But he would not have become famous. Instead, he began to feature himself as a vocalist, and became one of the best-known black entertainers in America. Waller appears to have started singing in public around 1929, first in cabarets, then on the radio. In 1931 he made his first recordings as a vocalist. Three years later, William Paley, the president of CBS, heard him at a New York party and gave him a spot on the network; the resulting exposure inspired Victor to sign him to an exclusive contract. Waller put together a six-piece band, billed as “Fats Waller and His Rhythm,” with which he recorded the latest Tin Pan Alley songs, most of them in informal but effective arrangements that featured his ebullient vocals and glistening piano solos. These records soon began to sell, and all at once Waller became—and remained—a hot property. The Rhythm recordings were usually jazz of the purest kind. Although Waller’s regular accompanists were for the most part mere journeymen, they provided solid, swinging support for his wilder flights of verbal fancy. Sometimes he prefaced a song with a spoken introduction whose choice of words was deliberately askew: “My goodness, I feel so effervescent this morning. Everything’s so eulogizin’!” (“I’m Crazy ’Bout My Baby,” 1931). At other times he slipped his own sardonic interpolations into an otherwise cliché-ridden lyric: “If you break my heart I’ll break your jaw and then I’ll die” (“It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” 1936). On occasion he dispensed with tomfoolery and sang a ballad straight in his light, raspy baritone, invariably to wistful and engaging effect (“My Very Good Friend the Milkman,” 1935). Beneath their zany surface, Waller’s vocals were the product of a highly creative musician who with endless ingenuity reshaped and paraphrased the melodies of the songs he sang. To hear him dally with a well-written tune like James P. Johnson’s “A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid” (1934) or Harry Warren’s “Lulu’s Back in Town” (1935) is to hear a master improviser at work—arguably the first great jazz singer to follow Louis Armstrong, and one of the first to profit from Armstrong’s unprecedented example.6 But unlike Armstrong, who was almost always glad to do whatever his audiences asked of him, Waller came to resent the fact that his fame as a singer-comedian made it difficult for him to play the music he liked best. As Gene Sedric, one of his sidemen, would recall: Many times we would be on the job and Waller [was] playing great piano, modern stuff with technique and fine chords, and people would say, “Come on, Fats, you’re laying down, give us some jive.” This at times would be a great drag to him; he would look at us and say, “You see these people, they won’t let me play anything real fine, want to hear all that jive.” In the studio, by contrast, Waller was freer to play as he liked. Of his many recorded instrumentals with the Rhythm, some feature him on electric organ, an instrument whose percussive qualities he found appealing. Over time, the group became more contemporary in its approach, and later, riff-based Waller compositions like “Yacht Club Swing” (1938) and “Pantin’ in the Panther Room” (1941, with Waller on electric organ) have a lightness of touch reminiscent of the then-popular John Kirby Sextet, a band he greatly admired. In addition, Waller recorded three sets of instrumental solos in 1937, 1938, and 1941 that suggest even more clearly the stylistic directions in which he apparently longed to travel. From the lacy openwork filigree of his solo piano version of his own “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” (1937) to the whirling, toccata-like ostinato with which he launches his arrangement for organ of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (recorded on a 1938 visit to London), it is evident that Waller’s musical ambitions extended well beyond the swing songs that delighted his fans.7 Would he have one day sought to emulate Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F he loved? It is possible, though his lack of compositional training would have presented a considerable obstacle. While he was a fluent and successful songwriter, his melodies, as Alec Wilder has pointed out, “are all made up of little pieces. . . . Each phrase is sustained by an imitation, or partial imitation, of the previous phrase. In a sense, he wrote like a barroom piano player.” In any case, Waller’s notorious lack of self-discipline meant that large-scale projects were out of the question. Just as he habitually threw together his small-group recording sessions on the spot, so his only extended composition, the six-movement “London Suite” recorded in 1938, was little more than a series of loosely knit, semi-improvised character pieces of no particular structural originality or melodic distinction. About the debacle of his Carnegie Hall recital, at which he played “London Suite,” the critics were barely polite.8 Not only was Waller incapable of summoning up the initiative to do more serious work, but his producers at Victor increasingly encouraged him to record third-rate songs that were beyond even his ability to enliven with the sly asides that had made him a star.9 By that time, alcoholism was inexorably robbing him of his powers, and though he had hitherto been able to play well even when under the influence of what he blithely called “liquid ham and eggs,” he was audibly and embarrassingly the worse for wear on several of the V-Discs he