Michael Cuscuna RIP at 75

[Serial_Apologist]

It seems that the Golden Age for jazz, much like that for Science Fiction, is 12.

I must have been a late developer!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I was surprised reading Peter King's autobiography, the age at which he started playing saxophone in his teens and gaining proficiency. The same with Dick Morrissey who used to show up for pub gigs wearing basically his school uniform. And I recently saw an old picture of Stevie Winwood playing guitar with his father's dance band at age c.13.

[Serial_Apologist]

I was surprised reading Peter King's autobiography, the age at which he started playing saxophone in his teens and gaining proficiency. The same with Dick Morrissey who used to show up for pub gigs wearing basically his school uniform. And I recently saw an old picture of Stevie Winwood playing guitar with his father's dance band at age c.13.

Apologies for lowering the tone, but I have a tape of John Gee talking about Phil Collins coming in during closing times to help arrange the chairs at the Marquee in shorts aged about 13 for a free entry, and Gee recalling telling Collins words to the effect "If you want to become a musician, fine; study to pass your O Levels and then you'll have something to fall back on when all else fails - says I to him!".

[burning dog]

10 can be THE age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir5-lPFWx_Y

[Serial_Apologist]

10 can be THE age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir5-lPFWx_Y

I 've always thought what Denardo did OK - whether that says anything about me, I've no idea! Certainly he became a suitable drummer for Prime Time.

Clark Tracey was 16 when he joined his dad's band. Stan would later say, "I had no idea that what I wanted all those years had been lurking in my loins".

[Ian Thumwood]

I bought two Moasics for by Dad. One was a collection of Buddy Ruich;s small group recordings from the 1960s which was hard work to listen to and the other was the first recordings by the new testament Basie band which was exceptional. i just feel that Basie's band of that era was exceptional and effecively blue-printed a standard "sound" as clearly as Miles' quintet did a decade later. Big band jazz was never the same after these records for Verve. However, i think that they were generally excessively expensive even if the care and attention put into them set the bar.

I am not sure how much I would agree that the music I listened to in my teens and twenties dictate my future tastes. I got into jazz when I was about 13 after hearing some records by Glenn Miller but had discarded this pretty quickly when I was introduced to the likes of Benny Goodman , Lionel Hampton and Count Basie by my Dad within about 18 months. By the tme I was 14 , I was exploring stuff my Dad had never listened to but I think getting into big band jazz had the advantage of making you curious as to what came before and the be-bop that followed. By the time I was 16 I was into Monk and then was obsessed by Gil Evans twelve months later. Gil Evans was key to getting me into contemporary jazz and, other than Blue Notes, I bypassed alot of the jazz from 50s and 60s in preference for what was happening in the current scene of the time. Evans also helped me explored classical music.

I would say that Bluenik's comments have a degree of truth but I think you tend to look back at those records differently. If anything, I am more open-minded about jazz although 70's fusion is still a blind spot for me and certainly more favourable about modern / mainstream. I liked the idea f music being shocking in the mid 1980s so missed out a lot of stuff which was more comfortable. In addition, I now listen to a lot more classical music than I have ever done in the past. I suppose I am more open-minded with the caveat that I thibk there has been a lot of jazz which has not aged well - 1980s ECM records being a good example. Those records more in the jazz tradition sound even better these days whereas some of the European stuff Eicher captured like Jan Garbarek's groups have not stood up at all well. Where I think most people here would agree is that the contemporary scene is pretty lightweight in comparison with the jazz being played even 30 years ago in the 1990s. Were the 1980s the last great decade for jazz? What would a future Michael Cuscuna issue from that time on Mosaic ?

[Serial_Apologist]

I bought two Moasics for by Dad. One was a collection of Buddy Ruich;s small group recordings from the 1960s which was hard work to listen to and the other was the first recordings by the new testament Basie band which was exceptional. i just feel that Basie's band of that era was exceptional and effecively blue-printed a standard "sound" as clearly as Miles' quintet did a decade later. Big band jazz was never the same after these records for Verve. However, i think that they were generally excessively expensive even if the care and attention put into them set the bar.

