Tommy Flanagan Trio – The Complete Overseas (Dragon / DIW Japan) — With Wilbur Little, Elvin Jones; with 3 alternate takes; recorded in Stockholm in 1957; also released by Prestige Records, etc.
Mainstream - Vic Dickenson & Joe Thomas & Their All-Star Jazz Groups (Atlantic) CD Tracks 1, 2, 4 & 6 Joe Thomas & His All-Star Group Joe Thomas (trumpet), Buddy Tate (tenor saxophone), Johnny Letman (trumpet), Dickie Wells (trombone), Buster Bailey (clarinet), Herbie Nichols (piano), Everett Barksdale (guitar), Bill Pemberton (bass), Jimmy Crawford (drums). Tracks 3 & 5 Vic Dickenson & His All-Star Group Vic Dickenson (trombone), Hal Singer (tenor saxophone), Buck Clayton (trumpet), Herbie Hall (clarinet), Al Williams (piano), Danny Barker (guitar), Gene Ramey (bass), Marquis Foster (drums). Recorded 1958. CD 24 bit mastering. Issued as part of Warner Jazz Best Collection 1000 series. The music on this wee gem of an album is first class and I am surprised that I was totally unaware of it's existence until a few week's ago. The sleeve notes are probably the smallest I have ever attempted to read, and even with additional lighting and use of a magnifier it was a struggle... "The music on this LP swings all the way, it is frequently exciting,and now and then attains an exceptional level of creativity"
Wa playing - Pat Martino - Strings Forgot how good Cedar Walton and Martino's tune writing were on this. Worth exploring for those that like the period of El Hombre, East and Desperado.
Listening to Wynton Kelly and Wes Montgomery Smokin at the Half Note. Fabulous album a must listen too. Wes Montgomery – guitar Wynton Kelly – piano Paul Chambers – bass Jimmy Cobb – drums
Anthony Braxton & Joe Morris: Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007 Anthony Braxton: Eb Sopranino, Bb Soprano, Alto, C Melody, Baritone, Bass, & Contrabass Saxophones Joe Morris: Guitar (what, just one guitar?) Recorded at Crowell Auditorium Wesleyan University on July 30 & b31, 2007 and released in this fine 4 disc boxed set to commemorate Clean Feed's 100th release. Nicely recorded and mastered by Jon Rosenberg each of the four discs holds an ~1 hour improvisation between two musicians who surprisingly had never played together before this meeting. Even more surprising since Morris' stomping ground was Boston. While Braxton typically uses compositional structures to frame improvisation and Morris is more at home in the "free" realm this is an excellent collaboration with sympathetic interplay, counterpoint and the sense of deep listening between the two. Plenty of sensitivity, little bluster and never difficult, in a relative sense. Highly recommended.
Agreed Ken is one prolific composer and that talent is somewhat surprising in contemporary Jazz, especially considering all the iterations/configurations he plays across. While I probably prefer the "composed" material I really enjoy the less structured improvisations because he is often doing that with a drummer (i.e. PNL, Hamid) and I love that pairing, plus his use of multiple reed instruments really helps to add variety in tone, attack and color. He also seems to be competing with Braxton to see how many different labels he can start or appear on So, "live album thread"? I wracked my brain to come up with your fave DKV but with the recent boxed sets I gave up. I like them all but am partial to "Trigonometry" wit the two sets featuring Don Cherry and Sonny Rollins material.
It's also great to see Gilmore outside of the Arkestra and all it's variations. IIRC this was his only "leader" date.
Some interest! The one to seek out is the remastered an expanded one issued by John Corbett on his now sadly defunct Unheard Music Series. It adds two brass band sessions to the original Folkways release. Baby Dodds / The Laneville-Johnson Union Brass / The Lapsey Band - Talking And Drum Solos (1946) / Country Brass Bands (1954)
Louis Armstrong Louie And The Dukes Of Dixieland A tuba eargasm AND Louis Armstrong. You can pretty much wrap me up and mail me in this s$%!t.
