Day 72: Duke Ellington "Mood Indigo" & Don Byron "Romance With the Unseen"

You know what had to happen was that I mentioned that there were performers making several return appearances here and now they're all vying for top spot. Yesterday's Miles CD gives way to some more Don Byron (who has his third, I believe CD go on) and Duke Ellington who may or may not be pulling even. Peaking ahead there's even a Jacky Terrasson, but it's actually the exact same Jacky Terrasson that just went on the hard drive, so that hardly counts.

Duke Ellington
Mood Indigo

More Ellington. Another compilation, this one seeming on the cheaper 'might find this at a gas station' variety. These so far have been older, lower fidelity recordings of early Ellington. The liner notes are pretty sparse, containing an almost dry history of Ellington's beginning in music and a list of luminaries that he's performed with.

I tend to think of this kind of big band recording as 'cartoon jazz,' though that might conjure images of close harmony female vocals personified as singing flowers. It's not quite that, but it still has that mono recording quality, kind of muted sound that comes from a combination of old recording equipment and an air-tight horn section.

The back of the CD is laid out weird, too. It sets up columns for track title, composer, and publisher, all in equal font. It's such a strange way to lay the whole thing out. A lot of times the composer and publishing info is left out of the main listings, or if it's included it's much, much smaller. This kind of borders on data entry style. A little weird.

I'm sort of grasping at straws. Already with Ellington there's not much left to be said about him, but worse than that this is the fifth time he's come up. On the plus side, now I know the name of a song that I often would have in my head, Things Aren't What They Used to Be. And you can never have too many versions of Black and Tan Fantasy. Also, Sophisticated Lady ties Round Midnight for most represented song, which I didn't really see coming. Though it is a cool song. I play it every time I get a hold of a bari sax.

Don Byron
Romance With the Unseen

Don Byron is third on deck. I don't remember if this was the empty sleeve or not, but Byron was one of those artists whose labels would give me advance releases and then the actual CD when it came out. I would usually forget I had the CD originally and end up taking both. So there is a fair portion of of the Albatross that is duplicate CDs. At one point I had like five or six of the same Screamin' Jay Hawkins CD. Sadly, they all met unfortunate demises.

One thing I can say about the Don Byron CDs that have gone in, they so far have been three different CDs. The only thing that's really carried over from one to the other is his skill at the clarinet. In that respect this is perhaps the most 'straight ahead' of the three CDs. No crazy instrumentation, no wild arrangements, straight quartet...

Of course as soon as I say that, extended electric guitar solo. But still, the most straight ahead of his recordings.

I'm starting to think that I should keep track of Beatles tunes that appear on jazz albums, because there are a lot it feels like. Byron has chosen I'll Follow the Sun for his album. I guess I can't be one to judge, in my high school senior year jazz concert I did Yesterday with the guitarist.

This is always the ideal, is an artist who experiments, who tries and delivers different things. But the counter-argument is, I guess, that most people--and with reason--want the same thing, or at least a little bit of predictability. Because of the nature of my collection and the way I dealt with it, I haven't for the most part known which Byron album is which. But I have felt a need to listen to Byron only to find out that wasn't the Byron I was yearning for, it was instead the much different Byron of the CD I just put in.

If an artist experiments then there's the risk, or rather the near certainty, that the experiment won't be to your liking. Even if you're Miles Davis, you can find Davis 'camps' among those that appreciate him and there are those that like the fusion stuff and those for whom Davis more or less stopped playing jazz. I was able to see him about a year before he died, and during a brief moment where he thought he'd address us (by speaking into his bell mic) someone started shouting "Play All Blues." Jackass, this wasn't a shitty downtown jazz bar, he's not going to play All Blues, and now I won't know what he had to say. How did you buy a ticket for Miles Davis thinking that All Blues was even a remote possibility?

So anyway...

Some of it is not going to be something you're into. And so now the artist doesn't get the superlative, 'Consistent.'