I am not sure how much I would agree that the music I listened to in my teens and twenties dictate my future tastes. I got into jazz when I was about 13 after hearing some records by Glenn Miller but had discarded this pretty quickly when I was introduced to the likes of Benny Goodman , Lionel Hampton and Count Basie by my Dad within about 18 months. By the tme I was 14 , I was exploring stuff my Dad had never listened to but I think getting into big band jazz had the advantage of making you curious as to what came before and the be-bop that followed. By the time I was 16 I was into Monk and then was obsessed by Gil Evans twelve months later. Gil Evans was key to getting me into contemporary jazz and, other than Blue Notes, I bypassed alot of the jazz from 50s and 60s in preference for what was happening in the current scene of the time. Evans also helped me explored classical music.

I would say that Bluenik's comments have a degree of truth but I think you tend to look back at those records differently. If anything, I am more open-minded about jazz although 70's fusion is still a blind spot for me and certainly more favourable about modern / mainstream. I liked the idea f music being shocking in the mid 1980s so missed out a lot of stuff which was more comfortable. In addition, I now listen to a lot more classical music than I have ever done in the past. I suppose I am more open-minded with the caveat that I thibk there has been a lot of jazz which has not aged well - 1980s ECM records being a good example. Those records more in the jazz tradition sound even better these days whereas some of the European stuff Eicher captured like Jan Garbarek's groups have not stood up at all well. Where I think most people here would agree is that the contemporary scene is pretty lightweight in comparison with the jazz being played even 30 years ago in the 1990s. Were the 1980s the last great decade for jazz? What would a future Michael Cuscuna issue from that time on Mosaic ?

I would think that reminiscence expresses well our differences as defined by generation, Ian. Where my own induction into jazz was anomalous for the era (early 60s) was that I had been brought up a musical snob, my mother (b. 1905) having been trained as a classical pianist and for teaching, gaining her LRAM in 1926, and my dad (b.1908) brought up on the Classical and Romantic composers such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner and Elgar. He was curious enough about modern classical music to listen to it on what was then the Third Programme and tape it for me to hear whenever I went home, but to him jazz meant Ambrose and Lew Stone and he saw big band Swing in the 30s as dance music, earlier New Orleans and Chicago as being what jazz was, jazz not being a serious but an entertainment music, so anything from Bebop on was either not jazz because it was "serious", or it was jazz pretending to be something else, he was not sure what! The boys older than me were into a mixture of Trad, Mainstream (eg Humph), 30s Big Band Swing, Boogie-Woogie and the beginnings of R&B popularity in Britain, eg Ray Charles and Fats Domino; those my own age listened endlesssly to the dire hit parade pop of the time, and slightly younger were soon picking up on Merseybeat, the Animals and Stones. The small school group of about ten of us were into Bebop, Hard Bop, some 50s Cool School (but NOT Brubeck and only the earliest MJQ), and we took Monk, Mingus, Coltrane and Dolphy on board as the records eked slowly out of the shops, each Trane LP being a lesson in how jazz was progressing, although Ornette Coleman was a total shock when we first heard it, and maybe only one or two of us "got" it - I was certainly not one, at the time. Jazz was one of my alternatives to pop, the other becoming acquainted with modern classical music mainly through the Third Programme and attending the Proms after moving to London and working there. I made the error of abandoning free jazz in the late 60s when I envisioned it as merging with avant-garde classical music (Stockhausen etc) or the experimental rock of the likes of Soft Machine, which I was interested in at the time. But all that went out of the window by about 1972 due, first to working long exhausting hours, then to engaging in left wing political activism. it wasn't until the late 70s, when one of the comrades in the political group popped up with LPs of John Surman, Frank Zappa, and Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill, that I re-engaged with the music, fully committing to it in the early 1980s around the same time you were first getting into it, and in the same areas of the music. I then continued following 2oth century classical music in parallel, so my interests in that area date back to the experimental 60s, when Schoenberg and 12-tone serial music were still very much "in the air" and shaping my openness to new sounds and forms in both musics.