Rolling Jazz Thread 2019

Anderson was swinging on the flippity-flop.

wait dave king is fit and stylish now?

fit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3isNd6UGaDQ

And the last couple times I saw him, my gf remarked on the quality of his shoes (no socks), he was fully cuffed and had the top button happening, looking good imo.

Brad Mehldau - Finding Gabriel is really hitting me, kind of adventurous in a low key MOR way, a lot of electronics and synth textures, jazz-meets-Brian-Wilson vocal arrangements

ooh good I'm always happy to check out some new Mehldau.

That description literally makes me shudder, but I'm glad you're into it.

An album that surprised me this week is pianist Greg Foat's The Mage, which features Malcolm Catto (of the Heliocentrics), Clark Tracey, and Moses Boyd on drums on various tracks; saxophonists Duncan Lamont and Art Themen; and guitarist Ray Russell. (Those dudes are all British jazz vets who've also recorded tons of library music and whatnot.) The first track is a kind of Pentangle-meets-Wicker Man version of the hymn “Of My Hands” with a female singer (Kathleen Garcia), but there's some other stuff later on that sounds like if Stanley Turrentine had made a whole album of Pink Floyd (circa Meddle/Dark Side) covers for CTI.

https://aotns.bandcamp.com/album/the-mage

Do you like him in general (Brad M)?

well I like a lot of 3 sounds/Turrentine/Pentangle so that sounds fucking good as well!

his last alb Seymour Reads the Constitution was brilliant.

Do you like him in general (Brad M)?

I like the Art of the Trio records, but I don't listen to them often. It was mostly the "jazz-meets-Brian Wilson vocal arrangements" that hurt.

Lol Wilson can be a loaded term, I could have referenced Kamasi or Axelrod I guess

Cheers for the Foat recommendation. I liked the Hampshire Foat stuff without ever being bowled over by it. This is making me think of Ian Carr's Belladonna in places.

At 37 minutes, the Foat record does feel a little like cuttings. By which I mean if there's more lying about, I'd gladly hear it.

Ahmad Jamal’s quartet was INCREDIBLE tonight. Full review on Stereogum on Friday.

really enjoying the Greg Foat

Tried putting on the Mehldau at home and the first track got an instant veto from the other human present

Listening now though and the other tracks are much less obnoxious, although odd-time trap beats aren't particularly cute (but stock drum machine samples + amazing string section on track 5 kinda brings to mind the last Radiohead album, which makes sense with Mehldau).

Funny that the worst tracks on this are the ones with Mark Guiliana ripping (I guess because he was brought in to sell the most overblown/melodramatic moments). I like Mehldau in chill beatmaker mode though!

he's fundamentally uncool but I like em

also this Greg Foat is extremely my jam

Hadn't heard of Greg Foat until now but this does a great job at seemingly like a lost '70s mystic jazz-folk curio

Such stoner jazz! Nice to listen to at work but it veers into corny self-serious jam territory sometimes (as nice as the tones and sax players are)

(sorry, I feel like I'm really bringing spicy takes today)

I find that new Mehldau completely unlistenable :(

Shuffling an old Mosaic box - five CDs by the Teddy Wilson Trio - which has been put up on Spotify by the original label, Verve. I think a whole bunch of these sets have been similarly repurposed in the streaming era, once Mosaic's limited rights to the physical reissue have run out. Anyway, I'm not at all familiar with Wilson's work, but this is pretty nice. Kind of cocktail-ish, but the band (various bassists, with Jo Jones on drums most of the time) swings hard.

Bouncing around Spotify and I learned that Joshua Redman had a new record come out this year, and it's great so far. Greg Hutchinson on drums, who I love (although the drum sound on most modern jazz records is so anemic and boring).

Tried putting on the Mehldau at home and the first track got an instant veto from the other human present

exterior

That makes it sound great, but if you imagine a civilian drinking her coffee in the morning and all of sudden there is a choir with dense jazzy harmonies, a busy distorted trumpet solo, and even busier live breakbeats, y'know, it's a lot. Might be a little offputting!

Re: drum sounds, here's Greg Hutchinson on my favorite Christian McBride record, now that's a drum sound: https://open.spotify.com/track/6rBmuYSyOWxZYCPT2CLBoZ?si=JMczQkyrQBKqhrnJJQ5U3A

wrt Greg Foat, definitely corny and self serious at times but given the UK folk they are touching on that's kind of appropriate

digging it

Oh, I really like the sound of this Mehldau so far.

Currently liking the new dave douglas trio album with andrew cyrille on drums and someone good on piano.

Yeah, that's a good one - it'll be in my Stereogum column on Friday. Uri Caine on piano - it's a sequel to a Douglas/Caine duo album from 2014, but Cyrille really adds to the mix (more so than he's done on some of his own recent ECM work, honestly - Manfred Eicher encourages him to underplay to the point that he's barely present).

https://davedouglas.bandcamp.com/album/present-joys

could imagine Eicher just wanting every drummer to sound like Paul Motian, which is probably quite unreasonable despite the fact that he was pretty great.

Kevin Whitehead on Branford Marsalis Quartet's latest---first excerpt is ho-hum, but others get better and better: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/22/725697470/branford-marsalis-revels-in-jazzs-timeless-challenges-on-new-album

Suffering a bit from LDN Jazz fatigue, but the Cykada album is great.

Thinking about jazz recording, I put on Phineas Newborn's 'We Three' after listening to some modern records, and was struck more than usual by how fucking amazing it sounds (in addition to the playing being amazing), then went down a rabbit hole of Rudy Van Gelder articles & interviews.