It works for him, though, I guess. I mean, he kept releasing albums that I would get promos of, so that's good. It's good to hear some inconsistency now and then.

As part of the Albatross' effort to tie everything in, two days after the Basquiat CD goes in, a CD with a track called Basquiat goes in as well. I really should look that guy's art up some time. Basquiat turned out to be a kind of haunting track, really.

Day 59: Ali Farka Toure "Radio Mali" & Duke Ellington "The Best of Duke Ellington Centennial Edition"

I continue to be amazed at how grouped up these CDs are. It's like the CDs that were alike wanted to hang out together or something.

Ali Farka Toure
Radio Mali

I've talked before about my failed amatuer ambitions towards ethno-musicology. One of the underlying curriousities that drove that was the circular notion of influences and cross fertilization that music undergoes. Ali Farka Toure is a fantastic example of that.

I'll admit that I didn't really know anything about him, so after writing that first paragraph I did the "don't say something stupid" Google search to see if I was about to get a detail wrong. Instead I made the same observation that everyone has made about Toure's music, about the intersection of traditional African music and music that is influenced by traditional African music.  I just called the sky blue...

Well, regardless of how well tread and obvious my observation is, it's still pretty intriguing to hear Africa re-absorb the blues. I don't have any translations or liner notes to go on to see the translations of the lyrics, so I don't know if subject matter carries over or not. I know that the music remains solemn and mournful sounding.

According to Wiki this is a compilation of earlier recordings, which makes sense since the style, instrumentation, and recording quality shift around from track to track.

There's a bit of a pedal tone to some of these tracks that becomes sort of hypnotizing.

Duke Ellington
The Best of Duke Ellington Centennial Edition

Another day, another Duke Ellington tribute. This one features recordings from Ellington himself, however, from a box set (I believe) that spans his entire RCA recording career.

At least they resisted the temptation to make Take the A Train the first track (it's all the way down at number 8).

This instead features some early recordings, and oddly enough the recordings I'm more familiar with as far as Ellington goes. I didn't, for whatever reason, listen to many of the Strayhorn era and later Ellington but rather a lot of these rough early recordings. It might be that I just picked up anything with Ellington on it from the bargain bin and that was filled with recordings that had cheap rights. Or maybe there was a focus on early recordings at the time I started listening to jazz. I don't know, but albeit still well known pieces like Black and Tan Fantasy and East Saint Louis Toodle-O are instantly recognizable to me and stir up that weird nostalgia for when jazz was still a new world to me. Same goes with Rockin' in Rhythm, I would hum the squeaky saxophone line to this day really, though I don't often remember the name of the song indicating I probably listened to it on tape most often.

Sure enough, the music here is presented in chronological order so that the listener gets to speed read through Ellington's 50some year long music career and hear how his music evolved. Honestly, the best way to put together a compilation of this kind.

Bitter sweet is that two of my favorite and most moody Ellington pieces, Mood Indigo and Creole Love Call are stuffed together on a medley with Hot and Bothered. Granted it's a long medley, over seven minutes which is pretty ground breaking for the time. Also, apparently, when they recorded it they did it from two distinct mics with a time delay so the person who remastered it was able to do so in stereo, pretty cool.

I had a recording a long time ago in which Ellington narrated Mood Indigo explaining that the song was a boy and girl who met every day to play, and they loved playing together, but today it was raining and they couldn't see each other, and this was their mood. Now that I think about it, it might not have been a recording but rather something I read, but I seem to hear that story in my head being told by Duke. Either way, the song has remained heartbreakingly romantic in my head ever since. I heard a story about Creole Love Call, too, something about a singer humming the melody to a set of riffs that eventually became Creole Love Call, but that's less vivid. (According to Wiki, it's actually a melody lifted off King Oliver...not nearly as romantic a notion as the story I had heard...)

Well, apparently there are lyrics added after the fact to Mood Indigo making it not at all about that. The internet ruins some perfectly good myths sometimes.

