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.