recorded in September 1943, three months before his death. Perhaps the harshest posthumous judgment to be rendered on Fats Waller came from the critic Max Harrison: Waller’s is probably the saddest case of misspent talent which jazz on records can show. His output suggests he had all the gifts a jazzman needs except the tough, almost ruthless temperament usually necessary for the truest creative achievement. If one goes only by the recordings Waller made in the last few years of his life, there is something to be said for this devastating appraisal. But even then, as can be heard in such performances as “Fats Waller’s Original E Flat Blues” (1940), “Pantin’ in the Panther Room,” and the explosive small-band version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” recorded in 1943 for the soundtrack of Stormy Weather, he was still capable of rising to an occasion that inspired him. Before that time, and throughout the middle period of his career from the late 20’s to the late 30’s, Waller’s studio work was noteworthy for its consistently high quality. To be sure, we cannot know whether Waller would have gone on to greater things had he possessed the iron determination found in greater artists. Nor does it matter. What he did (as opposed to what he might have done) was more than enough to earn him a place among the giants of jazz. Of the 675-odd recordings he made between 1922 and 1943, perhaps a third remain irresistibly listenable to this day, not merely for the brilliance of his playing but also for the scapegrace charm of his singing. Few jazz musicians have had a higher batting average. As for the “serious” compositions Waller never got around to writing, I cannot imagine they would have been more memorable than the life-enhancing records of popular songs he made so casually and in such miraculous profusion, and to which it is impossible to listen without breaking out in the broadest of smiles. To these recordings we can return again and again for the same reasons we revisit a play like Noël Coward’s Hay Fever or a novel like P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season. Their inspired craftsmanship and divine frivolity rarely fail to please. “He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre,” Joseph Epstein once wrote of H.L. Mencken. The same can be said of Fats Waller. Terry Teachout, Commentary’s regular music critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is at work on a biography of Louis Armstrong. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. 1 Handful of Keys (Proper Records PROPERBOX 71, four CD’s), a budget-priced box set imported from England but easily available in the U.S., contains a well-chosen selection of 95 recorded performances by Waller. Except as indicated, it contains all the recordings mentioned in this article. 2 Schuller went so far as to omit Waller from the second volume of his critical history of jazz, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (1989). No less revealingly, Waller has yet to be the subject of a full-length primary-source biography, and only one extended analysis of his musical style, Paul S. Machlin’s excellent Stride: The Music of Fats Waller (1985), has been published to date. Also of interest is Alyn Shipton’s Fats Waller: The Cheerful Little Earful (1988, rev. 2002). 3 We have only Waller’s word for this—his name appears nowhere in the published literature on Godowsky—but there is no obvious reason why he should have made it up. Godowsky did not have a major American concert career and was for the most part known only to pianists and connoisseurs of virtuoso piano playing. 4 Handful of Keys contains one of the solo pipe-organ recordings Waller made in Camden, “Rusty Pail.” Two dozen of his early solo and ensemble organ recordings, including an especially beautiful version of “Beale Street Blues” from 1927, are on Fats Waller at the Organ: Vol. 3, 1926-1929 (EPM Musique 982222), an imported French CD. 5 In 1941 Waller paid homage to his mentor by recording “Carolina Shout,” Johnson’s best-known composition. The performance offers a dramatic demonstration of the difference in the two men’s styles: Johnson’s, in his 1922 recording of “Carolina Shout,” is precise and elegant, even dapper, while Waller’s is faster, more flamboyant, and a bit slapdash. 6 Armstrong returned the compliment: his 1929 performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates introduced him to white audiences, and he continued to sing and record Waller’s songs for the rest of his life. 7 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was last available on CD as part of Fats Waller in London (Disques Swing CDXP 6442), now out of print but occasionally available from used-CD dealers. It can also be heard in streaming audio at www.redhotjazz/fats.html. (A RealAudio player is needed to listen to this site, which also contains many of the other recordings mentioned in this piece.) 8 We Called It Music (1947, rev. 1962), the autobiography of the jazz guitarist Eddie Condon, contains a sympathetic but frank description of the concert (at which Condon also played), along with an amusing, equally frank account of one of Waller’s helter-skelter recording dates. 9 Among the unsavory ditties foisted on Waller by Victor in the 40’s were “Abercrombie Had a Zombie,” “Eep, Ipe, Wanna Piece of Pie,” “Little Curly Hair in a High Chair,” and “My Mommie Sent Me to the Store.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Commentary America's premier monthly journal of opinion