This one in particular stood out, with this quote from Steve Hoffman (lol):
https://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/09/01/rudy-van-gelder

Take three or four expensive German mics with a blistering top end boost, put them real close to the instruments, add some extra distortion from a cheap overloading mic preamp through an Army Surplus radio console, put some crappy plate reverb on it, and record. Then, immediately (and for no good reason), redub the master onto a Magnatone tape deck at +6, compress the crap out of it while adding 5 db at 5000 cycles to everything. That’s the Van Gelder sound to me.

And from that article:

More interestingly, in the '50s Van Gelder couldn't or wouldn't record a piano "properly" to save his life. With much the same gleeful and wanton disregard for the potentially brain-hemorrhage-inducing consequences of sticking a German large-diaphragm condenser mic (made for recording orchestras from several meters away) one inch in front a trumpet, he'd stuff a cloth-wrapped mic in one of the sound holes in the piano's harp. And that's what Van Gelder's '50s pianos sound like -- as though you'd crawled under the piano with stoppers in your ears (which is why I shed a tear listening to the fantastic piano solos on his recordings, wishing I could've had a crack at capturing them.) The distant bass and muffled piano contrast sharply with the sizzling cymbals and the crispy "up-in-your-grille" horns, giving the "Blue Note sound" its curious chiaroscuro.

But many of us are also missing something essential about audio recording for people without dog's ears: human ears don't want “clean” sound. Rather, we’re drawn to harmonic distortion. People don't really want realism or even accuracy; we prefer "larger-than-life." That's what Van Gelder gave the world, to the best of his ability and equipment: the biggest, hottest sound he could form.

That's just so important, it's not just that there was more available analog gear in the '60s, it's that the classics were made with creative & irreverent recording choices that privileged excitement over accuracy. I hate that modern jazz recordings seem to have the same approach as classical music, to be as bloodlessly 'transparent' and accurate as possible. You have to do all kinds of inaccurate tricks in recording to recreate the same sort of excitement of hearing the music live.

I hate that modern jazz recordings seem to have the same approach as classical music, to be as bloodlessly 'transparent' and accurate as possible.

Some labels are worse about this than others. Telarc jazz releases used to be The Fucking Worst. But yeah, without going full-on Guitar Wolf, there's a lot to be said for rough recordings. And even the ECM sound isn't "accurate" in any real sense.

Tidal's Out There jazz playlist (not super "out there" tbh) is a good regular listen for me, find some good stuff

https://listen.tidal.com/playlist/0bfac8e5-4ff8-44e4-b112-5fb71d39bcc1

My latest Stereogum column just went up, and it includes my review of the (amazing) Ahmad Jamal show I saw last week, which caught me totally by surprise. Short version: I went in expecting sedate old-man piano-trio action and got a blow-the-walls-down jam.

Nice. A while back I looked up some videos of that band, here are a couple Poincianas. The original is a second line beat anyway, so Herlin really takes it there.

Higher quality video/sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cytUz9KkK9M

Band hitting a lot harder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFk9tms2E1Q

ahmad jamal was and is my favorite pianist and he's always a joy live. i really hope he comes back to NYC soon.

really loving the mehldau album with the exception of "the prophet is a fool" which is embarrassingly bad

I like mark dresser's music a lot, and his zany album titles( Ain't Nothing But a Cyber Coup & You), the new one is good. His last one Sedimental You grew on me quite slowly - so I'm going to give this one some time as well.

Drummer Lawrence Leathers has died, apparently a suicide. He played with Cecile McLorin Salvant, among a million others.

as noted on the RIP thread; Leather's death appears to be a murder.

Branford Marsalis getting opinionated in Jazz Times about who is jazz and who isn't:

Your two albums in the ’90s with the band Buckshot LeFonque—mixing jazz, pop, and DJ culture—got a mixed reception. What’s your take on artists like Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, who are now working at the crossroads of jazz and hip-hop?

Robert Glasper has a limited jazz vocabulary, and that’s not anything he would say is not true. I think it’s in his best interest to do that. Kamasi’s not a jazz player either. He’s a sax player. But his vocabulary is not jazz. It’s some jazz.

This is not something I want to go to war with. But I can listen to a Lester Young record, a Dexter Gordon or Wayne Shorter record, and ask, “Do you hear that lineage in his playing?” If you don’t, what makes it jazz? Improv? We’re back to that illusion again. The success that Kamasi has had—it’s awesome. But the people defending him as a jazz player are not jazz players. They have their own idea of what jazz is, and they are entitled to that. But so am I.

One interesting thing about Kamasi’s rise is the way he has connected on the jam-band and rock-festival circuit. But you first did that in 1990 when you played with the Grateful Dead at Nassau Coliseum in New York.

That was different. I was playing in their band. Buckshot played with [the jam band] String Cheese Incident for a while. We could have been in that. But at no time would I have accepted the notion that this was jazz. We had influences from jazz, from rock. It was a hybrid thing.

But you fit into the Dead’s aesthetic so well they invited you to join them at later gigs.

The first time, some of the guys were like, “Oh, no, another jazz guy.” Because they had David Murray and Ornette come in, and they just did their David Murray and Ornette thing on the tunes. But I never bought into the genius thing. The modern definition of genius is not about adaptability—it’s about a singular idea that you thrust and bogart on every situation. If I’m going to play with the Grateful Dead, I’m going to play with them, not on top of them.

https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/branford-marsalis-secret/

That's more or less what he said when I had him on the podcast. At that point, though, he argued that Kamasi's band didn't swing because the drummers were too up-and-down. As though Duke Ellington's drummers were constantly dicing up the beat like Tony Williams, right?

Greg Tate going off on Marsalis on Facebook was making me laugh hard this morning

Don’t think I brought it up here, but I recently learned about/had been blissfully ignorant of a Wynton beef with Arturo O’Farrill.

Maybe they’ve made up since then, but you can read about it here

I want a battle of the bands on a South Bronx playground.