Jazz for aficionados

Amen , my brother by a different mother .

Last night ,by chance, I tuned in archived hour of Marian McPartland’s "Piano Jazz " . I never listened to her much in the 40 years she did the programs as I wasn’t much into jazz then .
The conversations she had with virtually every one who was anyone in jazz must be the greatest treasure of jazz knowledge in the world . I ended up being up to 3 AM listening to a half dozen other programs . Most fun listening that I have ever had .
Programs are stunningly archived on Minnesota Public Radio . As they were NPR i imagine they are on other NPR stations as well .
I can’t imagine any lover of jazz not being overjoyed with both the talks and the music , the girl could play a bit , wonder on changes .Duos with guests are wonderful as well . One guy played "Blue Monk" on a French Horn and
explained how he harmonized notes to do it . Almost dropped my dentures !
As Dizzy and Lennie Tristano said" If you can sing it you can play it ' .

I saw Mingus live once, babes sure seemed to dig his act. 

Many/most women are hard-wired to go for the "bad boy" .
A   Harvard  bio prof told me because he was the one you could protect you from the saber-tooth tiger and bring meat home to your kiddies.

DNA of  10k years ago can override your rationality of today, ain't life a B-word .

The worst thing I ever heard in jazz was the day Dizzy passed.
 On whatever late-night show it was that Ellis M . was band leader, the host
  brought in a soloist to play a  last tribute to Dizzy's greatness .
  Said soloist was one Kenny G , never saw a band sit there so dead-pan.

Similar to being a combat infantryman, the guy who got a Silver Star yesterday is hiding behind a tree today . We all have good and bad days, there are no heroes .

Don't believe in being polite either . Crass attacks Class .

Learsfool forgot more about music than you know and his post is very well written and insightful , a delight to peruse !.

Someone needs to start a new jazz forum and leave the jerk to HIS circle .

You are right 0-10, I am a jerk 1st class and because the old axiom "takes one to know one" is true,  ,truth be told, I am just jealous that you are the only other full-fledged jerk that has ever surpassed even me .

It takes awhile to adjust to music aimed at the soul coming from music aimed at the crotch . 

You’re welcome . Just what the Brits call a simple home truth .
If the jazz standards are boring to you, in musical terms, it would be hard
to make a more banal statement .
I don’t make these general statements to be funny or a smart-ass, nor do I enjoy it .
I may well be the only well educated person you will ever encounter that was of legal age before rock existed , I know what I am talking about .
If the truth offends you it might be a good thing .

It’s OK to be entertained but the object is to learn to see/hear the truth in beauty and make it yours .
You have no way to know if its a stereotype or not , you have no means to compare and contrast. The very thought comes from others who want to make you forever a part of a mass mind which benefits them and degrades you .
I didn’t miss your point .

Oh, and the main goal of said mass mind is to turn away from the wisdom of the elders, which has always been a cornerstone of humanity, and replace it with the folly of the young .
Its been done so well that now vast majority of elders remain young fools forever.
The medium is the message .

ghosthouse, I did presume you were under 80 which is about as young as you would have to be to have the experiential knowledge required to make any meaningful fore and after comparison .
I don’t feel I am any smarter or better than you are , I do know that I am older and 
 wiser  which is as it should be and is no credit to me .

I find it sad that nobody seems to pay any attention to Anita O'Day.
She still is one of the greatest jazz singers .
I've heard her called the Basie of singers, no one had a better beat  than her.

Her Verve LP UMV2550 " Anita O'Day at Mister Kelly's"is the best sounding jazz vocal  LP I ever heard . Down to about 300 jazz LP's and
that would be the very last to go .

Right you are O-10, I should have made it clear that I was thinking of public 
in general on Anita, not folks on here .

Thanks 0-10.

No matter if Anita sang with the greatest band in the land or some pick-up guys , she did what only the greatest can do , leaving you feeling there was no other way the song could be sung .
Not the greatest voice ever but leaves you feeling like it was because she used it in the most honest way imaginable .

+!1for Elaine Elias, like to hear her sing, love to hear her play .

Julie London is a jazz singer to me because her side men and band leaders  were well known  jazz men , laid down a jazz beat and she sang to it .
Slow tempo usually ,but she could swing hard too .

Frogman, I have many Shirley Horn CD’s and did see her live, twice .

