The Year End Thing

A few people have asked for my year end top whatever thing (and why they ask, I'll never know). So I'm writing it here so it can be linked by whoever wants it.

Favorite records this year: Neon Mirage, Stan Ridgway. His best record since the majestic and time-tested Mosquitoes. Pretty much as great, Wig by Peter Case, which might be the best white blues album I've heard in ... lest's not count, shall we? And Mose Allison's The Way Of The World and Merle Haggard's I Am What I Am were each really strong discs that should age nicely enough to make us overlook bad 1980's productions. But the hands down was the Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden release, Jasmine. The record should be called "Improvising is the closest man gets to divinity, and electric instruments are toxic."

Movie: I didn't see anything this year except the Raymond Scott doc, which I was in. I liked the movie, but my hair looked really weird.

City: There wasn't a new one for me. My enduring loves for Huntsville and Tucson were reignited this year.


Gig: Not exactly a gig, but finally making a record with Jim Cavender, A Cellarfull of Noise. That was so totally worth the wait, my best duet stuff pretty much ever. The show in Mobile with Ben Harper and David White and the Echo Back Porch show with Mark Borinstein and Lee Joseph (the second one) were both high points, as was the most recent one with Wyatt Stone on bass. I learned a lot from each the duo shows I played this year, too. Every duo gig -- Jim Cavender, Patria Jacobs, Candye Kane, the great Phil Alvin and especially Al Perry -- was a learning experience where brand new things happened. And I loved being invited to play the 13 Guitar Rumble, Mike Vernon's Link Wray tribute show, for which I played electric guitar, something I don't generally care for and don't intend to do again anytime soon. Again, I've come to believe all those remarks Keith Jarrett has made about electricity over the years.

Show I Saw: Big Sandy, Frank Fairfield. My two favorite hopes for the future/links to the past/joys in the present. I've been verbal on Big Sandy elsewhere. Frank is like a visiting a dimension you only read about. He is The Old, Weird America.

TV: Big Love, Mad Men.

Rara avis: Anything by Roger Miller, especially the bootleg of him live at the Birchmere in 1991, solo. The depth of his creativity and scope of his songwriting are staggering. Oh: the mono Beatles stuff.

Other: Nick Lowe. The recent NPR Tiny Desk Show podcast was as great as anything I've encountered in the last coupla years.

On the whole, it was not a fun year. A lot of people are really struggling out there, and there ain't a whole lot of money on the street for people to be brave with. The midterms pointed to a national feeling of discontent. So did the relative lack of personal stake people seem to feel about their government, two years after feeling we had turned a new corner.

On a personal level, some folks close to me had awful health problems, family problems, and whatever else, and you made fantastic examples of yourselves by being strong, gracious, and humble. Some of you are small, true heroes, and I'm grateful to know you.

the most exciting musician i ever saw

In the early 1980's, Philadelphia was possessed of as lively and vital a music scene as any. Our punk rock scene was as switched-on as any (despite that relatively few record deals resulted), as was the local rap scene (Schooly D), etc etc.

In 1983, my somewhat mentor Eric Spiegel took me over to a bar on 18th St (between Sansom and Chestnut), where he wanted me to hear a jazz recorder player, Joel Levine. I said sure, and Joel Levine -- who looked like Tevye from Fiddler On The Roof -- was there, playing in a duo with a piano who looked like Groucho Marx. Joel took the first solo, and it was stunning. I'd heard few horn players that developed (still ain't). Then the Groucho looking guy took a solo that just about made me quit playing music. I'd never heard anyone quite hit an instrument like that.

That was my introduction to Uri Caine. Punk rock dared ask the musical question "Now what?", and he was the best answer I'd come to.

His playing through the 1980's was, for me, the most exciting thing of a very exciting decade. It didn't matter who or what was going on elsewhere. The Blasters would come to town, cool. X came to town, sweet. Wynton came through with Kenny Kirkland on piano, you bet. Muti was at the podium of the Philly Orch (oh well). Although Uri moved to NYC in 1985, he was still doing most of his gigs in Philly. A lot of the drummers were too loud (he was usually playing a shitty house piano mic'd badly) and often enough with bass players who didn't always lead the charge the best way. Generally, the nights I heard Uri play his most inspired were when the rhythm section was drummer Mickey Roker and either Wayne Dockery or Steve Beskrone on bass.

