I am not big on top ten lists, but this is the time of the year when many people write and talk about such lists. For me, this thread is certainly one of my top ten things about 2017. Thanks to Lonson for kicking it all off. Here are a few of my other top tens:
Red Rodney & Ira Sullivan Quintet – Sprint (Elektra Musician / Wounded Bird Records) — Red Rodney (flugelhorn, trumpet), Ira Sullivan (alto & soprano sax, alto flute, flugelhorn), Garry Dial (piano), Jay Anderson (bass), Jeff Hirschfield (drums)
I used to have an album wih those two as coleaders on the same label. Did they do two on Musicians/Elektra? WP Sonny Stitt - Stitt Goes Latin (Roost) stereo lp Thad Jones sounds great with Stitt. The Latin percussion is a nice flavor to add to the jazz components. A young Chic Corea is featured on piano. NP Sonny Stitt Turnin' It On (Prestige) purple stereo label This is an organ quartet with Leon Spencer, Melvin Sparks and Idris Muhammad. Could it get funkier?
Aah, the (infamous) Christmas Eve session where Miles and Monk ended up fighting in the studio... The music these two put down at that session was incredible. Sure, there were artistic differences and Monk and Miles were cut from the same cloth when it came to defending their personal musical viewpoints. It's a shame that these performances have been overshadowed to an extent by some of the nonsense written and spoken about the date. No-one hit anyone, Monk did comp (minimally, but effectively) behind Miles and Monk didn't get 'lost' during his solo on 'The Man I Love' since he played it the exact same way on the second take. In light of the banter at the start of take 1, where Monk asks Miles where he wants him to come in, other members get testy with Monk and Miles famously yells 'Rudy, put this on the record...all of it' it seems to me that Monk was fired up enough to produce something special, maybe knowing how much Miles liked fewer notes and slower tempos he thought he would take things to breaking point, tempo-wise. It's pretty funny to me, I can imagine Monk staring at Miles as he's about to start that solo and thinking 'OK, mutha****r' I'll give you some space, let's see what you can do with it'. The payoff is that Miles plays a gorgeous playful rejoinder of his own, Monk goes back to the standard tempo at the flick of a switch and all is right with the world. Monk plays another mind-bending solo on 'Bags' Groove', the polar opposite of what he played on 'The Man I Love'. Imo Miles wasn't yet at the exalted level he achieved when he moved to Columbia (I think he was there in terms of his playing, but not creatively) whereas Monk was somewhere around his peak and I think on these sides he set out to let everyone know who was the guv'nor. No knockout, but a clear decision on points. The real winner, of course, is music.
Ironically I got that Miles and the modern jazz giants OJC vinyl from my wife for Christmas! I wanted that other piece of the bags groove session. Great session
I believe that "artistic confrontations" between artists are almost always exaggerated by critics and historians. I don't know if there is a photo of Miles and Monk together. This one looks manufactured.
