Day 42: David Murray "Deep River" and Jumpin' Jive

There is an ad campaign out for Sour Patch Kids where little animated Sour Patch candies do something messed up to someone and then follow it up with something nice with the tag line, "First they're sour, then they're sweet." I've had my issues with it, since the messed up things that they do are way more severe than being adorable can make up for, but that's not why I bring it up.

I bring it up because the Albatross has just pulled a Sour Patch Kids bit on me. Yesterday I entered a smooth jazz saxophone player who had a name deceptively similar to a free/progressive jazz player who I was a fan of. As a result I was kind of moody about the whole entry.

Well, after two empty nests--a celtic 20th Century composition album and another Real World entry, there was a fake out. Inside a Scatman Crothers CD (you may know him as the voice of "Jazz" the Autobot on the Transformers. Or, as a legendary jazz performer and prolific actor. Or as a Martini Rossi 935 Porsche race car that turns into a robot) and instead there was an actual David Murray (not a 'Mc' in sight) CD inside instead. Completely random pick, I swear.

David Murray
Deep River

Ah yeah, that's the stuff...Murray isn't the most 'agressive' of the progressive/free jazz players by a long shot. I haven't seen him by himself in concert (I have as a member of the World Saxophone Quartet), but I don't envision him leaning into his saxophone's mic and yelling like I've seen Pharaoh Sanders do (in one of the coolest shows I ever attended). There's a little more exploration that goes into his style than shear sound. The second and third tracks are longer, slower, modal pieces with sparse, drawn out solos, M'biza being done on a bass clarinet.

In any gathering of saxophone players my default favorite always goes bottom up. First the bari, then the tenor player, then the alto. If all you play is soprano and your name isn't Sidney Bechet, stop it. But my love for the World Saxophone Quartet is so convoluted that I honestly think that my favorite is which ever one of them I'm listening to at the moment. I arrive at this conclusion because I was about to declare him my favorite when I realized that I have the exact same reaction when listening to my Hammiet Blueitt recordings.

These Coltrane-style modal pieces have a tendency to hypnotize me. I might start off moving my head to them, but with the amount of poly-rhythm going on it usually slows and settles into a thousand yard stare. Not a 'thing I have on in the background,' even if it is, I'll slowly stop what I'm doing and commence 'contemplating my navel' as some soccer coaches have referred to it.

This is kind of the stealth progressive jazz, like if I catch it at the right moment I might lure someone who is resistant to more, lets say 'aggressive,' sounds. Murray works his way towards that. We're four or five minutes in before the madness starts gradually. It never ultimately works, though. Sooner or later someone goes, "You listen to this on purpose?" and I have to switch to something tamer.

This album contains Mr. P.C., which is my favorite piece of Coltrane's Giant Steps album. This also brings the total of songs called "Mr" something to ten. Oddly enough, jazz and surf music are tied for most represented.

Various Artists
Jumpin' Jive

Well, the Albatross can't be completely predictable even when it's making up for earlier cruelty. I've talked a few times about the new swing revival that happened for what felt like a couple of months in the nineties. In an attempt to cash in on this quickly flaring trend several labels pushed out these kinds of compilations. Some of them contained actual artists, sometimes there were super-bland recordings by studio bands. This falls into the former category at least, it's a sort of 'greatest hits' album...just not really a 'jump jive' greatest hits album, more of a general swing greatest hits.

It has such stalwart standards as Take the 'A' Train and In the Mood and Sing, Sing, Sing. It does have some actual jump jive on it, too, with Cab Calloway's Jumpin' Jive (makes you feel six foot when your four foot five) and Louis Jordan's Caldonia (what makes your big head so hard?) I think I've talked about this before, I'm so familiar with these songs that those lyrics jump in my head not because of the original artists but because of wearing out the recording I got from the Scottish jump jive group Fat Sam's Band I encountered at the Sacramento Dixieland Jazz Jubilee. I don't have that recording anymore (I don't think) and have since acquired the original recordings, but that was what made me familiar with it (and started my weird obsession with wearing pleated pants, but that's another story...)

