Grateful Dead

Caught her with Amy Helm and another great singer at Chautauqua in Boulder a few years back. Then again opening for Dylan, when she promised to literally kick the ass of the Mango Mussolini -- cracked up the crowd. Boy, think of the Pay-for-View revenue from that televised event..............

there's no way the band could lose"

Wife had the good fortune to hear EF at a jazz camp back a few decades

The 5th Dimension are figured prominently in the Summer of Soul documentary on Hulu. Good flick. Seeing Mavis Staples singing with Mahalia Jackson may not make you a believer, but it will sure make you happy.

Would love to meet Mavis someday. Woman has the power of a thousand suns.

Flashback to ~1975... I'm 17... We get tickets for Ella Fitzgerald with the Count Basie Orchestra (the Count was conducting, I believe) and we head to the Westchester Premier Theater (now closed).

Picture 4-5 teenagers with long hair, flannel shirts and jeans, probably stinking of pot, possibly with "white walls" around our nostrils (we got into blow that year), entering the theater, where everyone was dressed in their New York City best. Just after the show began. The ushers wouldn't seat us in our ticketed seats down front -- understandable now, but not then. But they seated us somewhere. Ella and the band played a remarkable set and Phil Woods -- one of the greatest clarinetists ever -- played a solo that I still remember absolutely devastated us. Then the band took requests. The process was amazing! A well-heeled jazz fan in the audience would yell out a tune. The Count would confer with his band. Always, a player would say something like, 'Oh yeah, that's a bouncy thing in G#m" and band heads would nod in agreement, Ella would say yay or nay on her knowing the lyrics -- or she'd scat/fake 'em -- and off they'd go. So polished, you wouldn't know they'd never played it before. During intermission, we did get seated in our seventh row center ticketed seats, standing out like a pocket of hoodlums in a coiffed crowd. Amazing night.

We caught all kinds of uptown jazz and swing acts in those days because my buddy's dad had been a drummer for the fabled Savoy record label in Neward, NJ, and when he heard us listening to the Band of Gypsys (Hendrix of course), he went to his record collection, pulled out 15 LPs, handed them over and said, 'Okay, if you're gonna listen to Hendrix and the Dead etc., you also have to learn where everything came from. Dig this!' And he thrust the well-played platters into my hands. That opened me up to the music of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. Of course, over the years, I pushed back to the '30s and '20s -- Robert Johnson and Co., Lonnie Johnson, etc., which was a legacy of my friend's dad lifting the veil on popular music.

So, I may be HF, but I got schooled by that LP collection and dozens of killer shows in NYC while I lived in the area. Good times. Big ears. Ask about our Oscar Petersen 'experience' sometime.

That is all...

I can't help but remember Mr. Ones catch phrase, Music is the Best.

There's always something going on around here and certainly not restricted to the Grateful Dead.

HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THE 5th DIMENSION!!!

Here inside my paper cup we listen while on Stone Soul Picnics!

Just scored a Ella Fitzgerald collection (the complete songbook series)

Talk about Ella came up last night at work and came home to check my Ella stuff. I have several of the "song books" collections. Never knew the was a "complete" box set. Guess it out of print. Amazon had big dollar pricing. Found a copy on a site called Mercari,,,, 83 bucks!!! 16 cd box!

From wiki -

They are considered a cornerstone of 20th century recorded popular music, and as a whole, represent some of the finest interpretations of the greater part of the musical canon known as the Great American Songbook.

The New York Times columnist Frank Rich was moved to write a few days after Fitzgerald's death that in the Song Book series, she "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul."

Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians. As Ira Gershwin said, in the line quoted in every obituary: "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." Most of the rest of us didn't know, either. By the time she had gone through the entire canon, songs that had been pigeonholed as show tunes or jazz novelties or faded relics of Tin Pan Alley had become American classical music, the property and pride of everyone."[3]

Sorry for the non sequitur,,, I just had to share my good fortune.

Oh,,,,, don't tell the wife!!

Not a huge fan of his music, but he is a cool dude. Sound City is an outstanding documentary.

My wife used to watch top 20 video countdown

FF "LEARNIN TO WALK AGAIN!!!"

and

"THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST!!!"

no hate or disrespect

Just facts

I was lucky enough to see Nirvana in '92

"And now for something completely different..."

- Monty Python

For years now I've been writing the Foo Fighters off as populist soccer mom rock, and Dave Grohl as an over exposed puppy dog. I cannot believe how much I love the new record, Medicine At Midnight.

Very stylistically diverse and just a beautiful, fun, warm rock record. Amazing. I could not gush more.

And now back to your regularly scheaduled programming...