Now I have another version of Day Dream, this time as a feature for Johnny Hodges, a saxophonist I got into when I felt like most of my playing was going to be in big bands anyway. Plus, it was hard to find an alto saxophonist that wasn't under the shadow of Bird.

So that's four versions of Take the A Train so far, and we've really barely started with the project. Work Song is closing in with a more eclectic spread with a Latin version, Duke's version, and a surf version. Though it's cheating a little, the surf version was already there. I went through my 'surf thing' after I left the store. I mean, I still like it, but there was a six month 'collect all the surf I can' bender I went through while in college. And of course it's a different Work Song with Ellington.

Never knew there were lyrics to Come Sunday, either. I kind of prefer it without lyrics, it was another one of those moody Ellington songs that I really liked. To complete my tour of moody Ellington, Sophisticated Lady is coming up in two tracks. I hadn't realized that my favorite Ellington was in his ballads as much.

Day 58: Angel Sept. 2000 Sampler & Ellingtonia: A Tribute to Duke Ellington

I should remember these moments every time I start a new bag or whatnot. These moments where I start doing the CDs I avoided because I didn't think they would be interesting or whatever. So what happens is that there is a big stack of CDs I dread for like a week and half. This is not the best sell for the post that is about to follow, I'm sure it will be awesome...

Various Artists
Angel Sept. 2000 Sampler

This is probably the most amount of prep I've done in the set up for the post. And not really much of it will matter.

I've done these kinds of CDs before, these are the pre-release samplers that would be handed out in advance of the actual releases to both garner my excitement and presumably for me to play in the store to excite customers (the latter hardly ever happened.)

I would almost never listen to these unless for some reason there was something on there that I recognized or was intrigued by, but it would have to stand out because I hardly ever read them either.

For today's post I actually found five of the seven albums sampled here for the player. I could have just put the individual tracks that are actually on this CD in the player to be better representative, but I didn't think of it until I was well underway, so I didn't. Also, iTunes was unable (for the first time) to identify this CD so I got to be the one who labeled everything. After musing on how to label classical CDs in the player I finally decided the best way to go about it was to consider the performer the artist and to list the name of the track with the composer first. My logic being that if I wanted to hear a specific piece I would more than likely know who wrote it, so I could look for, say, Respighi if I wanted to hear Pines of Rome. This is undermined by the fact that I had to look up how to spell his name.

I've always wondered how much is put into these samplers. I mean, these aren't for general release, they aren't themed and packaged on anything other than, "This is the stuff we're putting out next month." But it's still a sales job, I'm being the one sold. How much consideration is put into how the tracks work together, over which performance is selected? It's (presumably) for a discerning audience, but it also has to work for people like me and 'below,' who either know some classical but don't listen to enough to be that up on it or people who just don't hate classical but it's not their thing.

As it is it's a pretty accessible collection. These aren't daring selections without being 'classical greatest hits' kind of stuff. It's heavy on the opera, but I don't know if that's a product of the selection or just that September was big on opera. The selections are also consistently moody, which I think has to be a matter of selection. I don't obviously think the sampler is assembled like I would the last second before a road trip...I just wonder what the criteria is that goes into it.

As if to punctuate the moodiness of the CD, there's a Chopin Nocturne. Chopin has become the Dali print of a college music collection. I run into a lot of college age people who will casually list Chopin as part of their 'classical cred.' I suppose the next thing I should do is scoff at this and offer up other composers that should qualify, but frankly I like Chopin, too, and there are worse things that they could like.

It ends with a modern composer conducting his own piece. It has a kind of 'overture of dances' feel to it where the piece builds to an intensity, becomes a lot faster, and then breaks down so it can build back up again.

Various Artists
Ellingtonia: A Tribute To Duke

I think my fastidiousness borked iTunes. Building on what I had done in the last CD I went through and corrected all of the artist listing on this CD, but now it won't recognize the whole thing as one album in that little flip-book cover viewer it has, so it lists it as an 'unkown album.' But when I click 'get info' it knows exactly what album and associates the art with it.

