A Lark Ascending

Not even...

The media that is now weeping for her also encouraged this celebrity excess. Kids in this sort of situation are expected to live the dangerous, rock'n roll lifestyle in order to be edgy. They all assume they are going to be Keith rather than Brian. The way the media used this woman's unfortunate life to provide copy crosses into another ugly story dominating the news at present.

I get the clear wallets online. Think it cost me about £20 for 1000 last time: This place is good for any Brits who take this path: http://www.jetmedia.co.uk/disk_wallets.htm

I cannot find my 'Legend: Bob Marley' anthology, for years my one reggae album. As a result it's never had a category of it's own. Bought a few reggae albums of late and want to get it into the new section. But it could be anywhere - pop/rock, World Music (Latin America) etc! This will worry me all summer.

But can you find things when you look along the shelves? I find the labelled "spines" of the jewel cases indispensable. I have a number of CD-Rs in slimline cases without visible titles on the spines and tend to pass these by when I should be aware of them. However, I speak as someone with fewer than 1,000 items. I moved across to PVC sleeves a few years back. Not as easy to find things - but you can make it easy by taking a few of your redundant jewel cases, sticking a label on the end, and using them as markers. Doesn't take long to find most things.

Jerry Gonzalez O know very well, Jazzjet - especially fond of his recent flamenco-related excursions. Saw Tyner with a later Latin band in the 90s at the Barbican - have the album from that tour. Dom I know but the others are unknown - I'm realising that Clare Fisher needs searching out. I've recently discovered how the internet can be my friend; using it for some of these OOP discs. Will explore, JS.

Pretty well the same up here - colder than would normally be expected. The usual settled weather pattern has not materialised this year and Atlantic fronts have prevailed. Sucks ! I'm on the summer break as of this evening. I demand 3 weeks sunshine so I can enjoy Sussex, Dorset and, eventually, Cornwall in all its glory! Things went tropical at Easter. The rainy season has shifted! Heard the farmers grumbling this morning on Farming Today - a few weeks back it was the dry spring, now it's too wet to get the barley in and another crop is growing alongside.

Oh, keep them coming. I'm genuinely interested. Played the Cesar 830 disc you recommended yesterday - great fun! Cuban really and just a bit 'funky-wah-wah' in places for me but the percussion was demonic.

I've seen that Caravan set, Aggie. I bought the remastered albums (with extra tracks) from a few years back and I think that will do me. I'm following the King Crimson upgrades because they have considerably better sound; but I think that new Caravan set will be a step too far for me. Interested in the reactions to the new 'Yes' album - I never enjoyed much after ToTO but (as mentioned above) really enjoyed Relayer in recent years. But the one I loved was 'Magnification' which was really strong song-wise and had all the instrumental flair of the 70s. Might take a chance on this.

'Bootleg' suggest 'illicit'. There's a 'cool' that hangs around illicit in many areas (soft drugs, booze during prohibition etc). I suspect that's the marketing angle. Suggests you're buying something not easy to get from behind a counter with a hint of danger about it. All without having to leave the house.

I imagine the thread title made more posters than me think about the criticism Emperor Joseph II was supposed to have made of Mozart - 'too many notes'. Nice explanation here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2004/jun/04/classicalmusicandopera Maybe it counts for Oscar too.

Hank Mobley and Bob Brookmeyer have appeared in that Capitol Vaults series over here too.

What a great track! Fits perfectly with this thread. And the album is an E-music! Thanks, Jazzjet! Just listened to this, which fits the bill:

I still think the major reason for the vaulting ambition of that era was the wider post-war sense of 'anything is possible' and that naive belief that you could remake the world. It probably also reflected the relative affluence (in the West) of that era and the sense that the good times were only going to get better. As those dreams soured - with Vietnam, Watergate, the big economic let downs (oil crisis etc), the realisation that most of the great promises (socialism, communism, hippyism, various religious cults) not only failed to deliver but produced new levels of corruption - so the optimism soured. You see it in the nihilism that set in at the end of the 70s and the me-ism of the 80s. In the world of popular musics aspiration became suspect; keep it simple, keep it direct, don't get ideas above your station. One of the reasons I've so enjoyed Porcupine Tree is because they don't accept that pop/rock music must be something close to the street that any band can play after learning a few chords. That vaulting ambition is there again!

I never got that far with Floyd! Can imagine reacting the same way! Once the greatest crime in pop/rock became 'pretentiousness' (what I'd always seen as ambition), lyrics reverted to direct statements.

Lyrics have never been central for me either...it's more that I've always found corny or over-soppy lyrics a distraction. 'Semolina pilchards, climbing up the Eiffel Tower' might not be the height of profundity; but 'She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' is far more likely to interfere with my enjoyment (or 'You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..'. I can happily sail through a double LP of Jon Anderson's lyrical burbling without having my enjoyment of the the music impaired; If he was singing 'I love you and you love me and we all live in a coconut tree' I'd be less enthralled. Classic example of this is Sandy Denny - her first solo album had typically Dylan-influenced allusiveness. No idea what the songs are about but I like that uncertainty. With each successive album she became more direct, romantic, confessional. I find those albums increasingly difficult to enjoy as a whole.

