jazz

i also unearthed this QUITE long thread with lots of QUITE LONG posts from several people who still post here. this was pre-september 11!!

'Jazz': Search and Destroy

it's mainly about the burns documentary and so it branches into a lot of territories i.e. what makes a good doc etc - but there is a lot of conversation about the music itself, what's "made it" into people's consciousness, what hasn't, etc

I am very very far from being someone who knows much about jazz, but as a complete diletente listener who mainly listens to recent British jazz, seeing Tracer mention Shabaka Hutchins compels me to recommend the following stuff:

Kaleidscope - Various artists (https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/sjr/product/kaleidoscope_2) awesome Soul Jazz compilation of London(ish) artists, that spans from quite trad stuff to things that seem to ahve little relationship to jazz and a lot to electronic / dance / dubstep / etc etc etc.

Moses Boyd - his debut album from early last year is great, also seek out Rye Lane Shuffle and the compilation that's on

Polar Bear - the band that got me into new British jazz about 15 years ago when they were Mercury Prize nominated. Several albums, all well worth checking out, but their last one (Same As You) is one of my very favourite records of the last decade, easily. There are lots of bands that share personel with Polar Bear and most of them are worth checking out: Acoustic Ladyland, Melt Yourself Down, Pulled By Magnets, Sons of Kemet, The Invisible (who are a rock band but good)

Black Focus by Yusuf Kamal - really fabulous record by keyboardist Kamaal Williams and drummer Yusuf Dayes. They've done stuff since that I've heard its of and thought was alright, but this is proeprly excellent. (I so don't have the vocabulary to write about jazz.)

The debut Empirical album was awesome, but I wasn't into anything they did after.

Portico Quartet, e.s.t., The Blessing / Get The Blessing, all good too.

Was thinking about Polar Bear just the other day, esp. Seb Rochford, and how big* he/they were 10-15 yrs ago, but rarely referenced in discussions of the current UK scene now.

*in contemp. jazz terms, obv.

Well he's bald now, so about a foot smaller than at their peak.

back in the 50's multi instrumentalist (tenor sax, flute, vibes - he was a virtuoso on all of them) Tubby Hayes was about the only UK jazz musician who had the full respect of all the top US jazzers from his stints in New York. Last year I discovered his late 60's big band album 100% Proof, it's one of the best, man.

Nick thanks. Those are great recs.

calz i don’t think i’ve ever heard of tubby hayes til now!

I discovered him last year, like with other brit-jazz luminaries like Stan Tracey and Acker Bilk he doesn't get as much love as he deserves!

When Sonny Rollins was playing in London he said something like "don't you lot realise how good Stan tracey is.."

couple random albums that i think would fit the bill:

Benny Carter - Jazz Giant
Oscar Peterson Trio - Affinity
Buddy Emmons - Pedal Steel Jazz (obv pedal steel is not real trad but as an instrument it kinda works in jazz actually)

whoa I gotta hear that buddy emmons, I shamefully only know him from the Danny Gatton redneck jazz explosion live disc but he is completely godlike on it

oh man i LOVE buddy emmons!!

thank you for these generous recs!

wow killer revive

More on the country jazz tip: think you indicated you weren't into Milt Jackson's vibes, but you might try very young, very pre-ECM Gary Burton, like when he was intrigued by Dylan recording Blonde on Blonde with a slew of Nashville cats, and decided to try it---he'd already done Jazz Winds From A New Direction w country jazz guitarist Hank Garland, but wanted a meaty combo effect: so on, the fucken finally available on legit sanely priced CD Tennessee Firebird, from the 1966 LP, he (on piano and organ as well as vibes) has got Buddy Emmons, Buddy Spicher, Charlie McCoy, Kenneth Buttrey (these last two I recall as Dylan colleagues; some others may have been as well), the Osborne Brothers, Chet Atkins, Henry Strelezki, with, from the usual 60s GB axis, Steve Marcus on tenor and soprano, Steve Swallow on upright bass and jazz titan (still at it) Roy Haynes on drum: playing Dylan, Hank Williams, lots more (37 minutes, but quality def over quantity, if results sometimes a bit mixed)
Also back on CD and more variegatedly relevant in this vein: groovy GB twofers Duster/Country Roads and Other Places and Lofty Fake Anagram/A Geuine Tong Funeral, that set last composed by Carla Bley.

