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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Apr 16, 2016 - 07:13pm PT
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anyone seen the Miles Davis movie?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2016 - 12:16pm PT
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It's a pleasure to follow the jazz-steps of Hooblie...
Supersilent 6.2
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Apr 19, 2016 - 06:27am PT
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His day-to-day existence was like a pendulum. Besides, he was a night person. The day for him was a many-houred awakening of a long-toothed spirit. He *entered* the evening. Even the quantity of his words increased as the light of day waned. It was as if he'd climbed a ridge of small hillocks, then settled into a golden period, a span of bewitched time. In a very real sense, his day was ushered in by the pushing of air columns through instruments, the heartbeat of a walking bass, the glistening punctuations of a ride cymbal. His stick like body, so worn by his utter disregard for its health, straightened to its limit only during those hours of music. And the music turned on his capacity for camaraderie and humor.
 Bobby Scott, "The House in the Heart", talking about Lester Young (The Prez), from Reading Jazz, edited by Robert
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crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
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Apr 19, 2016 - 06:34am PT
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Headed down to Sacramento to see it this weekend. Opens Friday. Getting decent, not great, reviews.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 24, 2016 - 01:13am PT
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Marcus Miller, who is a great story-teller, talks about Miles Davis and "Kind of Blue"
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Apr 24, 2016 - 12:46pm PT
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SHELLY'S MANNE-HOLE
Exactly one year after the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue was released, I was born in Sierra Madre California, within spit-shot of the rugged San Gabriel Mountains, August 17, 1960. Kind of Blue is noted as the best-selling jazz record of all time.
My father had been into jazz since the end of the Korean War. The first music I remember hearing, was jazz. My mother worked a few stretches of swing shift at her job with the Pasadena Light and Park Department, so Rodger had me to himself on those evenings. I feel fortunate to have retained some these very early childhood memories.
Between the ages of two and four years old, I would sit in a big black naugahyde easy chair, listening to jazz on the radio. As Rodger prepared dinner, he kept me satiated and entertained by feeding me olives and radishes while I listened to the music.
In those days, the early 60s, I recall much more vibraphone, or vibes, being played on the jazz stations. The playlist also seemed more trumpet-centric, whereas in later years, and even now I see the emphasis on saxophone. We lived in Southern California, so naturally, the smoother, more introspective West Coast jazz ruled the local airwaves at the time.
One radio commercial which got a lot of air time, was one which entreated the listener to come out to Shelly Manne's jazz club, which was cleverly named: Shelly's Mann-Hole. Shelley Manne was said to of been one of the most musical drummers around and he was big into the West Coast cool jazz scene.
"What's a manhole, daddy?"
"It's a round metal cover which blocks a big hole in the street. It lets men get down beneath the street in case they need to work on the storm drains and sewers."
"So they play jazz music down there? And there's a guy on a microphone down there? And they make radio from under the street?"
In the 70s my dad liked Quincy Jones, Chuck Mangione, and the compositions and arrangements of Michelle Legrand. He enjoyed playing Mangione's The Land of Make-Believe for my little sister. Sometimes in my early teens, I would thumb through his record collection. Visually, the album that sticks in my mind most is the cover of Milestones. Miles Davis sits on a stool against a burnt orange background. He looks thicker in the face and of better physical constitution than he did in many other photographs. On that album cover, Miles is the solid, serious artist. He holds out his trumpet firmly as if to say: THIS.
I was an inquisitive child. I asked a lot of questions. My father sent me to private schools until third grade. To answer my incessant questioning, to which he already knew most of the answers, he bought me a set of Colliers Encyclopedia. I mostly just looked at a section which featured a colorful array of world flags and another which highlighted the varied insignias of U.S. Army uniforms. Rodger eventually read all of those encyclopedias cover to cover. He was a voracious reader and when in his 30s and 40s, many said he could have challenged a graduate degree in history. He had a mathematical appreciation of music.
