jazzypaul

No. Two words: Kenny Kirkland.

This does raise an interesting point, and this isn't the first time I've wondered about this kind of hypocrisy here on the board. Being a Christian or a Republican is a choice people make. (I dunno about fatness.) And many people are born into Christian or Republican families. As for being gay, one can choose to be gay, and one can be born gay. Either way, it doesn't make a difference. What is "PC" shouldn't have anything to do with these factors. There's gotta be truth to this. Look at the disproportionately high number of gays and lesbians who suffered through some sort of sexual assault as children. At that point, I'm not even saying that it's a conscious choice, but the flip side to that would be absolutely ridiculous to ponder: that more gay children get molested than straight children. I'm not saying that there's not a large percentage of people who might be born gay, but to ridicule vibes for what's actually a pretty common sense remark is pretty silly.

Eyes totally open, but if the music starts getting intense, I start biting my bottom lip.

You're high, man. Pet Sounds is amazing. I love that record. For me, the most famous album I've never heard all the way through has got to be Blonde on Blonde, which is doubly insane because as a teenager, I was Barry from High Fidelity, in a record store just like Championship Vinyl. But, yeah, somehow, I've never heard it all the way through.

Not so fast. Many, and I repeat many of the Beatles' songs written by John or George were written exclusively by those two. Especially in the case of George. So to say that Paul and Ringo (who wrote TWO, count 'em TWO) should have sole rights to those songs is ridiculous. I may not like the idea of Yoko getting the lion's share of the taste of John's tunes, but that's the way it is. What I really don't like is that she gets a piece of Yesterday, which was written solely by Paul. He deserves the millions upon millions that that one song alone has generated. What I am still trying to figure out is how Blackwood/Northern Songs got out of the hands of Paul and John in the first place.

add to that the fact that kids are now practically encouraged to not go outside and play anymore. When I was a kid, atari was fun and all (I know, I'm dating myself), but it was still more fun in the long run to go out and play baseball or football, and you were cool if you were in Karate lessons. Now kids just want to attatch themselves to their computers and play video games all day. If you're just gonna sit around all day, you're gonna get fat, french fries or not.

I hope when I find a woman dumb enough to be my wife and give me children that I can be half the man that you were in that moment, Al.

That one is an awesome one, as is the first track on the first trio side with Liebman. I forget the name off the top of my head, but only Elvin could do Afro-Cuban like that! Awesomeness!

Really? Make sure you're playing the groove to Immigrant Song correctly. As well...try, just try to play When The Levee Breaks, as Bonham plays it. Unless your four way independance is totally together, it's a bitch. And if you can play The Crunge note for note at all of 16, I'm selling my drumset. I didn't get that one completely together until sometime last year.

Here's the other independance booster par excellance... learn all of your led zeppelin tunes. So many of these tunes (and their drumbeats) sound ridiculously simple, until you try to lay them down. As much as studying with some great jazz drummers in Chicago helped me a ton, and as much as going through the syncopation book in various forms helped me a ton, my drumming got REALLY freed up as soon as I started really getting into Bonham's brain and trying to figure out some of his grooves. On a lesser level, the same can be said for some of Mitch Mitchell's stuff as well.

I had it (kinda) easy learning french in high school. Half of my dad's family is of pied noir decent (french algerians, back when there was such a thing), and when they moved to France after the Algerians kicked them out, they moved into a community of pied noirs. Who spoke a different dialect of French than the rest of France, by the way, and continue to do so. Anyway, during my sophomore and junior years in high school, it just so happened that almost all of them ended up coming over here, in two month jaunts. So, for two months, I had my aunt, then my cousin, then a couple of uncles, and so on and so forth. When they found out that I was taking french class and doing pretty well, they stopped speaking english. And when I spoke parisian french, they didn't catch some of what I was saying. So I had to adapt to the algerian accent and dialect. By the end of my aunt's stay, I was thinking almost exclusively in french, putting adjectives after the nouns, speaking in french tenses and speaking overly formally (for US standards). Once in gym class, when asked a question by my teacher, I answered in French without even thinking about it. So, I knew the language, but ended up passing French junior year with a B- because I was confusing the teacher who didn't know the algerian dialect and assumed I was making words up. When I explained the situation, she said that she was teaching parisian french, and other dialects didn't matter within the four walls of her classroom. That wench! Senior year, I only needed 3 classes to graduate. French was on the list of classes that didn't make the cut. Now, if I hear enough French, I can kinda understand it, but for the most part, outside of a few key phrases here and there, I've forgotten most of what I learned. A lot of it is immersion. As many other people have stated, if you really want to become fluent in a language, you'll need to surround yourself with people that speak that language.

I fully concur that we must know standards so that we can play with others at jam sessions and on wedding gigs and the such. However, when I pay $20-30-40 to see someone, and they play There Is No Greater Love, they deserve to be beaten upon the head and face. I didn't pay to hear you play something that I've got on a Jamey Aebersold CD. That said, my band does some standards. However, when we do them, there must be two criteria met... 1) We must do something absolutely odd with it. And the more well known the standard, the more we must mess with it. Therefore, on the gig where we decide to do Body and Soul, be afraid, be very afraid. 2) Standards must be done differently every time. Re-harms on the spot, different rhythms, retoolings of the melody, whatever can be done. We do try to play some pretty obscure stuff. We're also big on doing pop covers by our favorite artists, and we've also got our very out and very weird version of Free Bird in case the nutcases at some of the places we play decide to be hecklers. If I believe in one thing in jazz performance, it's this: learn everything by the book. Then burn the fucking book as fast as you can.* *actually learned from a buddy, whose fake book was burned by none other than Fareed Haque for daring to read from the real book on a gig.

The Rufus Harley discs are already on the pile, man. Can't expect me to stray too far from an organist and a bagpipe player who throws up every day, can you?

Okay, so my boss put me on a scavenger hunt, looking for jazz with something (anything, really) to do with the Irish, Ireland, Shamrocks, whatever, for St. Patrick's Day. Okay, so I've got Coleman Hawkins doing I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover and Rosemary Clooney doing Danny Boy. After that, I'm licked. Any suggestions?

is this for me?

award for post of the week goes to (opening envelope) Chuck Nessa for "Indiana is a buffer"! Congratulations Chuck! (applause erupts from the crowd)

Would YOU want to name your store Naperville Market? My dad was right, the name of the town gives one the creeps.

My parents live in Naperville these days, and I gotta say, if Boston Market was still based in that absolutely bizarre, weird, odd, freakishly off place, I would boycott it until the day I died. Which would mean no spicy meatloaf. that would make me if not outright so I guess I at the fact that Boston Market of Naperville, IL is now in Aurora, CO. Strange thing is, if they wanted to move to Aurora, all they had to do was cross route 59.... silly corporate people always making things hard...

Man, I would love to see my beloved White Sox in spring training. How cool would that be?

the spicy meatloaf is where it's at with Boston Market. Yep. Spicy Meatloaf. MMMMMMMMMMM....

that is awesome.

That's 26 words, 26 spaces, 104 letters, for a total of 130 characters typed. Maybe we could get an hourly average on that? no.

That's 26 words, 26 spaces, 104 letters, for a total of 130 characters typed.

Amen.