Listenin' to Jazz and Conversation

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Lonson, Sep 1, 2016.

  1. Mirror Image

    Mirror Image 200 Years Of Anton Bruckner

    Location:
    United States
    Yeah, just imagine if John Zorn showed up with a reformation of Naked City? Talk about a frightened audience! :D Special note: I LOVE Naked City. :cool:
     
  2. Mirror Image

    Mirror Image 200 Years Of Anton Bruckner

    Location:
    United States
    I see classical and jazz being two different entities of their own and neither are mutually exclusive. But a lot of jazz drew on classical music and actually later on in the 20th Century classical music borrowed a good bit from jazz, but let’s not kid ourselves there are huge differences between the two of them. I have no problems whatever with people trying to preserve the past. What I have a problem with is the mouthpiece of this conservation is an elitist *********. Thumbing noses at musicians whose conception of jazz doesn’t match your own is completely baffling and illogical. As I mentioned before, it’s one thing to say you dislike something, but it’s another thing to go to great lengths to try and prove a point in which you’re wrong on all fronts about.
     
    ILovethebassclarinet likes this.
  3. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

  4. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    JR Monterose died in 1993 at age 66 in the small city where he grew up (Utica NY), among close friends and those he loved.

    He was a gentle soul, and very friendly.

    I did a special 3 hour broadcast for his 60th birthday, and several of his friends came to the studio to co-host. JR listened from home and called to express his gratitude. JR once inscribed all of my albums by him and chuckled that his autograph might make them worth something.

    Here is a typical image of him in his later years (real hair!), though he often played with his eyes closed

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    JR and Tommy Flanagan were best friends for decades. They invited me to their duet studio session

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    Last edited: Oct 9, 2019
  5. Mirror Image

    Mirror Image 200 Years Of Anton Bruckner

    Location:
    United States
    Spinning this one again:

    Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella, & Eivind Aarset: Lost River

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  6. brimuchmuze

    brimuchmuze Forum Resident

    Bill Evans - How My Heart Sings!

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    Maybe a bit under the radar among his great recordings of this era, but very fine.
     
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  7. brimuchmuze

    brimuchmuze Forum Resident

    Ya, I really enjoy this one.
     
    Mirror Image likes this.
  8. Mirror Image

    Mirror Image 200 Years Of Anton Bruckner

    Location:
    United States
    Over the past two/three weeks, I’ve been scrambling to get my hands on all of the Eivind Aarset I can and, thankfully for me, most of his own music and the recordings he’s been a sideman on have been in-print and with good prices to boot. :righton:

    For those here that are interested, I started a thread on Eivind Aarset. Please contribute when you have the time.

    Direct link here:

    Eivind Aarset: An Appreciation
     
  9. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    JR Monterose would often play his tune for tenor titled "Pain and Suffering". It was very intense and very passionate. He put his whole body into it.

    One night, with a smile, he revised the title, and renamed the tune: "Pain and Suffering...and a Little Pleasure", bringing some laughter from the audience that was totally blown away.

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  10. Mugrug12

    Mugrug12 The Jungle Is a Skyscraper

    Location:
    Massachusetts
    NP
    Robert Glasper "in my element"
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    With long time cohorts Damion Reid and Vicente Archer on drums and bass.
    Jaw dropping interplay is found here.

    If Branford is not hip to this trio he needs a serious talking to!
     
    Mr Bass, rxcory, Mirror Image and 5 others like this.
  11. SJR

    SJR Big Boss Man

    :laugh:

    Unfortunately no Midweek Miles this week — I was thinking maybe Wednesday Wayne, Midweek Mingus, Saturday Sonny or Tone Poet Tuesday/Thursday :D
     
    Beatnik_Daddyo'73 likes this.
  12. Berthold

    Berthold "When you swing....swing some more!" -- Th. Monk

    Location:
    Rheinhessen
    Starting the day with

    Woody Herman: Blues on Parade

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    and it will take some more weeks until the new Woody Herman set will arrive. :-((
     
  13. xybert

    xybert Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Zealand
    Love this album.
     
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  14. markp

    markp I am always thinking about Jazz.

    Location:
    Washington State
    Wynton Marsalis’ mission is what it is. He aimed for a big showcase place to present the jazz that is within his mission. Lincoln Center Jazz economics likely require a focus on mainstream jazz for economic reasons. The real estate has to be fantastically expensive. Maintaining salaries for the orchestra and support staff. And there are a lot of seats to fill:


    Rose Theater: 1,233

    The Appel Room: 483

    Dizzy's Club: 140


    Cutting edge jazz music will not fill those seats on a regular basis, at the prices required to keep JALC afloat. I lived most of my life in the San Francisco area, which has had a pretty good jazz scene for 30 years with clubs like Yoshis and Kimballs, and the ongoing SF Jazz concerts, which later developed into a dedicated SF Jazz building in San Francisco.