Rodger had a smooth face with just a wrinkle between his eyebrows. He was of average height, at 5'9". His thin dark brown hair receded, but I never saw much of any gray. For my entire life, he had burly forearms and a beer belly. When he worked on cars, he immediately began sweating like the prolific tennis champion Rafael Nadal, bearing down on the final set of a match.
"Rodge" considered himself a sociopath, which is doubtful on many fronts, but he didn't mince words, that's for sure. In the 1970s and 1980s I became a rock climber. We climbers spent many nights out in the cold and ravaged our bodies on the stone and lived hard at times. Most of us were inculcated with 70s drug culture. During that period in my life, some climbing buddies visited my family home. One of them was a bit war worn, but had earned his wizened visage, indulging many antics and bold adventures.
"Hey dad, this is my friend Mike."
"Hey there, Mike. Want a beer? I see you could use one, you look like 40 miles of bad road. Whatever you've been doing, it's aging you!"
When I was in my 50s and he was in his late 70s, I asked Rodger what he liked to listen to most. He said, "East Coast jazz. Hard bop."
"What about all those Stan Kenton records you have?"
"That's before I knew what I was doing."
Rodger had a good life for a war orphan from Nazi Germany. John Wayne movies convinced him at 16 years old that the adventure of war was where it was at. He lied about his age to the recruiters, and he got himself into the Army a year early. He survived the Korean War and got interested in sports car racing at the invite of my grandfather. For 35 years he had just one job, working as an equipment installer for Ma Bell's Western Electric. He wrenched on cars with his pals and worked as a corner flagman at Riverside International Raceway for almost 30 years. He drank mountains of beer and wine, smoked 2 to 3 packs of menthols a day, and lived happily into his early 80s.
He was hard to kill. He'd been in the hospital for a short stay, with cardiac and other issues and defied all of the doctors. Some of his numbers were extremely good for his age and others indicated he shouldn't have lived another minute. The end was imminent, yet he still continued on for a number of months and in a fairly robust state. We said our goodbyes.
"Roy, I've got one foot on a roller skate and the other on a banana peel."
I couldn't complain when he died. I just saw too many positives to his life and he had been a good father. Physically solid, but heart failing, while loading a case of bottled water into the back of his truck, he went out like a light. That was the expression he would use when my little sister and I were tired kids and fell asleep quickly. I like to say he shopped till he dropped.
I recently acquired 30 vinyl record albums from his collection. (I have yet to get the old 78 rpm records). Given that he said he liked hard bop, I have found it interesting that most of what he bought, purchased in the mid-to-late 50s, is predominantly West Coast cool jazz. Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, The Lighthouse All-Stars. There's some good stuff bridging away from swing, but not yet bop. The 3 Herds: Woody Herman and his Orchestra. Adventures in Rhythm: Pete Rugolo and his Orchestra. Elliot Lawrence Plays Jerry Mulligan Arrangements.
I'm schooling myself on the history of jazz and the more I read, the more I put it together. With where we grew up, I see why his collection has so much West Coast cool jazz. His modus operandi was to listen and to read. In those days, that process took time. By the time he knew enough to understand his own particular taste, he was raising a family and could no longer justify extras like hi-fi records to indulge his musical interests.
He did have Kind of Blue and Milestones in his collection. Both records ventured into modal jazz, but in Milestones hard bop comes through. I've had those vinyl records of his in my possession for years, because I knew what they were and he let me have them long ago.
I can see why my dad eventually settled in with hard bop. It's how I remember him. Bouncy, upbeat, and can-do. To get a feel for those rhythms and textures and colors that were Rodger, listen to Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus. Throughout my youth he was a compulsive whistler. Now that I have worked through more of his music and read about different styles, I see that he was whistling hard bop!
In my late teens I was into rock and roll and jazz fusion, and that wasn't Rodger's deal. Fathers and sons grow apart. But, when I was 19 years old, I took a young woman named Jeanette down to Hermosa Beach, to see some jazz at Shelly's Manne-Hole! The club felt tiny, and crammed inside next to the tables was a small ensemble doing improvisational jazz. That's bebop in a nutshell isn't it? Of course it has to swing! I really didn't know what I was hearing at the time, but I wanted to like it.
