UFO: Walk on Water

The other day I basically ransacked the various online stores I frequent, hunting for special offers. January and February are my busiest shopping months, simply because the various stores do their spring cleaning early, throwing out their stock to make space for the new year’s upcoming releases. These past years, a pattern began to emerge: January is clearance sale around the globe and end January and beginning February, at times, is extra clearing sale, getting rid of the stuff that wasn’t sold the weeks before.

So, I was clicking my way around the globe and I came across a name that I hadn’t heard for quite some years, UFO. It should come as no surprise to you regular readers that I decided to jump on this one, especially since it cost the equivalent of about two dollars (good for me, perhaps not good for the band, although the record label probably sold the copies at a fixed price). Continue Reading →

Music for Contemplative Moods

Music is a mood thing, always has been and always will be. There’s the loud stuff for the beginning weekend (at the moment I’m enjoying the hell out of Jeff Beck’s – for that time – extremely noisy but also fun-driven albums “Truth” and “Beck-Ola” from 1968 and 1969 respectively), there’s music to celebrate the good things in life with which for me is always jazz from the 30s to the 60s, there’s music to get penned-up aggression out of the system with (Judas Priest always gets that job done for me), there’s music to work to (I’ve written about that extensively on this site), and there’s music to simply listen to attentively.

Lately I have noticed that very often I end up in contemplative moods in which just about anything that is too noisy gets on my nerves. As my life is going through some major changes, I spend quite a bit of time sitting and thinking and it is really not all that easy to find music that can further that process without interfering too much. Continue Reading →

Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy

Note: This is a long post. If you are looking for a discussion of the song, scroll down 15 paragraphs … or so. ;)

I think it was William Blake who once said that “those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.” Right on, I would say, but when you have spent some time contemplating the idea of passion in relation to your own life, perhaps Robert Sternberg said it best when he narrowed everything down to a simple statement: “Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.” If you add Seneca’s age-old observation that “it is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted”, what you have is not only a much more complicated idea, but also a pretty solid framework to go by.

I could write about this endlessly, but suffice it to say that it’s easy to see that three golden rules can be derived from the quotes above:

01. Be strongly passionate about at least some things and don’t let others tell you that you shouldn’t be.
02. Passion is never enough if it doesn’t develop into more.
03. Don’t allow harmful passions into your life. Continue Reading →

The Siegel-Schwall Band

After having worked my rear end off these past weeks and after having gotten up too darn early today, on this year’s 23rd of December, to get some last minute rush jobs done, I have to say that the Christmas spirit has been about as far away from my own life as possible much of this past month.

Looking back at 2006, which I’ve been doing these past days as well, I have to say it wasn’t a good year, at all. I had some major problems, had to admit to myself that I had made one major mistake these past years, I lost a good friend, and many other things didn’t turn out at all.

Mind you, there were many good things as well, but they were few and far between and didn’t really come in larger numbers until the end of the year, and although things have started picking up again, to have to write off an entire year (probably even the ones before) and file it (them) under “Life sucks and then you die” (a motto which I used to jokingly refer to all the time) does not put one into any sort of Christmas spirit. Indeed, it kills just about any spirit.

Along came The Siegel-Schwall Band. Continue Reading →

Anita O’Day (1919-2006)

God, I don’t know where to start. If you drop by here regularly, you know that I always approach what I write about from a (very) personal and instinctive vantage point. It either has to be very close to my heart or I have to hate it. Both aspects bring out the most passionate responses. Often I have to root around parts in my head that I don’t always like to root around in to drag up or sometimes even unearth things that I buried a long time ago. To make a long story short, this one is going to be one of the more difficult posts to write. Try to bear with me … I’ll get to the point (relatively) soon.

When jazz greats die, there are always tons of people posting their R.I.P. lines on the various jazz forums around, writing up a few lines about how good this or that musician or singer was, what albums they loved and how important said artist was (or wasn’t). This time, when I joined the line of mourners, I tried to write something and could only post a line of sad smileys. That was it.

Why?
You need some patience for the answer. Continue Reading →

Shelly Manne & His Men at The Black Hawk

Recommending CDs is always a difficult affair. As soon as you say that some CD is desert island material for you, someone gets on your case, taking you to task for having said that, stating that the relative merit of this or that recording diminishes when taking other, more relevant recordings into consideration. On top of that, in jazz circles, one is always prone to be drawn into endless discussions with fans complaining that one is ignoring East Coast jazz when recommending a superb example of West Coast jazz, as is the case here. In the end, usually, everyone’s none the wiser.

If you read my site regularly, you know that I recommend recordings based more on a mostly emotional response. I do list some negatives here and there, but if there aren’t any, in my little world, I won’t try to come up with any. I’m also not all that objective because there are enough reviews out there that try their very best to weigh the pros and cons to give you a seemingly accurate description of a recording. That approach usually leaves me somewhat cold, although it does have its merits, because I want to read about what a recording did for someone. Is it music that resonates with a person and, most importantly, why did it have that effect?

Having said all that, the five CDs that comprise the complete reissue series of “Shelly Manne & His Men at the Black Hawk” are what I would consider to be some the best live jazz ever recorded. Whenever I’m asked why I like jazz and what jazz means to me, I put on any or all of these CDs. Considering the many thousand CDs I have, I’m often surprised that it’s really that simple. Continue Reading →

Eugen Cicero

When it comes around to music criticism, not much bothers me. One cannot argue about taste and one should try to live with critical reviews when they’re bad, just off or just badly researched. There’ll always be that one review that gets things right, negating – perhaps – those that botched things in the past.

With Eugen Cicero, things were and are different. To me he was doubtlessly a musical genius, a man with incredible technical abilities coupled with a great and definitely unique musical sensibility, brought about by a musical education that very few people had the opportunity to enjoy and yet, he was summarily trashed or politely ignored because he fused classical music with jazz at a time when it was easy to get lobbed into one basket with the Swingle Singers, Jacques Loussier and some lesser exponents of a school of jazz that has often been relegated to the living rooms of those that supposedly didn’t and don’t know squat about jazz. Continue Reading →

Les Trésors du Jazz

OK,OK, I’ll admit it. I just dislike compilations, usually. Yes, sometimes a single artist’s best-of compilation is all you could possibly want of one single artist’s output (and even twelve to fifteen tunes are eleven too many), and yes, every once in a while a compilation of different tunes from some period in music or showcasing a style one is interested in might be a good place to start.

Usually though, I dislike them because they attempt to do my job for me. As a collector, I almost always disagree with the editorial selection and I’ve all too often discovered that many of the tunes included I already had floating around my collection. On top of that, when it comes to jazz, I’ve gotten so tired of the recent flood of remix compilations of classic tunes and the policy of some major labels that limit the output for any of their artists to a steady stream of market-”safe” reissue compilations (just try to find some decent Cal Tjader reissues from Verve and all you’ll really find are, yes, compilations) that I decided to unsubscribe from, for example, Verve’s and Blue Note’s newsletters that lately have been trying nothing more but pimp the crap out of those useless things.

Then you have those “theme” thingies, you know, “Jazz for Lovers”, “Bar Jazz”, Jazz for the Bathroom”, “Jazz Standards that Absolutely NOBODY Wants to Hear Anymore”, and whatever else those labels can come up with. Dreck. Nothing but dreck. Continue Reading →