Music Notes by Mark Jordan & Jim Hanas Swing Time True, while the big band that rolls into town this Sunday bearing Count Basie's name doesn't actually feature the legendary ivory-tickler (Basie died in 1984), today's Count Basie Orchestra may well be the premier swing band in the country. Most recently the group won "Best Big Band" in Downbeat's 1996 readers' poll, and in March they captured their 16th Best Big Band Recording Grammy for last year's Live At Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. (The Count Basie Orchestra, in fact, has won 16 of the 39 Grammys presented in this category.) Admittedly, the competition isn't what it once was, but most fans and critics would agree that the most recent version of the group could hold its own against the best Basie bands of the past. Basie, born William Basie in 1904, was already regarded as one of the best bandleaders in the musical hot bed that was 1930s Kansas City, when in 1936 he decided to flesh out his nine-member band into the Count Basie Orchestra. It was this group that talent scout John Hammond heard on the radio while driving through Kansas City. Hammond immediately tracked down where the broadcast was coming from and began the association that would lead to Basie's first recording deal. Throughout swing's heyday in the '30s and '40s, the Basie orchestra was one of the most popular groups, spawning such anthems of the age as "One O'Clock Jump" and "Jumpin' At The Woodside" and featuring such legendary players drummer Jo Jones and bassist Walter Page. In 1950, Basie made a short-lived but fruitful return to smaller groups, but in 1952 he reconstituted the orchestra. And they have been playing ever since, barely even stopping a beat when Basie himself passed on. Today's band, led by trombonist Grover Mitchell, whose association with the group spans 22 years, sorely misses a pianist with Basie's rhythmic and melodic ingenuity. But the orchestra still adheres faithfully to the driving beat and seemingly off-the-cuff arrangements that Basie pioneered with his first orchestra in the '30s and which quickly became the standard for all swing bands. The Count Basie Orchestra is being presented as part of the World Class Jazz Series. Performances will be at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sunday, June 22nd at the New Daisy Theatre. Reserved table seating is $25 a person, unreserved balcony seating $20. Tickets are available at the Memphis Drum Shop and Borders Books and Music. Rock and Rigor "Never mind the great debate promulgated by detractors of Morissette who seem to hang a great deal of their argument on the lyrics to `Ironic' and how they're not truly ironic. Never mind all that. We're talking an entire generation which has found some kind of solace in irony and we're perhaps talking an entire age which will be viewed, if we ever claw our way out of the current morass to where we can look at it objectively, the age of irony." -- From the opening pages of Ironic, an embarrassingly premature biography of Liz Phair impersonator Alanis Morissette. The book's "author," Barry Grills, refers to irony no fewer than 25 times in the five-and-a-half -page foreword -- which is a whole lot for a guy who doesn't care what it means.

The Final Outrage With Total Social Negation, punk-rock heroes Neighborhood Texture Jam take one last stab at all that is decent. by Susan Ellis & Mark Jordan f all goes as planned, Neighborhood Texture Jam will release their third album, Total Social Negation, this week. But if the past has taught the punk-rock group anything, it's that plans have a way of changing. It's been two-and-a-half years, three labels, and a lot of hair-pulling since NTJ first embarked on getting this album out. The odyssey began in 1994 when they signed with the newly revived Ardent label while they were recording their second album, Bury Me in Haiti, at its studio. The record did well regionally, but was kept from larger success, according to NTJ members, by three factors, all linked to getting the word out on the band: Ardent's small staff (NTJ drummer and Ardent studio employee Paul Buchignani was promoting the record himself while at work); the band's uniquely confrontational and hard-to-peg (read: hard-to-sell) style; and finally, the band's personal commitments, like school and work, which kept them from touring widely. Because of the situation surrounding Bury Me in Haiti and the fact that Ardent was signing other bands that sounded nothing like they did (Ardent had started a Christian label), NTJ band members were not surprised that, while they were recording Total Social Negation, their raunchiest work yet, they were informed that Ardent wanted out. It was a move that the band members agreed with. "It was a mismatch of band and label," says Buchignani. "We just weren't right for each other, so we amicably parted ways." Included in the split were the $30,000-worth of studio recordings for Total Social Negation, which Ardent gave the band free and clear. Not only that, Ardent tried to shop the album to other labels and printed up singles after the relationship went bust. "It was a very, very generous thing," says guitarist John Whittemore. "In no way will I ever feel that Ardent screwed us or screwed up. It was just kind of a ridiculous situation for a while." After Ardent, NTJ first turned to Memphibian Records, believing that with the recordings in hand, they had a good-as-done CD. They were wrong. In what Memphibian Record's owner Greg Roberson calls a series of "snafus," the label never could deliver. The highlight of this time was when the master recording was lost, making the record-release party NTJ had planned for five days later pointless. But rather than let frustration discourage them, NTJ was actually spurred on. "This record was our little thing, our little baby, and we loved it," says Whittemore. "I guess we all, rather than bail out, decided to hunker down and get it done. Well, I guess we didn't actually hunker down or else we would have gotten it a long time ago, but still" NTJ reunited to play a series of shows whose proceeds would go toward the band's effort to release Total Social Negation on their own label, Snerd Records. And now, finally, the CD is in the record stores. "We did a smart thing this time and decided to wait until we actually had the CDs in hand before we booked any shows," Whittemore says. Total Social Negation may be the ultimate NTJ record: crass, thrash, and kick-ass. "This record is closer to the live shows than the second record [Don't Bury Me In Haiti] and further from the live shows than the first [Funeral Mountain]," says Whittemore. "It really captures what we do best and cleans it up just a little." Once again, the band's "texture" is used to full effect, with skillet and door finding their way onto the album's instrument credits. And lyrically the band is as outrageous as ever, giving us such politically incorrect ditties as "Gorilla Pimp" and the live-show favorite "McThorazine." Unfortunately, the album's release came too late to save NTJ. Though they will be playing two shows this weekend to trumpet the CD's release, for all intents and purposes the band is defunct and the members have gone their separate ways. Whittemore -- whose most recent band, the Delta Queens, is working on an album with Ross Rice (guess John didn't learn his lesson) -- recently graduated from dental school. Newlywed Buchignani has since drummed for the alternative band the Afghan Whigs and is expected to tour with Todd Snider later this year. Bassist Steve Conn cooks at Harry's On Teur. Vocalist Joe Lapsley is working on a master's degree at the University of Memphis. And guitarist Tee Cloar is a computer programmer. Total Social Negation now serves as an artifact of one of the best local bands in recent memory. Just a few years ago, when bands like Nirvana and Green Day ruled MTV, NTJ would have been a welcome spit in the face of the newfound commercial acceptability of punk. But in today's Spice Girls world, their message may fall largely on synthesizer-deafened ears. But that's not to say that for a die-hard few, a new NTJ album, even a final NTJ album, isn't a welcome release. Looking back, the members of NTJ can now laugh at their experiences. "It's really a pretty pathetic band story, if you think about it," says Whittemore. "We never could do anything that would work to sell our records. But it was always a lot of fun, you know. We just always played for the music."