I love when I find Erroll Garner albums at used record stores. The guy is a fantastic pianist and his records are always dirt cheap. Erroll Garner - Other Voices Original 1957 US pressing on Columbia Records
That Erroll Garner album sounded like another one! Erroll Garner - Soliloquy Original 1958 US mono pressing on Columbia Records
There is an interesting story about Erroll Garner's manager for most of his career, Martha Farkas Glaser (February 15, 1921 – December 3, 2014) was the manager, producer, and business partner of jazz musician Erroll Garner. She was also a civil rights activist. Though she was best known for her role as Garner's manager, she was also a prolific writer of lyrics and poetry. Glaser was born in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, and then earned her Bachelor's degree in Government with minors in Economics, Sociology and History from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942. Following graduation, she worked as Publicity Director, for the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Council, and in the publicity department for the Greater Detroit and Wayne County Industrial Union Council, where she aided programs to maintain food subsidies, and mobilized community leaders and labor and non-labor groups. She additionally worked as Compliance Officer for the War Manpower Commission. In an effort to support labor organizations and workers’ education, she studied radio writing in Detroit to “master the preparation of colorful documentary material in either narrative or dramatic form.” Ms. Glaser planned to pursue a career in public affairs and journalism, but following the Detroit riots of 1943 she became increasingly active in supporting human rights, taking a central role in the formation of the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee to combat race hatred. Calling to “ensure the right of all people to live in our nation without discrimination,” Ms. Glaser advocated, “a coordinated approach to unleash the optimum weight of the entertainment industry in the offensive against race hate.” Ms. Glaser was the first Jewish American woman to be hired by the city of Chicago to work for the Human Rights commission to oppose discrimination. As part of that effort, she organized Jazz concerts working first with Norman Granz, promoter of “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” (himself an advocate for the growing civil rights movement) and subsequently with agent/impresario Joe Glaser. She then went to work for the Disc Corporation of America as a publicist and organized the Jazz for justice tours throughout the late 1940’s. In 1948 she created her own music management company and settled permanently in New York City, where the Jazz scene was in full flower on 52nd Street. It was in that milieu that Ms. Glaser met pianist Erroll Garner, and the course of her life was set. Mr. Garner was a self- taught prodigy who astounded the music world with his seemingly limitless ability to improvise on the keyboard, despite a lack of any formal music training. While Garner was an artist, not a businessman, Ms. Glaser found that by combining her love for Jazz, her civil rights advocacy, and her innate business acumen, she was able, after signing an exclusive contract with Mr. Garner, to advance his career onto a level of prestige hitherto unavailable to Jazz artists. Garner’s 1955 composition “Misty”, quickly became a classic, and was the twelfth most played ASCAP song of the 20th Century, due in no small part to Ms. Glaser’s untiring efforts to promote and maintain Mr. Garner’s image as a world-class composer. Her success in that effort is evidenced in his long list of laurels, including a triumphant appearance at Carnegie Hall, winning the French Prix du Disque, and securing the only Jazz music booking contract with classical music agent Sol Hurok. Mr. Garner shared that roster with Andres Segovia, Isaac Stern, and the Bolshoi Ballet. Ms. Glaser’s vision encompassed recording as well, and she was a pioneer in producing Mr. Garner’s discs in the then-nascent Long-Playing format. In a singular instance, she instinctively secured a simple tape recording of one of Mr. Garner’s trio shows, in Carmel California, and when it was released as “Concert by the Sea” on Columbia, it became one of the largest selling Jazz releases of all time. Throughout this unbroken record of success, Ms. Glaser never lost sight of her early devotion to equal rights; She inserted a clause into Mr. Garner’s contracts prohibiting segregation of his audiences, a decade before the Civil Rights Act declared the practice illegal. Mr. Garner’s worldwide fame notwithstanding, Ms. Glaser shunned publicity herself, although her record of success in the music business, which was dominated in the 1950’s by males in executive positions, is testimony to her tenacious hold on a position of equality among her colleagues. Ms. Glaser was also a pioneer in the concept of musical artists owning the copyrights to their own work, an unusual concept at the time, and one of great benefit to Mr. Garner, who reciprocated with twenty seven years of loyalty to Ms. Glaser and their co-owned publishing and production company, Octave Music. In 1970 Clint Eastwood produced “Play Misty for Me”. The title of film