Jazz - What's your bag, man?

[cybot]

Yeeaahh, I knew I had some Larry Young!! The first one is a loose collaboration Jimi did with him (on one track only) and still not available on CD! The other one features the cut 'Street Scene' from 'Mother Ship'.Both Lps from 1969... Must have a listen to the Jimi jam later...Also, listening to the Jazz compilation I was continually struck by the contributions of mostly unknown (to me) guitarists - Jimmy Ponder,Malcolm Riddick,Willie Jones etc etc

[mcq]

I have the day off work today so I've been taking it easy and playing some great music.

I've been listening to some of my favourite Grant Green today - Idle Moments and Feelin' the Spirit. In my opinion, Grant Green is one of the great jazz guitarists. He did many fine things for Blue Note as both leader and sideman. Perhaps my favourite album of his is Idle Moments, but I also love Street of Dreams, Born to be Blue and the underrated Feelin' The Spirit (great version of Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child). There's also a fantastic 2-CD set (The Complete Quartets With Sonny Clark) that gathers together the three sessions which Green recorded with pianist Sonny Clark and which is also a personal favourite. And, as for his recordings as a sideman, he appeared on Lee Morgan's finest album, Search For The New Land, Hank Mobley's fine Workout (which is second only to Soul Station) and Ike Quebec's Blue and Sentimental (simple, straightforward blues workouts of a particularly heartfelt intensity).

[mcq]

Right after Grant Green, I reached for some of my favourite Ornette Coleman, At The Golden Circle, recorded in 1965 at a club in Stockholm. Great music, great band. Aside from Ornette's bluesy alto sax, you also hear a lot of his work on trumpet and violin - the latter instrument is employed primarily for texture - on this album. Charles Moffatt is a wonderful drummer, very much playing in the same spirit as Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins on the classic Atlantic recordings, and David Izenzon is one of the most interesting (but sadly under-recorded) double bassists I have ever heard. One of my favourite performances on this set (and, indeed, one of my favourite of all Ornette performances) is the beautiful Morning Song which begins with Ornette alone on alto, and then Izenzon comes in with his bowed double bass figures and finally Moffatt underpins this with drumming of the greatest sensitivity. The trio works on an extraordinarily telepathic level of communication throughout this album - there are some amazing duets beween Ornette and Izenzon and Moffatt and also between Izenzon and Moffatt which seem to emerge naturally from the music.

Coleman has always struck me as jazz's quiet revolutionary. This is a deeply cerebral man who has fully absorbed Parker's, Gillespie's and Monk's contributions to jazz and assimilated their influence into a very personal response to the music. There is nothing demonstrative or violent in his playing - which remains melodic and blues-based - but his primary achievement was in his radical approach to harmony and rhythmic structure. Perhaps his most daring move was the exclusion of the piano from his bands which immediately dislocates the listener and raises the profile of the bassist beyond a mere time-keeper. (Ornette obviously listened long and hard to Sonny Rollins' classic Night at the Village Vanguard sessions which remain an instructive reminder of how many bandleaders rely on the piano as a harmonic crutch and how strange the music becomes if you remove the piano from the mix - regardless of how tonally conventional the music may be otherwise.) Another important innovation was the concept of collective improvisation which represents a departure from traditional solo-based improvisation. One of his greatest expressions of this remains Free Jazz with its duelling double quartet and whose influence was probably only really assimilated fully by John Coltrane who developed and extended this approach quite a few degrees further on 1965's extraordinary Ascension. It continues to strike me that - very much like Thelonious Monk - Coleman's achievements are reguarly taken for granted without being fully understood. And, to do just that, we must go back to the music again and again.

[cybot]

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Ornette and his band, Paul; The only Coleman I have is 'Song X' which I still haven't got around to listening to properly.The only other jazz name I recognise is Billy Higgins; I'm sure I have a few albums he contributed to but two particular albums stand out and I'm wondering have you ever heard them? He plays on multi - instrumentalist Sandy Bull's first two albums (Fantasias for guitar and banjo and Inventions for guitar,oud, electric guitar and electric bass); He features on two side long tracks on both albums called Blend and Blend 2 which are mesmerising pieces, in particular, Blend features a ridiculously simple but unbelieveably tight drum solo which has to be heard!
As regards Grant Green I was always led to believe that he wasn't much use. Thanks for the tips :-)

Finally, speaking about favourite bassists - what's your opinion on Jenny F Clarke and Barre Philips? They feature on two favourite ECM albums Le Voyage (with Paul Motian and Charles Brackeen - a fabulous saxophonist in the mould of Pharao Sanders) and Journal Violone 2 (with John Surman and Aina Kemanis)...