yeah i i don’t know why it’s so hard for me to get with vibes. on paper this is exactly the sort of thing i like. guy’s all leaning against a fence post and everything. but you know what reading that reminded about STEVE SWALLOW. and i just went hunting and it turns out steve swallow did a new record last year with carla bley and andy sheppard called life goes on.

the first track is an absolute delight for a basic savage like me. an utterly spare blues jam between piano, sax and bass. not what i would have expected! it’s that simple. looking at the album art you imagine them all socially distanced in some huge empty concert hall, and you’ve got the privilege of sitting right in the middle of all of them, tapping your foot. back to basics. the other tracks are more adventurous but still so calm and spare and pretty.

https://open.spotify.com/album/50dZXAkVQ9PHCbtcNNaBsz?si=JGzbNJuyRSOJxsGxVFLGFw

just for posterity and so it doesn't get lost this interview that James Redd posted in the Carla Bley thread is outstanding.

https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-carla-bley/

so many funny quotes about mingus and sonny rollins and monk, and the way she listens. this stood out to me too:

In free playing everybody played as loud as they could and as fast as they could and as high as they could. I liked them, but there was also what Max Gordon said about a bunch of guys screaming their heads off: “Call the pound.”

I think the music needed a setting. Here I go again, fixing it. Take that solo, and put it in a setting where it made a lot of sense and it was really appropriate and be welcomed by the ear. I could put that guy over there, and I could give that guy kind of a background. Just as it was, I thought free jazz needed work.

When we were very young, Paul and I used to not want to hear a melody. We thought that was corny. We wanted to play only abstract things, only weird notes, only play minor ninths and major sevenths. We only wanted to play nothing that resembled anything that already existed. And that lasted for a couple of years in New York.

That went the totally opposite way when I got older. I had to have a memorable melody and I actually succeeded sometimes.

Free improvising could be very useful, very interesting and fun to listen to and fun to play. But it needed something to ground it a little bit, like tie the kite to the ground.

Iverson was recently enthusing on twitter about Paul's Footloose album, it's mostly made of Carla's compositions and is a seriously sick recording.

I like loads of that much maligned ECM sound stuff, especially some of the 80's/90's Paul Bley albums. But Footloose is recorded in that rough as fuck manner that does enhance the music.

I think a review mentioned the drum is undermiked, the piano is out of tune etc

lol no, the drums are definitely not undermiked, it's Steve Swallow's bass they were talking about.

Not sure I agree with that bit pulled out. I am sure there is a lot of hard blowing with a minimum of setting in free jazz (Arthur Doyle maybe), but I am happy with a freely improvised approach that can go to different places without getting back to the place it starts from. Sometimes the thing may not come off in the sense that you could put it in a record and repeat play, but that's a point around how to consume a piece of music.

“Call the pound.”

I don't agree with a lot of Carla opinions, especially when she dismisses Duke Ellington as someone who freerode Strayhorn's talent and took the credit, but did lol at this though!

saying that she never gives a dull interview tbf.

Yeah, though a number of people were already thinking about "providing a setting" to let it rip in, and doing it, pretty early on, more about that another time maybe (though reminds me: if you're into guitars, Sonny Sharrock's intensely mellow, never elided Ask The Ages, with Pharoah Sanders etc., is a great gateway to the land of the free).
My fave Bley in that vein is the first, s/t Liberation Music Orchestra album.

in 2018, the Downtown Music Gallery's enewsletter had a buncn of LPs by or incl. her, which I listened to on Spotify; here's some of my comments on Rolliing Jazz that year, maybe relevant to yr interests:

"MICHAEL MANTLER With LARRY CORYELL / CARLA BLEY / STEVE SWALLOW / TONY WILLIAMS - Movies (Watt 7; USA) Last sealed copy = $20

MICHAEL MANTLER with PHILIP CATHERINE / GARY WINDO / CARLA BLEY / STEVE SWALLOW/D SHARPE - More Movies (Watt 10; USA) Last couple of sealed copies / covers slilghtly worn = $20
Spotify has these as a twofer: both splendid, though if anything the sequel seems even more consistently engaging on first listen, even getting into kind of an art-metal groove thing at times (not xp "fusion funk")---when was the last time I thought of Philip Catherine!? And I didn't know Bley played tenor sax.

