Highly Opinionated
Then As Now: The Music Is To Die For
by Richard J Salvucci
Hey, it's September 1, 1939 and at the top of the charts is Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with the, whoops, singularly inappropriate tune “In the Mood." In the mood for what? Invading Poland? Because that was “officially" the start of World War II in Europe. In the Far East, things had been going on considerably longer, but we wouldn't get officially involved in that until December 7, 1941. And, guess what? Once more Glenn Miller and His Orchestra topped ...
Continue ReadingFantasy Box Set League
by Patrick Burnette
Box sets are back, baby! Some of us old timers thought they might be gone for good after the CD crash (remember when Joe Henderson's The Milestone Years was going for twenty-bucks at your local mall?) But companies have realized that for those happy few who continue collecting “physical media," the big-ole stack of music still holds an appeal. In these later days, when the audience for such extravagance is both smaller and crazier than that in the ...
Continue ReadingWhy Steely Dan Can Never Really Be Yacht Rock
by Eric Pettine
This article was first published on All About Jazz on April 20, 2019. The website Really Smooth Music provides the definition of the term Yacht Rock as being “a variation of popular Soft Rock that peaked between the years of 1976 and 1984 (as featuring a) highly polished brand of soft rock that emanated from Southern California during the late '70s and early '80s. The term is meant to suggest the kind of smooth, mellow music that early ...
Continue ReadingMy Summer with Sonny
by Patrick Burnette
Raise your hands, jazz fans, if you've been thinking about jazz legend Sonny Rollins during the last few months. After all, the great man is still with us at age 94. Reaching such an age is an accomplishment for anybody, but a miraculous feat for an African-American jazz musician born in the early decades of the twentieth-century, who saw so many of his predecessors and peers die young from drugs, alcohol, hard living, and the stresses of omnipresent racism. Rollins ...
Continue ReadingFusion: What's in a Name?
by Mike Brannon
This article was first published on All About Jazz in November 2000. When I was just starting out, playing guitar in bands as a kid, it was the Blues of Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell, Howlin' Wolf and then the Stones, Hendrix, Cream, Johnny Winter, Kinks, Clapton, The Who, Zepplin etc. A natural progression. When I was about 18 I heard a record with Joe Pass and Herb Ellis on it doing guitar duets and everything changed. ...
Continue ReadingGive Your Regards to Broadway—and Hollywood
by Con Chapman
Those who recognized the complexity and beauty of jazz early on--such as twentieth century French critic Hugues Panassié--rightly characterized it as American's unacknowledged classical music. Their sentiment came to fruition in the wrong way by the end of the century when the genre had fallen from its peak to its current lowly status, tied for last with European classical music in terms of popularity. This downward plunge has been blamed on everything from Elvis Presley and the coming ...
Continue ReadingA Tale of Two Jazz Humbugs
by Con Chapman
"Humbug" is a little word of great utility that has unfortunately passed out of general usage. It means, according to Webster's Dictionary, “a person who does not live up to his claims; impostor." While it carries the connotation of deception or trickery, it was more generally applied to what we would today call--with less compactness--a pious fraud; the fellow who claims to have principles, but upon closer examination fails to live up to them. This is a tale of two ...
Continue ReadingThe Rat Pack vs. the Kids in the Kitchen: Are Those Our Only Choices?
by Con Chapman
It was a more important anniversary than most so we decided to splurge on a local restaurant that always gives me buyer's remorse when I get the check. My wife and I are both getting up in years and we eat out at what she used to jokingly refer to as “blue hair hours," when you can get the early-bird special if you want. In that time slot the crowd consists of senior citizen guys and their wives, ...
Continue ReadingJazz Inside And Out: Select Posts from 2013-2015
by John Goodman
Here's a selection of posts from my now-discontinued blog, Jazz Inside and Out. I started writing it in summer 2013 and persisted for about six years. As 2016 rolled around, like many others I got quite taken over by politics, and my posts reflected that. Readership went up, jazz took a sabbatical. Politics and jazz are my passions, but politics is always transient—and jazz endures. Some of these posts still have relevance, I imagine, and of course your ...
Continue ReadingZappa and the burning strings
by Mick Raubenheimer
Zappa. A glimpse. The composition was entering its fifth mood, a diabolical, gleeful, lurching rhythm, led by deep-plowed violin. The song was “Revised Music for Violin and Low Budget Orchestra," it was written for Jean-Luc Ponty by Frank Zappa. A new instrument dawned into my framework as that composition wheezed and moaned and ranted and spun—that classic, demure, genteel pansy of an instrument had been plucked from its staid Old European stand and forged into a complex, eloquent ...
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