Well, you must have read my mind, because "Trigonometry" (2001) is also my favourite live document of the DKV Trio. By far. Most live releases from their pre-hiatus period (1996-2002), including the widely acclaimed "Live in Wels & Chicago" (1998), are overwhelmed IMO by free-flowing longeurs which could run for almost 40 minutes, like the title track on "Baraka" (1997), but with not enough interesting source material or its creative reinvention to justify such lengths. On the other hand side, we have an extensive documentation of their post-hiatus activity (since 2008), with two big boxes "Past to Present" (2008-11) and "Sound in Motion in Sound" (2012-14), when they largely abandoned any (free-jazz) structures and scriptures to pursue on-the-fly improvisation, which to me sounded less and less fresh and inspired with each passing year. On this landscape "Trigonometry" stands out like a granite rock, offering two 2001 concerts that are filled to the brim with fiery interpretations and improvisations over some great source material (Cherry, McPhee, Ellington, Rollins, Ayler and Vandermark himself), performed by a band at the absolute peak of their collective powers. When some friends of mine were lucky to catch the DKV Trio live in 2002 they were shocked how good the band were and would hype it as the new New Thing. So everyone grabbed their earlier live releases and the head scratching began. Okay, that Wels & Chicago stuff was good, especially Don Cherry's Complete Communion suite performed at Wels, but something was apparently missing. The answer came years later when I finally got to check "Trigonometry", and I immediately understood what my friends had been raving about. The punch and drive of the band at the beginning of the 00s turned out to remain unmatched, when they tore the structures and scriptures apart with an unbelievable passion, yet without getting lost. So if I were to try to show anyone what I think has been great about the DKV Trio I would direct him/her to "Trigonometry" without any hesitation, against the common Internet knowledge. And then I would suggest checking the Wels & Chicago set, and finally, if there is still thirst to be quenched, maybe some early gigs from "Past to Present" box, when they still tried to rekindle the old magic. DKV Trio: Trigonometry, by Ken Vandermark That's my take on this group.
I'd say they are on that razor's edge That pretty much sums up why the band never clicked with me. I just can't imagine recording a rock album in such a sterile way. I hope they were wiping down that mixing board with bleach every night, music made for the operating room
Bar Kokhba - Lucifer: Book of Angels, volume 10 Mark Feldman (violin), Erik Friedlander (cello), Marc Ribot (guitar), Greg Cohen (bass), Joey Baron (drums), Cyro Baptista (perc.) (Tzadik, 2008)
Got a good deal on a MINT copy of the LP version of this set, so couldn't pass. I debated for years about whether to buy, and I'm glad I did. Though it is unfortunate that mostly here we only get Parker's solos or melody statements, truncated, they are so remarkably good that it is well worth hearing, and the cumulative effect of listening to these snippets is remarkable. What a musician. I'd say this is not just a set for "Parker specialists," it is a set for anyone who has already absorbed the classic Parker Dials and Savoys and the Verve material and is hungry for more. Despite the fact these are not mostly completely performances, in many ways I feel like this set comes closest of any out there to conveying why musicians worshipped Parker; the playing sounds so fluid and relaxed and yet he's achieving things that few if any contemporaries could hope to achieve - now that is technical facility and artistry - making the impossible sound easy. I like the fact that with LP sides you have a built in 20 min or so listening time; for me that is about the perfect dose for absorbing these recordings, a bit at a time. Also has one of the very best booklets of any Mosaic, up there with the Herbie Nichols set and a few others. In general the sound quality of the recordings (made on a non-professional wire recorder) is much better than I anticipated, though some are indeed pretty noisy and have considerable artifact. The LP version has been out of print for years, but Mosaic still has some copies of the CD version which will be going out of print soon - so don't snooze if you're on the fence.
I often wonder if people who simply had listened to Steely Dan's recordings without knowing all this stuff about how some of them were recorded would have even been able to tell how the material was created. Kinda doubt it. Suspect the "sterile" tag is predicated on knowing about process and not, to my ears, justified based on the sound of the final product. I just never heard "sterile." Also odd that jazz fans will dismiss the band on this one issue when they were one of the only popular/rock groups to truly "get" and organically infuse just about everything they did with jazz sensibility. It feels very much like a bit of snobbery here - well, they weren't "real jazz." A track like "Aja" is an absolute monster, blistering Wayne Shorter solo and all, and to my ears not at all far off from something the much ballyhooed Weather Report might have done, even if the recording process differed. I don't listen to recording process, myself - I listen to the finished product and take it on its own terms. The musical company kept - loaded with jazz improvising legends like Shorter, Victor Feldman, Phil Woods, Bernard Purdie, Chuck Rainey, Steve Gadd, Lee Ritenour, Larry Carlton, and many others - says a lot I think. So yeah, they may have spliced together parts of different solos - so what? Listen carefully to some classic jazz albums everyone thinks of as un-futzed with and you'll hear edits galore. And some stuff everyone drools over like Miles' plugged in albums were by definition artifacts of studio production. Also I think the "sterile" or "overworked" critiques would certainly not hold in relationship to most of their recordings (pre-AJA). THE ROYAL SCAM, the album before AJA, was recorded sporadically over a 4-month period which is hardly an unusually long period for pop albums of the era. KATY LIED, the one prior done over 2 months. PRETZEL LOGIC over 3 months. First 2 albums, less than a month each. Just sayin' - but obviously we can agree to disagree.
