Rolling Jazz Thread 2020

Interesting. I watched a lot of those Sunday night virtual shows.

Really enjoying the Okuden Quartet (Walerian/Shipp/Parker/Drake) record, thanks. Calm, spacious free jazz is the best free jazz.

sure, on wednesday

Have you guys been watching the Smalls feed on Friendbook? Good stuff. Really good piano and guitar duo right now.

NY Times Jazz Top Ten--I'm ignorant of most, but thrilled to see Dialectic Soul incl.! Playlist at end: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/arts/music/best-jazz-albums.html

Currently enjoying the Susan Alcorn album from that list, it's got a good vibe and the pedal steel is really great in that context.

Yeah, that's a great record. Didn't make my own year-end list, but I liked it a lot.

Briefly dipped into the unfamiliar-to-me releases on that list and the Lloyd, Gamedze and Alcorn are all sounding great.

That is a seriously stacked band on the Charles Lloyd album

How that Ron Miles record mentioned on another thread? Didn't know he had a new one.

Okay, hadn't looked at the lineup on that Charles Lloyd record until just now but yeah.

Dezron Douglas/Brandee Younger album is really pleasant and enjoyable: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/force-majeure

I like that, it's very pretty and simple and it swings a bit as well.

Yeah, it's a really nice record. I saw them perform as a duo opening for Tony Allen in 2019.

What a likeable album!

one of my fave swinging bass-player+1 duo albums is the classic Ray Brown/Duke Ellington one This One's For Blanton. I'm not saying it sounds like this one, but similar vibes.

With all due respect to John Surman, the interplay between Anouar Brahem and Dave Holland on Thimar makes me wish they'd done a proper duo LP. Bass + plucked strings is an underused configuration, to be sure.

I haven't heard the Ellington/Brown but it's an appealing premise.

Ray Brown swings so hard even your eyes are trying to tap their toes!

It's nothing you haven't heard before but Matthew Halsall's Salute to the Sun is the kind of flutey, chilled out spiritual jazz I'll never get sick of:

https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/album/salute-to-the-sun

This Brandee Younger album is exactly what I've been wanting to hear lately (of course it's on IA).

Speaking of bass in duos, Vince Giodano played that and tuba in Zoom-type settette w Loudon Wainwright and guitarist David Mansfield: early jazz tunes from their recent I'd Rather Lead A Band, which also incl. VG's other bass instruments and his Nighthawks (he and the band did a lot of music for Boardwalk Empire, which is where they first worked w LW). Sounds pretty good! Also lots of informative commentary on the songs:
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2020/12/02/941234800/fresh-air-for-dec-2-2020-loudon-wainwright-iii-and-vince-giordano?showDate=2020-12-02

Yeah, good stuff. I didn’t notice you on the Loudon Wainwright thread yesterday.

Also, speaking of Duke, yall know Money Jungle, w Mingus and Roach right? You may have the 7-track original, or the good-sounding late 80s Blue Note LP w a few bonus tracks, like I have--but I wanna get this 15-track CD:

https://www.discogs.com/Duke-Ellington-Money-Jungle/release/7620539

There may be later editions that are even more inclusive---one of the few where I'm lured by alll the alt-takes, but several prev. unreleased titles have gradually emerged as well.
Of course the latest SOLD OUT vinyl fetish vinyl More Perfect Than Evah remaster has 0 bonus material.

It's nothing you haven't heard before but Matthew Halsall's Salute to the Sun is the kind of flutey, chilled out spiritual jazz I'll never get sick of:

https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/album/salute-to-the-sun

― pomenitul

Patrick Forge just played a track off this album on his NTS show. Gorgeous stuff.

Heh, p4k reviewed the Dezron Douglas / Brandee Younger:

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dezron-douglas-brandee-younger-force-majeure/

Just saw childhood friend Nic Cacioppo (son of composer Charles Cacioppo) mentioned as the drummer on the JD Allen Trio record that came out this year. Going to have to pick it up, sounds pretty good!

He's great on it (and on Barracoon from last year).

Archie Shepp and Jason Moran have a duo album coming out in February; the first track was posted on YouTube on Friday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzU75hKYvLA

Good to know, unperson. He had a lot of competition when we were growing up, always getting second chair to another good friend. The latter ended up getting horrible tendonitis that multiple surgeries couldn't resolve, and now works for A&R for some record company. Glad Nic was able to stick it out.

New Charles Lloyd had me going back through his last few releases, what a run for an octogenarian. That 'I Long To See You' release by his country/folk band w/Frisell is just gorgeous.

