sgcim

The British Prog band Yes did a cover of "No Opportunity Necessary..."in their early days, and neither the OP of it nor any of the site's 200,000 members who listened to it had any idea it was originally written and recorded by Richie Havens. When I pointed it out and posted RH's version, only one friend of mine on the site posted that he thought they were equally good. The other posts were, "Golly, that was before Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman!" Richie Havens had a disco period, you call that "serious"?j That album by Jeremy and the Satyrs with that joke of a vocalist, was that laughfest serious, too?

Yeah, that's a really good record. I stumbled on to that when I was doing a search on the Jeremy and the Satyrs album. It really struck me how respectful the audience was of Tim and his music. You could hear a pin drop when they were playing, and they were so hip, they could tell what song Tim was going to play by the chords he played as an introduction to each song. The same musicians were on Richie Havens album "Something Else Again", Eddie Gomez, Warren Bernhardt and Donald MacDonald. I thought "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" was from "Mixed Bag", and I flipped out when I heard it on"Something Else Again". I knew some great song was not on "Mixed bag", but I forgot which one it was. A lot of the great folk artists back then like Richie, Tim, Nick Drake, Judee Sill, and Kenny Rankin were all hip to jazz, and used jazz musicians on their records

Thanks, Niko! Those three musicians who worked together in the NYC club and studio scene of the 60s and 70s, Gary McFarland, Sam Brown and Donald McDonald, all died at relatively young ages. Brown, of suicide at the age of 38, McFarland of a still unsolved case of drug poisoning/OD at 38, and McDonald of an undisclosed illness at 41.

I listened to Essra Mohwk's (Sandra Hurwitz) first two albums and thought she and Sill were doing two very different things. I found Sill's first two albums to be vastly superior musically to Mohawk 's pounding out minor 11th chords and wailing out unmemorable melodies. As Robert Christgau said of her, ""Here is a vocalist who should throw away all her Leon Russell records. When she calls herself a 'full-fledged woman,' it sounds like 'pool player's' woman, which given her persona makes more sense."[ Also, lumping her in with Judee Sill as a 'forgotten singer/songwriter' makes no sense, as she released twelve albums in her long career as a singer/songwriter, and had gigs with, as background vocalist and lead vocalist, such well-known artists as Carole King, The Grateful Dead, Kool and the Gang and John Mellencamp. There is also the fact that she was a beautiful woman, and had a relationship with Frank Zappa, who encouraged her and signed her up with his record company Bizarre Records. She even sang with The Mothers for a while. Sill, on the other hand was not what you'd call an attractive woman, was ignored by Zappa (even though her husband played keyboards with the MOI), and she publicly outed the head of the record company she was signed with (David Geffen of Asylum Records) calling him a"little,fat fag who wore pink shoes", causing him to drop all advertising for her records, which resulted in poor sales. I don't know of anyone who ever heard of her who lived outside of her tiny contingent of fans in a small section of California. Sill also had the same addiction problems her husband had, and severe back problems from a car accident. It also hurt both singer/songwriters that they were not playing what was then considered 'commercial' music. A few of the same sidemen on both albums ; Eddie on Bass, the mysterious Donald McDonald on Drums , and Steig on winds. I'm referring to the Jeremy and the Satyrs album and Sandy Hurvitz' first album on Reprise. If anyone knows what became of McDonald, please chime in here. I can't find anything about him anywhere,

Yeah, Bob Harris(1) was the Leaves' drug dealer. They didn't even know he was a musician. He walked over to a piano while he was making a 'delivery' to them and played the schist out of the piano, and they freaked out. He wound up playing keyboard for the Leaves on some obscure tracks. Then Pons got Harris and Sill involved with the Turtles and got Harris into the "vaudeville" Mothers. Or about that Jeremy and the Satyrs album with that horrible singer?

The piano player on "Live at the Fillmore East album in 1971 playing his Wurlitzer was a junkie dude named Bob Harris, who was a great jazz pianist and also played and did arrangements for The Turtles. He got the gig with Zappa on the recommendation of Jim Pons, bass player for the Turtles and then Zappa in 1971 . Harris was also the husband of Judee Sill, the first artist David Geffen signed for Asylum Records. Sill had written Lady-O, which was one of the last tunes the Turtles did before they broke up. The Turtles had her on salary as their songwriter for about $35 a week.Sill's first album was co-produced by Jim Pons, the Turtles bass player, , and John Beck, guitarist of The Leaves. I never heard of Judee Sill until about 1990, and flipped out over her music, so I wanted to find out who the hell she was. I emailed Mark Volman about her, and he seemed to be bugged about her, and kind of blew me off. He seemed annoyed about all the interest in Sill some 20 years after her two Asylum albums were released. I tried Volman again, and this time he answered all my questions, but was still negative about Sill, but very positive about her husband, Bob Harris (not to be confused with another Bob Harris, who played keyboards and sang for Zappa in 1980). I read Howard Kaylan's bio, and he has nothing but great things to say about Sill, so there must have been something going on with Sill and Volman. I guess we'll never know, like that middle finger deal on "Overnight Sensation" T.D. mentioned. Anyway RIP Mark Volman.

