Rolling Jazz Thread 2021

Cool? Have you ever heard the Barney Kessel recording mentioned here?
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2016/09/08/sounds-of-spock-gerald-fried-barney-kessel/

Did you know about Julie London’s husband and his compositions?

Haha, no, the link doesn't seem to work. I suppose I could hear it by watching some of those episodes? xp and no; Bobby Troup?

Sorry, there used to be youtube with the recording, but couldn’t find it, only a cover version(!)

Yes. He was some kind of jazz pianist. Most famous composition was “Route 66” and then maybe “The Girl Can’t Help It” although I seem to hear “Hungry Man” a lot.

Guy who is a great player, teachs at Queens College and wrote some great books on jazz practice and harmony, David Berkman, is livestreaming from Mezzrow right now.

On the other hand, Chico Pinheiro is playing with Ari Hoenig and Edu Bello at Terraza 7. They are streaming a little bit of it for those who cannot attend in person.

I did try to check my knowledge of repertoire when I read the tweet by trying to sing "Blue Bossa" in the original key on the spot. My wife was trying to listen to something important and gave me an annoyed look.

Update: she was singing it out of the blue tonight, without at first being sure what it was.

Interesting. Haven’t played that one in a while.

Terraza 7 is where I want to go as soon as I am back to doing indoor.

You can go now! A lot of it is outdoor, like last night’s show.

Basically they are outdoor until about ten and then they move inside if there is another show so as not to disturb the neighbors.

Thanks for the heads up!

One thing: Freddie doesn't seem to post the listings until right before the show. The best way to know what is going on is to walk by and look at the chalkboard out front, although obviously not everyone can do that.

A previously unknown live performance of Coltrane's A Love Supreme (with Pharoah Sanders and Donald Garrett added to the band; this comes from the same run of shows as 1971's Live in Seattle) will be released in October. Here's "Pt. IV - Psalm":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmDbJ8TrQe8

In one of the major John Coltrane discoveries of recent years a long lost second live performance of his masterwork, A Love Supreme, has surfaced and will be released by Impulse! on 8 October. A Love Supreme was originally recorded in December 1964 and released in January 1965. Until now the only full performance known to exist was from the Festival Mondial du Jazz Antibes, Juan-Les-Pains, France, July 1965, which was issued as part of A Love Supreme Deluxe Edition in 2002.

This second full performance was recorded on 2 October 1965 and is from his week-long stay at The Penthouse, Seattle from 27 September – 2 October 1965. While Impulse! previously released a posthumous live recording in 1971 from this gig, John Coltrane featuring Pharoah Sanders Live In Seattle, it was taken from the 30 September show and did not feature any music from A Love Supreme. This performance was recorded independently by Coltrane's friend Joe Brazil using the Penthouse Club's in-house equipment but has remained a completely unknown quantity until now, with no mention in Ashley Khan's book A Love Supreme / The Creation Of John Coltrane's Classic Album or the exhaustive John Coltrane Reference Book.

The original A Love Supreme album and Antibes performance were by Coltrane's Quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. By the time of the Penthouse date, Coltrane had expanded the quartet, bringing in Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax and Donald Garrett on second bass, and bass clarinet, plus shakers and other percussion items are played by one of the above or perhaps by Brazil and saxophonist Carlos Ward, who is said to have been at the performance. This performance runs considerably longer than the original A Love Supreme and captures a historic moment as the newly refigured sextet launch into the suite with power and spirit.

Excited for that!

Wowwww

That's insane. I'd read that there were only two performances of A Love Supreme, one being Antibes, and the other happening in Philadelphia, I think. It's strange that, given the release history of the Seattle residency -- '90s CD reissue with a lot more material, a gray-markety The Unissued Seattle Broadcase -- that the ALS performance was unknown/unnoticed for all these years.

Wow

I wonder if the expanded lineup and length will make this sound more like the spiritual jazz that owed a lot to the original (albums like Karma). I guess Coltrane was flirting with that sound on Kulu Se Mama in this era.

You know who loves keeping standards around? Record labels and music publishing companies. Fuck standards. Ban 'em all for 20 years, like a controlled burning of a forest, and see what sprouts in their place.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 24 August 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Really unfortunate metaphor.

Btw just personally I think that going to school for jazz in 2021 is a probably a poor life decision, unless 1) you want to be a professor, or 2) you're already good enough to be a professional musician and want to study with a master who teaches at one of these programs.

A little curious about this, btw, especially 1). The professorial job market is a bloodbath, as far as f/t positions are concerned, and has been for years. Moreover, it requires many years of additional training on top of a degree for the minimum entrance requirements. That almost seems like one of the least practical reasons to get a music degree. Otoh, opportunities for private and school-level teaching and gigs are expanded pretty significantly by the acquisition of a degree and, at least here, getting the additional certification to teach in the public school system just involves another year or two and is comparatively a much safer bet. I would just advise people not to do it in a way that involves going into significant debt. Or was it something specific to jazz education that was striking you?