[mcq]

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Green wasted his talent on soul-jazz. These, unfortunately, are the recordings which people think of when they hear his name but there's more to him than that. I haven't heard of Sandy Bull but he sounds an interesting talent. Billy Higgins is a legend among jazz drummers - he could enliven the dryest of performances. His last recordings are on two excellent albums by Charles Lloyd - The Water is Wide and Hyperion to Higgins - and shows a 65-year old man's powers undimmed by time.

I have heard Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark name-checked many times but I haven't yet heard his work.

I have heard Barre Phillips, however. One album I keep meaning to pick up is his session with Derek Bailey, Figuring, which I've heard is a real meeting of minds). I'm convinced that sometime/somewhere I heard one of his solo bass recordings and was very impressed. His career has turned out to be rather more interesting than his near-contemporary, Dave Holland.

Oh, and Song X is a great album and a very brave one for Metheny, as indeed is his album with Derek Bailey, Sign of Four.

[cybot]

Just back from the garden! Read your reply Paul and you mentioned Derek Baily. I have some of his stuff but not the important jazz albums.Still what I have I'm happy with! There's an unusual one he did with a Japanese dance artist in a disused forge somewhere in Paris! During one of the pieces you can hear the torrential rainfall on the leaking glass roof!(Music and Dance - on Revenant). Another one features him duelling, in more ways than one, on electric guitar with another unusual guitarist Noel Akchote in a live setting (Close to the Kitchen - on Rectangle). This is just unbelievable and just shows what two electric guitars are capable of in the hands of two masters.... Another one features him with David Sylvian on his Blemish album.
He certainly got around!
Incidentally I believe Derek was so devoted to improvisation that he actually said that '...symphonic music and chart pop suffer from the same malaise - predictability'.

[Ivor]

I ordered this from Play.com today on a friend's tip-off.

http://www.play.com/Music/CD/4-/3478652 ... oduct.html


€16.99 for all five albums? Sur' I'm savin' money sweetheart.

[Derek]

Vying for top slot for the best sounding CD ever in my system

Possibly because of the following I seen on the back cover:

The classic Blue Note albums which span the mid 1950’s to late1960’s were recorded directly on to two track analog tape. No Multitrack recording was used and consequently no mixing was required.
Therefore, this CD was made by transferring the one step analog master to digital.


Grant Green "Feelin' the Spirit"




From the original liner notes: "Green has made no attempt here to recreate the five spirituals he plays in anything resembling their original context, nor has he tried to duplicate their often pallid manifestation on the concert stage. He has approached them with affection, but as music to be played in his style. The result is a fascinating combination: the techniques of modern jazz, blues, and gospel, all applied to the spiritual." - Joe Goldberg

Track listing

1. "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" - 7:25
2. "Joshua Fit De Battle OB Jericho" - 8:00
3. "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" - 6:05
4. "Go Down Moses" - 7:25
5. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" - 9:00
6. "Deep River" - 8:53

[Seán]

I ordered this from Play.com today on a friend's tip-off.

http://www.play.com/Music/CD/4-/3478652 ... oduct.html


€16.99 for all five albums? Sur' I'm savin' money sweetheart.

WOW, that's an excellent find Ivor, well done. You have a few real beauties in there: 'Ellington Uptown' starts with Skin Deep Dukes first drum feature and was written for Louis Bellson. This album also contains one of my favourite of all Ellington pieces his tone poem: A Tone Parallel to Harlem. The CD 'Such Sweet Thunder' is Duke's and Billy Strayhorn's tribute to Shapespeare, it's a superb album, it was recorded in 1957 and for an Ellington recording is really well recorded too. It was the first time that the orchestra was recorded in stereo the producer was the classical music producer at Columbia records. 'Black Brown & Beige', is gorgeous, I assume that Mahalia Jackson is on that CD and it was recorded in 1956. The 'Anatomy Of A Murder' recording is from 1959 and is from the Hitchcoock movie of the same name and 'First Time! The Count Meets The Duke' is a real battle of the bands from 1961 (Dave bought it recently too). Anyway, I hope that you enjoy them, I have them all and really love them. Only for Duke Ellington I would have given up on music in my tender teens.

[Ivor]

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy them, I have them all and really love them. Only for Duke Ellington I would have given up on music in my tender teens.

While I have a few Duke albums already I didn't have any of these. Perfect.