This week I like to go through some piano trio sessions. Anyone else interested? Starting with Nat Cole The Capitol Records 2
Starting off with Monk's Thelonious Alone in San Francisco on cd. Conversation, grateful to have heat and power this morning. Temp is 6 degrees fahrenheit out there.
The Commodor Years The Tenor Sax Lester Young Chu Berry & Ben Webster Classic small group sessions by these 3 masters Recorded in 1938, 1941 and 1944. Im becoming obsessed with listening to any small band sessions from these early years. So nice to really hear their magic out front and center. This is a 1973 Atlantic 2fer I dug outa the cheap bins.
In a broad sense, it is surprising how relatively few small group jazz records were made prior to 1945, after the brief craze for small groups in the late 1920's. The record companies wanted big bands. Even legendary performers like Louis Armstrong, were unable to make many small group records after his Hot Five and Hot Seven records. After the War, the economy forced companies to downscale and accept small group sessions. Minor labels could not afford big sessions, so they put out the majority of the small group sessions before 1945 You would probably enjoy many of the records that were made for the Keynote label. If you are not familiar with John Kirby, look for his records
Yes it seems like you need eccentric individuals like Harry Lim or Teddy Reig to make the small labels viable even for the short time they lasted. I picked up the 11 cd fresh sounds comp of the Keynote Label and really love it. It seems people only focus on the superstars but there is much to love there by “lesser” artists. Occasionally I find a roost comp in the bins and that’s a good day. Although I like some big band stuff I really prefer these small combos where they can break free more. Do you know of a book on this era. The small labels era of the 30s through 40s. I think there must be many interesting tales to be told. Thanks for the Kirby link. I don’t know him.
Anthony Braxton - Quartet (Willisau) 1991, Studio Anthony Braxton: alto saxophone, clarinet, contrabass clarinet, flute, sopranino saxophone Marilyn Crispell: piano Mark Dresser: double bass Gerry Hemingway: drums, marimba
I have not kept up with books on jazz for many years. Gunther Schuller wrote a good one, though it was not explicitly about small groups. He was a composer, so it blends in some serious musicology with history.
I don't typically listen to music while I'm doing something else, but the weather is frigid outside, I'm off work, media is all in reruns and holiday programming, so I'm in the kitchen cooking beef stew and listening to Bird -- the Dial & Savoy master takes follows by the Verve master takes.
It was in single digits this morning here east of Pittsburgh, so cranked a little Pat Metheny '80/81". Michael Brecker and Dewey Redman warmed things up quite nicely.
Baked chicken pot pie yesterday, and chili is on tap for tonight! Coltrane Blue Train on deck for sound “comfort food”!
I used to name food dishes that I was preparing after the music that I listened to while cooking. So, when someone asked what was for dinner, they might get the answer "Klact-o-veeseds-tene Stew", after the Charlie Parker tune. Sometimes it was named after the artist, like "John Coltrane Rice"
I don't have this one, but I picked up Gunther's companion book Early Jazz a while back. All the musicological stuff about the prehistory of jazz - looking African drum choirs, the blues scale etc. are really fascinating (although maybe not a light read). I still need to finish it, I've been dipping in and out.
Here is something non-jazz that I am deeply into. This early music has been largely ignored in America. Most of the interest is in Europe. I worked for a few years doing environmental surveys in Eastern Kentucky. I wish I had looked Buell Kazee up and gone to visit him. Buell introduced the song "On Top of Old Smokey" to the popular canon in the 1920's. My Dad would sing that song constantly as he was renovating our family home.
I own it. There is a tune (Cravo e Canela) in which her husband Airto Moreira plays wonderfully berimbau with the great Milton Nascimento as vocalist. To me it is an album that tell us the great value of Montreux Festival in the seventies, probably the peak of its long history.
These days I've been approach Schuller with some care. Darcy James Argue has published a piece substantially questioning the accuracy of Schuller's transcriptions -- Misunderstanding in Blue (by Darcy James Argue) -- and the conclusions Schuller draws from these transcriptions (or maybe his transcriptions grew out of pre-conceived ideas about the music he was trying to transcribe). And Jeffrey Magee, in his great book on Fletcher Henderson, Uncrowned King of Swing, takes Schuller to task for extending a kind of reflexive criticism of Henderson, Redman and early orchestrated jazz as being somehow being pulled between "true and false jazz" between hot jazz and commercial pop -- Magee's suggestion is almost that this divide is a culturally biased misapprehension of the music as it was both experienced by listeners and intended by practioners in its time. Not to say Magee and Argue are right and Schuller is wrong, I dunno. Just to say that Schuller's texts maybe aren't gospel.