Meanwhile, Carla Bley's 1976 Dinner Music seats her and Mantler and Rudd and Carlos Ward with funky-smooth session aces Eric Gale, Richard Tee, Cornell Dupree, Steve Gadd, Gordon Edwards---tuba player Bob Stewart is kind of the hinge--for results that can be sneaky-acerbic in the mellow pocket, keeping or bringing it all back to the foreground, forebrain: "Ad Infinitum" def. keeps it, from the beginning, and Rudd soon takes a hold of the closer. "A New Hymn," after the near-generic chit-chat/inconsequential refinements of "Ida Lupino" and "Funnybird Song"--but "Dreams So Real" seems as sincere and even urgent as highbrow, and "Song Sung Long" is urban romantic intrigue, and "Dining Alone" is urban anxiety unifying furtive imagery (via Bley's sung-spoken thoughts)---the pressure of that Manhattan candlelight!
The opener, "Sing Me Softly of the Blues," starts well but turns into something like more nerf-funk chatter, music for the pilot of a pre-PBS afterschool series, but the good tracks here are really up my alley.

Michael Mantler:
The Hapless Child
Watt/4
words by Edward Gorey
(from 'Amphigorey')

Robert Wyatt (voice)
Terje Rypdal (guitar)
Carla Bley (piano, clavinet, synthesizer)
Steve Swallow (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)

recorded July 1975 through January 1976
Willow, NY, and England
A whirlwind right out of the gate, and I knew from later all-instrumental versions how strong some of these frameworks would be---did not expect the excellent and unusual studio effects on some of Wyatt's vocal turns---but eventually, when the words are more upfront, can seem overly emphatic---Gorey's dank little narratives work better with his spare, black white & grey drawings or etchings or whatever they be. Also, c'mon, it's Gorey---think I'll go on to the settings of Beckett and Pinter.

That is, the *overall* effect, the ensemble onslaught, not primarily Wyatt's vocals, can seem overly emphatic here.

Mantler again: Silence(1976)---the overemphasis here is confined to some of MM's heavier handling of Pinter's words, and Chris Spedding's often repeated use of sustain etc., drawing a note out and curving it around 'til it's a needle in my earphones ---but it can hurt so good, and the voices are strong and distinctive, Carla Bley holding her on with Kevin Coyne and Robert Wyatt---and sometimes everybody follows Wyatt's dustdevil percussion, without ever missing their cues (it's a play with a small cast/combo, compressed, maybe condensed, into a single LP's worth of songs).
The text itself may grow on me, but so far doesn't seem up to several Pinter plays I'm more familiar with, though Mantler can highlight the weak spots in his literary sources, maybe by blurring some of the plot points.
(More about Mantler's work w Wyatt, and other jazzcentric adventures over on Robert Wyatt: Classic or Dud?)

And I still want to check this Bley (which a friend described as "beating Zappa at his own game and then some")--here's xgau's take:
European Tour 1977 [Watt, 1978]
Although the basic concept--Kurt Weill Meets Ornette Coleman for Indiscreet Ellingtonian Frolic--is a little abstruse, this actually does reward the sort of close listening that earns so many theoretical payoffs. Perhaps amusement is the reward a little too often, however. I like a joke as well as the next fellow, but a few emotional expositions do help assuage one's conscience. A- Bullshit to that last; I wanna hear it!

But yeah, she settled into the conversational small group setting quite a while back; lots more where that came from.

https://img.discogs.com/Fw6AdCnpIXF8qld8p0meYEpiuvQ=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(webp):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4193425-1573634278-8632.jpeg.jpg

such a great album is this. It's quite unusual that he's one of these amazing talents that faded out of the jazz scene, but rather going on some tragic spiral into drug addiction he worked as a librarian for decades and only died a couple of years ago.

yeah this is a good one. discovered it on youtube, where it seems to be one of those albums that randomly cracked the recommendation algorithm, approaching a million views currently. shame hes not around for it

On first listen, this is nice but tbf there's not a whole lot to distinguish his style from that of better-known pianists of the era.

Musicians who just kind of quietly faded out in a non-tragic way is interesting. Not quite the same thing, but my guitar teacher recorded with Lou Donaldson and Tony Williams Lifetime among others, but got a pharmacy license and was a practicing pharmacist for years. He made a handful of other records and taught until he died but never sought out the level of performing/recording career he probably could have had.

I think he's brilliant, yeah not of the greats maybe but that alb really clicks with me and he's someone I can enjoy as much as other ledges of jazz piano like Red Garland or Hampton Hawes.

i am pleased to announce that my jazz brain has evolved and i now enjoy the 12-minute modal workouts

but i will probably always like wynton kelly more than anybody. Kelly Blue is so ridiculously good

I love Wynton, especially on the Blackhawk shows with Miles Davis. (I have the four CD set of both the Friday and Saturday shows.)

