NP: Local $7 find on vinyl. 1975 Liberty Reissue. Woohoo! Nice 3-piece - organ, guitar, drums... no filler, all natural just how I like it. The Incredible Jimmy Smith* - Crazy! Baby
Some Sunday afternoon listening. Lou Donaldson - Gravy Train Chuck Mangione - Bellavia Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers Wanted to insert pictures, but need to work on how to do that.
Back around 1974, it was very exciting when RCA France issued all of Rollins on RCA (with some rarities) in great quality. The USA albums had been out of print for years and very scarce. Since then, the older collectors who prized the originals have largely passed their collections on and you can find originals.
Much to my surprise, I Called Him Morgan, the great, new Lee Morgan documentary is now available for rent on Amazon video. We watched it tonight, and I'd highly recommend it. Catch it while you can! I recently saw the new Coltrane documentary but liked this one even more.
Trying to keep cool (and my sanity) on another stiflingly hot summer day... It rained a little last night but that just made it more humid. I hate Tokyo summers. Impulse vinyl reissue from 1997.
Tomorrow, Monday July 17, is the 50th anniversary of the death of John Coltrane. A strange coincidence that John passed away, so young, in the heart of "The Summer of Love".
Chico Hamilton - The Master (Enterprise) Absolutely trashed from work today, ten and a half hours. This album is starting to give me a bit of a lift. Little Feat sans Richie Hayward (for obvious reasons) plus a few other musicians. It's like a lost instrumental album by the Feats.
I've been hunting that one for a while, but had forgotten to add it to my Discogs want list, which usually makes albums find their way to me quicker than otherwise. Thanks for the reminder, I'm a big fan of Lowell-era Feat and need to pick this up, and am a little bit closer to doing so now.
If you want to post images you take yourself I have found this site (see link below) to be fast easy and advert free (unlike photobucket ) Postimage.org — free image hosting / image upload
Overall I prefer Trane's Atlantic period over the others though I like them all. It has imo a good balance between his straight ahead style of the Prestige era and his edgier The Impulse years. It's like a Goldilocks situation, just right..... YMMV as usual. NP Red Garland - Red In Bluesville (Prestige) lime green stereo reissue. I think this was my first RG album and still a favorite.
One lesson I learned very early in life, when listening to music, just listen. I save the thinking or reflecting for later. Occasionally a few thoughts wander in that may or may not shape what I listen for on subsequent plays but I try to keep mental distraction to a minimum. I prefer to listen in solitude too, I feel the music differently when other people are around. I'm not talking about singing or dancing to music, which is one of life's great pleasures to be shared with others. I don't think anyone should worry if they don't like or 'get' A Love Supreme. It's not a jailable offence. It's been eulogized to death and I try to approach it as just an especially good jazz record that I sometimes like to listen to instead of other especially good jazz records. I get more out of it that way and it stays fresh.
That's more or less how I see it. I started right at the ground floor with Coltrane/Lush Life on a Prestige twofer CD I remember buying in Liverpool. (This after spending the morning in the Beatles Museum down at Liverpool Docks- definitely the less significant event that day!) I went more or less chronologically from there up to the live stuff on Impulse! On Giant Steps and Olé the porridge tastes perfect..
I've not been to Tokyo but I lived on the Gulf Coast (U.S.) for six years and it was similar. Summers were typically high 90s with humidity runnng between 90 - 98 % when it wasn't raining. I really didn't like it. It's been 100 F for the last two days and today will be another before it is projected to "cool down" tomorrow to 90 F. It is very dry here in Northern California which is a big plus in the summer. It is the hottest summer I can remember in my 35 years here although the weatherman said it was worse one year in the 1970s. NP Kai Winding & Curtis Fuller - Giant 'Bones' 80 (Sonet) With the Horace Parlan, Mads Vinding and Ed Thigpen rhythm section. Recorded in 1979.
I did a similar thing with Trane. I bought his Live At Birdland on Impulse first but I couldn't really hang with it much so I decided to do what you did and start with the Prestige titles and worked through his discography and worked my way through Prestige to Atlantic and Impulse. It felt more natural to explore Coltrane's growth as he himself did and by the time I got to Impulse the Birdland album was easier to follow.