His playing at the time was based in a kind of cross between sixties Chick (his harmonies) and McCoy Tyner (his strength and rhythmic drive). All kinds of other stuff figured in -- his personal musical culture was the deepest I'd encountered up to that time -- but those two influences seemed to guide his playing at the time.

He had the most unapologetic playing style I've ever seen. He brought everything he ever heard, and he didn't disqualify. Enough reverse racism poked its head through into the music that -- and mind you, not enough to dominate anything, but just enough to make a young white guy wonder how well he fit -- that looking too educated might be a bad policy decision.

Uri was unapologetically cerebral, not only in his playing, but also in his speech. On the other hand, the same rhythmic boisterousness that characterized his playing for it's social form in his warm, loud laugh and his ability to get along with anyone. He spoke a little bit of several languages, too, which I thought was very hip. He reminded me of Fiorello LaGuardia, who was mayor of New York during those Damon Runyon years.

By the late 1980's, it was apparent that Uri was becoming one of the New York piano stars. He'd just started playing with Don Byron in the Don Byron Plays The Music Of Mickey Katz project (that established the place of klezmer music in the downtown scene of the period, and with it helped introduce several key players, including Uri, Josh Roseman, Mark Feldman, and most obviously Dave Douglas, especially when the DB Plays MK album dropped in '93). When Uri's own CD Sphere Music came out around the same time on the then-prominent JMT label, the feeling was, "Well, finally he's definitely not local anymore."

This clip is sometime in the last seven or eight years (around the last time I saw him, actually), playing with Dave Douglas' quintet. It gives you an eye (ear) into the thing I saw, that I heard all those dozens of times through the 1980's and for roughly twenty years more. The spark, brains, drive, and humanity. Probably the most exciting musician I ever saw.

Christmas song!

christmas with skip! by skipheller

why we need either a new beefheart or a new butterfield

This clip is from about 35 years after Son House made his recording debut, which he did in 1930 for the Paramount label. In 1966, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band would unleash East-West, which sits alongside Beefheart's Safe As Milk (1967) as the most revolutionary, progressive blues statement of the period. Maybe even so far, even if for totally different reasons.



Butterfield and guitarist Mike Bloomfield might have spearheaded a movement towards a freer, less cliched blues style. Their deep roots were matched by their open minds, so that when they brought such inspired musical choices as the Adderley Brothers' "Work Song" and the LP's expansive title track (written within the band, it was real.

"East-West" brought forth the influence of Indian music into a blues band, a first. Except for Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, it's nearly impossible to name a blues person since "East-West" who has figured world music into the blues context. And Taj and Ry were of that same generation.



(For all of the notable blues-based improvising the Grateful Dead did even after Pigpen's death, they were never brave about bringing non-Western elements into the band, despite Mickey Hart's research on world percussion music.)

Taj Mahal remains the most interesting blues guy on the planet for any number of reasons. His nose for tunes is infallible. His guitar playing is still fresh and evolving. As a bandleader, he's a force of nature. And his ability to be himself no matter what genre politics might be inflicted by somebody who would say what "blues" or "jazz" is supposed to be... As a Pan-American vocalist, he deserves a place beside Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Toots Hibbert.

Contemporary blues seems adverse to the musical adventure set forth by Butterfield, Beefheart, and those other greats. Not just because it's performed less and less by the group of people who originated it (which it is). But because since the Texas blues codification that set in around 1980 seems to still be very much in place. Jimmie or Stevie Vaughan have replaced BB King as the dominant stylistic template for electric guitar, and -- in the post-Hendrix age -- the electric guitar is the symbol of the blues. Despite the incredible, form-smashing stuff set forth by Butterfield, Taj, Beefheart, Gregg Allman, Ry Cooder, and a few other greats, the popular stuff since 1980 is 12 bar 4/4 shuffles. Some would argue that that's the real stuff and it's what 'the people' really want. Can blues mean polymetrical music, 11/4 to 3/4?
Why not?