Curse you digital media...

Anyway, here's yet another tribute to Ellington. This one is made up of either Canadian performers or performers who spend a lot of their time in Canada. I dig Canada, and apparently from the liner notes, so did Duke.

This was recorded for Ellington's 100th anniversary (which is probably why I have so many of them, aside from him being an immensely influential performer and composer). I don't know if it was assembled from already available recordings or if it was recorded special for this album. The groups are pretty different in their approach so far ranging from regular swing combos to big bands to a simple guitar and vocalist singing one of my favorites, In a Sentimental Mood. I never knew the lyrics to that song. I still don't for the most part, she had that 'jazzy Novocain' style of singing where the words kind of bend together.

The liner notes mine the more obscure and far ranging elements of Ellington's compositions in a classic liner notes 'look what I know' kind of display, but the selections are straight canon. Only thing missing is Satin Doll, though it does end with a Mingus composition that itself is a tribute to Ellington.

Also, if I had finished reading the liner notes I would know that in fact these are recordings lifted from other albums and assembled here, each track is credited with its original album release. I guess you could look at that as the cheap way to go, to assemble stuff already paid for in your library, package it up, find a jazz critic to write a blurb inside the liner and you're set. But in a way it's almost a more honest tribute, what better way to show the influence of Ellington than being able to pull together a bunch of tracks from unrelated artists who were already performing his works for no other reason then they were good.

I used to play the snot out of Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me. I have no idea why I dug that song so much, except maybe the little figure in the A melody that would happen between phrases. Maybe it was because I actually knew the lyrics (which a girlfriend at the time forbid me to sing because she felt like I was singing to her my intent to cheat on her...).

I don't know what it is specifically, but piano pounders really like Lush Life.

The last three tracks move a little away from the standard Ellington catalog with recordings of Melancholia, Day Dream, and Chelsea Bridge.

Day 34: Funkdamentals, Louis Armstrong/Duke Ellington Selections from the "Complete Session," 4-Sight Self Titled

I guess I can take a few minutes away from obsessively checking the status of the video to work on my long term project. The completely clean and unrecognizable CDs keep popping up, including a sampler from a box set I don't remember coming out. Apparently they over-fed the beast. I guess you can't entice a dog on a full stomach. How many times can I restate that metaphor?

That probably means I should just get to it...

Various Artists
Funkdamentals

I almost feel like I shouldn't have to listen to this album to consider it listened to. Thanks to a friend's parents growing up, I listened to all of this all through my childhood. Other people my age might have Thompson Twins or Depeche Mode or Wham! in their closet of shame--or maybe they have a bunch of metal bands they have that they guiltily admit that they really liked (or no guilt, who knows...), but I have this stuff. Before Jazz (and before a brief detour in early rap), there was Funk for me. In fact, Funk is why I played the sax. I saw a video with Clarence Clemens standing on a tall white pedestal playing the tenor sax and I thought, "Damn...that's my instrument, I want to play that!"

My vision was to stand in the horn section playing Earth, Wind and Fire or behind someone like James Brown. I wanted to be on that giant white pedestal growling out an eight bar solo in a funk or soul song. That was my very first image of my potential future self as a saxophonist. Obviously, that image evolved and I've talked about the various stages of that daydream before.

These are the songs I sing mindlessly when I'm completely idled. The "Give It To Me" chant..."Giveittomegivemethatstuffthatfunkthatsweetthatfunkystuff(give it to me!)" I don't really think about it. It's just the music in the back of my head. And since it's the first music I 'learned,' it shapes my tastes in music I like now.

The weird thing is that outside of funk, I really don't like dance music. And I absolutely don't dance to this or anything. I bob my head, but no dancing.

Man, I love Fantastic Voyage.

