Listenin' to Jazz and Conversation

I picked this up last week. Sound is superb. I can't stop listening to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Just beautiful.

 

very nice.

 

Benny Goodman: Jazz Tribune 1/2

 

Seeing Wynton Marsalis on the Grammy's in the early 80's really kicked my dabbling interest in jazz into overdrive. Here was a young man, my age, playing jazz and classical music at a high level. I have seen Wynton and Branford Marsalis many times over the past 30 years, and have all their albums. For a long time, Branford was my favorite. More recently, I've been appreciating Wynton's composing and arranging for large groups.

While both Wynton and Branford were outspoken early on, that has been tempered for some time. I do not reccall Wynton making a negative remark about "fusion" for at least 20 years. And during the 80's & 90's there was a lot of watered down "quiet storm" music parading around as "jazz" for folks who had not developed an ear for bebop and its iterations. Branford is still very outspoken, and right on target IMO.

The hype for Wynton and Branford was good for jazz, IMO, in that it spawned a generation of players who focused on the basics, like their predecessors did. Learning standards, playing in groups, touring, and learning from the more experienced players.

The hype also led to major label record interest in jazz in the late 80's through the 1990's, that had not been there for a long time. Columbia, Blue Note, RCA, Verve, and other big record company subsidiaries, had decent sized rosters of artists (some young, some old) and the budget for good recordings and larger ensembles. In addition to the Wynton and Branford's large Columbia catalogs, we now have large catalogs from (then) up and comers like Roy Hargrove, Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Geri Allen, Terence Blanchard, James Carter, Greg Osby, Joshua Redman, Renee Rosnes, Bobby Watson, Cassandra Wilson.

The major label interest in the up & comers coincided with major label support for significant runs of albums by veterans such as Charlie Haden, Randy Weston, Betty Carter, Shirley Horn, Abbey Lincoln. Joe Henderson, Ahmad Jamal, J.J. Johnson, Jackie McLean, and this was quite a blessing. Which major music companies are supporting the jazz veterans of today?

Meanwhile, Wynton's leadership led to Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and its home in NYC. Wynton has been a tireless educator, and earlier in his career, a road warrior. Branford took side gigs in Sting's band (which also piqued my interest in the 80's), and gave jazz some good exposure as the Tonight Show and leader in the earl 1990's.

The Marsalis brothers have had interesting and long careers, with good contributions to jazz.

 

I learned to stop attempting to read Stanley Crouch's liner notes on Wynton Marsalis albums. My take was a guy who could not play at the level of good NYC jazz musicians, and was trying to make up for it by writing incredible convoluted sentences that came off as pompous rather than intellectual.

 

Benny Goodman: The Harry James Years #1

 

I am not a big fan of Wynton, partly because of his music and partly because of his sweeping neo-conservative views. But I do enjoy his Live at Blues Alley and return to it from time to time. I seem to remember his Black Codes and J Mood were also very good.

IMO Branford is a different kettle of fish from his brother. Likes to kid around but still deadly serious about his art and has a more inclusive view of what constitutes jazz music. After all, he has performed with Sting and made several hip hop-oriented albums (Buckshot LeFonque). I do enjoy his playing very much.

 

Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark - Invitation to a Dream Bandcamp 24/44.1

Susan Alcorn - pedal steel guitar
Joe McPhee - soprano saxophone & pocket trumpet
Ken Vandermark - tenor saxophone & clarinet

We lovingly dedicate this album to refugees, immigrants, and the persecuted wherever they may be.

 

Harry James: Big John Special

 

Taylor Ho Bynum - The Ambiguity Manifesto

 

Stan Getz - The Dolphin

Lou Levy!

 

Gene Krupa: Drummin Man #1

 

To me, this isn't a feather in anyone's cap, at least not artistically. J@LC is a real missed opportunity. The programming for basically the institution's entire life has lacked creativity, spark, original ideas, ingenuity.

In a place full of jazz clubs where jazz still his a living breathing form and where you can go out an see the best jazz musicians somewhere every night of the week, J@LC is kind of an after-thought, the least important jazz institution in the city. How long has it been around now? 20 years? I think I've been to four shows there in that time maybe. Every year I get the catalog because they try to get me to subscribe, I look at the calendar of events, and think, "What a yawn, there's nothing special here worth going to see."