Yeah, 2) makes sense for me but not 1). I remember last time Sund4r and I had this discussion several years ago, and I asked around. Seems it used to be possible to acquire some kind of academic professorship based on performance and other achievements, with much less formal training, but much less so these days.

To another point, another friend did exactly as described and just spent a year of so getting a teaching degree on top of his music masters so he could teach in a public school.

The studio version of Kamasi Washington's cover of Metallica's "My Friend of Misery" was the only thing I wanted to hear from their massive covers compilation The Metallica Blacklist, and here it is. I'm into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJorhZA-gFY

Oh, I would never encourage someone to pursue becoming a jazz professor. I was just trying to make the opposite point, that getting a degree in jazz isn't necessary if you want to become a working musician. Staying in academia was the only reason I could come up with to do so, not saying it's a good reason!

This guy was this epitome of a certain kind of beloved jazz professor, Howard "Dr. Bebop" Brofsky. I heard he was teaching his famous Jazz History class right up until very near the end.
https://www.vpr.org/vpr-news/2013-10-26/howard-dr-bebop-brofsky-remembered-for-contribution-to-vt-and-national-jazz-scene
https://www.reformer.com/local-news/family-friends-remember-dr-bebop/article_d403026f-8076-591c-bf89-ff9637291406.html
https://digital.nepr.net/music/2013/10/22/howard-brofsky-rip-1927-2013/

Lots of great players teach or taught at William Paterson, such as Harold Mabern, but I believe most are adjuncts and don't have PhDs. Although at many schools even the adjuncts apparently have to have PhDs, those that don't are associates or something.

There does not appear to be a Steve Swallow thread on ILM, so I am going to post this interview link here. This is a really good interview and has a unique look into a few different jazz scenes and life of a musician of those eras. It also touches a bit on your education discussion too. Definitely worth checking out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZe7HoJhcIY

Rest well, Phil Schaap. Earlier this year, on the occasion of his @NEAarts award, @jazznight aired this profile, which Alex Ariff wrote and produced with a lot of feeling. ‘Bird Flights’ is just one part of what made Schaap such a legend. #RIP https://t.co/ngdqYNgdmc

— Nate Chinen (@natechinen) September 8, 2021

Also Pat Metheny is on the new ep of Questlove's podcast, it's good so far. I like that he describes himself as not a natural guitar player and requiring a ton of work, practice, and warming up to do his thing.

Jazz guitar…is kind of a crazy-making instrument.

RIP, Phil Schaap. It was always reassuring to see you at Dizzy’s, either inside the club or outside hawking your wares.

Haha, looking forward to hearing Pat Metheny explain how guitar is hard for him.

Not enough hours in the day to practice iirc

https://www.cp24.com/entertainment-news/royal-conservatory-of-music-renames-school-after-jazz-legend-oscar-peterson-1.5579087

Cool

NY Time excited about grandson musician Adam O’Farrill

If you pay close enough attention to jazz, Adam O’Farrill might have landed on your radar about a decade ago, when he was still an adolescent. His last name is immediately recognizable — his father and grandfather are Latin jazz royalty — but he stood apart even then, mostly by hanging back and letting his trumpet speak for itself.

Since his teens, O’Farrill has prioritized restraint, so that his huge range of inspirations — Olivier Messiaen’s compositions, Miles Davis’s 1970s work, the films of Alfonso Cuarón, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, the contemporary American-Swedish composer Kali Malone — could emulsify into something personal, and devilishly tough to pin down.

NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/arts/music/adam-ofarrill-stranger-days.html

Cool. Saw his brother Zach the other day.

Zach is in his band I see.

a Jazz Times article headline from 2019 said:
Adam O’Farrill Does Not Play Latin Jazz

Yeah they play together a lot. A friend of mine plays with them sometimes.

Pianist Christopher Parker To Release Soul Food CD Oct 29 via Mahakala Music, Ft. William Parker, Daniel Carter, Jamie Branch, Kelley Hurt & Gerald Cleaver

ABOUT THE ALBUM

This is the sound of an artist becoming what he is, manifesting what was inside him for a very long time. Of course, Christopher Parker is no newcomer to music. First mentored by pianist Charles Thomas (whose 1996 album The Finishing Touch! was recorded with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins), Parker has played piano and organ for over three decades in Little Rock, Memphis, New York, and now Little Rock again. But lately, all the musical choices he makes have been distilled down to what resonates on the most personal of levels. “The ideal is to mature and age in a way where you're ripening, rather than decaying,” he laughs, and that's at the heart of his debut album, Soul Food.

Parker has worked the genre known as free jazz for most of his musical life, or at least since the 1990's, when he bucked the conventions of music school at the University of Memphis (which features a long list of legendary jazz alums) by playing with the likes of Frank Lowe and George Cartwright. That was also when he met his wife-to-be, Kelley Hurt, a true artistic partner, whose voice, reminiscent of Jeanne Lee, graces this album with everything from whispers to wails.

