Rolling Jazz Thread 2021

Come to think of it, he said in Leroi Jones's Black Music (unless it was Blues People)that when he had a chance to jam wit some out cats very early on, like maybe when he was still majoring in playwriting, they laughed at "my Stan Getz shit," but when he went into a blues, they said yeah, that was right." Something he may have thought of again after his relatives' response---and I've always heard his path through it as going with the way my older Black customers in CD etc stores used it: they could be looking for BB King and/or Bobby Blue Bland, sure, but just as likely Smokey Robinson, Junior Walker, Nat King Cole (with his trio and/or as croomer). So with Shepp you get blues and bluesoid elements in different contexts, incl. "Mama Too Tight" (w new thing solo im midst of tight 60s groove), to Attica Blues, Litte Red Moon, the albums with Horace Parlan, and the rustic metamorphosis on Charlie Haden's duets collection, The Golden Number (also in some of his work with Cecil Taylor).

jam *with*, also "they said, yeah, that was right" closed quote(or "they said yeah, that that was right" was the part of his sentence I meant to quote, though still may be imprecise, decades after last reading the piece).

Nir Felder trio with Antonio Sanchez and Matt Penman at Smalls Live sounding great right now.

I loved that Matt Penman Good Question album a few years back

Listened to that Blue Note Re:Imagined record with LDN musicians; it's all a bit tasteful and wine bar-y but still some good stuff.

Unperson, I listened to your Christian McBride podcast and when he was listing every drummer in the world who had played with Rollins, I couldn't believe he didn't mention Steve Jordan. I guess it's more of a Spinal Tappian drum chair than I thought, but I was under the impression that Jordan was his guy for the '00s. Clearly that's not the whole story, but since he was on Rollins' last studio album and was with him the one time I saw him (at Ravinia), and from listening to recent interviews with Jordan, I assumed he was the first call.

https://hafezmodirzadeh.bandcamp.com/album/facets

the new Hafez Modirzadeh album has got Tyshawn Sorey(on piano), Kris Davis and Craig Taborn involved.

That Modirzadeh record is really good; I interviewed him about it for Bandcamp Daily. I imagine it'll run in a week or two. (I may put the full transcript of our conversation on my Patreon page, as we covered a lot of ground.)

Fire! Orchestra does nothing for me (unsurprisingly, since I dislike 95% of big band jazz), but the new Fire! is very much to my liking.

yeah it's a bit different to their last trio one but good stuff nevertheless. I can't listen to Fire Orchestra either.

xp

not even Duke Ellington, pom?

Duke Ellington is the main reason I left myself a bit of wiggle room with that 95%.

I think New Orleans Suite is one of the greatest ever and think it contains the last ever recorded playing of Johnny Hodges. I play it to death and then I play it to death again after a short break.

Turns out my Hafez interview just went up.

I disliked big band jazz for a long time, but Ellington finally cracked open for me a few years ago, and Count Basie's mid '30s recordings are pretty amazing too. I also like some modern big band stuff like Darcy James Argue's Secret Society and the Michael Leonhart Orchestra — a lot of that is more indebted to 1970s movie scores and modern classical than to big band tradition, so it's very interesting without the obligation to swing.

I like Fire! and Fire! Orchestra; the latter's version of Penderecki's Actions is a lot of fun.

I like Mingus’s big band stuff, and some of Sam Rivers’s and Charlie Haden’s as well. Count Basie is absolutely classic, of course. But yeah, skepticism is my default attitude towards the genre.

obv Carla Bley is exempt from criticism as well imo. Do the large avant-garde ensembles of Henry Threadgill count as big bands? god knows idk shit tbh! but they have done some incredible work.

his record label describes it as the “little big band” sound

whenever people say they don't like big band jazz, i direct them to this video and they go, "okay, so yeah this rules"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmALIF7c3lY

that link isn't working this side of the atlantic Table!

Oh of course Gil Evans as well

ignore me it is working now!

Such Sweet Thunder was the album that got me into Ellington, it's fucking awesome!

I even had that as my ringtone for years!

This was always pretty fresh and engaging, though haven't listened in a whie---take it away, wiki:

Far East Suite is an album by Duke Ellington that won the Grammy Award in 1968 for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance – Large Group or Soloist with Large Group. Ellington and Billy Strayhorn wrote the compositions. The album was reissued in 1995 with four previously unreleased alternate takes.[1] In 2003, Bluebird Records issued the album on CD with additional bonus takes.

Strayhorn died in May 1967, making Far East Suite one of the last albums recorded during his life to feature his compositions. Was especially struck by "Blue Pepper,"which uses a backbeat for Ellingtonian purposes--he does not play that rock 'n' roll, doesn't need it.
'

On the other hand, Xgau's right about this early stuff, incl. the rock appeal of some:
The Best of Early Ellington [MCA, 1996]
Although it doesn't approach RCA's long-lost Flaming Youth and touches fewer famous classics than Columbia's fainter, cleaner two-CD Okeh Ellington, this warm, scratchy disc leads out of his tangled discography into his '20s music, which traffics in a rinky-dink novelty more rock and roll than his glossy big-band dance charts. At first only a few familiar tunes stand out from the delicate audacity and raucous detail of the sound. But soon every theme kicks in, every silky clarinet solo and bumptious plunger mute. Ellington called this jungle music because white folks would never have believed he heard the modern city so much better than they did. They learned, kind of. A oops not really big band, but big enough, and couldn't resist slipping it in.

whenever people say they don't like big band jazz, i direct them to this video and they go, "okay, so yeah this rules"

Yep. "La Plus Belle Africaine" -- any recording, but especially this one -- is easily one of my all-time favorite Ellington works. So many of his pieces have incredibly evocative and affecting twists and turns, but this one just goes into whole other worlds of...well, Ellingtonia, I guess.