I now have another version of Cherokee as well, this one by Charlie Bernet.

Alright, I don't know this one, 47th Street Jive. It's all the awesome elements of authentic jump jive, including a weird skit/exchange between the singer and the band leader thick with hipster (before the people that term applied to were insufferable) slang which carries into the lyrics which are usually a direct address to someone who either needs to lighten up or stop doin' you wrong (in this case stop talking because you're about to lie.)

And really what compilation capitalizing on the swing revival is complete without Sing, Sing, Sing, which closes out the album. But this is no slouch version of the song, it's Benny Goodman's nearly nine minute long version. Take that, swing dancers.

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 7:UMO Jazz Orchestra "Electrifying Miles" and Roger Waters "Pros and Cons of Hitchhicking"

Day Seven...I've made it an entire week and The Albatross has done a pretty decent job of portraying itself.

It's started Day Seven with cruelty...the promise was the Dirty Dozen Brass Band's Voodoo, one of my all time favorite bands and one of my all time favorite albums from them. This would have been a lengthy diatribe about how ridiculous it is that the Dozen wouldn't be uploaded immediately except that The Albatross didn't allow for that selectivity when I abused student loans to get my Mac.

But instead it's about the tragedy that Voodoo still won't be uploaded onto my iTunes, because it's an empty nest.

The next is a fatal flaw AND a mystery CD all in one. The Secret Sessions, from what I can make out on the back of the cover, is a recording of previously unreleased recordings from some sort of 'super band' gathering of Corky Laing, Ian Hunter, Felix Pappalardi, Mick Ronson, Leslie West, John Sebastian, and Todd Rundgren, with Eric Clapton and Dickey Betts.

I'm not into any of these people (or know who most of them are), so I don't know why I have this. It's possible I grabbed it because I liked the idea of a secret 'all-star' session and what that might turn up. I'll never know, however, because the CD is split in several places. I may or may not have stepped on it a few times thinking it was just a case and not the CD itself.

After the disappointment of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the tragedy of The Secret Sessions, I wasn't about to let the next CD slip through my fingers. Fused to the liner notes, I got a rag and a razor and after some touch and go moments I slid the CD in with more than a little trepidation. I'm happy to report that the CD made it. Our condolences go out to the liner notes, however. So without further ado, lets begin Day Seven:


UMO Jazz Orchestra
Electrifying Miles

This CD surpasses the previous champion for cost of a new CD at almost $200...even used is $7...so far, though, I have to say, worth it.

I don't really know anything about the UMO Jazz Orchestra because apparently I'm not Finnish. But, I do have Google, which translates wikipedia for me. UMO in Finnish, it seems, stands for New Music Orchestra. There were a fair amount of downloads on Amazon, just not this album, so they get around.

This seems like a modern-day big band/fusion approach to Miles Davis' early fusion works. If I wanted After Hours 4 to be more Bitches Brew, UMO is here to deliver.

After a few days of short tracks, it's cool to get back into ones that have a run time of over five minutes. And all the Bitches Brew goodness is here, long modal solos, dated but still cool synthesizer sounds, spacey guitar solos, and, of course, a trumpet with a harmon mute on shoved into the microphone.

I had discovered this kind of music by accident long before I was really ready to hear it. The neighborhood I grew up in had a video store open up at one end, at a time when video rental places were new and novel. So almost every day I would bicycle down there, eat the giant Hershey's bars they had available and rent just about anything I could. This included a Headhunters era Herbie Hancock concert and a similar Miles Davis concert. I didn't get it, I didn't understand it...it was loud and quiet, funky and chaotic...I didn't know what to make of it. But I was fascinated by it, so I stored it away in my brain as I wandered through the pop music minefield of childhood until I did the long walk around jazz fusion back to this core material, now far more able to grasp what was going on. One, as a ten year old child, simply does not walk from Feels So Good to Bitches Brew.