In the years after, Parker kept playing, studying and teaching jazz, often with Hurt, and gained some local renown, but nearly five years ago a sea change came about: The couple was commissioned to write music celebrating the Little Rock Nine, heroic high school students who defied local segregationists in 1957, resulting in their No Tears Suite in 2017. That quickly led to the decidedly less-arranged free jazz outfit Dopolarians, where the couple joined Chad Fowler (Parker's old friend) and Kidd Jordan on saxophones, William Parker on bass, and the late, great Alvin Fielder on drums.

Suddenly, the floodgates of in-the-moment creativity within Parker opened like never before, as new projects for Fowler's Mahakala Music label followed in quick succession. In one lightning bolt of a week in New York, he and Hurt recorded both Nothing But Love, a tribute to Frank Lowe, and enough tracks for both Parker's debut, Soul Food, and its as-yet-unreleased follow up.

For Parker, a longtime gigging musician, something inside was stirred. “It was starting to happen when the Dopolarians recorded,” he says, “but I was still getting my mind together at that point. Then about a year later, the Dopolarians played in Memphis, and something clicked in my head, like I'd been waiting for years for it to happen. Soon after that, the world stopped because of a pandemic; I had time to think. And I said, 'Maybe your job on earth is not to play every week at local bars. Maybe that's not your ultimate purpose. You certainly did your time with it, but when are you gonna get down and make an artistic statement and just go there? Quit tiptoeing around it and BE IT.'”

For Parker, Soul Food is the most perfect statement of that impulse, precisely because it is the most personal. As Parker notes, “Kelley and I were friends with Art Jenkins, who sang with Sun Ra. And he used to tell us, 'When you make music, it comes from your inner spirit. People don't have any choice. They have an inner spirit too, and their inner spirit is going to recognize your inner spirit.' It's a moth to a flame kind of thing. It's gonna get a reaction, because your inner spirit is gonna speak to their inner spirit, and it's beyond the surface ego plane.” With those words to guide him, he pieced together the ensemble for Soul Food.

An ego-less approach brought spontaneity and flexibility to the sessions. “I picked the players I did on purpose. The first day was just me, Daniel Carter (winds), William Parker (bass, shakuhachi flute) and Gerald Cleaver (drums), and Kelley. It was a quartet with some vocals. We literally sat down and just started playing. No chord charts, nonothing. Daniel, for instance, only wants to improvise. When I realized that, I said, 'Okay, I 'm not going to be in charge of anything. I picked great musicians, so what do I look like telling them what to do, anyway?'

“Meanwhile, there was a Vision Festival going on in New York at the time, during which we ran into this woman, Jaimie Branch, and we just started hanging out together, not knowing who she was. Then it turns out she's this trumpet player who's on the gig we're going to see! So we asked her to play on the record and she came the second day. And those tracks make up Soul Food.”

The absolute freedom with which they play, accentuated by Hurt's intimate vocals, redefines freedom itself. This is not the freedom of chaos, but a freedom from within.Summing up, Parker reflects, “In the last three or four years, my music has been transforming into something more personal and meaningful. 'I'm gonna make this music with purpose.' Or, as Alvin Fielder used to say 'Buck naked.' We're going out buck naked. I'm not putting up a front. It's just me. And that's really hard to do. You have to avoid narcissism. And if you really tap into that inner spirit, you will affect people when they hear you play.”

https://soundcloud.com/user-751795786/morning-ritual/s-Y5q82URMUkC

https://soundcloud.com/user-751795786/guardian-angels/s-h4gOjldgVTR

Did yall catch Fresh Air's coverage of the Lee Morgan box? Oh shit, may have to give it up for this---ace comments & choice of excerpts by Kevin Whitehead---stream/download:
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/04/1043051663/trumpeter-lee-morgan-channels-coltranes-splashy-style-in-live-at-the-lighthouse

The two sample tracks from the Christopher Parker are cool - "Morning Ritual" more spacious and conversational, rich in timbral range; "Guardian Angel" more intense and frenetic.

I don't know how I heard about this record, but has anyone heard it? Sounds lovely to me.

https://danielcarternyc.bandcamp.com/album/friendship-lucid-shared-dreams-and-time-travel

That's great, the acoustic guitar/horn duet combo is really nice

Yeah, I bought it and am listening now, and some other pieces with flute are also really lovely. Feels very intimate and warm, great record imho!

Oh yeah, that's nice.

Nice loose sense of dialogue and play; pleasing timbres

I also was rather pleasantly surprised by this record, a recent one from Astral Spirits— Shocron's piano playing is particularly multi-faceted and wonderful. https://astraleltemplo.bandcamp.com/album/el-templo

Stay tuned... pic.twitter.com/yIf8wjQt6s

— Blue Note Records (@bluenoterecords) October 6, 2021

This looks promising, anyone know more about what this will be?