Electric blues seems to be in its evolution roughly where bluegrass music was in the late 1960's -- destined for the musuem unless... And 'unless' was followed by Sam Bush, David Grisman, Tony Rice, John Hartford, and a whole lot of other newer, younger adventurous types who did start playing new songs every night. It took time, but the contemporary -- even mainstream -- perception of bluegrass is no longer Flatt & Scruggs. It's Alison Krauss. And without a few Grisman's changing the music's playing field, that wouldn't have happened.

If there is a Grisman figure to emerge from the post-Stevie blues scene, I'm thinking Derek Trucks, whose stylistic freedom within his own playing makes him my hands-down favorite guy to emerge from the electric blues scene in these last couple decades:



The blues answer to Alison Krauss (or Dave Alvin or Big Sandy) hasn't wandered across my radar yet. I'm sure they're out there. And when they arrive, it will be interesting to see just how much argument their progress inspires. That will be worth staying tuned for.

never mind SANDANISTA, this is the most revolutionary three-record set ever

First off, Jimmy Martin is as serious as cancer here. A master.

To bluegrass-minded guys of my generation, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 1972 Will The Circle Be Unbroken was as important a record as any could be. Along with Old And In The Way, John Hartford's Aereo Plain, and the Columbia David Bromberg album of your choice (mine being Demon In Disguise), it was at the foundation of our tradition.

But where the other records were flags planted by the post-Kentucky Colonels generation, Circle brought generations together. The Dirt Band had scored a couple of big pop hits in 1972, "Mr Bojangles" and the Nesmith-penned "Some Of Shelley's Blues". They could have gone the way of Brewer & Shipley or several other folkie acts, but they did the unthinkable.

Up to that point, the only triple album set that held for in the marketplace were George harrison's masterpiece All Things Must Pass, and maybe its follow-up (of sorts), The Concert For Bangla Desh, both produced by the great Phil Spector. They had Spector, ex-Beatles, Dylan linkage, and then some going for them.

The time is never right for a live-in-the-studio triple album of pre-World War II country vets, bluegrass stalwarts, and hippie folkies who play bluegrass, all bunched in, complete with studio dialogue. Or is it? Wikipedia offers the following:

Will the Circle Be Unbroken is a 1972 album officially by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but with collaboration from many famous Bluegrass and country-western players, including Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis, Bashful Brother Oswald, Norman Blake, Jimmy Martin, and others. It also introduced fiddler Vassar Clements to a wider audience.
Its title comes from a song by Ada R. Habershon (famously re-arranged by A. P. Carter) and reflects how the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was trying to tie together two generations of musicians. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was a young country-rock band with a hippie look. Roy Acuff described them as "a bunch of long-haired West Coast boys." The other players were much older and more famous from the forties, fifties and sixties, primarily as old-time country and bluegrass players. Many had become known to their generation through the Grand Ole Opry. However, with the rise of rock-and-roll, the emergence of the commercial country's slick 'Nashville Sound,' and changing tastes in music, their popularity had waned somewhat from their glory years..

It was a defiant, loving, revolutionary musical move. This was the era of "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree".

Circle was an inexplicably huge success. On the Billboard charts, it hit #4 country and #28 pop. Now, #28 doesn't sound like a lot, but this was an all accoustic three record set fairly devoid of contemporary personnel. This was Mother Maybelle, Roy Acuff, Merle Travis. This was an uncompromised Jimmy Martin hitting the high hard one.

(For all the hoopla about Gram Parsons and Sweethearts of the Rodeo, this was the rock generation finally digging deep enough to reach the real country roots and deliver the real stuff and not just an imitation in a Nudie suit. Complete with commercial success and critical accolade.)

There are a great many rumors and stories about this record, not the least of which being that Bill Monroe refused to be involved with it because he was still pissed at Earl Scruggs, whose departure (with Lester Flatt) from the Bluegrass Boys was unforgivable to Monroe. Even more unforgivable, they eclipsed him commercially, even beating Monroe to Carnegie hall.

(Monroe's attitudes towards former sidemen could be damning at best. His relationship with one-time protege Jimmy Martin would make a fantastic psychology textbook.)

As it was, Scruggs had to take a certain amount of shit from Roy Acuff. Scruggs had by the time of these sessions dissolved his partnership with Flatt and had formed a more modern group with his sons. Acuff -- who may or may not have been a Klansman -- had a few cutting remarks to make, and Earl took it like more of a gentleman than I will ever be.

