You know, I need to give it a proper sit down and listen. We’re out of town visiting relatives and I was playing it last night though my laptop speakers while the kids were running around making noise and I was in and out of the room myself, so I missed large chunks of it. I don’t have much Ornette, just Shape of Jazz, which I like a lot... this one seemed more free than that one.
Wp McCoy Tyner - Tender Moments (Blue Note) NP Arthur Taylor's Wailers - Wailin At The Vanguard (Verve) Live set at the VV with Jacky Terrasson on piano from 1992. Tender Moments is an interesting project to me with six horns along with the rhythm section. It gives it a plush sound that is refreshing.
Selfie....the chocolate chips must have made a difference. I just listened to Out To Lunch and while I couldn't focus on everything (like herding cats or 3 year olds at a day care center) the bass and drums are so amazing I'll have to go back through again and focus on the other instruments. I liked it much better than my first listen but I'm still confused as to what the plan was going in. Do you, or can you, rehearse that ? Organized chaos or 1,2,3....play ? A free form experimental jam or written out plan? I don't know the history of this session,was it ground breaking and well received or controversial?
I think I'm not alone among Coleman fans in finding that Ornette's late '60s work is probably the period of Coleman's music I return to least -- the recordings with young Denardo just never really come off as far as I'm concerned, and I never loved the two-reedssound of the band with just Coleman and Redman, nor did I love those albums like this one with Jones and Garrison, both the contrasts and the interplay that were so remarkable in the earlier quartet and trio just aren't there.
I cannot get enough of the Sam Rivers' Celebration, recorded live in California in 2003 with Anthony Cole and Doug Mathews. I cannot remember another trio of instrumentalists switching their instruments in such an effortless and inventive way. I'll need to look up the trio's two earlier live dates: Concept (1996) and Firestorm (2000), because this one is a stunner.
Bobby Timmons - Holiday Soul (Prestige) blue stereo pressing. One of the least "Christmasy" sounding holiday records. My favorite.
I was reading an interview with David Sedaris who mentioned four jazz artists that would be on his iPod. Tow singers Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln and two pianists, Duke Pearson and Jessica Williams. I think zi could hang out with that guy.
Rez Abbasi - Unfiltered Universe Rez Abbasi - guitar/composition Vijay Iyer - piano Rudresh Mahanthappa - alto saxophone Johannes Weidenmueller - double bass Dan Weiss - drums Unfiltered Universe, by Rez Abbasi
Tomas Fujiwara - Triple Double Horn, guitar and drums double trio with a fantastic lineup. Tomas Fujiwara – drums Gerald Cleaver - drums Mary Halvorson – guitar Brandon Seabrook - guitar Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet Ralph Alessi - trumpet Triple Double, by Tomas Fujiwara
George Duke - Faces in reflection, 1974 It surprised me how mature and well executed this album was when I first heard it. The sound quality is great. "Ndugu" was a revelation to me after his not so relevant work with Miles. I'm Aquarius but can listen to Capricorn all day long.
I just saw it's McCoy Tyner's 70th birthday. Have to play some of his music, like this Supertrios album.
Yeah, the drums and bass on this one are what I pay most attention to. Richard Davis saves the whole thing IMO. My least favorite track is Gazzelloni (I think it's this one - whatever track is the military march-style bop) but I give the others a listen every now and then to see if I can connect with some of the other pieces. Hasn't really clicked for me yet though. I've got several Dolphy titles in my library and this one's my least favorite of them all.
WP John Taylor - Phases (CamJazz) solo piano NP Walt Dickerson - To My Queen Revisited (SteepleChase)
Louis Armstrong and the All Stars "Satchmo 1956" Decca Records, Universal Japan SHM-CD The cymbals sure are recorded hot but it works!
I'm not a big Charles Lloyd fan -- not that I ever had anything against his music but I've never heard a Lloyd album that really rang my chimes in the kind of personally way that music I return to does. But in my year-end catch up listening I really enjoyed his latest and Jason Moran is great on the record.
As I said a while back I'm reading the book about Braxton's tour of England in the mid-80s. At the point in the book where I was on Friday on the way to see Joe McPhee, he talks about being a big admirer of Warne Marsh and raves over a solo on a piece called "Excerpt". So on Saturday I visit Ray's Jazz and find the album that it is on.
