Tír Na HiFi

Seán wrote:

fergus wrote:

At a recent session with Fran he played extracts from the above and I orderd it the next day. I was very taken with it altogether.

WOW Fergus, I am really delighted to hear it. Duke Ellington wrote wonderful music throughout all of his life and his suites are his finest creations, I feel. The Shakespearean Suite is truly wonderful music-making and was well recorded too. In fact, it was the first time the Ellington Orchestra were recorded in stereo but the LP was originally released in mono. There are many more wonderful Ellington recordings available, you might even enjoy his sacred music too.

Do please let us know what you make of his music. If you do enjoy it then you will probably enjoy his New Orleans Suite. He has been my hero ever since I was in my teens.

Seán wrote:

mcq wrote:

Glorious music this morning with the ever-adventurous Max Roach improvising with the great Anthony Braxton on Birth and Rebirth in 1979. Braxton has been one of the truly great musician-composer-thinkers in jazz over the past 40 years, furiously and passionately committed to developing the music as an original art form beyond the cultural stasis that was jazz-rock and the revisionism represented by Wynton Marsalis. To hear him play his alto sax is one of the great joys of life, like an amazing melange of Warne Marsh and Eric Dolphy, but always pushing outwards from these influences and forging his own identity. As profoundly interested in philosophy and mathematics as he is music, his recordings are truly inspirational to me. The learning curve may be steep but the rewards are immense. The great Max Roach is with him every step of the way on these free improvisations that never fail to touch me to my very soul.

Here's a sample:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcJ1pg4UUv8

I have not given much time to Marsalis and his pontifications on Jazz, his musings bore me to be honest. When his group exploded on to the Jazz scene in the late seventies they took the world by storm, but once he parted company with his brother Branford in the early eighties I felt he lost his way and I lost interest in him. The Marsalis brothers did play a fabulous concert in the Cork Opera House in 1981, I remember it well.
I was never fond of Anthony Braxton and "Free Jazz", I always found it too intense and devoid of any beauty, but that's me, I know that some people love it. I even attended an Evan Parker gig in London in an attempt to discover what I was missing....at the time, I was sorry I did.
On an entirely separate note I have to say that I love Eric Dolphy's music-making, his was a tragic loss.