Circle -- largely because of its organic mix of players from different eras -- helped my generation bond with country music in its root form. My friends didn't have Carter Family albums or any of that stuff. There were a ton of blues reissues, but country music didn't hadn't earned the same archival consideration (and really still hasn't yet, either). A great many of us learned "Wildwood Flower", "Sunny Side of The Mountain", and a whole lot of other traditional material from this album. This was our introduction to Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin, Roy Acuff, Merle Travis, and a whole world more.

The Dirt Band have since done two sequels, and they each have their moments.

But this first one was the one. For so many of us, it was the Rosetta Stone.

big city, bright lights

As a child, a small child at that, the music I was most drawn to had words in it I could recognize. "Gentle On My Mind" had a door, sleeping bag, couch, river, rocks, and soup in it.

My family originated in South Philly, with my mother and father meeting in the neighborhood there on the transit bus he drove. South Philly was downtown, or rather "Downtown".

My parents had this album. It was the first song in life I remember, and I remember thinking it was written about my grandmother's apartment in the Tasker projects. The lyrics and what they meant to a little kid in the city... The song came out in puffs and belonged to grownups but was totally a fixture of my life. It was like smoke from my grandmother's Tareyton's.


Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares and go


There are movie shows downtown
Maybe you know
Some little places to go to
Where they never close downtown

Downtown where all the lights are bright,
Downtown, waiting for you tonight.


I had some sense of what she felt before I could ever have had any idea of what she meant. Whereas Dave Alvin and Stan Ridgway -- two of the better songwriters of a generation -- were drawn into the craft by Marty Robins' "El Paso" (a record I could never stand), Petula felt closer to my home. She sang from Downtown, and her songs had subways and traffic and neon lights in them. It wasn't invented street cred. She sounded like the girl who took my dad's bus to work every morning. I would imagine her living in an apartment somewhere around Broad and Federal. I think it might have also been tied up with That Girl, the popular TV show of the time, which starred Marlo Thomas as a young (italian-American) woman living on her own in the city.

As I got older and started getting my own apartments and jobs and living my city life, Petula's own rendition of city life was real. Whereas guys like Springsteen etc did the tough guy thing out the wazoo, the only professional urban tough guy who was at all credible was... Dion.



But Dion was an extrovert, the guy we all looked up to in the neighborhood. There was no existential crisis in him. Petula had questions. She asked herself "who am I?", had arguments with a boyfriend who would storm out only to sleep on the subway. And she took her comfort in the life of her city. I got that.

In 1967, Glenn Gould wrote an essay about her for either High Fidelity or Stereo Review. Titled The Search For Petula Clark, the piece was a curious look by Glenn at Petula's hits. Often called satire, I don't think it was. Glenn loved his home city, Toronto. His deep and abiding affection for that city was far from satirical. He was a lonesome, secluded urbandweller, and those lyrics and the beautiful dignity with which she sang them... yeah, I think he felt it.

Below is a wonderful recording of Glenn reading the article for CBC.



The hits of Petula Clark have held up very, very well. Arranger/composer Tony Hatch did a very classy job. And Petula's lack of histrionics gives these wonderful songs a poigniancy that never celebrates itself vis a vis self-congradulatory self-pity. There's blood and bone here. It is not the beach, the desert nor the border. This is the music of apartments, subways, taxicabs, and late night coffeeshops.

I love these songs. Always.

skylarking

That most effortless of jazzy singers up there is Johnny Mercer. He wrote this tune, which is called "Jamboree Jones". The kid lipsynching clarinet is Clark Burroughs of the Hi-Lo's.


November 18, 2010 is Mercer's 101st birthday. It is impossible to overestimate his talent, impact, and contribution. His first hit, "Lazybones", came to us in 1933. He co-wrote it with Hoagy Carmichael, with whom he wrote my favorite standard song of all time, "Skylark" (1941).

Mercer, Carmichael, and Willard Robison mean the world to me, as someone who came from a blue collar family but who aspired to play jazz.

Jazz standards -- Cole Porter, Jerome Kern et al -- had that "Penthouse Serenade" quality of martinis and tuxedos. Nightclubs, not bars.