I don't know what the dancing thing is, really. I could come up with a bunch of excuses. It's not that I'm ashamed of my dancing (though it is, really, just awful)--I don't have the desire to dance (my brief romance with breakdancing aside--also, just awful). Dancing is one of those things where I don't know if I'm watching a good display of talent or I should put a wallet in the person's mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue.  I even took a graduate level class on dance analysis, nothing.

Do your dance, do your dance, do your dance QUICK! Cameo never managed to popularize the cod piece.

Familiarity is probably a big contributor to why this CD was never opened. I knew all these songs, I could play them back in my head pretty easily, there was no rush to get them on the player. No doubt they came home with something I hadn't really heard.  Certainly it didn't come home during the Great Monster Rancher Play.

For record store employees who also loved their video games, Monster Rancher was a godsend. A video game where you make monsters from your own CDs? Couldn't be more perfect. In fact, the game was designed to get you to combine monsters and make them better that way, presuming I guess that people would run out of CDs to make monsters out of. For us, this was not a problem. We never really made it far in the game, we were too busy finding out what monsters all of our CDs made. We even had informal tournaments where we'd bring over ten CDs we hadn't put in yet, generate the monsters and have them fight it out for supremacy.

My champion monster came from Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, a pretty spectacular Naga. It seemed fitting. I miss that game.

For all of the fawning over Funk, the only other just pure funk on my iTunes before the project is a couple of Funkedelic albums when I realized that I was losing them. I used to have the entire Funkedelic catalog, but they all went adrift and only two, Hardcore Jollies and The Electric Spanking of the War Babies, were saved.

Duke Ellington/Louis Armstrong
Selections from "The Complete Session"

This seemed too short to count as its own CD. This is another one of those advance promos where they don't even have the artwork sorted out or at the very least produced and they're not giving me the complete cd.

This is really a CD that was waiting for iTunes or related media player. Because there really wasn't going to be an instance where I was going to throw in a CD with four tracks, one of them with false starts and conversations to have in the background or something of that kind.

I guess if I had a multi-cd player, like my brief moment in my bus, then it would work.

This is another one of those legendary artist CDs where I don't really know what to say. I can't really comment on the sounds that everyone knows even when they don't listen to jazz.

I went through a heavy Armstrong phase for a bit when I was living in a house with a lot of roommates. One of my roommates was pretty into The Carpenters. This created a fusion in my head when bored at work and I started singing Carpenters songs in Armstrong's voice. It's a moment that delights me to this day. Try it, it's awesome.

4-Sight
4-Sight

I usually have been listening to the CD for a little bit before I start typing. The process goes, I pop in the CD, transfer it to the hard drive, get the Amazon player link, scan the cover, and then start assembling it into the blog. By then, the CD has digested and I've been listening to it for a little bit. Usually I've looked up anything I didn't know as well. I haven't done this one because I really didn't know who the hell it was and I kind of wanted to see what my reaction was going to be.

Turns out it's a progressive jazz quartet. Everyone in the group has managed to continue playing (and the bass player has apparently become a professor at Michigan State while playing bass in the Lincoln Center Orchestra.) But as this particular group, just this once.

Wow, on track four it got all fusion-y on me. Still a little funky though.

There were a few groups of like this when I was there, jazz combos with names (instead of the "So and So Quartet). I usually didn't see many follow up albums from most of them. In fact, Sex Mob is the only group I can think of that I saw two or more of.

Which isn't to say that these groups aren't any good, they are. I really like this, not as much as Black/Note, a group from the same period, but it's pretty good.

Day 5:The European Broadcast Union Jazz Orchestra "100 Years of Duke Ellington" and "After Hours 4"

Two fake outs today from The Albatross. First was the Errol Garner CD that is apparently too scratched to be played by the computer, which kept spitting it out. I don't really remember ever listening to that CD so I don't know how it got scratched, but such is The Albatross. It joins the 'to be repaired' pile with Bang on a Can V.2

The next fake out comes in the form of what I thought today's new first CD was-

The European Broadcasting Union Jazz Orchestra
100 Years of Duke Ellington

This CD isn't available for download, so I've linked to the Amazon page that still has samples.