From 2:00pm to 4:00 Felipe Luciano is hosting a tribute to Eddie Palmieri with former band members joining by phone. NOW! 99.5 FM

Just finished "Softly, With Feeling", a bio of Joe Wilder. He was really a great person, forced to feel the brunt of racism, like Clark Terry, without letting it get to him. No matter where he went, the Marines, the classical music world, Broadway, on the road in the South with big bands, he was treated like crap, but was able to transcend it, by virtue of his superiority as a person. It's not surprising he wound up with other great black musicians, like George Duvivier, Milt Hinton and Hank Jones. His hard work during his early classical training enabled him to sight read anything, and he was able to get lead trumpet work in both commercial work and jazz work, and eventually learned enough about improvisation on his own, to excel in that realm, also. Rather than relying on high note chops, he was noted for the beautiful sound he got out of the horn in the middle and lower ranges, and his creativity as a soloist. It's no wonder that he wound up playing for Tom Talbert, who able to discern other great players who played the same way, like Aaron Sachs. A great deal was made how unknown he was, which surprised me, because my father had bought albums like The Pretty Sound of Joe Wilder, and the Bix, Duke and Fats album of Talbert that he was featured on, so they were always lying around the house when I was a kid. I didn't realize that he never led his own small group in a club until he was in his 60s, even working with younger players who realized how great he was like Michael Weiss, besides his old buddies Hank Jones and Milt Hinton. He was even featured on a Steely Dan cut, so he was obviously big in the studios, so outside of his small group jazz playing, he was quite prominent in the studio orchestras, like Johnny Smith, another musician that he worked with on "Annotation of the Muses" by Johnny Richards, during his 'Third Stream" phase. The author Edward Berger, seemed to be unaware of the tremendous difficulty of making a living in the jazz field, and that musicians had to play other types of music (Wilder even wound up playing 'club dates' for a while) to get by. The worst culprit in Wilder's case seemed to be the classical field, which refused to allow any Black musicians to play in their orchestras, until quotas had to be imposed. If you were someone like Joe Wilder you didn't stand a chance of getting an orchestral job. Much of the book deals with legislation that enabled Black musicians to find work in Broadway orchestras and Symphony orchestras, Finally Ben Steinberg started The New World Symphony Orchestra, which allowed minorities to play in it, and Wilder was a charter member. However,Wilder left after he was disgusted at the political in-fighting that forced Steinberg out of his position as conductor. He eventually found work in the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He also went into teaching at Julliard and Hamilton College in his 80s. He was still alive and active after surviving cancer when the book was written, in 2014, the year of his death at 92.

Yeah, he was a pisser!

RIP I listen to Latin Roots every week on WBAI, and Eddie would be calling up Felipe Luciano and joke with him for more than a half hour on the air. Sad news.

You can't.

RIP. They used to play him a lot on WBAI radio. You can tell he was a trained pianist. While he was against all of the things the hippies were against, he didn't approve of their aesthetics.

LOL! No, it's gotta be a Heavy Glass band. They have those in Norway.

Whatever it was, it died with him. I remember reading an interview with Don Friedman, who had worked with Chet in the past, and the interviewer said something about seeing Chet play recently, and Don interrupted him and said, "Wait, you're saying that Chet is still alive?!" The interviewer answered in the affirmative, and Don still didn't believe him. Don then went on to describe how Chet would drive them from gig to gig, going over 100 MPH through residential neighborhoods, day or night. He said the time he spent playing in Chet's quartet was a living hell. That's all I remember, but it must have been something like that that made my friend quit after eight months...

I loved her albums "Live at Carnegie Hall" and Cleo Sings Sondheim" the most out of her many recordings. She went from jazz to acting to singing in musicals to singing opera. With her four octave range, she was capable of singing anything. She was the daughter of a Jamaican man and British woman. For a period of time, she was considered the greatest female singer in the world. RIP, Old Gal...

Rod Stewart was the headliner of the bill, so he came on last, after If. I remember walking out on him as he was holding a bottle of Southern Comfort, singing like a drunk old lady. I don't remember if I ditched my friends, or they came with me, but I had to get outta there. The next day I went to TSS and bought If's first album. They were even more obscure than Sabbath. Many years later (pre-internet ), I only met one other person who was an If fanatic. We were doing a week-long gig with Al Martino in Connecticut, and he was the bass player on the gig, and we drove up together. It turned out that he didn't even know of the existence of the first If album, so I invited him over my place, and sat there in shock, listening to their first album on Capitol. I fulfilled a lifetime dream of mine by writing a transcription of an instrumental tune of theirs for big band (If only had seven guys in the band-two tenors, a vocalist and rhythm. With the advent of the 'internest' I uncovered a deep, dark secret of the first album that I had suspected for many years. They secretly added a trumpet player on a few of the cuts who wasn't listed in the credits of the first album. This is common knowledge today, but there was a time when you could be doing hard time for perpetrating a crime like that, according to the Jazz-Rock laws of the time. Thankfully, the laws have loosened up since then...👿