But Mercer, Hoagy, and Robison were different. Carmichael and Robison were midwesterners, mercer from Georgia, and their songs had real people in them. While the Porter's and Kern's were outmoded by the end of World War II, Mercer continued to be a viable songwriter and performer into the seventies (Darling Lili, his last collaboration with Mancini, gave us the Oscar winning "Whistling Away The Dark").

Mercer's lyrics were among the most poetic in all of American song, but they always had their feet on the ground somehow. "Moon River" is a classic example:


The scene is unforgettable as is the song. Definitely one of Mancini's greatest melodies, and probably Blake Edward's all-time moment as a director. I've always believed that Mancini called to Mercer for lyrics for this because her knew he was on the verge of a masterpiece. Another example, unforgettable, untouchable, irrefutable:



I don't think I'm saying anything new to suggest this was Mancini's, Mercer's, Jack Lemmon's, Lee Remick's, Jack Klugman's, and Blake Edwards' crowning work. Days Of Wine and Roses was the career moment of everyone involved with this film on both sides of the camera. And I think they all knew it would be, because there's a certain 'elevate my game' quality to everybody's contribution, including Mercer's.

Mercer was no stranger to drinking. In the classic fashion, this most gentle and poetic of souls had his heartaches. His classic "One For My Baby" is the most perfect expression of this experience. Sinatra planted the flag in this song as if it was a territory he was conquering, and [the song] has become so closely identified with Sinatra that it nearly defies reason to consider it had been written as an uptempo bit for Fred Astaire to sing in his 1941 flick The Sky's The Limit. Sinatra's reading is true and perfect, Fred be damned.



(Most often Mercer's lyrics found perfect voice in Bing Crosby, but that's a whole other story.)

Mercer was also a truly gifted jazz singer. Here he appears on the Nat King Cole show, Nat on piano and vocals, in the fifties.



Few songwriters of this caliber could ever regularly offer such definitive reading of their own material. Roger Miller comes to mind, as does ... Wow. Nobody. Not like this.

I'll leave you with this:

Rare Roger Miller

First off, thank my friend Jim Carlton for having the good sense to record this off the TV, probably 4/23/85. His first (and only) musical, Big River, was about to hit Broadway after out of town tryouts in Cambridge and La Jolla. On Broadway, it slayed. 1,005 performances. It launched the career of John Goodman. It won Roger Miller a Tony, which must have looked out of place next to his eleven Grammy's -- the record for a male artist until Quincy Jones finally broke it.

(Awards are meaningless, but what the hell. You don't write "England Swings" if you're looking for awards. Roger said he always tried to be on the edge of creative thinking, and I believe him.)

By the time of Big River, it was assumed that Roger Miller's best days and best work were behind him, despite that he still popped up every so often and always delivered. But these three songs point to that his muse was vacationing. The range of the eighteen songs in this show are like a guide to the stuff Roger did great. There are straight country songs ("River In The Rain"), a Roger novelty tongue twister ("How Bout A Hand For The Hog"), and the completely perfect, beautiful "Maybe Leavin's Not The Only Way To Go".

Here, he performs all three, and it's clear that Roger is in full bloom as he was in the "King Of The Road" period.

If you don't love Roger Miller, you will never swing like a pendulum do.

all that is good about music

Joey Baron is a drummer who grew up in Richmond, VA in 1955, went to Berklee College of music yadda yadda yadda. He lived in LA for the seventies into the 1980s, and played with a lot of very commercial jazz folk like Al Jarreau. He moved to New York in the 1980's, and over a few years one of the most imitated, influential jazz musicians of an era. Personally, I think he's had as much to do with the progress of the rhythm section as Jaco Pastorious and Scott LaFaro had on earlier eras.

But that's not why I love Joey Baron. First of all, he became the first post-bop musician to give me the same uplifting swinging feeling I get from Count Basie. His playing in the 80s/90s Bill Frisell Band(s) did for me what Mitch Mitchell in the Hendrix band did in the 60s -- it redrew the map, elevated the game, and made the adventure fun all over again. Not only was Frisell the voice of guitar we'd all been hoping for, but Joey was every bit as revolutionary in his approach to drums. Not because he could play faster or trickier stuff. If that had been the case, Dave Weckl would have won the battle by 1985.