I've never fully found my way into the work of Julius Hemphill. Some of it, like the WSQ stuff and some of the later sextet stuff, I really like, even love, some of it like Blue Boye I've tried and tried to enter and haven't found a way into. But I've been listening to Dogon A.D. lately -- the 2011 CD reissue that including "The Hard Blues," which was cut at the same session but wound up on Coon Bidness, with the replica of the original self-produced album cover -- and boy, not only am I loving it, but given it's time (1972) and it's place (St. Louis), it's like a missing link between the AACM and earlier free jazz and later in the tradition stuff (now that "The Hard Blues" has been restored to a place it seems like it always belonged) and kind of loft jazz stuff. Really quite the album, and especially in this expanded edition it feels like a complete statement. (In fact, if I had been sequencing the record in '72 and had to leave something off for time, I might just have put "Dogon A.D." on the A-side and "The Hard Blues" on the B-side.) And I've also been digging Vijay Iyer's cover of the title track. It's a weird piece that, unless I'm mishearing the herky jerkiness, seems to have some kind of multimetric thing going on between the cello, lead instruments and drums, that I have a hard time puzzling out the meters so it's interesting to hear how easy Iyer's trio makes that seem to play.
Mike Reed's People, Places & Things – About Us (482 Music) — Greg Ward (alto saxophone), Tim Haldeman (tenor saxophone), Jason Roebke (bass), Mike Reed (drums) with David Boykin (tenor saxophone), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Jeff Parker (guitar)
The East Asian Monsoon moves across Japan in mid-June bringing a marked increase in rainfall and humidity. Only this year the rainy season has been very short and not very wet in the Tokyo region. Contrast that with the western island of Kyushu where 1/2 a metre of rain fell in 24 hours (!) leading to widespread flooding and landslides which claimed 25 lives. It's mid 90's daily here and the worst of the humidity is yet to come. August is hotter. There's no daylight savings time in Japan which means the sun rises at 4:30 am this time of year so it's stinking hot by the time you step outside. Those people coming here for the 2020 Olympics are in for a shock.. Tokyo is much like Singapore in summer. Locals tell me Osaka and Kyoto are even hotter.. The cicadas are already putting in an appearance, 3 weeks earlier than usual. Japanese cicadas are LOUD. This is the time of year when I long for England's green and pleasant land (though I see it's been stinking hot over there this summer). Herbie Mann's Stone Flute helped soothe things earlier but I'm in for another restless night..
Does anyone know if there are any affordable copies of this Dogon A.D. CD available for purchase anywhere? I learned about it from this forum and have been actively searching with no luck. (My assumption is that that is just the sad reality of the situation and I will need to accept it!)
Sounds like everyone has a different way into Coltrane's music. For me, the Coltrane Atlantic stuff is probably the stuff I listen to least. Trane with Miles, listen to that a lot, the Miles '50s quintet is easily my favorite Miles band; Trane with Monk, some of my favorite, Trane -- his reading of "Ruby My Dear" is probably my favorite recording of my favorite Monk song, and Trane's '57 "Trinkle Tinkle" solo is to me the moment where you can hear Trane kind of becoming the John Coltrane that we know in his maturity, probably my favorite Trane solo. Hard bop Trane, not my favorite, but I still sometimes return to Blue Train, but this is kind of a period where my excitement about the material wanes and I almost never return to any of the stuff between that and the emergence of the classic quartet on the '61 Vanguard recordings (and those are my favorite Coltrane recordings, the '61 Vanguard stuff). Not that I have anything against that stuff, nor fail to appreciate the importance of Giant Steps in particular (and of course the material on Giant Steps is probably Coltrane's most important work as a composer), but I've never had any kind of emotional connection to that material. To me the early classic quartet stuff is the sweet spot -- the Vanguard material (including the stuff with with the expanded group and Dolphy), Impressions, Live at Birdland, A Love Supreme. That's really the stuff I love most from Coltrane. I can't remember when I first heard Coltrane. His playing was always just there via Kind of Blue and the Monk stuff and the ubiquity of Giant Steps and My Favorite Things. But it was that classic quartet 61- A Love Supreme recorded in Dec. '64, that I really fell in love with and return to. (Good lord, that cadenza on "I Want to Talk About You" from Live a Birdland, maybe my second favorite Trane solo after "Trinkle Tinkle"). I like some of the later stuff too -- especially Meditations and the duets with Rashied Ali.
It was a limited edition and its OOP, I actually ponied up almost $50 for a copy but there's a two-LP vinyl edition still available new on Amazon for $57, so I figured I was actually getting a good price on the edition I wanted -- a portable one.
