ghost of miles

Yes, it's wonderful--just played it on the radio about two or three months ago. My liking for Ralph Burns was what pushed me over the edge on picking up this set, and I didn't regret it. I don't mind Woody's vocals, but I do skip over the Dixieland stuff.

Happy birthday to a swell poster!

Brownie, this still probably doesn't fall within the parameters that you mention, but Allen Lowe's THAT DEVILIN' TUNE and AMERICAN POP: FROM MINSTREL TO MOJO, 1953-1956, seem to have received very limited distribution. I had to buy mine through Cadence. He's an excellent writer, one to whom I was hipped by our own Joe Milazzo, but his books are damned hard to find.

A few nights ago I was walking home and noticed that somebody was watching "Jeopardy" in their front living-room. Not necessarily all that odd for my artsy/bookworm-ish neighborhood, but I still thought, "That's cool, people still watch that program." Shows how clueless I've become since we gave up cable TV: Story from the previous day:

Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington's "Main Street," as it were, viewed from the western edge of the IU campus: The Arboretum, between the two buildings where I work (Main Library and Radio/TV Building): Hoagy Carmichael's grave, about 150 yards from where I live. Found all of these on the web, but I actually know the guy on the left--he's a DJ at WFHB:

Rachel, I love the canal! My grandfather used to take me up to Holcomb Gardens at Butler when I was little, and the canal has fascinated me ever since. The Indiana Historical Society sells a couple of books about the canal: one is a collection of poems and photos by a man who used to frequent the Indiana Avenue neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s; the other is a more general history of the canal. When I was a kid the section that your photo shows was pretty much an open ditch; they really beautified it in the early 1980s. I love walking along it whenever I go up to the IHS now.

Yes, I tried logging in last night around 8 and got the ol' error message.

Hmmm... well, thanks for that info, Mike. I was under the mistaken impression (having never seen the album's tracklist) that it was another Basie/KC tribute. In that case, I may have some re-thinking to do--except that I still want to feature the Russell/Baker group, and am still looking for the CD-R. May be better to match it up with the Five Spot and yoke the Brookmeyer with Rogers, as you suggested. August is the Basie centennial, of course, but Baker is also leading the Smithsonian Masterworks Jazz Orchestra in concert on Saturday, Aug. 14, and my program will be airing right around the time it lets out. Perhaps I could do Russell on Aug. 14 and Brookmeyer/Rogers on either Aug. 7 or Aug. 28 (21st will probably be a Parker show). Enough of my thinking out loud--thanks for the tip!

Hello all, Does anyone have a decent-sounding copy of George Russell's KANSAS CITY album, recorded for Decca circa 1960, that they could make a CD-R of for me? More than willing to send a CD-R of something OOP in exchange... I'm trying to put together a program built around Brookmeyer's KC REVISITED and the Russell LP. PM me if you prefer...

That squealing jazz... Yeah, I'm surprised, too, to see it get so much play (it's in Yahoo's top news stories box right now) but well-deserved, a pleasant surprise. That Mosaic set is pretty amazing, simply because they were able to license from so many different labels to put it together... I'm glad that he lived as long as he did. "Black Velvet" is a thing of beauty, and I'll listen to it again tonight.

Valerie Wilmer's JAZZ PEOPLE used to be a really hard to find, somewhat overlooked book, but I think it finally came back into print as a paperback several years ago. Did Boris Vians' writings on jazz ever get published as a book?

Sometime in 1998... in this category, I did 70 years' of living in 30 & decided to retire. -_-

A fair amount of Dutch blood from my mother's side of the family... perhaps this explains why I've been eating so much lately? I'm only 6:1 & 175 lbs--guess I've still got some growing to do...

Definitely time to pull out the Mosaic again.

I think Best finally got a bit of loot when ANTHOLOGY 1 came out--wasn't he on some of the early tracks?

McCoy Tyner, NIGHTS OF BALLADS & BLUES. Yesterday: very bad. Bought a used, near-mint COMP. BILLIE HOLIDAY ON VERVE, even though I already have most of the material... also used copies of Don Byron's TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENTS, an Irene Kral w/Junior Mance on Fresh Sounds, and the Silos' CUBA.

Hey all, I'll be re-running a two-part Coltrane special as I bid farewell to my weekly community radio program. Tonight it's "John Coltrane, In His Music, In His Words: The 1950s," featuring interviews with Trane scholar Carl Woideck and with Coltrane himself (the August Blume interview from '58). I'll also play some of Coltrane's early R & B sides, including the rare Gay Crosse and Coatesville Harris recordings. Listen here or there if you're interested; program runs from 6 p.m. (7 New York, 9 California) to 9 p.m.

Good choice--I'll pull this one out.

Hardbopjazz, you should never have asked... now the jazz demons have been loosed. God help us all...