You don’t have to be much of a jazz fan at all to love"A Love Supreme".
If you listen to Classical Music a lot its not difficult , just beautiful. And if you are of a religious bent it’s sublime .

+1 thanks to Frogman for the NPR story . I never bothered to research the backstory .


To me , its always seemed like the search for meaning innate in all human beings, how we seldom know we are on a journey till/if  we arrive at the destination .  

As a Christian what other meaning would come to mind after "A Love Supreme" by a serious artist in a serious genre ?
Not Suzy Q under the boardwalk .

Speaking of short shrift I’ve not seen any love for Jackie Terrasson(?).
A fine original piano player who gets air time on Mpls. Jazz FM .
Where can I go to learn how to make these You Tube posts ?

Well, once you get past history I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer .
 To me "paste" was that stuff you used in kindergarten .

O-10 , thanks for saying I'm not stupid. I wonder at times .
All jokes aside, when you are old and have been a student all your  days
your brain's hard drive is filled up and it rebels wiping something out it considers important for something it considers trivial .

Must be nice to have perfect pitch .

Mid 60"s had some great artists alright , but most of them were products of the 20's through early 50’s  when forms of jazz where THE music of America .
By mid 60’s jazz was irrelevant to most, then ,as now, rock was the American norm .
To my dying day I will believe the great big banks were/are the zenith of jazz.
The big band, like a Symphony Orchestra, is not a collection of instruments , but an instrument unto itself , one which can do things no smaller group or soloist can .

I feel for you frog.
I always have reception problems on my yacht out on Lake George too .

RVG was the man alright, I used to just buy an album on his name alone .
But more i listen a lot of his work is too "in your face" for my current taste .

I never thought of that but I think you are right frogman.
The reason I listen to Jazz is I grew up listening to swing, and
start of bop, all day, every day on the radio .
Still pissed from when rock came along and murdered it .
And as is well known , when one gets close to departing this vale
of tears one is comforted by things from your childhood .
Few seem to realize how great the composers of the best "standards" were,
to include word-smiths like the Great Johnny Mercer .
I didn’t know great they were myself till I heard a first class Symphony
Orch., Berlin R.I.A.S., play "Stardust", Sleeply Time Girl" and many others few times a week.
In Classical I listen like a hawk for all elements which is uplifting but not relaxing .
Listening to Jazz 88.5 station here, I don’t know about the audience side of things , but on student and young player side , there is an tsunami of great young jazz talent out there .
Few days ago I heard some cuts from North Texas State Lab Band 1, they
reminded me of Artie Shaw or Charlie Barnett at their best, swinging and having a ball !
P.S . I don’t say Upstate NY is most beautiful place in the world because I was born in Syracuse, but because it is just the plain truth .

It’s not the Music itself that is the best, it’s the end use to which it is put and the level of that end .
Bach said the purpose of music is to glorify God and wrote "To the Glory of God ". And he meant it . Much of Classical music is religious music and
most of the greatest composers made efforts toward that goal, the praise of God , a sung and played prayer.

I see Jazz as a conversation between peers to bring music at its best to the human level, a love thy neighbor as thy self exercise at it’s best , which is a noble effort in and of itself . And at the end of the day a tribute to God, as we humans can’t think of God all the time any more than a student can study all the time .

I see pop/rock as simple melodies for those who want to live life the easy way, melody without rhythm. I believe the cults that form around this band and that are a way to live your life without ever creating one for yourself.
Much like those who make a sports team the center of their existence , hard to call it a life in either case .

Folk music, real folk music , is special in that it is a living binder of community, a crucial element for all humans that is woefully absent in our time .
Also once you get past, say the beat in Celtic music for instance, there is a whole lot of music going on , much like "blue notes " in jazz with the music of centuries being improvised much like jazz is , still room on those old charts .No accident that some of the greatest modern composers , masters of composition like
Bartok, Janacek and Vaughn-Williams dove deep into this endless well .

O-10
One of the 4-5 things I know for certain is " if you ain't getting better you're getting worse " .

And we are not always aware of our emotions , our society and our place
in it usually becomes a "comfort food" for our emotional state when we hear this or that without us knowing why or to what degree .
IMO, jazz fans are often folks who like to swim against the tide .


