Day 14: US3 "Cantaloop" (Single), Stefon Harris and Jacky Terrasson "Kindred", Archie Shepp "Live in New York"

Going for another triple at the end of the week as this time I've encountered an honest single and it seems a cop out to count it as a full album. Getting more into CDs I don't remember ever getting, including unopened ones.

The worst part is the addictive nature that brought on the Albatross in the first place, because after starting this project, I've wanted to actually go and get more music. I'm discovering music that I had that I really enjoy every week so far, but I still feel the need to go and actively add to the pile. Something has to be wrong...

Three empty nests today as well--Duke Ellington in Sweden, Don Byron "Romance With the Unseen", and Jerry Granelli Jeff Riley.

US3
Cantaloop (Single)

It's hard to find too much to say about this. I suppose I should be embarrassed by this quickly faded rap fad of one taking samples from the Blue Note catalog to make modern rap songs. I hoped it would catch on, I'll be honest about that. I have some rap in my past. I liked Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, and Grandmaster Flash...I even went to a Fat Boys concert. I've made my peace with it.

But I grew into jazz, and when it looked like I could combine my early love of hip hop and jazz, sure--sign me up. And Cantaloupe Island is a funky song all by itself, perfectly fitting into a hip-hop mix.

So I was into this as much as anyone else with at least a passing fascination. But Cantaloop was the only one that did, and US3 faded quick. I don't know if they're recording anymore or off doing other things or what, but I never heard from them again the entire time I worked at the store.

Singles on CD are a difficult thing for me, but that might be because I'm not often that into 'remixes.' I get it, it's several different takes on the same song, and that can be intriguing, but essentially I have the same song now five times. To its credit, some of the later remixes are fairly different, but they all come back to the old Herbie Hancock piece.

That was a refreshing side effect, people started searching out Herbie Hancock records to find out where that track came from. This of course wasn't Hancock's first foray into Hip Hop, he was also responsible for the iconic Rock It, which prompted my dad to speculate that Herbie Hancock didn't know how to play piano. Little did he know...

I think singles exist to completely cure you of liking the song after listening to five slightly different versions in a row. I still like it, but man, I'm kind of done with this song for like a month or so now.

I have to admit, there was a part of me that was hoping I'd end up for at least a little while as a saxophonist in a live Jazz/Rap band. I was kind of willing to be a whore on the sax, mostly because I felt, no matter what, the horn always classed up the joint. I had a bias, obviously.


Stefon Harris and Jacky Terrasson
Kindred

There are probably some sound reasons I never got around to listening to this CD. All white covers are never a good sign, The Beatles aside. White covers and white suits, double whammy. People named Stefon, also not generally a good indicator. All respect to Stéphane Grappelli, but violin is still a little hard to get into in jazz.

And as much praise as I had for the vibes earlier, it's still a bit of a land mine instrument.

When taking home boxes of CDs at a time, these all seemed like sound reasons to put off listening to this CD.

My mistake, apparently. While there are some tracks that are easy going and light, this is a progressive jazz CD that goes right along with the earlier James Carter CD and anything else I would normally listen to.

It has a pretty good spread of traditional Jazz standards and modern pieces, like the rather smokin' Rat Race that finds the two performers chasing each other in overlapping solos.

This is a far more intense jazz experience than the cover suggests.  I'm not sure what they were trying to convey. I guess it's pretty hard to come up with a concept for a jazz album cover, now that I think about it. There's only so many shots of a guy standing next to his instrument one can try and pull of.  I remember reading an interview with Wynton Marsalis where he complained to the photographer that he didn't want to hold his horn in yet another photo-shoot, though he eventually did. Now that I think about it, it might have been Chet Baker. Doesn't matter, I guess.

I mean, rockers can identify the 'hard-coreness' of their music by the look of the cover and the amount of stage make-up their performers wear, but a progressive jazz album could end up looking like a fusion album by the cover.

This is another damaged set of liner notes, so I don't have much insight into the CD itself, but this is really pretty good.


Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd
Live in New York

I've mentioned before my fascination with trombone players and there not being enough of them. Well, the Albatross has been hiding this unopened gem since 2001. Roswell Rudd, which by the way is an awesome name, joins saxophonist Archie Shepp (I'll admit right now I thought he played piano) for a live concert in New York.