    I attended a really cool SF Jazz concert in the mid-1990s, featuring Cecil Taylor with a big band (populated mostly by local musicians). Quite an event. And the mid-size theater was 50% full at best, maybe 700 people. Even at small clubs like the original Yoshi’s in Claremont, and Koncepts Kultural Gallery, I saw shows where there only 50 people or less in attendance for Steve Lacy, Henry Threadgill, and Bobby Bradford, Amina Claudine Myers, and Marty Erhlich (Cecil Taylor did sell out Yoshi’s). Jazz is a fringe music, and the more esoteric and leading edge, exploratory branches of jazz are appealing to just a tiny band of aficionados within that fringe.


    I think of JALC more like a great show in Las Vegas. A fun night out, you know what you are going to get, its expensive, and lots of attendees are on an expense account. Someday, I hope to attend JALC, ideally on someone’s expense account. Otherwise, when I’m in NYC, I go to the Village Vanguard, which is also pretty mainstream, and easy to get to, and not too expensive, and pretty good restaurants nearby.
     
  15. Berthold

    Berthold "When you swing....swing some more!" -- Th. Monk

    Location:
    Rheinhessen
    Bud Shank & Bill Perkins

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  16. Some Stan Kenton Reissues on his own label "Creative World Records"

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    And the original covers (from Discogs)

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  17. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    It's not a question of "cutting edge" music. I never mentioned anything about cutting edge music.

    I know well what it takes to raise money and kept these cultural institutions afloat. I have friends and family involved in development in the classical music area in NY, including one who used to do development for another Lincoln Center housed institution, the NY Phil. But there's "mainstream" and then there's unimaginative, replicating what everyone else does, and becoming a kind of stale, unimportant institution that people ignore.

    As I said in my post, other Lincoln Center institutions -- like the NY Phil, like the Metropolitan Opera, like the Rose Theater -- do far more creative programming and are much more institutions that people turn to in NY as kind of artistic centers, the productions the put on are the talk of their areas sometimes. Sure, they've had their ups and downs artistically over the decades. I'm not sure the ABT ever will again be what it was under Balanchine. Jazz at Lincoln Center is NEVER that place. The thing is Lincoln Center is NOT a Las Vegas casino. It's a major national cultural institution that houses all these important, not-for-profit cultural institutions which keep alive all these other forms according to the missions of the institutions and the visions of the ADs.

    Of course the NY Phil is going to do a lot of nights of Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and and programs like Psycho in Concert or Renee Fleming sings Bjork (though even that one sounds interesting), all those same sort of warhorses and money raisers that J@LC does. But they're also this season doing premieres from Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Esa-Pekka Solonen and a bunch of other composers. Yeah, they do more shows and its easier to slip a Muhly premiere on to a program with popular warhorse. But this is compelling stuff. And even the warhorse programming can be interesting -- like the their doing Erwartung and Bluebeard's Castle on a double bill this year, and its a US premiere of a particular stage production of the Bartok.

    And other, costly, high profile cultural institutions in NY, where real estate and production costs are expensive do some pretty creative programming. At Carnegie Hall last season they put on this really interesting new Jason Moran commission on the Great Migration. And the Whitney is doing this staged performance series -- and collaborations and works on paper -- with Jason Moran through January, including unusually stagings like a re-production of the interior of Slugs for a rep concert. It's exciting, different stuff. Why are the art museums in New York and the classical concert venues -- which face all the same challenges of cost and real estate and fund raising -- doing more exciting and creative jazz programming than Jazz at Lincoln Center?

    J@LC has never been the sort of institution the ABT was under Balanchine or the Met or the NY Phil is (or the Public Theater is), even though I suspect WM sees himself as a sort of to jazz what Bernstein was to classical music during his tenure at the NY Phil. That's why I say the program and has been a big missed opportunity for jazz -- a high profile, well endowed, major NY not-for-profit in one of NYC's cultural cathedrals (albeit housed at a separate site), devoted to jazz could have been and should have been a tremendous opportunity to do what it's supposed to do according to its mission "enrich and expand a global community for jazz." But it hasn't been that sort of program.

    In fairness, J@LC certainly has done more different sorts of programming and and brought in other voices and creators from other parts of the jazz tradition in recent years, compared to the program's earlier years, (in a metro area of 22 million, it doesn't really take that much to fill the Appel Room, though it's kind of a lousy place to see a show -- great dramatic view, but if feels like watching a concert in hotel atrium). And I certainly have no beef with concerts from Bobby McFerrin or Dianne Reeves or whomever. Just that as an institution, J@LC represented a big chance for jazz that I think hasn't been capitalized on.

