The Line-Up 11-27-2009 by retronius

I'd like to note this was a rather special episode of The Line-Up.  I recorded it on Thanksgiving Day because I spent this evening having the actual dinner with family.  It was generally enjoyable, at least as enjoyable as spending time with family can be before you get tired out.

The concept for this show was originally going to be "I'm thankful to have covers."  Most of this episode of the show was covers and remixes or reinterpretations.  I didn't run with that line because it takes me ten takes to do practically everything and after a while, I try to keep things simple in order to not screw things up anymore.  That and a couple songs in this set were originals so that threw things off.




Vijay Iyer - Galang
Robert Glasper - No Worries
Why don't I own this album?  Oh yeah, the station doesn't have any extras and I'm flat broke, that's why.  Still, I really want this album, Iyer's Historicity, and Aaron Parks's Invisible Cinema.  Someone make that happen, will you please?
Herbie Hancock - All Apologies
I know there are some people out there who would be shocked to hear this song at all, let alone how good it is.  It's Herbie, what can you say?  But there are few people who would be so audacious to play Nirvana on the piano, especially in 1994.  There would be no The Bad Plus without Herbie Hancock paving the way.
Justin Vasquez - Stella by Starlight
This one is off Vasquez's debut album, Triptych.  I got a hold of it recently and I frankly wasn't impressed.  Vasquez shows promise but you have to look hard to find it in this album.
Sam Sadigursky - Miss Teen U.S.A.
Ever since I got Words Project II, I've been going crazy to play this song on the air.  My parents didn't get it.  They didn't see this video first.
Brad Mehldau - She's Leaving Home
I have had the "The Beatles are great composers but mediocre musicians" argument with quite a few people.  I explain this away by listening to a lot of Beatles covers by jazz musicians because they're able to play with great skill some of the greatest songs in rock history.  I loved Mehldau's cover of this song.  Yes, Lennon and McCartney put together a good song but it certainly wasn't the harp in the background that made it great.  I'll go more into this later when I have the will to write about it.
Ramsey Lewis - Sun Goddess
How awesome is this song, really?  Ramsey Lews and Earth, Wind and Fire? Game over.
Nat King Cole/Natalie Cole/will.i.am - Straighten Up and Fly Right
Shout out to Shaneka.
Gerry Gibbs and the Thrasher Band - Chameleon
Gerry Gibbs means something to me.  Back in high school, I used to listen to his show on KRTU every Friday afternoon.  I liked his wit and his great taste in music.  KRTU helped expand my tastes in jazz and Gibbs was a large part of that, especially.  On my 18th birthday, my parents took me to Carmen's de la Calle Café to hear Gibbs play with his trio and we enjoyed it quite a bit.  While I can't really do anything for him financially considering his dire straits (I'm broke as an unfunny joke), I can at least give him the shout out he deserves, stand with the rest of the station behind him, and link to this site lending him a hand.
Vince Guaraldi - Skating
Once again, another shout out to Shaneka, but also... I mean, come on.  It's the day after Thanksgiving.  If you haven't heard one Christmas song by now, I figured I should ease you into things here.  "Skating" is of course off Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, but while it's Christmas music, it's really just an overall great jazz piece.  It has nothing at all to do with the specific mood of the show but there are times when I just have to say, I have a radio show and I can do what I want.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Partnerships

I had intended for my next post to be about America's socio-economic economy, but I'll save that for a little bit later. I was just reading through my normal load of publications and I ran across a brief article that bothered me so much upon reading it that I just had to write something about it. NME reports this morning that John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page got tired of waiting for Robert Plant to make up his mind about doing a new tour with Led Zeppelin and they're just going on without him . Considering how late to the game I am to one of the best bands ever, I cannot feel right in saying whether or not this must stand, but I know this certainly bothers me. Maybe it's a matter of perspective, but at what is the art still pure from its source when the authors are missing? Is Led Zeppelin still Led Zeppelin if Bonzo's son is playing the drums and some other dude is doing all the singing? When it was 75% original band and things were kept in the family for the ot
Read more

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme  put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list .  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this
Read more

2022: I Lost My Father and Got Into Milton Nascimento

Image
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." --Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Folks have been bandying that quotation around the last few weeks on Twitter, the social network that just won't quit no matter what literal Apartheid-era Afrikaner and dumb Bond villain does to stomp all over it, asking what 2022 was for them. I didn't know after ruminating on it for some time, ultimately joking it was a year that made very pointed, declarative statements about how my life herein would go in some ways and made phrases that trailed off into nothing, leaving me to guess its intentions in others. It was a year of feast and famine as my years often are, and always interesting, as I often hope my life is. I wasn't not entertained, even when I was sad or even when I was irritated, and that's always been my hope to approach life that way. But I still don't know what this year was to me. Freelance music journalist Larry Fitzm
Read more