This is one of the fake outs that occasionally happens because The Albatross is made up largely of jazz and classical. What I thought I was picking up was a Duke Ellington, as in Ellington will actually be playing, CD. Nope. I'm picking up an album of Ellington charts played by a set of professional studio musicians.

This particular CD came out in 1999 and has been sitting on my shelf still in its wrapper. This CD has been following me around for more than a decade without me so much as unwrapping it. This CD is fresh as the day it was born and hopefully handed over to me to, I guess, get excited about.

At some point (and it might be here somewhere in The Albatross) the Chabot Community College Steel Drum Band recorded an album that was optimistically sold in stores. Not to put top level studio musicians in the same category as a bunch of community college students in a steel drum band (I was in that band two years before and a year after the recording, where we didn't so much as have a end of the semester concert I don't think...my timing: impeccable), but that's kind of what I feel about this.

It's another live recording, and I think it really is one of those things where you're looking at all the skilled players you have and thinking, "Man, we're wasting all this talent and skill recording ins and outs to daytime talk shows and station bumpers." A combination of two concerts in Canada, produced by a French-Canadian radio station for broadcast in Geneva to celebrate the 100th year since Ellington's birth, by a band consisting of players from Canada, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Austria, France, Norway, Hungary, the US, Slovenia, and the Netherlands...I think that alone is a pretty good example of how powerful Ellington's music is and is a tribute unto itself.

I seriously didn't think the nationality list was going to be that long when I started it, I was just looking at the first page of bios. The sole American is a Russian immigrant.

What saves this CD from being a complete vanity is their selection. There is a half hour long medley at the opening that burns through the normal catalog of Ellington standards that everyone knows even if they don't know they know them.

The actual tracks are far more obscure, Harmony in Harlem, Heaven, Purple Gazelle. Sometimes stuff is not in the regular canon because it really isn't as up to par as the stuff that is. And then there's Ellington, where he just wrote too much awesome stuff to have it all be like that.

It also includes the larger later works that Ellington had performed in Europe like the Togo Brava Suite and a piece whose only reference I can find on Google goes back to this actual CD, labeled "Cent-Ellington 1st movement, The Promise and 4th movement The Gift" These are all Ellington's suites, longer works he did later in his career that either weren't jazz enough for jazz people or weren't classical enough (or at all) for others. As such, these are not often recorded and hard to find. This is not just another rendering of Satin Doll, this is stuff you're pretty likely to have never heard.

This is actually another surprise that has happened since I started listening. I started off (you can see it a few short paragraphs ago) bemoaning the goofiness of who this was versus who I thought it would be, but as I get into it--this is some rare and intriguing stuff, and not just because it's a decade old promo from a group that recorded once. This is the kind of thing I keep The Albatross for, right here. Stuff I wouldn't even know existed without it.


They weren't really set up to record that chant at the end, so even with pretty good headphones I couldn't make it out, but that was kind of awesome once I got into it.


Various Artists
After Hours 4

Another one that is not on MP3, at least at Amazon, so the link is to the CD page where you can hear samples. You can also buy a new copy for $102.59! I have to admit, I started thinking, "New MP3 player, here I come!" but used copies are $4.12. I don't know what makes the new copies so special, but there you are.

This comes from the This is Acid Jazz collection/label/can't really tell anymore. I've been trying to come up with a way to describe Acid Jazz and its place in time. Take a time when Enya and Ace of Base were popular, New Age actually had radio stations, and raves had reached the point where there were 'very special episodes' of 90210 about them. US3 had released a rap album sampling jazz that was flash in the pan popular. Acid Jazz is the blender result of that. Electronica, really, with horns. No soloing or improv the way you'd know it in 'regular jazz.'  The music that might end up being played in the Chill Room while you try and gently come down off your E.

