sgcim

See an EN&T doc ASAP! I had blockage in one ear earlier this year and intense sinus pain, so I made an appointment to see my EN&T guy to get my ears cleaned, and after he used that electronic tool to clean out my ears, he said,"Now isn't that much better!" I couldn't hear any difference. Thank God, the guy gave me two scripts; one a strong antibiotic, and the other a Fluonase generic nose spray, I had a big band gig that night where the band was gonna play one of my charts, so I didn't fill the scripts that day. I got to the gig and noticed I was having a hard time getting a good sound out of my guitar and amp.Then we play the first tune, and it sounded like a bunch of banshees screaming! I realized I couldn't hear any of the low pitched instruments; all I could hear were the altos and trpts. For some reason I was able to finish the set without freaking out or anything. Then on the break, I calmly told the guys in the rhythm section that I couldn't hear the bones, Bari or Bass. they just shrugged their shoulders, and the bass player had to open his mouth. He asked us if we ever heard of this well-known bass player, saying that he just got a bunch of sub gigs for him, because he lost the ability to hear pitch, and couldn't play music anymore. That's when I started to freak out. I told the drummer/leader about my problem and asked him if he thought it was like the bass player's problem. He said the bass player's problem was neurological, and mine sounded like some type of ear infection. That mellowed me out, and a bunch of the other guys in the band started telling me about their similar problems with their ears. One revealed that he had a hearing aid. The next day I filled the script, and made slow, steady improvement. Everything's been fine until this week, when we lost the heat in the co-op building I live in. I've been hearing ringing in my left ear, but it's not that annoying. Can the intense cold we've been having in NYC cause ear infections?

It be a bad day for R&B and/or soul jazz guitarists; first Cropper, then Upchurch. RIP. The king of NY, Cornell Dupree and Melvin Sparks both passed in 2011. Seems like a fourteen year cycle.

He was a major dude. He even had his own orchestra, the PHIL-Harmonic:

The Billy Bauer one in the archive achieves the impossible; someone who can out-talk Phil! I sent a link to two friends of mine who studied with him, and they're spending hours listening to it. BB's studio was located above a bar, so his tongue was very loose. One of my friends said he could write a book just about the lessons. The one with Joe Dixon is pretty special to me, because it's got 1/8th of a session i played on with Joe. I did most of the arranging,, and wrote some tunes for it, too. Phil was selling it on his website for a lot of bread, and then he passed. I wonder if the archive will include stuff like that? At least I got part of it.

At least Sangrey and his buddies...LOL!!!!!! https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo241107617.html

I guess the future of that series was uncertain, and its end was always near,

This seems be a sampler of the artists featured in the British Jazz Explosion series. As usual, DM's "Storm Warning" is my fave.

Dick Morrissey's son just hipped me to this new bunch of re-issues. I can finally hear "Storm Warning"!. https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/decca-launches-british-jazz-explosion-series/

The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Sanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard. I studied Composition, Orchestration and Tonal Counterpoint with the author's father, who was a renowned US composer, and wrote some great works in the Neo-Classical style, but then switched to Serial music by the time I studied with him. He was accused of coming in to five of his six daughters' bedrooms in the middle of the night, and doing some naughty things with their bodies when he was drunk. He claimed he didn't remember doing it. He's given the pseudonym of Frank Rousseau in the book, but here was his real name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lessard I asked him what he thought of jazz. He said "I don't; I don't think of jazz". Now I can say the same of Serial music.

A bass player friend of mine has a cousin whose last name is Corbisiero, who used to be a Rugby player in England, till he got cancer. He recovered, and now he works for CBS covering Rugby games. I'm gonna ask him who I should pick when go over his house to jam tonight. He said Montreal 40

Did he tell you about the time Brookmeyer said to Phil Woods "Come on Phil, be a man, sell out! He was trying to get Phil to move to the West Coast and be a studio musician so that he could play dance music for Jim Sangrey to dance to.

Wow! I've gotta get that Brookmeyer book!

But i like to play da songs, and the songs have changes. Should I just forget about playing and just learn to dance? I could do The Jerk pretty good when I was a wittle boy.

I just finished Johnny Dankworth's autobio, "Jazz in Revolution" (1998), and came across JD's explanation for why Jazz isn't and will never be popular: ......."jazz is a music for the minority. It can only be truly understood and evaluated by people gifted with 'chordal ears'- IOW, those lucky folk who can listen to the improvisational skills of a soloist and still hear the underlying chord structure. So jazz music can only by luck become popular in the wider sense.,and can rarely enjoy the financial security and mass acclaim which goes with that phenomenon. Thus most jazz musicians remain skilled, dedicated and poor, and even a jazz world-star name like Dizzy Gillespie's was and still is for that matter-unfamiliar to most people in the country of his birth." He used Diz as an example, because he was working with him at the time, and was a very close friend of his. This explains a lot.

RIP.