From Miles, they don't just play music from that period; Nefertiti gets the treatment, too.

I feel bad that this almost ended up in the Fatal Flaw pile, this is a pretty rockin' CD. Fusion, if I may use a horribly abused meme, 'jumped the shark' really quick. It was a short hop from Bitches Brew, Headhunters, and Birds of Fire to Spyro Gyra, Yellowjackets, and Dave Koz (full disclosure, my brother just stumbled me an admittedly awesome YouTube video of a dude with a remote control fishing yacht with a little remote control fisherman on it that would fish, and the music was a Spyro Gyra song that I actually owned...)

If Spook! were to be my theme song, I think I'd want Calypso Frelino to be the theme of my updated remake if they were do to it in that seventies Hollywood Auteur/exploitation way. Nice, it also has a complete Chameleon-style breakdown/change up. This might be the kind of music you play if you want your car searched. This is cruising across the desert out of Bakersfield at 3am music.

This was awesome.


Roger Waters
The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking


It's tempting to play a kind of 'one of these things does not belong...' bit with this. It certainly doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the albums (well, David Sanborn is on the album, he's a jazz saxophonist). Without context you might guess that this is a mystery CD, but in fact it's the first one to go through that I actually bought on purpose.

Yep, I still bought CDs, we all did. Promos weren't hand picked, and there was a smorgasbord of hand picked CDs before us every day.

Okay, great, but why Roger Waters?

The journey begins in junior high when my uncle gave me two tapes for Christmas: Judas Priest Screaming for Vengeance and Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon. The Judas Priest album just sounded cheesy to me. I listened to it fairly often because hey, I didn't have that much of my own music yet anyway. But it just never caught on. Pink Floyd, however, that stuck. I played the hell out of that tape. A few years later I was able to get a copy of Momentary Lapse of Reason that joined Basie and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on that aforementioned 40w Radio Shack car stereo (with equalizer!) in the near constant loop. It had the advantage of not drawing complaints from passengers not used to the usual play list.

Fast forward to the record store...the main buyer (who again, has, or at least had, an Albatross that makes mine look like a casual collection) and the eventual manager are both really big Pink Floyd fans. Finally I'm able to feed that adolescent fascination with the band. I learn about the band, fill out my collection, trivia up, all the proper stuff. So when dumping off excess promos at a used store, I find this Roger Waters solo album on the cheap, listen to it once, and then lose it to The Albatross.

Much in the way people identify their personalities by what Beatle they are or if they're "Elvis", "Beatle", or "Rolling Stone" you can take an equal degree of someone's temperature by figuring out when they think Pink Floyd stopped being Pink Floyd. Are they still? Did they stop when Waters left the band? Or had they stopped way back when Syd Barrett had left the band?

I'm not one for listening to lyrics much, so it took me a bit to realize the importance of Waters in the band. Besides, I listened to as much of Momentary Lapse of Reason as I did to Dark Side of the Moon, and that was all I listened to for years, so I didn't know any better.

I feel like I should talk about the album itself, but what can I say about it that hasn't been said? It sounds like variations on themes from The Wall (with constant return to refrains from Mother). Not surprising, I guess, given that they were written at the same time, apparently. The spacey bits aren't as spacey without the tinkering in the background that Gilmour and Wright brought. And Mason. I don't really know how the labor was divided up, but I know that Gilmour doesn't sound as cool on his own, so those other two bring something to the table.

It's still cool, has a lot of those weird moments, like the ominous delivery of a benign line like "I asked if anyone was hungry." Or the Arabs with knives at the foot of the bed. Or the little monologues that my co-workers would occasionally recite that I didn't know. And it's certainly an all-star band. But ultimately it makes me want to hear The Wall. I guess this would be good for when The Wall is played out but you still want something a lot like it. For all my criticism that damn title track gets stuck in my head.

