For a long time it was hard to get a hold of this album

 

It was a classic, but the good people who ran Blue Note (stand up Michael Cuscuna) thought it wasn’t “jazz enough” to need to be reissued.

Sometimes records just stop you in your tracks and you have to have them. It’s rare but it does happen. It’s happened a lot over the years to me but as you get older it gets rarer. Well, I reckon this album might do to you what it did it for me. This is a special record it has a great feel, some off key poetic lyrics and the vocal harmonies and arrangements are both sublime and enchanting. It’s different.

I discovered Doo-Bop long after its release, in fact about 12 years. At the time I was listening to Pete Rock, De la Soul, J Dilla and a lot of other 90’s era Hip Hop. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was Miles Davis’s best album ever because I would be at risk of being flogged in sixteen four time by a flugel horn wielding hipster but this album is solid. If you haven’t heard it, it is time to lay back and give it a spin.

To be honest I never dug Dave Brubeck too much. He just didn’t fit into my “jazz iconography” file – sort of, not “cool” enough. I sort of resented the fact that this school teacher type of guy had been the first jazz cat to feature on the cover of Time magazine (even though it happened way before my life time in 1954 there was still “beef”)

 

On page 145 of Jon Szwed’s Miles Davis Biography “So What” the following ingredients which made up Miles’s recipe for chilli were listed. It was just a list of ingredients, thirteen of them, with absolutely no instructions. The finished product, Szwed notes, is to be served over linguini.

 

I guess there are some people that you just don’t think will die. I mean, I think you know they will and even must, but it doesn’t figure that one way they won’t be there. It’s usually your grandma or someone like that – you don’t want to think it and somehow you wish it away. And when it happens it sort of makes no sense.

Somehow Terry Callier was a person like that to me. So the news of his passing came as something of a surprise.

In a bad month for music related deaths (RIP Donna Summer, Robin Gibb and Chuck Brown) sometimes the lesser known folks, but never the less pioneers, go less noticed.

Chicago guitar player Pete Cosey was one of those. A unique and eclectic guitarist who is less known than he ought to have been.

If you are feeling particularly musically adventurous then this -

Might blow your mind, whatever music you like and however brave you feel.

Under the power of Y (an ancient symbol of for the rising spirit of man no less) the Albert Ayler trio play one of their masterworks – Ghosts (First variation) for you.

Hey there folks. A life time of loving music has led me to some pretty great and some pretty crazy stuff, and this here spot is where I’m going to tell you about some of it. In particular some of the homegrown stuff.

I don’t know if you go in for those kind of self help and business type books but one idea recently caught my eye courtesy of Chris Arnot in the UK Guardian..