There's a lot here for me to like. Progressive jazz sound, trombone, live music banter right off the bat, with Rudd introducing his composition Acute Motelitis with "Trapped in a motel room in the middle of nowhere." There's even poetry, apparently.

Eventually the Albatross was going to reveal my fascination with spoken word, and it apparently decided to slip it in here on what is apparently a super album of 'things I dig.' Yep, I like spoken word. Now, I thought what you're thinking, that it meant that I like slam poetry. Turns out, not so much. I mean, there have been a few instances of slam poetry that I have actually liked, but it took a whole lot of bandless rap artists before I got to those. I feel that poetry struggled really hard to let people know it didn't have to rhyme only for slam poets to re-enforce the idea that it had to.

But that aside, I actually dig spoken word. It all started with a quest to find a recording I had read about of e.e. cummings, which I never did. But I discovered a lot of Beat recordings and other spoken word story tellers and kind of got into it. This also led to my beard, but that's apparently a long story that after I typed out I realized even I didn't care about...

Every track, it seems, is getting an introduction. A heartfelt tribute to a loved one with the a pretty cool nickname (Steam), and the introduction to Pazuzu that made it sound like a summer insect, but is instead apparently a demon who is also featured in The Exorcist. Also the gargoyle that Prof. Fairnsworth lets loose in Futurama. The two trombone Slide by Slide...jazz titles like their puns...this song metamorphoses a lot in its 11 minutes. I also like the acknowledgment at the end, "Thank you very much for Slide by Slide...featuring everybody..."

I've never been comfortable with saxophonists who also sing. Perhaps it's jealousy. Maybe it's that the trumpet is easy to hold to one side out of the way, but the saxophonist has to lean over his horn dangling awkwardly from his neck or to the side to sing and we have an extra hand to position when we start to play after we sing.

Or it's just that I can't sing so I don't think other saxophonists shouldn't either. Nice closer with a tribute to Elmo Hope.

The Albatross closed out with a lot of lies and fake outs (including the disappointing Fatal Error of the Count Basie Plays Ellington...) but also some albums that were destined to languish in obscurity if I actually selectively went through this. Not bad, Albatross...now quit killing good CDs in the process...

Day 1: Paul Brady "What a World" and J.J. Johnson The Eminent V.2

To begin I have to set what I'm going to attempt as ground rules.

First: I have to try and do at least two albums a day.

Second: I have to listen to the whole album. This rule is already chafing, more on that later.

Third: The CDs must be randomly selected, no picking and choosing. Pick a stack, take the ones off the top until the stack is on the hard drive, move on to the next stack. This is easy to do because these things are in no particular order and never have been.

Next, some clarification. I was only one of a few buyers at the store, and by the time I left, those buyer positions had been consolidated and I was relegated to 'books.' What I bought specifically was Jazz and Classical CDs and satellite genres as the store defined them. In a rock store with at the very least an indie affectation, I was the guy for that 'other music.' So that's what The Albatross is made up of, this won't be an "I Love the Nineties" parade of top artists of a past decade, those CDs went to everyone else in the store. These are the leftovers, the unwanted, the "Who the heck is that?" mixed in with some genuinely fantastic jazz and classical selections I was able to get even after I turned on the people above me to that kind of music.

Paul Brady
What a World

Having said all of that, this CD is a perfect example of The Albatross because I have no idea why it is here. Looking at the cover, I thought it might be one of those new blues CDs where it's more watered down soft rock than actual blues. I was half right, just not about the blues part. According to the liner notes this is a collection of collaborations with other artists I equally haven't heard of to produce a bunch of...I guess I can call it soulfully sung...soft songs.

It contains tracks named I Believe in Magic, The Long Goodbye, and Sea of Love. I should have seen it coming.

This sounds like the soundtrack to that movie you catch on Encore at 3pm which has a star you recognize in it but you don't remember it coming out and all of the hair looks out of date. Or maybe an unlicensed Steve Winwood cover band?

This is very nearly a dangerous amount of synthesizer use without a rapid beat, flashing lights, and E. (Screw you, Vampire Weekend, I'm using the damn Oxford Comma and if you don't like it you can suck it.)

I am perhaps being uncharitable. This is certainly not something I would be prone to be interested in. I don't know who...maybe mid-aged secretaries that want to have music taste but don't have the time to bother? It's not bad really.

