jazzbo

Many happy returns Ray!

Yeah, another Austinite who is a little baffled. I'm a nonsmoker too who would prefer smokefree places, but I'm a lover of FREEDOM! Wait, does that mean I'm now considered an ultraliberal?

Lately: Tom Jobim, "Ineditos" and the collaboration with Selena Jones Randy Weston "Marrakech in the Cool of the Evening" Grant Green "Feelin' the Spirit"

I thought Malcolm Addey was the remasterer of this, I hope so, I think he does better work than McMaster. There is quite a bit of mention of this set in another thread, about the new Selects, and favorable at that. I haven't gotten this Select yet, but I have all the material in other forms except the unissued session, and I LOVE IT! This is great stuff, a great variety of material. Weston's playing and writing is topnotch!

There's another thread about this set on the board somewhere. . . . I've had advance copies for some time, and just got my set last night and haven't compared them yet. This is a great reissue, I'm sure. Mnytime: there is one other recording from Japan with Sam Rivers circulating the collector's network. . . or should I say at least one other.

Here's another one, solo guitar renditions of Herbie Nichols' compositions. Amazing!

Hell yeah Vibes!

Obscure in some ways . . . and very recommended:

Man, Cosby's albums from thirty some years ago are hilarious! Thanks for reminding me of them Larry.

Pee Wee Russell. . . . yeah start her off RIGHT! I love Kenny Davern as well. That man can play, and he can play anything!

I certainly enjoy Carlin, but don't have much experience listening or reading him. I'm a huge fan of Jonathon Winters though. For example, I totally love a phrase I saw him say by pure chance flipping a channel one night, "Remember: only the mediocre are always at their best." My wife and I were going through the hardest times we ever have due to an illness, and that really hit home, and lifted me up. It's a funny play on word meaning and also quite a strong statement!

Hey, I thought it was "Impressions" in disguise!

WOODY ALLEN: These... I should just add, parenthetically, these stories are true. These things actually happened to me. I don't make them up. My life is a series of...of...eh...these crises that...that eh... I came home one night, some month ago, and I went to the closet in my bedroom, and a moth ate my sports jacket. He was laying on the floor, nauseous, y'know. It was a yellow and green striped jacket, y'know. The little fat moth laying there, groaning, y'know, part of a sleeve hanging out of his mouth. I gave him two plain brown socks. I said "Eat one now and eat one in a half hour." Someone asked me if I would tell this...story. A long time ago... It's a wierd story. 'Twas out in Los Angeles and I was at a party with a very big Hollywood producer, and at that time he wanted to make an elaborate cinemascope musical comedy out of the Dewey Decimal System. And they wanted me to work on it, and I go out to the producers building in downtown Los Angeles,and I walk into his elevator, and there are no people in the elevator, no buttons on the wall or anything. And I hear a voice say "Kindly call out your floors, please." And I look around, and I'm alone. And I panic, and I read on the wall, that is a new elevator and it works on a sonic principle and it all sound. All I have to do is say what floor I wanna got to, and it takes me there. So I say "Three, please", and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to three. And on the way up I began to feel very selfconscious, 'cause I talk, I think, with a slight New York accent, and the elevator spoke quite well. I get out of it, and I'm walking down the hall, and I look back, and I thought I heard the elevator make a remark. I turned quickly and the doors closed and the elevator goes down, y'know, and I...didn't wanna get involved at the time with an...elevator in Hollywood, but - this is the strange part of the story, the other was the normal part - I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. Anything that I can't reason with or kiss or fondle, I get into trouble with. I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise for some reason. My toaster pops up my toast and shakes it, burns it. I hate my shower. I'm taking a shower, and somebody in America uses his water. That's it for me, y'know, I leap from the tub scolded. I have a tape recorder, I payed a hundred and fifty dollars for, and as I talk into it, it goes "I know, I know." About three years ago I couldn't stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my posessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them. I opened with a joke. And then I said "I know what's going on, and cut it out!" I have a sun lamp, but as I sit under it, it rains on me. And I spoke to each appliance, I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good. Two nights later I'm watching my portable television set, and the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said "I thought we had discussed this, what's the problem?" And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile. And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he'd sent me to a chiropodist. I'm going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say "Kindly call out your floors, please", and I say "sixteen" and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen. And on the way up the ellevator says to me "Are you the guy that hit the televison set?" I felt like an ass, y'know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-semetic. The upshot of the story is, that day I called my parents, my father was fired. He was technologically unemployed. My father had worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him. They replaced him with a tiny gadget, this big, that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressiong thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.

