Ellington at Newport

So I was going to post this in the comments section of Seger's post on Mingus but as I started to write it became a blog post of it's on...

My first jazz record, Ellington at Newport. A fantastic record on it's own right, but the majority of the magic rests in the final song, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue". The version Duke and his band did of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" that night literally damn near set the crowd into a riot. Ellington told Paul Gonsalves (tenor sax) to blow as long as he wanted during the interlude, which Ellington later called "The Wailing Interval" or "Blow By Blow." In what has since become jazz folklore, Gonsalves almost created a riot as he played a tenor sax solo for 27 choruses that stirred up the normally staid crowd into a frenzy. Legend has it that the solo made a striking platinum blonde woman in a black evening dress jump from her box seat and start dancing. This helped serve as a catalyst for the crowd frenzy that grew as Gonsalves continued his solo. The crowd was racially segregated and as the black half started going wild so did the white half. The cops on guard yelled at Duke to stop fearing a riot but he yelled back basically saying that it was too late to stop now.

Unfortunately there's no video of the performance, but here's a video clip I found of Duke and his band (Gonsalves included) performing "Crescendo in Blue" just a few short weeks after the Newport performance. Before this record came out Ellington's career was on the downturn, but after this his music was suddenly reintroduced to a new generation of fans

The Armpit Collection XIII

Mingus Ah Um

"My whole conception with my present Jazz Workshop group deals with nothing written. I 'write' compositions--but only on mental score paper--then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the 'framework' on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man's particular style is taken into consideration, both in ensemble and in solos. For instance, they are given different rows of notes to use against each chord but they choose their own notes and play them in their own style, from scales as well as chords, except where a particular mood is indicated. In this way I can keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos."

This is the first jazz record I really got into. My thinking is that it represents a well conceptualized link between the old (big band swinging type jazz) and the coming (free, improvising intellectual type jazz). There's also a lot of communal blues power in this record. Listen for Fables of Faubus...that main horn melody makes me want to crack open an ice tray, fill up my glass with ice and bourbon.

Springsteen Super Bowl Commercial

Get excited goddamnit! And kudos to Don Mischer Productions for getting it right once again. First Michael Jackson then Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, and now The Boss. Don Mischer is on a roll, minus the 2004 DNC balloon drop "what the fuck are you guys doing up there" incident of course.

UFO-01 Detector

A friend recently pointed this UFO Detector to me on Amazon.com The product reviews are laugh out loud funny!

***** Astonishing, it works!, January 7, 2008
by E. Jackson
"At first I was a bit skeptical of this product, since my last experiments with UFO Detectors had failed. But I was amazed when the product arrived, and even before I had taken it out of the box, a giant blue Police box landed in my backyard! A scruffy man with a brown trenchcoat told me his gravitational flux capacitor had registered my UFO Detector, and that I needed to be careful with it. I said thanks and waved goodbye, then walked out into a large field. To my amazement, I found a giant spaceship belonging to a man named Han Solo. He called it the Millennium Falcon and offered me a ride, but at that moment my UFO Detector went off real bad, and I turned around to see a giant ship crashing into the ground. A blue alien came out and complained that Moya wasn't running too good. I helped this woman and her crew fix the ship and waved goodbye to all the aliens. Exhausted I went home. And THAT was just the first day! I have had this UFO Detector for over a week now, and have discovered amazing UFO's with it. A giant bug ship named Lexx, , Another strange ship with two buffoons named Lister and Rimmer, and The Star Trek Enterprise! OH MY GOSH! I highly recommend this UFO Detector to anybody who wants an amazing adventure. It's Great! "

The rest of the reviews are just as great.

"One Of The Things That Amazes Me Is That They Don't Seem To Go About This In A Show Business Way"

A wonderful thing happened to Me over Christmas. Besides getting Guitair Hero: World Tour for my Wii I also received my very first Stooges album, the fantastic Rhino reissue of Fun House. It's one of the handful of records I've ever heard that actually lives up to the hype. And whilst doing some Stooges research over the past few days I came across this concert footage from Cincinnatti 1970. Enjoy!