Thing is, to a degree, I kind of liked what Miles Davis was up to at the end of his career (I was lucky enough to see him in one of his last performances). And I think I was excited for what the prospect of Acid Jazz might be, so I snatched up Acid Jazz promos whenever they came up. Snatched sounds like there was competition, that's misleading. I casually acquired them with little to no resistance from my co-workers. Ultimately, I was hoping they'd be more Bitches Brew and less Paul Oakenfold. (Full disclosure, I messed up his name and thought, "I should check to see if that's the guy I'm thinking of"...I got a guy who apparently farts music...ah Google...)

For a more charitable description, here's Wikipedia:

Acid jazz is a musical genre that combines elements of jazz, funk and hip-hop^[1], particularly looped beats. It developed in the UK over the 1980s and 1990s and could be seen as tacking the sound of jazz-funk onto electronic dance: jazz-funk musicians such as Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd and Grant Green are often credited as forerunners of acid jazz.^[2] Acid jazz has also experienced minor influences from soul music, house music, acid rock, and disco.
While acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including sampling or live DJ cutting and scratching), it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. The compositions of groups such as Jamiroquai, The Brand New Heavies, Los Amigos Invisibles and Incognito often feature chord structures usually associated with jazz music.
The acid jazz "movement" is also seen as a revival of jazz-funk or jazz fusion or soul jazz by leading DJs such as Norman Jay or Gilles Peterson or Patrick Forge, also known as "rare groove crate diggers" or "Cataroos".

I would say that the 'fusion revival' predates Acid Jazz, but I guess that's a matter of perspective and I'm not prepared to go to the mat on that. By the time this compilation came out there wasn't much to distinguish it from the rest of the stuff on the adult contemporary station that played Sade and Shadowfax (the band, not the wizard's horse) on a near constant loop.

I think I remember liking Incognito, or hearing a track I liked, and that sort of fooled me into thinking I like Acid Jazz. I think more than anything, the name threw me off. On my own, I like some pretty abrasive music, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, The World Saxophone Quartet, Lester Bowie, John Zorn...dissonant free jazz--I was hoping that Acid Jazz would be like that for electronic jazz, or at least funkier, but it often is neither. And apparently I didn't have the patience to wade through all of it even though I was getting them for free, because I never found one I liked (with the possible exception of Incognito, if I'm remembering that right.)

I always hedge when I feel I'm being uncharitable, but seriously, I'm six tracks in on a compilation and I haven't even noticed the tracks changing much less could I identify them or distinguish them. To make matters worse, my brother has just stumbled me some Eric Dolphy and Headhunters-era Herbie Hancock (not knowing that I'm doing this at the moment). Before I was able to stop the YouTube videos, the contrast was pretty severe.

On the plus side, it makes an amusing if surreal soundtrack to the episode of Dirty Jobs playing in the background...

This is what smooth jazz needed, trunk rattling bass.

The track titles are what you'd expect from what you hear-
Playtime by Jimpster
Waterfront by Marschmellows (not making that up, go to the Amazon page)
Summer's End by Yada Yada

The current track that actually borders on funkiness has a pretty cool name, The Beautiful Women of Scant Virtue by Chris Standring. Plus it has hit a hot button with me, samples from ephemeral sources like science records, corporate videos, instructional films and the like. I guess that's sort of played out (though to be fair, this is from 1998), but I'm still a total sucker for it.

9 Lazy 9 and their Electric Lazyland also borders on funky. Plus, cool name.

Much like the band that dreamily brings this compilation to a close, Sad Rockets.

Alright, I feel bad for not being charitable again. There is a time and a place for this music, and Friday afternoon after having been roused by barking dogs is probably not it, especially not after some big band music. If I had done this entry at night like the last ones, perhaps winding down or after a drink or something I probably would have a better impression of it.

But such is the nature of the beast, I have to play what comes to the surface.

That's Day 5. Be sure to join the Facebook group to get a peak at what's coming up in the line up. Also, first successful mid-day completion!