was derived from the Garner’s “Misty”, which played a key role in the plot of the movie. She argued for all rights that are associated with “Misty”. Ms.Glaser and Erroll Garner were involved in a long struggle with Clint Eastwood. Consequently Clint Eastwood and Universal paid $25,000 to use the song in the film. After Mr. Garner’s career was cut short by his untimely death in 1977, Ms. Glaser maintained her tireless effort to keep his music in it’s premiere position, securing hundreds of licensed usages and overseeing a continual stream of LP and CD releases drawn for her trove of studio productions of the pianist’s work. This stream of releases continues. Thanks to Martha's diligence and perseverance and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings, including many newly discovered unreleased treasures as well as his first known recording in 1937 and his final concert, are now in the process of being archived, digitized and assessed. These recordings, photographs, video, symphonic scores, memorabilia, legal and civil rights documentation span the tandem careers of two unique individuals, one an original jazz improviser, and the other a true innovator in the areas of human rights, the arts, and business. Martha Glaser created an Erroll Garner archive, which was donated to the University of Pittsburgh, Erroll's hometown. Erroll and Martha:
from the New York Times in 1985. Soon after this, when the CD era started, a steady stream of new first time releases by Garner were issued. THE POP LIFE; AN ERROLL GARNER TROVE By John S. Wilson Published: December 11, 1985 ERROLL GARNER left behind many hours of unreleased recordings when he died on Jan. 2, 1977. But after nine years, none have been released. All are still stored in vaults, mute and unheard. Even an album called ''Erroll Garner Plays Gershwin and Kern,'' a set of recordings made by the pianist between 1964 and 1968, which has been available in Europe for a decade, was issued in the United States for the first time only a few weeks ago on the Emarcy label. However, this release promises to be the prelude to the appearance of as many as a dozen albums drawn from the tapes locked away in the vaults, including recordings of Garner concerts. ''People have wondered why I've been sitting on this wealth of material for so long,'' Martha Glaser, who was the pianist's manager and is now co-executor of his estate, said the other day. ''It took me a while to recover from Erroll's death, and when I got started thinking about the records, the emphasis in American companies had turned heavily to rock and fusion. The record industry was in a state of flux and from day to day you didn't know who owned the companies. Today, we're dealing with a generation of record people who don't have roots in Garner's era, who don't have a taste for it.'' ''If I had been entrusted with the last but unviewed works of someone such as Picasso,'' Miss Glaser continued, ''I would be very careful about which museum or gallery they would be shown in. With Erroll's recordings, I'm extremely concerned about sound. Even the Dolby system subtly changes the characteristics of his work, as if we had changed intensities and hues. It even changes the sense of swing in his playing.'' Most of the engineers who worked with Mr. Garner and understood his needs have retired, Miss Glaser said. She chose to have the newly released Gershwin-Kern set prepared at Atlantic Records because there is a record cutter there who worked with Garner. The pianist was very particular about the treatment of his music on records. ''He would have been happy if we had never gone beyond monaural recording,'' Miss Glaser said. ''When we got into stereo, he was very concerned. In the early 'Ping-Pong' era of stereo, he said he didn't want somebody 'reconducting' him. He wanted to hear the music as it was played.'' The American version of the Gershwin-Kern disk is slightly different from the European release: One previously unreleased track has been added, a single chorus of ''Nice Work If You Can Get It,'' on which Garner joyfully plays and sings to celebrate the end of the session. It reveals a voice that adds the semblance of words to the grunts that customarily accompanied his playing. This was not the first time he had sung on records. ''There is one actual vocal by Erroll in the vault,'' Miss Glaser said. ''He made it almost 40 years ago, but I don't think I'll release it.''
From that same article in 1985: "European television is an archival gold mine of jazz performances, according to David Chertok, who has assembled what is reputedly the largest collection of jazz films in the world and is curator of the exhibition at the Museum of Broadcasting. ''European jazz festivals have been filmed or taped since the early 50's,'' Mr. Chertok said. ''The taping is usually subsidized by the government of each country, so it's their property. The use of the tape is permitted on their own national TV and then they go into the vaults. And they stay there, so it's questionable whether any of them will be seen again either in the country of origin or anywhere else. There are hundreds and thousands of these things that I'd like to get my hands on. France has an incredible collection that includes 20 or 25 years of the Antibes Festival.''