Yeah, I forgot Stereophile. . . sent a few letters in there that were published, and I was quoted in one of the columns, talking about a Mingus Big Band cd. That magazine really went downhill though and I haven't read it in about three years! (Heck it may be fantastic now, but it had become just a lot of fluff and a lot of ads for some time.)

Hey, today my answer is "Dwitzah" by Ed Motta. Try it! Part Steely Dan, part Herbie Hancock, part . . . well it's a new fusion of sorts and a lot of fun. On Universal, in both Brazilian and English editions.

Now, did I say it was on this thread? Here is where it is: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...2&t=1152&st=120

Former Ohioan here, weighing in on the side of the music. Even though my Dad and my brothers could well be at the game. I'm like RT: almost everything would trump sports for me. I can understand people playing sports to a certain extent; did that too when I was young, liked soccer and tennis the best. But watching it? And paying more for every product too?

I think Bev made some good points about the differences between this board and AAJ. Vive la difference!

Hey Sal, not to worry. Not a big deal either way, but I sent you a "private message" just now in place of the email.

Your groggy head enjoys the rolling sound of the synth as your left hand lazily picks a walking line and your right hits those odd Milesian Oberheim chords that you had been fooling around with to use in "Lou's Dues are Blues," the composition you are going to lay on the man himself soon as a feature. You can't remember if you've done with the j, but there it is cold and crisply dead in the black onyx ashtray. . . you want to relight it but you know you shouldn't. Now you find yourself at the window again with the breeze and though you want it to, it doesn't clear your head. Suddenly you hear a voice as if it were right behind you but you spin and no one is there, no one at all. You then see the image on the vidscreen on the wall in front of you. Your Host, Master G. Ugly as sin. "Aric," the voice was even more deep than before, and the bevy of babes were surrounding him, and smiling your way. "Do you know Malcolm Merryweather?" At first the name meant nothing, then a memory came floating up to the fore of your cranium and you said, "Yeah. He's an asshole." The babes tittered and G giggled. "Maybe so," he finally said, "but he's right now HOT, just won a big contest, and I want him in my band!"

Man, I hope I got out of there FAST ENOUGH!

Yeah there were some that were I think. I wrote that T. S. Eliot one and they published it. (It's in the issue with the humongously obese Elvis on the cover.) And I wrote an even better one as if it were from William Faulkner, that I don't think they DID publish, but I quit reading the mag around the period they may have published it and am not sure. . . . It was a doozy, he was bemoaning the fact he was facing jail time for tax evasion for the taxes of the entire fictitious county he had created. . . . Well, I and my dad at least thought it was pretty darned funny!

I've had some luck. Had letters published in Rolling Stone, "Conan the Barbarian" Marvel Comic, a "Doctor Strange" Marvel too I think, and in the National Lampoon (as T. S. Eliot though!) I've had a few articles published in the e-zine "doobop" which is no more, and one was an interview with Michael Cuscuna which has been moved to the All About Jazz website. It came to me as a surpise that my interview was referrenced twice in Michael Cook's "Blue Note Records: The Biography." Also, some comments that I have made about the RVG series appeared in Jazziz magazine about a year ago. That one was also a surprise. A nice little beginning!

Not an improvement as far as I'm concerned! I miss the old one already!