Quiet Reflection

If left alone for an afternoon, there's no telling what my Mac and I will do. I made another song today in Garageband, a minute long instrumental track titled, "Quiet Reflection." Seeing that one can't exactly post a .mp3 on the blog, I went ahead and videotaped the outrageous Xmas display at the gas station down the street, thus making the project "shareable." When the Xmas decorations are put in slow motion with the song, I believe it brings both the song and video more to life. I got inspired to make this after watching this video.

If you go to the YouToobs to see the video, you can click "watch in high quality," and it looks and sounds a little better than how it's posted in the blog.

Young Money (An Ode)

Over Xmas Day, while hanging out in an obscure part of Brooklyn with some good friends, I learned the ways and means of the Apple program "Garageband." I am now a full-fledged music Producer, in the same vein as Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre, and Babyface... I already know how to use iMovie. So today I produced/composed a brief work of art titled "Young Money (An Ode)". I made it for my girlfriend, who I love very much, and is vacationing in Nevis, West Indies... Love enough to dedicate my first 100% Macintosh work of art to. She has no idea how lucky she is...

Redneck Pornography

I can imagine that after a while, the barrel starts to get hot...
Am I right, guys?

IAN MACKAYE ON... COMPUTERS

“It’s fascinating to think that people are spending enormous blocks of time, even without working, in front of these light boxes, tapping on plastic things. They get up after eight hours of intensive work and nothing has moved and nothing has changed but I could just spill some tea on this table and the stain would still be here. I don’t think there’s ever been a point in history where you could spend eight hours doing something and not a speck of dust gets moved. When you cook for eight hours you’ve got a lot of food, if you’ve been sweeping the floor is clean, if you are building something it gets built. Even if you are writing on paper you have paper that’s now been written on. There’s something fascinating about this idea that everything you do it doesn’t exist, it just exists in this temporal form. The information doesn’t exist. I mean, obviously I know that you are here because you wrote to me on the computer and I wrote back so there was a net effect and now we’re here. I’m not saying it’s a bad technology, I just think it’s an interesting idea. What will it do to people mentally? What will happen to our society if they feel like they can’t get anything done? I don’t know."

(source)

Merry Xmas

A Season of Giving, a Sense of Common Purpose

Merry Fucked Up Christmas!

This is cruel cruel cruel. And as he's crying the family just laughs away.

Today My Hate For The Yankees Grows

First they buy my second favorite pitcher, CC Sabathia, for 7 years $161 million dollars (effectively taking the bat away from the best long ball hitting pitcher in the league). Then they pick up AJ Burnett for 5 years $82.5 million dollars. And now they've bought Mark Teixeira for 8 years $180 million dollars. One can only imagine whose next...

Blogama: Your Weekly Address

"The search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us."

Blog # One

"Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise."

Ishmael
~ By: Daniel Quinn

I Want My MTV, Back

Amy Winehouse - New Music - More Music Videos

With all this talk of restructuring the auto industry it's got me thinking that the real industry that needs restructuring is music television, most importantly MTV. Over the last quarter they have seen a 23% drop in their core demo of 12- to 34-year-olds and conversely this is causing ad revenue to dry up. So with numbers falling what's their solution you may ask? Well according to Variety it's "16 new reality shows". Now granted some of these seem interesting (like a Matt Stone and Trey Parker produced show), and they are "going to focus less on loud and silly hooks and more on young people proving themselves" which is always a good thing. Hell, they even go so far as to say that they are trying to create shows for the "Obama generation". But "G's to Gents"? Donald Trump's "Girls of Hedsor Hall" where a dozen hard-partying young women are whisked off to an English finishing school? Sure that may be better than endless loops of Viva La Bam and Pimp My Ride, but here's an idea. How about they play actual videos.

There's less overhead as it's much cheaper to produce. It makes for more enjoyable viewing. And seeing as Music is in the title of the channel it just makes sense. They have enough archived video and new video that they could play a wide amalgamation of material. Vintage clips from the pre music television days, videos from days of MTV past, modern pop radio stuff for the casual MTV fans, indie music, and more interesting bands like Radiohead, Wilco, Springsteen, ect. Maybe do some of those MTV concerts like they used to do. And sprinkle in some musical programing such as "making of's" and documentaries.