The real question I'm wrestling with is why the hell is it here? There is a chance that it was mislabeled as 'world' at the store because the singer is from Dublin, which would have landed it in my box. But this is a pretty decent aping of inoffensive American soft rock. There's nary an Irish influence to be heard, not even in the affected twang in the singers voice. He's traveled the world, apparently, to find collaborators throughout the 90s, but I really can't even hear that. He does admit, however, that out of the 'around fifty' songs he wrote at that time, these are the ones that bore his imprint the most.

Oooh, Travelin' Light has some slide guitar. Like salt on a potato, it almost becomes about the salt since it is suddenly the spiciest thing going on.

This CD has successfully traveled through four cities and six moves. It's a poster child for The Albatross, the jewel case is smashed, the liner notes wrinkled from hopefully some mild water damage. There have been a few culls over the years, but usually I was unwilling to throw out artists I hadn't heard just in case, but during culls I don't have time to listen to everything. So this poor bastard has been following me around waiting for its moment in the sun only for it to be this. To make matters worse, I know the next artist and like him. So this is just excruciating.

I wonder about its journey, because somehow it's wound up in the 'prime pile.' The one that is actually in my room and not the shed, that was readily visible and easiest to access. Presumably these would be CDs that I actually selected or listened to, but I honestly don't have any memory of it. I have a feeling I'll be hitting shuffle in a few years and having to run to this blog to remind myself who the fuck this is and why it's on my iTunes, so here's a note to my future self: You didn't understand it then, either.

Jay Jay Johnson
The Eminent V.2


This is the other side of the Albatross coin. I know who J. J. Johnson is. I like J. J. Johnson. I probably made a big deal out of getting this CD, dragged it around the store and bored my co-workers with how awesome it was that I got it and that they should be jealous. I had even formed an arbitrary obsession with the main buyer in the store over trombone players, and when you have an arbitrary obsession with trombone players, there's not a lot of places to go. This CD was a score. It even had Charles Mingus on half of the tracks, and then Horace Silver and Paul Chambers on the other half. I mean, how awesome is that?

And yet, 8+ years later it's sitting in a random pile under Paul Brady unopened. Even Brady had shed his wrapper at some point, but this is the first that this CD has seen the light of day, factory fresh, as it where.

Blue Note had a big rash of re-issues with alternate takes and other such goodies, promising clean remasters (this particular one a "Rudy Van Gelder Edition"), also a big thing at the time. Here's my guess: I got this CD along with a batch of awesome Blue Note CDs and this got left out because I was too into Kind of Blue and poor J.J. was shuffled off to the forgotten heap, the white noise of apartment filler that was to become The Albatross. Which is a shame, because it's pretty awesome.

Somehow, even in its wrapper it has managed water damage (I hope it's water...some of my living arrangements have involved pets...I'll just leave that implication...) so I have no access to the liner notes (which the outside of the sleeve informs me are not the original ones because these are the 'actual sessions' and not the hodge podge (paraphrasing) of the original 12". Seems kind of a gyp, now that I think about it, for a fan of the 12" who was looking forward to his CD clean remaster. Jazz is in the solos, if it's not the same session that means his favorite solo is no longer there.)

I'm listening to this on a pair of studio monitor headphones (Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, if anyone cares), but I left the TV on...this is making an interesting soundtrack to the 'silent movie' version of the Secret Girlfriend re-run that's on. I have to say it's an improvement...it's also classing up the ads for the porno channels and chat lines, giving them that old school "Playboy After Dark" feel. 

This is really is hard bop at its best. (As a side note, I always thought 'hard bop' was mislabeled.) I used to want to play this, heavy arrangements in small combos with plenty of room for soloing. If I had opened this at the time I would have likely imagined myself taking Hank Mobley's solos on the second half of the album. Hell, I'm doing that now...

I was never able to do those breaks at the beginning of solos...too much pressure to do something awesome right away. Part of the reason I'd make a terrible rap artist, after the hype-man got done hyping me, I'd crumple from the weight of expectation. Maybe I could manage as a low-key hype-man, "Dudes, this guy is awesome...get ready to check him out, it'll be cool, I swear. No, really...just...you won't be sorry...hear him out for a few, if you don't like it get a drink and come back for the next act, that'll be cool for sure."

That was awesome (see? I'm a natural!). I wonder now if The Albatross will spit up V.1 at some point.

That's Day 1 of Project:Albatross, and it's managed to deal a pretty good snapshot of the beast, music I love but for some reason never cracked open and stuff that makes no sense as to why it's here.