Great to know about Shepp-Moran, thanks! Shepp and pianist Horace Parlan also made at least a couple of duet albums drawing on deep river music, Trouble In Mind and Goin' Home.

Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s, recently published by Harper Design, is a testament to the bygone American nightlife culture that thrived at midcentury — years before the full realization of a Civil Rights Movement, but well into a more casual arc of racial integration.

The book, a featured item in the WBGO December fund drive, amasses hundreds of souvenir photos, handbills and other memorabilia from clubs across the continental United States: iconic rooms like The Three Deuces on 52nd Street in Manhattan as well as lesser-known spots like Gilmore’s Chez Paree in Kansas City. Through the images and ephemera — and several in-depth interviews, with Rollins and others — the book presents a complicated portrait of America in the two decades bracketing the second World War.
...This is a difficult book to classify. In a way, it’s a coffee table book, because of all of these incredible images. But it’s also a really keen work of jazz history and scholarship...That last bit opens an interview w author:https://www.wbgo.org/post/sittin-jazz-clubs-1940s-and-1950s-opens-portal-past-and-dialogue#stream/0

new Cortex album is excellent.

Getting around to checking out this Dezron Douglas/Brandee Younger quarantine album, this is gorgeous. Didn't expect to enjoy this nearly as much as I do.

i'm down with anything brandee does, period.

one album I liked at the time but somehow foolishly forgot about for ages was Quin Kirchner's The Shadows and The Light. It's one of the best.

Advance track from xpost Shepp-Moran. If link doesn't work, look for their "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJuO7v20dWQ
Let My People Go Tracklist:
01.Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
02. Isfahan
03. He Cares
04. Go Down Moses
05. Wise One
06. Lush Life
07. Round Midnight

Of course he really means the best on bandcamp, leaving out quite a few that I would have picked, although does inc. Irreversible Entanglement's Who Sent You?, which is exemplary Moor Mother and International Anthem just for a start, and Mary Halvorsen's Code Girl's Artlessly Falling, which is also very satisfying, though he says it's "a Robert Wyatt homage of sorts," which had not occurred to me even with Wyatt himself appearing (to good, lingering effect) on several tracks, and p. sure I wouldn't think of him if he hadn't. Need to check most of these for the first time:
https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-of-2020/the-best-jazz-albums-of-2020

Holy shit, this Angel Bat Dawid live album is incredibly powerful.

Got Got $2.5 million lying around? You could live in Cecil Taylor's old house....5 million lying around? You could live in Cecil Taylor's old house...

Some really nice Rhodes & drums duets:
https://deedsone.bandcamp.com/album/bookends

Matt Shipp has written a very interesting piece on what he calls the Black Mystery School of pianists. The school consists of Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Mal Waldron, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Sun Ra, and Horace Tapscott, with partial credit given to Dave Burrell, Geri Allen, Rodney Kendrick, and Ran Blake (who is white). What's just as interesting as who's in is who isn't — Ellington, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Mary Lou Williams, McCoy Tyner...read the whole thing. It's a fascinating window into how Shipp thinks about the piano.

Wow, very interesting, thanks.

Hasaan Ibn Ali - here's someone you don't see getting mentioned very often, he was a big influence on Monk and was clearly brilliant on the evidence of his one album with Max Roach. But he faded into obscurity and iirc he was homeless when he died.

aka The Legendary Hassan

BTW, RIP Stanley Cowell, apparently - another pianist you don't see mentioned often but who did a lot of interesting work as an improviser and composer

RIP Jeff Clayton, too.

xp okay Shipp is including Those who cultivate a certain mysterioso air and vibe to go with a high level of (sufficiently, for him) autodidactic idiosyncracy and proficiency and stylistic distinctiveness and apparently dramatic flair, innkeepers of thee flame, proprieters and high priests of the mystery religions of the Ancient World as Now(also "fock the world")--but, although he keeps referring to Waldron, doesn't say what brings him into this circle, or Randy Moses, compared to some who are excluded. Maybe he'll write some more about it, or could be drawn out by an interviewer (unperson?)
Don't (yet) know that this is a very useful way to think about these artists, or ones excluded, beyond obvious connotations. Obviously some kinds of playing are more likely to be successfully taught.

"fuck" the world, that is.

RIP Diane Moser too. Probably not known to most of you. I used to go see her big band sometimes on Tuesdays at the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium. https://www.njarts.net/jazz/diane-moser-jazz-pianist-composer-bandleader-and-educator-has-died/