    But I don't want to keep harping on it because unless folks are in metro NYC, J@LC is probably pretty meaningless to them. And if folks are in metro NYC there's so much jazz programming available across the area that its an embarrassment of riches, even without J@LC. Just, like I said, that I think of J@LC as a missed opportunity for jazz to have a bigger, broader sort of bully pulpit that's really a leading voice for enriching and expanding it. Someday, of course, it will have a different AD, and it will be something programmatic that has to stand on the strength of it's program, no so much on the personality of its founding AD. And these institutions have ups and downs. The NY Phil has a long period in the wilderness before Alan Gilbert.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2019
  18. hockman

    hockman Forum Resident

    They are very good. Any Tapscott album is an engaging combination of "in" and "out" playing, but not too "out".

    The earlier CDs that I've heard sound fine. Original LPs are now collectible and command pretty stupid prices.

    Note: Outernational Sounds has recently reissued a bunch of Nimbus records including the Tapscotts. I am not sure how they all sound but the one I have, Creative Arts Ensemble, is pretty good. It's on 45rpm although many of the others are not.

     
  19. Berthold

    Berthold "When you swing....swing some more!" -- Th. Monk

    Location:
    Rheinhessen
    Bill Perkins: Just Friends

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  20. eeglug

    eeglug Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL, USA
    Last night I went to see the new Miles Davis documentary Birth Of The Cool. It's been getting mixed reviews - I read a couple prior to going to see it. I don't know if I agree with some of the criticisms I read but I will agree that I felt it a bit lacking, from a music perspective and documentary film perspective. From a music perspective it's mostly a superficial look into his work. Nothing in the narrative will reveal much of anything to those familiar with his music and you certainly will not see/hear any full live performances. There's not much effort made in describing how the various stages of his career differ from one another musically, just very vague pronouncements about how at each point he was daring to do something different.

    Having just watched Ken Burns' Country Music documentary I would say that this one is not quite at the level of finish of that one, although perhaps it's an unfair comparison given the scale of Burns' project. When I compare them I'm talking about how these respective docs are put together, their pacing, how they tell their stories. Burns' work, for all its shortcomings, never fails to keep things moving and drawing the viewer in, whereas this Miles doc falls more readily into some dull spots.

    One conspicuous (to me) awkwardness in MD-BOC is how there are a lot of 'dead air' sections - talking heads interviews with pauses in the talking when there really should be some music in the background. There should be nonstop music in a music doc, shouldn't there? One really bizarre bit of editing has a voiceover of someone talking about Miles' signature close-mic muted trumpet and how great that sound is - all while a passage of an open trumpet ballad plays in the background! Many times throughout the doc fails to explain important information that would be helpful to novices, for example introducing the name Charlie Parker and almost immediately reverting to calling him Bird without properly connecting the two as being the same person. The film also spends a good deal of time on his relationships with women (including new interviews with some) but fails even at that by not properly explaining how he broke up one rlationship and started another - it becomes a bit of a revolving door of ladies. For example Cicely Tyson and Betty Mabry are depicted entering his life but you never how/when/why he broke with them.

    One device used extensively is an actor speaking as Miles as a voiceover - it's been a long time since I've read his autobiography but I'll assume most of this voiceover comes from that. (This actor has a raspy voice himself and it works well enough I think). It's good to see some familiar faces among the talking heads: Jimmy Cobb, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Marcus Miller, Mike Stern, Mtume, Santana, even an old snippet of Gil Evans talking. Coltrane is shown and touched upon in the narrative. Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley are not mentioned but are seen in session photos. One new story (to me) was about Miles trying make a stage announcement just shortly after his throat operation that damaged his voice. Among the positives is that the filmmakers know how to play up some of the humor, mostly dealing with Miles' blunt no BS attitude to life. Perhaps the real crowning jewel of the doc are the sometimes funny interview segments with Frances Taylor Davis, who is a kind of larger than life diva-ish character. She never fails to entertain when she is onscreen or talking.

    I wish I were more familiar with what film/video performance footage of Miles is already out in the wild as I'm not sure if some parts of the film have never been seen before. Even if there were any unseen bits, none of the performance footage lasts very long and most of it is in the background as someone is speaking - so I guess it would be more of a tease. (There's a bit of footage during the Cosey years where the camera is handheld and the cameraman is walking around the stage - not sure if I've ever seen that before).

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: I give this film a 3/5. If you're a Miles diehard you should probably see it eventually but be prepared to not be blown away by anything music-wise. If it helps anyone, I was accompanied by my wife and another female friend both of whom knew nothing about Miles' life and both really enjoyed it.

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  21. GregM

    GregM The expanding man

    Location:
    Bay Area, CA
  22. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

  23. Bobby Buckshot

    Bobby Buckshot Heavy on the grease please

    Location:
    Southeastern US
    Streaming now, and noticing they're playing this Monk/Mulligan tune from this release: Thelonious Monk - Milestones Of A Legend

    10-CD Euro gray market release that I'd never seen. Wow - what a way to get a lot of Monk for cheap. Not wanting to spark a big debate on these collections but for a newbie to the music this would be a great set.
     
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