RIP, Ozzy Back in HS, my band was one of the first to play Sabbath at HS Battle of the Bands and dances, in the US, and people didn't know what we were playing. I heard the title song to their first album on WABC FM, and it scared the hell outta me! The next day I ran down to TSS and bought the album with my allowance. Our lead singer basically turned into Ozzy, and even wrote away to one of those ads in the back of comic books and got an 'official' document sent to him, declaring him to be an "official Minister of his own church- The church of Satan!" I still have a picture of me from back then, when I still looked like something resembling a human being, staring into a candle light ceremony where our lead singer/Minister tried to call on Satan, "a black shape with eyes of fire". He never showed up... Then the fateful day came, Nov. 10, 1970. My sister worked at the Fillmore East, and she called up and said,"That weird band you love, Black Sabbath, is playing at the Fillmore; ya want me to get you and yer creepy friends free tickets to see them?" I said, "Please, please, please!!!!!!!!!!!! So the whole band (except our drummer, who was one of those kids who studied, did his homework, and listened to his parents, and was forbidden to take the LIRR into the evil city of NY) took a field trip, and somehow found our way into the bowels of the East Village, and sat there with orchestra seats, waiting for Ozzy to come on. We were disappointed to see four guys with long hair, who looked nothing like demons from hell, stumble their way through the BS album, with feedback and chops problems. They were followed by the British Jazz-Rock band "If", who could actually play the s--t out of their instruments, and I said goodbye to BS, and hello to the Jazz of Dick Morrissey and Terry Smith- jazz guitarist extraordinaire!. Dick Morrissey's son said the guys in If couldn't believe how bad BS was, and they used to have to put their hands over their ears to tolerate it. I should thank Ozzy actually, after that concert, I was so shocked at the difference between If and BS, I realized jazz was what I was looking for. Oh Larder!

RIP, Chuck. His "Feels So Good"gave us Band Directors something to play that the band and the audience actually liked.

Mike Alterman, a pianist that I worked with for five years in a band, spent eight months on the road with Chet Baker in the early 60s, and was so traumatized by the experience that he never said a word about it in all the time I knew him. I'd meet Mike occasionally after the time we worked together in that band, and he'd talk about the time he spent in the Woody Herman Band (he can be heard on the WH album "East Meets West" playing a long solo on a blues), the time he was fired by our current prez for asking for a raise in his solo piano gig in Trump Towers (Trump heard him playing some show tunes and said to Mike, "I like that!", so he figured it was a good time to ask DT for a raise- wrong), but he went to the grave a few years ago without saying a word about his eight months with Chet on the road, at least to me. RIP, Mike.

This comes a a total shock.I didn't think he was that old. RIP, Hal

Here's a suite of the score Schifrin wrote for the Exorcist, that was turned down by Friedkin. Lalo called it a setup by Friedkin, because the studio told Friedkin that the score and the scenes in the trailer were too much for audiences. It was scaring the hell out of them, and they told Friedkin to tell Schifrin to tone the score down a lot. But Friedkin, being the weirdo that he was, refused to tell Schifrin that the score was too bombastic, and at the final studio recording, he led Schifrin into a trap where the executives heard the same music from the trailer. Friedkin walked out of the recording studio after a few music sequences, and told Schifrin to meet him privately in the head of the Warner Bros. Music Dept. Schifrin was hearing plenty of horror stories about what was going on- Friedkin's temper tantrums, dismissing friendly advice, firing his collaborators, etc... "He started to scream, foam was coming out of his mouth. "Where are the two orchestras of strings? This is not what we talked about! This music is not going to be in my film!!" he told Schifrin. Lalo could see that WF was out of control, and there was no reasoning with him, so he remained quiet to avoid a physical confrontation. Larry Marks, who was the head of the Music Dept., told LS that WF had already had a group in mind, Tubular Bells- and the help of a composer, Jack Nitzsche. William Blatty cake to LS' defense and made public declarations to the press, and the fired ex-film editor confirmed Blatty's comments about the setup. All Friedkin could respond with was that LS had written a score with "Mexican Maracas"! From LS' Autobiography.

Well, they had people like George Barrow, Charlie Fowlkes in the band, and I forget the rhythm section, but the conductor/pianist knew what he wanted, and told them how to play her show.

RIP, Connie. She brought her own guitarist when she toured, so I was out of work when she was appearing at the theater in NY, where I was in the house band, for the first few nights that she sang there. Then, when she was attacked at the Holiday Inn, right near the theater, they replaced her with Melba Moore, who didn't carry her own guitarist with her. I was really young when I had that gig,still in my teens, so when they asked me if I could play R&B, I said "sure", not even knowing what the hell that meant. I was completely about jazz when I had that gig, and didn't give a crap about any 'commercial' music. The guys in the house band kind of gave me a hard time, because I was getting paid a full week's salary for only working half the week (about seven bills, which was pretty good money back in the 70s), and they were getting the same amount for working a full week of shows.

I missed this announcement, but I found out about it from a trumpet player I played with last night. Sad news, but at least he got to play great jazz with the WDR Band, and enjoyed a nice retirement. I played a bunch of gigs with him back in the late 80s. RIP.