Kelly's my favorite of the pianists Miles had at that time. I don't mind Bill Evans (though I would dispute that "everybody" digs him), but Red Garland was always way too tinkly for me.

I LOVE Bill Evans, and he was crucial to Kind of Blue (though yes, Wynton was the right pianist for "All Blues" too) but he was with Miles for a very short time. What little they did in the studio was incredible - less than two LP's worth of music - but I don't think he was ever given a chance to settle in on the road thanks to the audience's indifferent (even hostile) reaction towards him. He's still one of my two or three favorite jazz pianists. The Village Vanguard recordings with LaFaro and Motian are favorites. (I prefer the box set over the two expanded albums - nearly the same amount of music, but I prefer the box's presentation.) Their two studio LP's are nearly as great. Undercurrent, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, and the two volumes of the Solo Sessions he did for Riverside are all great. Plenty of later stuff that's excellent, including Tony Bennett's best album, and he's played on other great albums by other artists besides Miles, but in terms of the sessions he led, those Riverside albums I mentioned are the ones I return to most.

no need for tinkle-shaming Red Garland, he did some fine work!

Love Red Garland, like Wynton Kelly, do not dig Bill Evans.

Love Bill Evans and Red Garland and Wynton Kelly, tho Evans will always be my favorite.

Evans is among my top jazz pianists. Him, Herbie, Bobby Timmons, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Mehldau, probably leaving someone out. I always enjoy Wynton Kelly and Red Garland but they both feel less consequential to me.

Oh McCoy Tyner of course

The thing is, you don't listen to Evans for the same thing you listen to Wynton Kelly for. That's why Miles put Wynton Kelly on some tracks and Bill Evans on others, they do very different things. If you're just listening to Everybody Digs and saying "this doesn't swing as hard as Bud Powell" then you're missing the point. I don't really get how anyone could not enjoy the Village Vanguard sessions, but w/e.

The thing is, you don't listen to Evans for the same thing you listen to Wynton Kelly for.

Absolutely. I would never say "Bill Evans can't play"; I just say "I don't like Bill Evans' whole thing", just like I don't like Brad Mehldau's whole thing, just like I don't like 90% of Keith Jarrett's output. It's neither good nor bad — it's Not For Me. But by the same token, I can't really understand how you rank Bobby Timmons and Erroll Garner (both of whom are great, in context) over Wynton Kelly and Red Garland.

I was excited to seek out some Red Garland recordings by the appearance of "Billy Boy" on the Columbia 2LP Jazz Piano Anthology, where it was credited to him rather than Miles. A few years later I finally heard Milestones and said "wait a minute...."

Wondering about this---have you heard it, unperson?

RESONANCE RECORDS TO ISSUE IN HARMONY IN JULY 2021 FEATURING TRUMPETER ROY HARGROVE AND PIANIST MULGREW MILLER IN A CAPTIVATING DUO
Previously unreleased live recordings from 2006 and 2007, available July 17th as a limited-edition 180-gram 2-LP Record Store Day exclusive and July 23rd as a deluxe 2-CD and digital edition issued in coordination with the Hargrove and Miller Estates
Elaborate booklet with rare photos, informative essay by Ted Panken, interviews and statements from Sonny Rollins, Christian McBride, Common, Ron Carter, Jon Batiste, Karriem Riggins, Keyon Harrold, Ambrose Akinmusire, Chris Botti, Robert Glasper and others
More info (and check roster of artists on this label):
https://resonancerecords.org/product/roy-hargrove-and-mulgrew-miller-in-harmony/

Haven't heard that yet but I get lots of promos from Resonance. Their releases are usually excellent; that Rollins in Holland set is fantastic.

https://www.musicaloffering.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/iisolfizrbcgrpeqccqn.jpg

this is the biz!

“have horn, will blow”

:o

eddie "ouch! lockjaw" davis

jazz is pretty good

FWIW, Lockjaw's Very Saxy is great. Four tenor sax players including Buddy Tate, Coleman Hawkins, Arnett Cobb and Lockjaw himself.

I love that pre-Jimmy Smith churchy style of jazz organ and Scott/Lockjaw collabs are great. You’d probably also like Wild Bill Davis.