MTV used to have a certain feel to it, a certain something that always kept you checking back to see what was the next new thing. I remember the feelings I felt the first time I saw "Smells Like Teen Spirit", or "Closer", or "Creep". I remember staying up late to watch bands perform. I remember watching for hours in hopes of catching Dr Dre. It always kept me coming back for more. But now there's hardly nothing on the channel, minus the occasional stand out performance on one of their award shows. There's an hour of videos in the morning and that's about the extent of it unless your tied up in the soap opera that is Hedi Montag's life. In fact, the best thing I've seen on MTV in the last 4 years (not including awards shows) was seeing Amy Winehouse play a late night concert from the TRL studios about a year and a half ago. So in the spirit of leaving on a good note, I'll leave you with a clip of the last good thing I saw on MTV. Enjoy, and let's hope music makes it back to Music Television.

Sex Ed Rocks

If Obama Can't Pray With Pastor Rick Then How Can He Negotiate With Castro?

Goddamn, talk about pastor problems. First outrage over Rev Wright, then over Pastor Otis Moss, and now Rick Warren. Now for some background, Rick Warren was a staunch proponent of Proposition 8 out in California, and has said some pretty nasty things about gay rights and abortion. And even though Barack Obama disagrees on these issues he has still selected Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration, and the gay and lesbian community along with many on the left have gone into an uproar. They say "how could you give this man such a platform, legitimizing him and his views". Well if that's the case then how could the left support Obama sitting down with dictators such as Raul Castro and thus fore "legitimizing" him?

All during the campaign the view from the right has been how that negotiating with the Castro's, and the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's of the world would give them a platform and legitimize their hate filled speech and evil acts. And now the left, who supported Obama in negotiating with these kinds of people, are now using the same logic against him for having Pastor Rick Warren give a prayer at the inauguration. From day one of Obama's campaign he has spoken of "starting a dialect between differing points of view". This is nothing new for him. So I don't see why all the shock and ballyhoo. Also of note is the fact that the man giving the benediction, Rev Joseph E Lowery, is the complete opposite of Rick Warren. He's pro gay rights, pro choice, and very much a leader on civil rights. So the opening prayer goes to the anti-gay preacher and the closing prayer goes to the pro-gay preacher. Seems fair to me.

Obama has an amazing ability to take from people the issues they can find agreement on and work with them on those issues, no matter how radical some of their views may be. He found agreement with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers on education, so they worked on education. He found agreement with Rev Wright on God and poverty, so they worked together on those issues. He found agreement with Senator Brownback (whose as far right wing as they come) on AIDS in Africa, so they worked together on that issue. And he found agreement with Senator Luger on nuclear proliferation, so they worked together on that issue.

So if the left can't be cool with Pastor Rick then how can they be cool with Obama sitting down with Ahmadinejad who has said that he doesn't believe in the Holocaust? You can talk with, work with, and deal with people who don't completely agree with you. Tolerance also means being tolerable to people who don't agree with your view of tolerance. And it's that sort of inclusive kumbaya approach that is going to get our country back on the right track. Obama and Castro aren't going to agree on whether Communism or Democracy is the path for Cuba, but they can come to an agreement that allows trade relations and for Cuban-Americans to go visit their families. And Obama and Rick Warren aren't going to agree on gay rights and abortion but they do agree on climate change, poverty, health care, and the fight against HIV-AIDS, so why not work together to tackle those issues that they do agree on.

It's time to stop letting these great divides divide us from common purposes that we do agree on. Or as Barack Obama said today "that dialogue I think is part of what my campaign's been all about, that we're not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans."

CNN States the Obvious

Is this really news? I don't mean any offense to the Pasley family and their poor daughter, I just hate reading headlines like this, especially when this is CNN.com's top story. Hopefully this article will bring awareness to the issue, and a way to break cancer news to children in a "good" way will be discovered. No?

The Great Thing About Year End Lists

Sure they can be debated and pulled apart for putting crap at the top (Rolling Stone calling Beyonce's "Put a ring on it" as number one single) or for emitting stuff that shouldn't have been. But the great thing about year end lists is that you sometimes stumble across things that you never knew existed, like this video above. Fleet Foxes "White Winter Hymnal"