Posted about this album the other day on the Coltrane thread, but it went unnoticed. Didn't know there was a SACD of it, maybe Lonson can tell more about it... Don't expect to find here Pharoah's impulse albums sound. Not even similarities with the music he played together with Trane. It's a beautiful tribute by a friend. For me (love Trane softer tracks) almost like a Coltrane best of played live. Check this one:
Those are definitely composite images. Columbia didn't exactly shout out the fact that Miles and Monk weren't playing together at Newport on the album artwork. I don't know of any photos with the two of them together. Would love to see some if they're out there.
Martha Glaser and her heir (her neice) even set up a fund to support research into Erroll Garner after her own death: Erroll Garner – Martha Glaser Archive Research Award With generous support from The Garner-Glaser Foundation, Inc., the Erroll Garner-Martha Glaser Archive Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh supports research into the Erroll Garner jazz collection held by Archives & Special Collections department within the University Library System. The research award is designed to offer a researcher intense use of the collection in order to produce a scholarly article, professional presentation, help prepare to teach a class on jazz, produce a video or documentary, write a book (or chapter), or some other body of work. The scholar will be expected to share his/her research with the University Library System in order to build a body of work around the use of the Erroll Garner collection. The successful applicant will also be asked to make a presentation (in-person or remote) to ULS staff on his/her work in the archive. The Erroll Garner Archive includes correspondence, sheet music, legal documents, photographs, memorabilia, awards, sound recordings, and moving images documenting the life and work of pianist and composer Erroll Garner (1921-1977). It also comprises a large amount of material related to Martha Glaser’s own career. Information about the collection can be found here: LibGuides: Erroll Garner Archive @ Pitt: Home . In their application, research scholars should indicate the length of time the project requires. The amount of the award will be granted based on the length of stay and will provide funding for reimbursement of receipted expenses for travel, housing and meal expenses while doing research into the collection in Pittsburgh; award may not exceed $2,500. Applicants at the University of Pittsburgh may equally apply for a stipend rather than travel funding. Award recipients are asked to share their finished product in some professional manner, whether that be in a publication, presentation or some other appropriate venue. There is no deadline to receive applications; rather the award program operates under a rolling deadline and will review applications as they are received. Each application will be review by an independent review committee, consisting of archivists, music librarians, and music teaching faculty, based on the applicant's research topic and the availability of relevant material in the Erroll Garner Archive. The committee will make its decision within 4 weeks of receiving the completed application. To apply, please complete the application and submit to: Ed Galloway Interim Assistant University Librarian for Archives & Special Collections University of Pittsburgh Library System [email protected]
Pharoah Sanders is amazing playing ballads, whether his compositions or standards. I wish he had done more! I got to hear him practicing once. I believe he practiced on his horn endlessly.
It's one of my favourite Prestige sessions, ( I even have a t-shirt with the album artwork on it). Definitely my favourite version of 'The Man I Love', not least because Milt Jackson also plays so fluidly on it, it's not just Monk v Miles. Monk does another great job with this song on his last studio appearance for the Black Lion Sessions recorded in London.
This quotation from a web article says it all: "When he [Erroll Garner] became hugely popular in the late 1950s, critics began to dismiss him as a sellout." He really was among the giants, but jazz critics get very upset when something or someone becomes popular. Here is a link to a great article about Garner with many embedded video links Erroll Garner's Archives Go To Pitt: The Man and The Music
I sold my RVG CD, as it s0unded so awful. There are countless CD versions out there, does any of them use a better master? Is there a go-to CD versi0n of this album?
Maybe it's my system, but I have a Japanese RVG edition of the Birth of the Cool that I think sounds quite nice. There is a Japanese non-RVG reissue of 2016 on SHM-CD that sounds good. . . UCCU-5776, and there's an earlier Capitol US cd that includes the live versions that sounds good.
I never thought I would see this obscure lost gem re released on vinyl. Straight from the heart of Albion. Many of the key players of the British Folk scene helped out on this session from ‘72. Too bad they would both be gone before this reissue came out this year. Bright Phoebus Mike & Lal Waterson on Domino reissue 2017 EU release