I know all the big uptown donor-focused institutions tend to be conservative, risk averse, and unimaginatively programmed, playing to the older suburban bigger money audiences with familiar stuff (and by the way, I'm now part of the older, suburban audience, though not part of the bigger money audience). And I know J@LC has kind of a repertoire focus. But even over at the Metropolitan Opera, people are talking about Mr. Nézet-Séguin's Turandot, no one ever talks about programming at J@LC; I got the catalog for Debora Borda and Jaap van Zweeden's second season at the NY Phil this year and thought, "Wow, there's a lot of interesting and different things to see this year." Borda of course built her rep turning the LA Phil into one of the most creative and dynamic orchestras in America, maybe she's up to something good at the NY Phil. But there's more interesting jazz programming not only going on in the jazz clubs but at other big donor institutions -- like Jason Moran's recent stuff at the Whitney and at Carnegie Hall, like when the new Whitney opened with a full Cecil Taylor retrospective. So obviously even at risk-averse, donor-focused, institutional sort of places not devoted exclusively, there's more interesting and important jazz programming.

 

To me, for better or worse, Stanley Crouch has been a major figure in American public thought completely unrelated to Wynton Marsalis or even just music -- he never only wrote about music -- for nearly 50 years. Before I ever heard of Wynton Marsalis, I was reading Crouch in the Voice, in the NY Daily News, and other publications, and not just on the subject of music -- I didn't even know he took a crack at being a drummer until later -- but on the subject of race, police violence, and other kinds of public policy and culture . His style was always deliberately provocative and confrontational (as successful columnists often need to be to draw attention to themselves). But he also, at least by the early 1980s, was part of a particular culturally conservative, black intellectual circle, led by Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison. That group latched on to teenage Marsalis as their avatar (and, in Crouch's case, meal ticket), and Marsalis took them on as mentors. If Marsalis hadn't come along, Crouch and Murray would have made him up, and in some ways, especially when Marsalis was a very young man, they did.

 

Buddy Rich: The Argo, Emarcy & Verve Sessions #4

 

Yep, good ol' Branford "new jazz musicians suck" Marsalis

These hot takes are both funny & sad, and while I still enjoy some of Branford's music, he does himself no favors with this garbage.

 

A quotation:

"It's just music. It's playing clean and looking for the pretty notes."
-Charlie Parker

Should we call Bird a neo-conservative?

I never use that word to apply to music. I'll leave that one for its dominant current dictionary definition: a political ideology characterized by an emphasis on free-market capitalism and an interventionist foreign policy. It has too many implications.

 

If you like CDs at reduced prices, try Academy on 18th Street. They also have vinyl. If you like rare LPs, try the Jazz Record Center on 26th Street. It also has CDs, mostly at full price. Both have excellent selections of Mosaic sets at good prices

 

The Jazz Record Center is essential but I also really enjoy the Brooklyn shops...
Like earwax , academy , grouch etc. That whole area is wonderful as a neighbourhood too as a flipside to the madness of Manhattan
Edit; dont miss Smalls ( grenich village jazz club)

 

Does he mean that modern jazz musicians lack feeling?

 

Jelly Roll Morton: The Victor Records #5

 

That's the way I read it. Although it also comes off as projection. Dude is almost 60 years old and has had a successful career - Grammy wins, Tonight Show band leader, etc. - and still feels the need to say stuff like this.

 

Eh, I don't know. What @chervokas says makes sense to me. TEHO I guess.

 

Well, no, of course not, that would be an historically inaccurate characterization, as we know so well the divide during Bird's own time between the traditionalists and the modernists. His wasn't an art or aesthetic concerned with preserving or returning to the real or imagined values of the past, and it was received very much in its time as a radical break with the past, even if we can more clearly discuss it now, away from the heat of that moment, as less of a break. I understand the beef with the political aspects of the phrase, but I don't think neo-traditionalist captures it, not all of it anyway because there WAS a political dimension to it, even if it was cultural politics (and this was a product of the 1980s when culture wars and politics in America became inextricably meshed perhaps permanently), though perhaps that was more Crouch's contribution than anyone else's. FWIW, I have a lot of areas of agreement with some of the ideas of these political and cultural critics and historians -- Murray's fundamental premise in The Omni-Americans, that the black experience in America IS the American experience; and even the idea that for jazz (or anything) to be something in and of itself, it can't be everything, so what is it?, etc. I don't think it's unfair or inapt for Marsalis' music to be considered in the context of this because it very much was informed by it, and directly so. I don't think it's true that there's the art over here, and the ideas that shaped the art in its time over there and they should be or even can be considered separately, though often in hindsight as we get decades or centuries away from the contemporaneous culture that formed the art, new audiences can approach the art differently.

 

....I know @SJR will hit us with some “Mid-Week Miles”. I’m going with some “Hump-Day Herbie”

NP:


Herbie Hancock ‎–
Empyrean Isles



Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on June 17, 1964.