I love the combination of Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver.
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Just back from the evening concert, Gould Trio, Robert Plane.....so an antidote in the form of Ray Brown Trio, 'Live at Scullers', great playing by Benny Green on piano, and this album has never sounded better than the Qobuz master on Telarc.Comment
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Some marvellous tenor ballad playing from Billy Harper on ‘Angel Eyes’ with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, live at Slug’s in August, 1968. Ronnie Mathews(piano) & Lawrence Evans(bass).
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Mal Waldron's 1950s output, but particularly "Mal 4" the trio on Prestige from 1958. This is probably the most "pianistic" I've heard him with that hallmark dark edge & tension always not far away. I really like this album - it's fast becoming a favourite up there with Mr Hope.
Here's "Get Happy" , Mal meets Bud and converses
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Alto saxophonist Monty Waters(1938-2008) with Yoshiaki Masuo(guitar); Ronnie Boykins(bass) & George Avaloz(drums) playing ‘The Black Cat’ recorded in 1975:
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The Individualism of Gil Evans.
Really impressed with my first listen to this, so ordered up a copy .
would like to have ordered a vinyl copy if nothing else for the lovely artwork, but they are silly prices .I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I am not a number, I am a free man.Comment
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I have been listening to some of the piano music by Frederico Mompou this week but feel that this Catalan composer has been seriously over-rated. He reminded me a lot of Erik Satie about whom I also feel ambivalent but there were times when I listened that I felt that the music seemed like a sketched out idea in need to some improvisation to take it further It is quite interesting when you encounter composed music like this and then contrast it with something that has been improvised yet which is far more sophisticated. At one point I was imagining how someone like Keith Jarrett would have taken this music and just how far he would have gone. After the second spin, I played some Paul Bley (The duet album "Notes" with Paul Motian) and the contrast seemed huge. Mompou is one of the first composers for piano that I have heard where I feel that the "less is more principle" does not hold up in the least.
It did get me thinking about the whole concept of being economical with notes and why, when improvised, this can be pithy and right on the money. When it happens with classical music, for the most part I am unimpressed. Pieces like Chopin's Preludes seem to nail this. Mompou, in my opinion, is a musical lightweight.Comment
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The answer might be in a quote from Beyond the Fringe. Peter Cook: "And now, Dudley Moore continues to play with himself...". There are various points in western musical history when composers retracted away from complexity in order to as it were re-calibrate from basics: Immediately following the death of JS Bach, who had taken contrapuntal complexity as far as had been possible, bringing the Baroque era to a cul-de-sac; John Cage and some of his associates in the 1930s who turned away from 12-tone composition to concentrate on the previously under-examined rhythmic and timbral aspects of music; Cornelius Cardew and the New Experimentalists (so-called) in the early 1970s under the influence of Zen Buddhism and then Maoist ideas. The Spanish composer Falla changed direction from the opulent Spanish nationalist with Impressionism style to a bare-boned Neo Classicism in the 1920s in search for a quasi-religious "purity" - I don't know if Mompou was part of that tendency, but it was very much of its time. Surely a large part of the interest in jazz lies in its real time improvisation with its give-and-take in the moment, which is attention grabbing in an entirely different way from how straight through composers seek to create variety through new means, and has little to do with density of information or profusion of notes being delivered?Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View PostComment
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Currently listening to "The Two-Headed Freap" by Ronnie Foster
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Sonny Rollins "Nows the time" with Herbie Hancock, from the RCA album of the same name, a long time favourite. Also the later extended "Alternatives" double album from the RCA sessions, for which Sonny successfully sued them and won advances, a flat fee and an injunction! Don't mess with Mr R!
I've AT LAST read "Saxophone Colossus", all 720 pages plus after looking at it for a long while. It is very good, exhaustive, detailed and harrowing on the fifties and it's drug related squalor. No glib romance there. Amazing that anyone made it through all that. No wonder Sonny is "eccentric"!
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Brother Jack McDuff - The Fourth Dimension....dig that grooveline!
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Robinson Khoury 'Broken Lines' live from Studio 104, Radio France. Just started.Originally posted by anorak View PostComment
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Team SaintOriginally posted by teamsaint View Post
When I first heard that album at the age of about 17 I was seriously impressed. The edition I was riginally familiar with had some quartet tracks with Jimmy Knepper which were supposed to be sketches for later arrangements which never materialised. Returning to this record later, I think that parts of it are exceptional but there are pieces like "Hotel Me" which look forward to the more improvised and less arranged music that appeared later and that linger on too long. "Barbera Story" always strikes me as one of Evans' most haunting scores although "Bilbao Song" from "Out of the cool" is by far the most radical arrangement Evans produced of Kurt Weill's music. For my money, "Barbera Story" is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, one of the most evocative tracks, "Las Vegas Tango" has some really rugged brass playing at the end where the interjections are not in time and there seem to be alot of wrong notes in there too. Once you are aware of it, it does take the shine off this chart - especially after Knepper's excellent solo. I do not feel the record companies gave Evans the studio time to correct all the flaws. Had they known then how reverred the recordings would be, I think they would let him get the music right. "Las Vegas Tango" could have been one of Evabs finest tracks .
The tracks "Concorde", "General Assembly", "Barbara Story" and "Spoonful" are sufficient reason to buy this disc. If you can get the unedited version of "Spoonful", that is a bonus. All in all, this is a must have Gil Evans recording and it is strange that the record was culled from so many recording sessions and not envisaged as a single production. I used to love Gil Evans and was uncritical of his work. "Individualism" is not totally cohesive yet it always makes me sad that so little followed on after this disc until "Blues in orbit" which is probably his worse studio effort. In my opinion, the only Evans records that are essential after "individualism" are "Svengali" and "Priestess." I love the Jimi Hendix record although it is very much of it;s time. "Individualism" stikes me that there was probably alot of great music that he could have recorded between the session on this record and "Blues in orbit.Comment
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AnroakOriginally posted by anorak View Post
Welcome to the board,
This CD was getting a lot of attnetion last year when Ronnie Foster released a new record. I am quite partial to the Blue Note organ groups and feel that they offer a fascinating parallel to alot of the then current Jazz Fusion. I like the fact that the are quite funky and suppose tjis kind of jazz is a guilty pleasure for me. It is curious how this stuff runs alongside bands like Earth , Wind & Fire or even Stevie Wonder's music of that time. I know SA often points out that the there was a kind of marriage between jazz and progressive rock in the UK during the 1960s an 70s in the UK which produce a kind of hybrid which was rock-influenced music which was musical enough for jazz fans to fine something of interest. By contrast, I think the albums like Foster's were attempts to maintain the relationship between jazz and Black popular music. It is a different approach to what was happening in the UK .Comment
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