Oddly enough, this would be a good CD in the same situation as the previous CD. Played back to back, this would greet the morning sun as Las Vegas came into view. (I just looked up the concept of the album, apparently a real time experience of a midlife crisis where the singer contemplates adultery...I guess in my vision he decides for it?)

And with that the first week of the project comes to a close. It's certainly been interesting to me...I hope its interesting to whoever is reading this. Maybe I'll do a week in review for people who don't want to read the long daily posts.

Day 3: Milt Jackson "Sa Va Bella," "The Best of Al Jolson", and Disappointment...

One of the most consistent elements about The Albatross is that it is full of lies and disappointment. If you follow this on Facebook you'd be expecting Chuck Mangione and the compilation Bang on a Can V.2. 

At least that is what The Albatross would like you to believe. But, as many times in the past, The Albatross was raising me up (who wouldn't look forward to juxtaposing inoffensive smooth fusion with an experimental music compilation?) only so it could bring me down.

Chuck Mangione's album The Feelings Back is an empty nest. The CD has long since flown the coop. Perhaps this is one that I listened to right away and that never made it back. It's too bad. I have a big soft spot for Mangione in a bizarre nostalgia way. When you're a kid in some ways you're at your musically purest. You like things on a completely gut level, you just get hooked on something without really knowing why. It was that way with Feels So Good.

Honestly, I believe that if listening to that song doesn't make you smile at least a little you might be dead inside. Mangione is the soft side of Chucks with beards...maybe there should be a counter facts about Chuck Mangione (Kittens look at pictures of Chuck Mangione to brighten their day, Rainbows are the sky smiling because Chuck Mangione is underneath it...sorry, moving on...) That wasn't on the missing album, but there is something warm and friendly about Mangione's tone that would have been comforting right now. Like footie pjs or having someone tuck you in. You wouldn't want anyone to catch you enjoying that as an adult, but admit, deep down...it'd still be nice.

But as much as The Albatross lives to surprise, it also lives to disappoint.

So it goes also with Bang on a Can V.2. But this one has had a much more tragic fate. The CD has been, I'm guessing, soaked, and is not only dirty, but fuzzed to the liner notes. It may have rendered it unplayable, I'm going to try and recover it tomorrow. So, two more deep I go.

That brings us to Great Swing Classics in Hi-Fi...which is also an empty nest. Apparently an album where a bunch of largely white (while still legendary) band leaders re-recorded songs in the new 1950s 'hi-fi'. Oh well, on to the next one...

At last, a case and a CD...

Milt Jackson
Sa Va Bella (For Lady Legends)


I dig jazz vibes. The Modern Jazz Quartet was one of the first groups I started to get into when I began to explore 'real' jazz (post-Mangione fascination.) The vibes are, at least to me, the quintessential cool jazz instrument. It's smoking with a cigarette holder. It's the guy who can pull off a smoking jacket. It's the martini drunk by the guy who cares how its made. I should be listening to this on a hi-fi while sitting in a large leather chair on a plush rug with a fire place in the middle of the room.

This album is also a poison pill to my brain. A tribute to the woman who influenced Jackson (with Etta James doing vocals) it contains some of the most persistent earworms that vocal jazz has to offer. Right off the bat with Lady, Be Good (I love songs meant to be sung to women sung by women...as with most things of this nature more common than songs meant to be sung to men sung by men...still...) What a Difference a Day Made...that song has officially been stuck in my head for over a decade alongside the theme to I Dream of Jeannie. My only hope is that at least in jazz there really is no 'definitive' approach to a song and the given melody, especially for singers, is...well, optional. But no doubt tomorrow I'll be walking around humming the version of Lady Be Good I'm familiar with and only occasionally remember why.

Looking down the track list, Send in the Clowns is coming up...that's another hunk of stinky cheese that I can't get enough of. Interesting track order - Good Morning Heartache and This Bitter Earth bookends A-Tisket A-Tasket. It's like a bummer sandwich with a rainbow inside.