Betty Carter – Inside Betty Carter (United Artists / Capitol Jazz — Blue Note) — Betty Carter - vocals; Harold Mabern - piano; Bob Cranshaw - bass; Roy McCurdy - drums.
I don't know about its contemporaneous reviews but it's certainly considered an all-time classic today and I think it's by far Dolphy's best studio date as a leader (thought the stuff posthumously release Alan Douglas stuff -- release on Iron Man and Conversation I think is up there). It was 1964, so jazz was already half a decade into the "new thing," and stuff I think that was considered more outside (like Ornette's Free Jazz which of course Dolphy played on) were out there for a couple of years, and other stuff that was more radical in terms of changing the language of how to construct a solo and what to construct a solo out of in the music of Ayler, who was really emerging at the time, though I think some of Bobby Hutcherson's solos contain some pretty out there uses of unconventional thunks and glissess, the kind of use of sound vs more specific pitches and duration, that would become a common part of the music with the emergence of the AACM. It's certainly not "chaos" or "free form" -- the forms are relatively conventional and not enormously departed from -- it's head-solo-head quintet jazz. The heads have tonal themes you can sing (actually they're often stuck in my head, I think the pieces like "Out to Lunch" and "Gazelloni" and "Straight Up and Down" are earworms; "Something Sweet, Something Tender" is just a lovely ballad with a beautiful melody and yearning harmony). This isn't guys getting together without prepared material to play something without structure until they feel like they've reached an end. What I think is most fresh about it then, and what still sounds amazingly fresh about it to me, is the use of time and the role of the rhythm section. It's one of the earliest and probably the most radical early example of Tony Williams' playing -- time elasticity and stepping back from just keeping time to be as much a color and tone instrument as anything, in very intimate and wide ranging musical conversation with the other players. Like Dolphy says in the liner notes, "He doesn't play time, he just plays." There were other drummers, like the recently passed Sunny Murray, getting into playing color and tone and things beyond the time keeper's role, but a lot of the stuff Murray was doing at the time was in the context of Ayler's and Cecil Taylor's music, which is dense with sound and energy. On Out to Lunch, both Williams and the band, and the Davis-Williams rhythm section, leave lots of space to operate in, and work with silence and purse a kind of series of breakdowns for improvised passages, where it's not just a whole rhythm section together chugging along backing a solo, but standalone groups of instruments playing here and there apart from the whole before the head returns. It's another element of the record that I think anticipates something the Chicagoans would really run with. Also I think that 9-count rhythm on "Hat and Beard" but with the piece still with a finger-popping swing....these days, you know, you put on a Dave Holland big band record the whole group is cooking in some irregular time signature and not only are they so comfortable with it but the music is just popping...I think its really around this time and with records like "Hat and Beard" that easy swinging irregular meters start to become a foundational part of the language of jazz (vs. slight off kilter meters as a kind of novelty the way Brubeck framed "Take Five"). I think sometimes people get confused, as you mentioned you were, with some of the music of this era because they listen for formal things they think are supposed to be there -- a back beat, a fixed cycle of chord changes that repeats maybe being lined out in a steady fashion by piano, bass and drums, an AABA 32-bar song form or a 12-bar or 16-bar blues form. But this is an era of music where musicians were looking to break out of those very rigid, fixed, repeating containers as vehicles for jazz improvisation and composition. That's the whole nature of the "new thing," so if you try to enter the music by anchoring yourself to those other elements of form, you'll be confused. But if you listen instead to try to hear a beginning-middle-end flow to the performance and listen closely to what the musicians are doing with each other as they advance through the solos and interact with one another sonically and rhythmically -- listening instead to what they are doing vs. what they're not doing -- it's much easier to enter the music. And of course musicians have to rehearse and you have to prepare -- prepare ways of listening and thinking and playing -- to be able to pull off performances like these. One of the worst things I think that ever happened to "free jazz" was that it was given the moniker "free jazz" -- almost none of this stuff is free in terms of being formless at all or being approached without preparation. One of the interesting things that happened in the 50 years since this stuff was created is that first takes of some of the free landmarks emerged -- a first take of "Free Jazz," a first take of Roscoe Mitchell's "Sound" (which is a little more tender and lighter on the rhythm section and which I like better than the master), so you can hear in these things that the musicians are working within a framework and you can hear, in the case of the take of "Sound" different approaches within the framework just as sure as you can hear different solos on mulitple takes of a bop group playing standards.