We stayed for a while. Then Jeanette got bored with it so we left. We were just a few steps down the sidewalk and we briefly looked in to another club as we passed by. A self-conscious rock 'n roller stood shod in red tights and knee-high lace up leather boots, making tonal wreckage with his guitar. Jeanette swung her dark brown shoulder length hair around and pointed her perfect nose up in the air toward me, then peaked her eyebrows.
"Maybe that's what we need to check out!"
As she held my arm, I wheeled her around, we picked up our pace on the sidewalk and just kept on moving. I couldn't do it!
Just yesterday I was hiking into the verdant Gregory Canyon, to the right of Chautauqua Park in Boulder Colorado. The red powdery trail beneath my feet was rimmed with rivulets of melted spring runoff and the green scrub along the trail was dotted with aromatic spring blooms. White snows still coated the pointed summits of the surrounding peaks. The Flatirons lay above the steep green lawn at the edge of the manicured path, their slender rectangular faces organized like keys on a vibraphone.
I thought about Milestones, the namesake tune of the album, and how evocative it is of the feeling of spring. I drank in nature's fecundity and felt the rhythms of jazz driving all of it. There is such lively, productive, and hopeful movement in Milestones. It is much like water burbling, green grass swaying in active breezes, flowers rhythmically popping open, little creatures busily scurrying about in the verge.
My old man liked driving. Before I was a teenager, I went lots of places with him in his car, just the two of us. We would race along the edges of the guard rail of the Pasadena Freeway in his Porsche speedster. It felt risky but controlled and I liked the sense of speed. It was here that I learned about confidence under duress.
He would take me to Will Rogers State Beach and the sand always stuck between my toes on the ride home. We did lots of errands together. Rodger would bring me along to his favorite Caldwell Tires in Pasadena. Steeped in the pungent smell of fresh rubber and clanking airguns, he talked shop with his racing buddies.
Rodger liked to drive us up to Altadena to get haircuts in his favorite barbershop. While waiting my turn, I could look at superhero comic strips and unwrap the tiny comics wound around pink squares of Bazooka bubblegum. At the end of the cut, there was always the slightly irritating feeling of stiff bristles against my neck as the barber cleaned up. Sitting in that barber chair, with mirrors in front and behind, I marveled at the reflections repeating into infinity.
These drives usually made me sleepy. My father would back the car into the garage and had a habit of un-clicking his seatbelt just as he shut the engine off, letting the car coast the remaining 10 or 20 feet into the garage. Then, without fail, the un-snapping of his seatbelt would wake me up as the car came to a halt. Just to be sure I was awake and ready to move on, and in a fatherly sing-song, he would whisper aloud: "End of the line."
[Click to View YouTube Video]
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Reading:
Kind of Blue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind_of_Blue
Shelly's Manne-Hole:
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2008/08/manne-hole-part-1.html
East/West:
http://hubpages.com/entertainment/East_Coast_West_Coast_Jazz_in_the_50s
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 24, 2016 - 01:01pm PT
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Tarbuster
That's an all jazz story about your father. Thanks for sharing!
Eli Degibri - Cliff Hangin'
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Apr 24, 2016 - 06:54pm PT
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Tarbuster, that was a wonderful and heartfelt tale from you.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Apr 27, 2016 - 07:59pm PT
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In '68 or '69 my parents got a new stereo. They purchased Wes Montgomery's Down Here on the Ground and A Day in the Life, which were among the more popularly oriented albums from his later career. I absolutely couldn't wait to get home from grade school and play that stuff. Mostly pop covers and not really straight ahead jazz, but smooth and listenable.
Progressive rock guitarist, Steve Howe, cites Wes Montgomery and Chet Atkins as prime influences.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Apr 28, 2016 - 10:37am PT
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Jim Brennan, I like what you just said about Wes Montgomery.
Wes Montgomery's tone is round and full of color. It is a ringing bell, turned on its edge and neatly clipped at both ends.
He's a master storyteller and there is truth in what he plays.
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