"worlds of Ellingtonia" is such an edifying and pleasing phrase!

Yeah, love Such Sweet Thunder. The slink of the title track is just perfect. The Star-Crossed Lovers is so swoony.

My issue with Fire! Orchestra isn't that it's a big band, more that it doesn't do the big band thing particularly well - it's surprising, cos Gustafsson has been involved with some terrific large ensembles, but the things that work really well for the Fire! trio - hypnotic riffs, an engagement with slow burning rock and blues forms - don't really work scaled up. That Orchestra album with the ridiculous Scandi prog vocalist was a chore, and the episodic structure didn't really lend itself to satisfying group interplay. I generally think Gustafsson is at his best in small groups, particularly when it allows him to be subtle. Hearing him do these extended technique and extreme timbres at a low volume is really exciting - the latest Underflow being a case in point.

new Joe Chambers album Samba de Maracatu (on blue note) is cool as..

xp

absolutely concur with you there, Stew

that Ellington video table posted is stunningly good

I was trying to find something else from him many years ago, literally stumbled onto that video. Continually wows me.

https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/never-is-enough

just what I needed tonight ... a new Thumbscrew album.

It's really good; I wrote about it on Friday.

I think it's great that one of the most impressive + out there modern jazz trios of the moment have a track called Emojis Have Consequences!

Hope it is good, was disappointed by The Anthoy Braxton Project: maybe should listen some more, but so far pretty bland, especially her, esp, compared to the Braxton-Chabbourne set I'd recently listened to while posting about, and everything else I've heard by Braxton himself.

Listened to that Blue Note Re:Imagined record with LDN musicians; it's all a bit tasteful and wine bar-y but still some good stuff.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, February 25, 2021
Yeah, and you might prefer Kaleidoscope, on Soul Jazz Records, which is even more The Sound of Young London, but doing their own compositions, a wider and sometimes deeper range (haven't heard the digital, but the CD, I know, also the vinyl, I'm told, have very vivid sound, and delving booklet, pretty much a book). It led me to a lot of good 2020s and 2109 releases by K contributors on bandcamp and YouTube.
Discussions of some of these artists and albums can be found on the shape of acid jazz to come: MOSES BOYD's Dark Matter and
A catch-all thread for the current jazz scene in London, including Shabaka Hutchings, Yazz Ahmed, Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Camilla George, Theon Cross, Zara McFarlane, Daniel Casimir, SEED Ensemble,
(and some mentions on RJ 2020 and before)

Those four sample tracks from the Thumbscrew on Bandcamp are fantastic! Added it to my cart right away.

Yeah, I was totally sold 20 seconds in.

Jazz drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., who had been battling cancer for six years, has died. I've heard him on countless records, but only saw him live once, in January 2020, subbing for Billy Hart with the Cookers. It sounded like an avalanche. He was very much of the Art Blakey/Elvin Jones school of jazz drumming; if you were the bassist who had to stand next to him, you might as well just mime your part, because no one was going to hear you.

Fuck, I didn't know he had cancer. He was one of my favorites, this record is a classic in my book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6MwTVkgY4o

You can only get away with playing like that if you're the leader, but I f'in love it.

Yeah, that's an amazing record; I mean, just look at that band. They made three albums together, and they're all hard as hell.

For those of you who crave Dutch jazz, this is a recent initiative of a series of 50 concerts with 130 different musicians. Ian Cleaver is a musician to follow as he's only in his twenties but already a veteran. This is a video with guitarist Jesse van Ruller.

Something different: this Anthony Coleman album was announced on Twitter by Marc Urselli, but otherwise hard to find (if you use the search function of Bandcmap it won't show up).

The current episode of the NY Times Popcast is all about jazz, with a ton of discussion of Immanuel Wilkins, Georgia Anne Muldrow, various International Anthem releases, and much more. It's hosted by J0n C@r@m@n1c@, who I think is one of the worst big name music critics, but his guests are Giovanni Russonello and Marcus J. Moore, who are both great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/arts/music/popcast-jazz.html

I've always had a blind spot where The Second Great Quintet is concerned: something about the way Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock interact in *this* context, like they encourage each other towards inertia, compared to Miles, Tony Williams, Ron Carter---what are yall's favorite albums by this group, that might get me out of this rut---? I want to believe.

I like Nefertiti best of the studio records I've heard, the heads are very memorable even if the improvisations can get abstract.

Yeah, I'd rank them:

1) Nefertiti
2) Miles Smiles
3) the quintet half of Water Babies
4) the quintet half of Filles de Kilimanjaro
5) E.S.P.
6) Sorcerer
7) Miles in the Sky

The live stuff on the Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel box, Miles In Berlin, and Vol. 1 and Vol. 4 of the Bootleg Series is often better than the studio albums (except for Nefertiti, which really is a masterpiece). Maybe start there.

So this just happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CVa1dkkXcY

Not sure what I think yet.

Yeah, I don’t love that. There are two songs with Iggy on the album, and I’m not super into either one. The instrumental stuff, some of which has as many as four horns, is better. In general, though, I kinda feel like Dr. Lonnie’s just running out the clock at this point.