Pop music was just a background thing for me in '65 (I was only 10!) but I remember being struck by the Beatles tunes and The Byrd's Mr Tambourine Man'. In retrospect its the date where the Beatles start to get really interesting for me; and the whole pop thing starts to get harmonically more adventurous and more ambiguous lyrically (the Dylan factor kicking in).

I love the final paragraph on that link. How many musicians would pick the late 60s/early 70s as 'the golden period of music'? When it comes to pop/rock the late 50s, mid-60s and late 70s are the fashionable choices. I'm in complete agreement with that time period. 1967-1976 or thereabouts for me. Never equalled, never surpassed...of course Wilson seems to be singlehandedly trying to change that and it makes me very happy. My golden time too. But I've always assumed its because I was between 13-21 in those years! Think I'd push it back to '65, though.

How do you associate a 1950s drink with 70s instrumentation and production values? To address the question: Martini's were still being drunk in the 1970s. Adverts were also being made about them (I vaguely recall stacking bottles of Martini on shelves in supermarkets I worked in during the early 70s). Bossa type music was used in the UK in the 60s and 70s to market this stuff, conjuring up an image of wealth, jet-set life, sophistication. I distinctly recall the early 60s adverts (which must have coincided with the Bossa craze) and wondering (at 9) if my future involved lolling around on boats off the south coast of France, surrounded by women in bikinis (it didn't). There's a certain sound in the 70s music I'm talking about which immediately throws up those same images. Maybe it's just my brain that's wired that way. No particular judgement being made on the music. I love the overall sound - it's just that sometimes the rhythms can get too regular, sometimes the sweetness a bit cloying for my tastes. But identifying the point where the bliss crosses to the beginnings of queeziness is not easy - I don't think the distance is that great. And just in case anyone is feeling peckish: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bossanova-Martini-Lounge-and-Restaurant/102641161039?sk=wall&filter=12

I love the final paragraph on that link. How many musicians would pick the late 60s/early 70s as 'the golden period of music'? When it comes to pop/rock the late 50s, mid-60s and late 70s are the fashionable choices.

That's how I remember it - I bought it for a few years in the late 70s. Quite surprised to see Mike Stern on the cover. Warren Vaché was more their style (no axe to grind against the latter, by the way!).

The Martini adverts of the 60s used Bossa type music extensively (as did the Pearl and Dean advert trailers in cinemas!). The 'Lounge' revival of the 90s also locked into that sound too. I just find there's a thin line between the melodic beauty and light, airy rhythms of this sort of music and something that sounds smooth and not much else. Sometimes the rhythms can sound almost mechanical - I wonder how far this fed into the later drum machine styles.

I have a dozen or so Hermeto discs (and a couple of tribute discs to him!) - he's very influential in the UK, having toured here with bands with a Brazilian core but UK horns etc (one of the best concerts I've ever attended was by Hermeto with such a band in Cheltenham). You can hear him all over the music of the Loose Tubes crowd from the 80s. The rock-fusion thing is only a part of what he does (and might be just a 70s thing)- the discs I have are maverick takes on more acoustic Brazilian music. Got hold of a copy of Tamba 4 and loved it. Great recommendation if not in the fusiony area. I have Airto's 'Natural Feelings' but not 'Seeds' - one to seek out. By chance I was listening to Vinicius yesterday - the disc with that title. Splendid stuff. Downloaded his two most recent (including the Frisell duet) as my e-music quota renewed. Thanks for all the other recs which I'm noting. James Last is really challenging my ability to break through preconceptions, though!

Thanks all. I've managed to find one of two of these OOP ones in 'unusual' places and will be giving them a listen in coming days. I've tried to limit the thread to a narrow area because there are already superb threads on the wider area of Brazilian music and Hard Bossa. I have a funny relationship with this fusion-y Brazilian jazz. When it was current I largely ran from it; I was moving from rock into more 'serious' music ('I was so much older then....') and so reacted against its light, breeziness. Yet there were things in my collection (like the version of 'Stone Flower' on Santana's Caravanseri) or buried in my memory (the Brasil '66 songs I heard as a kid on the radio) that were just waiting to surface. And, surprisingly, I can now hear influences is in some of the UK prog-jazz-rock that was my staple in the mid-70s. One result of 'discovering' (in a personal sense) Brazilian music a few years back has been to make me much more open to this fusion-y stuff. I still blanch at the synths, find the tick-a-tikka rhythms on some discs a bit hard to take and don't really relate to the overtly soul-influenced, slap-bass, 'let's get down' side (that has more to do with being a hung-up Englishman). But as an overall sub-genre I find it very attractive, especially on sunny days. Played this a couple of times yesterday: One I got on e-music a few years back. A marvellous compilation of more recent, breezy fender-rich performances from the likes of Azymuth, Joyce, Marcos Valle, Victor Assis Brasil (fabulous 'Ginger Bread Boy) etc from the Far Out label who feed a thriving minority interest in this music in the UK (mainly London). I find you have to step very carefully here. It's very tied up with a dance scene and quite a few of these records (not the example above) get the remix treatment with drum machine beats and the like. That's a line I can't get across! P.S. Will investigate the Hermeto, fasstrack - one of my favourites. 'Slaves Mass' falls into this area.

The Curtis Amy was a gas! This great vinyl album never made it to CD (except as part of a Mosaic Select) and now sells used on Amazon.com for $99.99!! Pity I never bought it in my youth! I'm hoping that Select will pop up on iTunes soon like one or two others.