Have to thank Jim again for selecting this blast from my past. This was the first Armstrong lp I ever owned, and it was a real eyeopener, a MILESTONE in my jazz listening in many ways. I had come back from Swaziland with the sound of the British Blues bands in my head, and the sound of that South African music that is so distinctive, and most of what was playing on the airwaves I had no referrence point to, though I learned to later. . . . A copy of Filles De Kilamanjaro somehow planted for me to find in the Burton, Ohio public library knocked me for a loop. . . here was a fusion of a lot of the sound and feel I had been longing for, and I found that Miles at Fillmore was out there for me to grab in the Coventry area of Cleveland, and I became an electric Miles fanatic, and then on to Weather Report, Return to Forever, and more. . . and an exploration of the urban blues greats of the forties and fifties began as well, simultaneously. Then I went to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and I finally met people who were into the electric Miles and the fusion stuff (which I saw as two separate categories) and was exposed to Coltrane and earlier Miles too (I had gotten a copy of ESP and one of the Blackhawks at the same time in a hip little record shop that was a long walk from my dorm.) And I found that you could ride a subway and spend all your money for the week and see John Lee Hooker at a bar for a few sets, and so I started seeing some of the Chicago greats in clubs, and even helped arrange to have J. B. Hutto come to a dance at the University. Heady times for me, this musical discovery! So one time at the record store I stood transfixed with a copy of Plays W.C. Handy in my hand. I don't know what drew me to this lp, but I had it in my hands, and I couldn't put it back in the bin. I'd heard some Pops, and read of how important he was, and really liked some of the big band sides like "I'm Cofessin' that I Love You". . . but this was different, an older Pops, one I really didn't know anything of, it wasn't Hello Dolly, but what was it? I bought it. I got back to the dorm, I put the needle into the groove. . . and was really surprised at what I heard. First voice I hear is Velma Middleton! And then that fat and juicy trumpet, and t hat booming bass and then that happy and joshing Armstrong voice. I was fascinated. I listened to that lp over and over. The way that Barrett Deems hardly played and then was swinging the band away and then hardly played and still was swinging the band away. The way that Trummy Young just forced excitement into the grooves. The way that Velma and Louis were flirting and cooing and laughing. This seemed so ADULT. It wasn't like the Clapton or Jagger of Winwood or Santanna vocals I'd heard over and over. They were adult, they were in a way reckless in the clarity of the feeling they were singing out. . . . I kept listening to this lp and driving a rather not appreciative roommate to the library. And it seemed to bridge the Chicago blues I was drinking in and the jazz that I was moving towards. . . . AND I made a link in my mind and heart between the playing of trumpet on this album and Miles' Blackhawk lp. The Blackhawk lp had floored me too and showed me a different Miles indeed, hardly at first even recognizable as the Miles of Live/Evil. But the more I listened, the more I focused on the swing in the sound and the way that Wynton Kelly played that brief solo piano piece that closed a side. . . the more I dug this. That Blackhawk volume brought me into a new world of music. And so did the Armstrong, because within six months I had several other Columbias from the fifties, and a Decca with Teagarden, and over theyaers I kept going to Pops and getting that reality dose. Real feeling, real swing and drive. . . . One other interesting thing about this lp that I'll tell you about. (I feel like an old man spinning some yarn of youth, but you don't have to read it after all. You can click to the next post. . .) About three months after I got this Pops lp, a "prospective student" came to stay with the "House Master" of our dorm and his wife, to see if she liked the University. She was from Houston, she was dark and desirable and I ws wondering if I should make some sort of play because she seemed to be okay with talking with me a bit. There was a little party in the common area for her, and they were playing the usual stuff, which actually in those days included some bozo playing "Hooked on a Feeling" at eleven on the volume dial, which is an agony that I still remember. At one point she came over to me and said "Isn't there some different music to play?" I was in a tizzy as I slipped back to my dorm and my meager, weird collection of jazz, blues, Ravi Shankar, Crazy Horse. . . etc. I pulled out a few, and Plays W. C. Handy was one of them. Given the mandate by Lavinia, I commandeered the turntable, I put that one on, it certainly was different. . . . SHE LOVED IT. She came and sat with me and read the back of the album cover. We were pretty inseparable for the next few days. It was grand. . . . Ultimately she never came to UC, which is something I certainly don't blame her for, and we exchanged some letters for a while and then stopped, and I wonder what has happened to her. . . . And ironically six years later, I was in Texas and have been here ever since. I really think it was POPS that wooed her for me. So, this is a sentimental favorite, but it's solid, it needs no nostalgia or sentiment to prop it up. The way that the sound booms in that Chicago studio, and the voices and the horns are so prominent and full and rich. The way that the band does its little riffy arranged heads and the way that the singing is so fantastically swinging and joyful and the way that the music seems to be just flowing out with no effort . . . . This is a milestone recording in so many musical ways. I want this one with me always!