I myself grew up devouring history books, studied academically same for
ten years and still read it daily .
Took me a long time to get it that some of my love of classical is because
I can put myself mentally anywhere,  anytime, with anybody in western history since early medieval times and have been doing so in music unawares for many decades .
I got interested in jazz because of the way Mingus used music to express the horrors of racism in the USA .

O-10, 
Send a nice check, pro's get paid for what they know, ask any therapist .

Truth is, when you hear "ahead of his time" perk your ears up, you might just hear someone with one of the rarest of all human traits, the courage to be in his time .

Nothing strange about it you’re listening to someone else’s yang so your yin
allows your yang to dig whats going on .

Try,
 Ralph Vaughn-Williams "The Lark Ascending" , many think this is the most perfect piece of music ever written ..
 A Lark takes off in ever increasing winding circles , not straight lines like other bird's , an O-10 with feathers .

Herr O-10 ,
I got as far as " turned blue" only to find my Google ain’t customized and since I don’t know how to do that either ,its not likely to be . I have no real
contributions to make to jazz "pastes" in any event .

If you REALLY want to hear classical as beautiful as it gets, go to You Tube
and select the version by the great Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, the Decca Classical Version,who not only has this music in her bones , but is about as beautiful as women get. She only plays the first half on this version but she does it to such perfection IMO its the place to start . Full versions of 15-18 minutes are on Tube as well but none in her class .

To boot she plays one of the best violins in the world and the production of this Decca selection is beautiful beyond belief, so beautiful that words truly fail me, never seen anything like it !

Yes, I remember how Marcellus was the go-to .
After listening several times I thought he was 98% of what Meyer was and the recording could be the difference .Still , reminds me of two great singers equally fine , one of whom hits their high-notes just a tiny bit easier .
My bias speaking . Mayer teaches at the Hochschule level in Lubeck . just gets better and better.

Thanks , Frogman

The difference for me is the Mozart makes me awestruck , the RVW makes
me cry. Not a figure of speech .

Sabine Meyer is on my top-ten list of greatest living players of any instrument . To my old ears Cleveland lacked the lyrical element for the great composers who wrote everything in human voice terms,Mozart and Schubert above all. Leaving out the clarinet sounds almost like Haydn.
Dresden band has it , not surprising for a German ensemble .
Of course , I could be all wrong , don’t mind being corrected .

Bet he could play one hell of a polka !

A lot of truth in what you say, O-10.
But down the road a piece, for those who come after us, if the live music dies it will all die .

FROGPERSON ,

I hope you are in the catskill's  !

Back at you Frogman , VERY glad to hear that !
And I Truly pray that  ALL  on here survive this as well .

HUMANITY ALERT !!
There is a recent post over on Thiel Owners that is as human a post as I have seen in a long time .
post is ""Great Spirit and Great Music "" by tomthiels "" .
No matter what genre you are into this is a masterpiece for this time !Be there or be square .
Thats a big blog or whatever you call this , is about 5th up last page as I write this .

https://youtu.be/ph1GU1qQ1zQ?t=8

I got it on here(for now) .

We all know the song but nobody ever heard musicians from over the world snyc  it up so perfectly brick by brick for 18  months ,
And finish at the right time !

Amen on Previn. One of my pet peeves is the "dis he gets as a Classical Conductor.

Many of his recordings of the English rep. with LSO are still the best available .
Most stick wavers won’t even touch the difficult  Walton 1st Symphony , with its jazz syncopated rhythms and chromatic notes .
Previn nailed it in a perfect performance that has yet to be equaled !
IMO a very great Conductor and all-around Musician .

Thanks guys , if I'm in presence of someone who says Ringo was not a good drummer I'll deck them .

For those who love trad jazz there was a great piano player out Chicago, Joe Sullivan, who recorded a lot of Fats Wallers songs, many unpublished, in 40 and 50’s .
Didn’t play them like Fats , but did justice and showed the many facets of his music .
Butch Thompson did an hour show devoted to him yesterday on local
jazz station and Butch sure has cred  with trad lovers .

In Germany I was always OK with the expensive gas as I knew it funded
the cost-free German Higher Education System and German students
had none of the horrendous debt burden so many American students have .
Also ,made me think is this trip necessary?

USA has 50-60 trillion $$$ in debt which is certain to eventually destroy the dollar . Germany has none .
Think Macro.