No, Joey brought the joy back to the instrument. He took jazz drums away from the mandatory ride cymbal. He gave it a freakish unpredictability coupled with a groove so hard that he imbued the cerebral Frisell with a lift that would have elevated Booker T and the MG's, whose drummer, Al Jackson, is one of Joey's great inspirations.

Also, he's a great guy to go to when you feel like your musical hopes are being dashed on the rocks of bad gigs, sad gigs, and/or no gigs at all. He's given me a few key words about how things go wrong, local musician politics suck, that it's hard, and music is still worth it.

(When I moved to Los Angeles, he told me to start going to see Jack Sheldon as often as possible, which was the best advice I ever got about music here in town.)

Other things he told me worth knowing: To use everything you've ever learned, trust your taste, and don't be afraid to carve your own approach along the road of music. Play for the love of music, and you'll always find things to love about what you're playing, no matter what you're playing. Don't worry about the politics of whatever local scene is going on around you, just work on your playing and your concept. You'll be fine.

This clip points right at the joy, invention, genius, and love that it Joey Baron. If you've heard him before, this is prime Joey.

If you've never before encountered this amazing man and his wonderful music, you're welcome.

"gentle" again

In my life, I've played this songs more times than probably any other song. It was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar, and I've known the words since before I could possibly have known what they meant.

I stopped playing this song for a few months earlier in the year. In my trio, we had enough other stuff with the same feel and tempo. But I missed it. We weren't playing any John Hartford material, and I feel towards John Hartford pretty much the way Mose Allison was for years towards Duke Ellington -- he was worth roughly one cut per record. And, if you look through my catalog since I started recording/producing, John's music has figured into every period. If you're wondering what my fav JH covers from my own work -- Lisa Christian singing both"6:00 Train And A Girl With Green Eyes" and (the undeservedly obscure) "Go Home Girl", and Ray Campi singing "Lorena", which, while not technically a JH song, he did teach it to me over the phone.

So I'm playing "Gentle On My Mind again, and finding new stuff in it.

Of course, John always found new stuff in "Gentle". The above clip was from within the last ten years of his life. The rolling tempo at which he recorded it in the sixties has given way to a light bluegrass breakdown. Not long before this version, if my (overly complete) collection of Hartford bootlegs, he was playing it twice this fast (at full breakdown tempo). Then, within the last few years of his life, he recorded a true bluegrass band version of it, with the chord progression distilled down to two chords.

In 1977, at one of his great artistic peaks, he did this version (in the notoriously unpopular key of E flat). Definitely a transitory approach.



Not long after, he cut this version with an electric band on his All In The Name of Love album, in a slightly lower key, with Benny Martin and Buddy Emmons each taking jaw-dropping solos. John's banjo solo is one of the most singing of his career.



To most of us, the way we hear it is still tied to the sixties version.



However you hear it, it's such a wonderful song, and it's a joy to play. I hope I do it justice.

November

,
11/4 -- Redwood Bar, Orchestra Superstring, Dick and Jane Family Orch, Skip Heller Trio with special guest DJ Bonebrake.

11/11 -- Gladman drops The Moon East of Dixie: Best of The Gladman Years, an anthology of the stuff SH cut for Trenton's most exclusive indie label in the early 1990's. Originals plus covers of songs by John Hartford, Dave Alvin, Hoagy Carmichael, and Kurt Weill. If you saw SH in the early 90's at the Tin Angel or wherever, this is that crop, finally harvested by producer Ed Jollimore.

11/19 -- Mike Vernon's Annual Rumble -- a full-on throw-down in honor of Link Wray -- and SH and surf great Jon Blair will join forces to play two by the late, great Linkster. Again, at the Redwood. SH playing electric guitar.

11/20 -- The Skip Heller Trio at the Cafe Amsterdam, Magnolia & Vineland, NoHo.

SH will be playing the Bean Blossom John Hartford Tribute fest in June. We're putting that together now, so bank on some sort of SH Plays John Hartford disc in time for that.

Anytime now, A Cellarfull of Noise -- the amazing SH/Jim Cavender duet disc -- will be available at CDBaby. This record is really truly all that. Don't not buy it!