Jazz Writing School Final Exam Essay Question

Compare and contrast:

Mingus 1964 (w/ Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, and Clifford Jordan)

with

Mingus 1974 (w/ Don Pullen, George Adams, and Hamiet Bluiett).

Pay special attention to the piano.


Perhaps, a better comparison would be to this lesser-known 1972 edition of the group, since they're playing the same tune, "Peggy's Blue Skylight", but I just really love the Adams-Pullen era of Mingus (especially Changes Two) and wanted an excuse to link to that badass Umbria video.

Though it would be a good exercise, I don't think I will be completing this "assignment".  We're on the cusp of a three-day holiday weekend, after all, and I'm pretty sure I'm not up to the challenge.

Five Geezers Who Were Mates

Check out The Adios Lounge preaching The Truth about The Faces.

Scharpling Calls Out Herzog

Here I go again, "retweeting" without Twitter.  @Scharpling on the Gulf oil spill:

Isn't it time to stop demonizing oil & start demonizing nature? For its willful fragility? Hey, @WernerHerzog, your voice is needed here!

Then, a few tweets later, this link.  Remarkable as the image is in and of itself, it's really only the portal to a world of (celebrity photo-op-related) amazements.  Two of my favorites: this and this (why are they posing outside a men's room, and where is that mist coming from?)

Q: Who's Counting?, A: Roger Ebert

If you stopped reading Ebert's one-star review of Sex & The City 2 before the end (or never started reading it), you missed this:

Note: From my understanding of the guidelines of the MPAA Code and Ratings Administration, Samantha and Mr. Spirt have one scene that far, far surpasses the traditional MPAA limits for pumping and thrusting.

The review also has a great first line:

Some of these people make my skin crawl.

Jersey Slim

As an amateur pizza maker, the major problem I have is not getting my dough stretched thin enough.  I always end up with a crust that's too thick.  So, the photos in this article absolutely blow my mind. 

Breakmeoffapieceathat Rit-ter Sport

A favorite new discovery in the realm of internet-enabled niche obsession documentation:

This guy's extensive coverage of the Ritter Sport bar (among many other chocolates). 

The Ritter Sport is one of my favorite chocolate/candy products, but I've only tried a few flavors (including multiple encounters with the dangerously seductive marzipan-filled variety), and only seen maybe a dozen.  Turns out there are many, many, many more, some presumably sold only in Europe.  Reading these reviews (each one complete with a pentagonal graphic illustrating the bar's performance on a five-point rating system) has got me wanting to try some of the exotic rarities, like the Olympia and the amaro-flavored Ramazzotti.

RJD, NSD!, H&H

Before I heard that Ronnie James Dio had died, I'd already started on this post, inspired by the Awl's as-it-turns-out eerily-timed "listicle" of lesser-known Black Sabbath members (they included Dio, even though I would consider him one of the better-known Sabbath members).  As much as I enjoyed reading the names and resumes of the various Sabbath fill-ins and replacements (it was like a peek inside the heads of Scharpling and Wurster), the post was really just going to be an excuse to post a link to one of my all-time favorite album covers, and certainly my favorite cover of an album I haven't even heard, the Hipgnosis-designed Never Say Die!

While the Heaven and Hell cover was a familiar presence in my youth and adolescence—I remember it as something that was just around, on people's lighters, t-shirts, and in record store windows—I don't remember seeing Never Say Die! anywhere.  Were H&H's smoking angels easier to relate to (and thus, co-opt and recontextualize) than NSD!'s mysterious/menacing pilots, or was it just that H&H was a more popular, well-loved album?  Probably both.

As for Dio, my only real memory of him is from my college days.  I remember sitting in the window of a bar on the main college town drag wondering at the line of black t-shirt-clad townies stretching out the door, down the block, and around the corner from the local indie (or to be historically accurate, alternative) rock club across the street, a longer line than I'd ever seen there.  I found out from one of the black t-shirt wearers who came into the bar that Dio was in town.  Being summer (I was still around taking a class), the campus was mostly deserted, and this was my first glimpse of the town's summer music scene, an alternate (but not "alternative") reality in which "college rock" was temporarily-but-forcefully shoved to the side, metal was king, and Dio was a BIG F***ING DEAL.