But isn't Paul already--but... wha... It's all right there on the back of SGT. PEPPER, I tell you!

"A Brief Convergence: Miles Davis & Sam Rivers" is now in the can, with a "special thanks to members of the Organissimo jazz internet discussion board for their thoughts & reflections on Sam Rivers' tenure with Miles Davis' band" embedded in the production credits. Setlist includes "Oleo" (7/15/64), "Stella By Starlight" (7/15/64), "Autumn Leaves" (7/12/64) and several tracks from Sam's FUSCHIA SWING SONG. Next week: "Blowin' In From Chicago," a program devoted to past & present Chi-town musicians, including music from Dinah Washington's AFTER HOURS WITH MISS D, the new Von Freeman, and the Gilmore/Jordan BN collaboration.

I just had trouble logging on for about an hour or so... am I here yet?

Listening to HATFUL OF HOLLOW today, I find myself thinking the "depression rock" label a bit of a misnomer--there's such a sense of joy at the heart of the band's music, in the sense of aesthetic excitement. While they certainly had a "sound," I was always a bit uncertain of where that "sound" was going to go, as the albums came out--unlike, say, the Jesus & Mary Chain or Husker Du, who found a formula early on and did interesting things within it, but who didn't deviate all that much once they did. And I still long for the days of singles coming out every several months, though I know that's a difficult pace for most bands to sustain. The current "one CD every 3-4 years, with NO singles in between" system of distribution is a real bore, IMO.

He did indeed profess to be celibate, and often used "I/you" in his songs, eschewing direct gender identification, but songs like "Handsome Devil," "William, It Was Really Nothing" and "Hand In Glove" didn't leave much doubt... (And according to Mojo, an early, discarded song was titled, "I Want a Boy for My Birthday"). Most of my friends, like me, were straight, but we were all pretty early gay-rights advocates--and again, it's easy to forget that that was not a popular stance, particularly as the AIDS epidemic became more widespread. Perhaps listening to the Smiths was also an easy way to glom onto a sense of political militancy (their music in & of itself certainly wasn't overtly militant) because of Morrissey's identity (willed or not) as a gay lead singer... very 1980s indeed! For me, though, it was mostly that songs like "How Soon Is Now?" and "Well I Wonder" really caught the mood of being young in that particular time.

Last night I picked up a Mojo/Q issue devoted to the Smiths, and spent most of the evening reading it while I listened to a couple of their CDs. I had such a great love for this band when I was an undergrad in the mid-1980s, and their music, for the most part, has held up well. They provided such a great soundtrack for the coked-out alienation of that decade, the discovery with AIDS that love indeed kills, the rise of Reaganism/Thatcherism... As someone who was already badly hooked on R.E.M.'s early Rickenbacker sound, I was a sucker for Johnny Marr's bevy of sharply beautiful hooks (didn't he even buy Roger McGuinn's old 12-string guitar?). It's easy to forget, too, how unusual it was in 1984 for a band to be fronted by an openly gay singer (though Morrissey managed to be subtle & overt at the same time) who didn't dress in drag, a la Boy George, or camp it up in over-the-top ways. My parents were shocked when I told them Morrissey was gay and that I was listening to the band (1984 in Indiana, remember). His lyrics were such a revelation, too; my girlfriend and I laughed so hard when we first heard "Girl Afraid," which perfectly captures would-be romantic anxiety, but also includes lines such as "And she doesn't even like me/and I know because she said so..." They incorporated so many musical influences in their work, from the MC5 to girl groups (listen to MEAT IS MURDER for what I think is the best example of their range). And they were a great singles band--God, there was such a thrill in going down to one of the local record shops every three months to get the new 12-inch (and their b-sides were often pretty killer as well). In the fall of 1986, while I was still taking in THE QUEEN IS DEAD, I went to visit a friend at a nearby dorm. He was a solemnly benign, hipper-than-thou poet who dressed in de rigeur black, and as I was talking to him he lowered a needle onto his turntable. "What is it?" I asked. "It's the new Smiths single," he said with a look of wry merriment, and as the opening chords of "Panic" careened off the record-player, he broke into a bohemian jig. God, that song! "Burn down the disco/hang the blessed DJ/because the music that he constantly plays/It says nothing to me about my life," followed by children singing the joyously defiant refrain, "Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ..." It caught so well what many of us felt about radio in the 1980s. The Smiths, we felt, were our band--the sensitive, lonely aesthetes finally had a club. Which is why the day that I heard they were breaking up felt like the end of an era in indie music. I imagined it was what many more felt 17 years before when they heard that the Beatles were no more. Autumn 1987 was a bleak time in many respects, and news of the Smiths' conclusion made it only more so. In a 1986 interview, Morrissey said, when asked what fate he wished for their songs: "I don't necessarily hope that people will say we changed their lives--I just hope they say our songs remind them of a certain period in their lives." In that case, they succeeded wildly, and then some.