Fun fact: Up until this moment I thought it was ...a Day Makes, not Made. I've been mishearing that for years. Good to know.

I played vibes in high school briefly. Well, vibraphone. I don't think you get to use the hip cool 'vibes' until you're laying it down Milt Jackson style. This was for drum line. I faked out the instructor because I was trying to see how to hold four hammers and he for a moment thought I could do that. He hated me a little after that.

What the hell...the band does this out-of-nowhere chanting at the end of what would otherwise be a hokey standard (A-Tisket A-Tasket). I love it... I don't understand it ("So do we so do we so do we" and then "no no no no"), but I love it. Ever since John Coltrane's Om! and A Love Supreme I've had a thing for chanting in songs.

Seriously feel like I'm trying to woo a classy lady with this...it's the kind of jazz you can play and have a copy of the Kama Sutra too prominently displayed on a coffee table and totally get away with it.

Send in the Clowns is less cheesy without an over-emoting singer performing it. On vibes it's just smooth. That may be because everything on vibes is smooth.

An appropriate end to the album with the title track doing a little Latin feel. Latin jazz can be really smokin'...and sometimes it can be like someone 'spicing things up' by putting a little pepper on their BLT. This is the latter. Nothing wrong with that, though...you don't want to disturb the tobacco pipe smoking you should be doing while listening to this album.

Transitioning from this album to the next in my iTunes library, Moby doing a cover of Verb:That's What's Happening (another promo that had made it on iTunes before being lost to the beast) is a little jarring.


Al Jolson
The Best of Al Jolson



Another instance of Amazon not having the album on MP3, but you can listen to samples here.

This is one of those 'archive' promos I would grab that I would get a bit of a hard time for. Truth be told, I fancied myself a bit of a musicologist, or at least I wanted to be until I realized I didn't have the aptitude for it. Plus my ego wouldn't let me be anything other than a performer, not someone who comments on performance...now look at me...

Al Jolson is one of those artists I'm more familiar with as a parody than with the actual artist. To say that about Al Jolson specifically is kind of interesting I guess. I was probably in the last generation to watch old cartoons un-edited, all the racism fully intact. That meant rubbery characters in black face making like Jolson belting out "Swanee" and "Mammy" while little Picaninny caricatures would dance happily, perhaps munching watermelons...we watched these on TV between (and sometimes in) Bugs Bunny cartoons. I think there was a sense that this was wrong, just old.

Maybe it's the cartoons...maybe it's time...maybe it's sensitivity...Jolson just sounds hokey. I mean, he is. This isn't really a revelation, now that I think about it. He's the most famous person of a group of people that did a horrible thing...I wonder, without the black face, would he stand out in the canon of singers? I think there is an argument for it...there were a lot of black face singers...

According to the liner notes it was Jolson's stage presence that made him legendary, his ability to engage an audience in a time when live performance was king. You can certainly hear it in the recordings, even without seeing him you can tell he's a very animated singer...and not just in the context that I know him, as a racist dancing flower...

So this is a strange place to be. I felt at the time and feel now it's important to have this. It's a part of American music history, warts and all...and it really is good for what it is. But it's still uncomfortable...like, I would feel the need to sheepishly explain if My Mammy came up on party shuffle.

Like the old racist cartoons, I think that they should be accessible, but I don't really have a problem with them not being shown on Saturday morning anymore.


Hallelujah I'm a Bum Again...the theme song to how some Republicans envision the unemployed I guess...sorry to get political, it was too hard to resist...

Listening to this CD is making cartoons funnier retroactively. In that uncomfortable kind of way...

I think that owning this kind of stuff (stuff only for its historical value) has a little element of that guy who carries way too much knife hoping for that one instance where someone has to cut a thick rope..."I got it!" I have this stuff waiting for some instance where someone's going to need a specific music and I'll have it. Of course the daunting nature of The Albatross defeated that.

As I said, The Albatross is full of lies and disappointment.