Tír Na HiFi

I've just been listening to two of Keith Jarrett's best albums - which also happen to be two of Jan Garbarek's best as well - Belonging and My Song. Glorious exercises in group empathy and simple melodic invention. What a tonic this must have been in the Seventies to all that formulaic jazz rock. And what grand form the man was in at this stage of his career - between 1974's Belonging and 1977's My Song, he also released his greatest solo statement, The Koln Concert (to which ECM owe so much), and another masterpiece, The Survivor's Song, with his U.S. band - absolutely immortal performances with not a note wasted. As much as I love the Standards Trio, I think ECM have just released too much material by this lineup and it's great to see Jarrett varying the format a little by releasing a duet album with Charlie Haden - hopefully there's more to come. I'd also like to see him work with a horn player again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXpPlBFG ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqVA8cO7ZY (Art Tatum would be proud of that solo!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn5r6KscagM&feature=fvw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdbBgjLv1s8

I have a lot of Keith Jarrett's including the 10 (!!!!) Lp set, The Sun Bear Concerts etc etc but I don't have either My Song or The Survivors Suite for the reasons you outlined above ie too much material... But what I have I'm very happy with. BTW what's the story about the piano used in the Koln set? As far as I remember it was somewhat faulty/out of tune....

"Think of your ears as eyes."

Here's Jarrett speaking about the Koln concert. I think it's from the documentary, The Art of Improvisation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9rTZLjBOfI

He refers to an unsatisfactory piano, but, like you, I heard reports about an out-of-tune piano and I think he's also mentioned at some stage having severe back pains during the concert. Whatever happened, he produced some outstanding music that night. There's another story that comes to mind about the great Cecil Taylor about a solo performance about his at Basel in Switzerland in 1981. The powers-that-be (cloth-eared philistines that they were) at the concert hall locked away the house grand that all visiting pianists regularly used and refused him access to it. Instead he had to resort to a rented, out-of-tune piano with which he had limited rehearsal time. The result was, in my opinion, one of his greatest performances and is immortalised on the classic live album, The Garden (available on Hat Hut). It's truly amazing what these guys can do in the face of adversity.

mcq wrote:I've just been listening to two of Keith Jarrett's best albums - which also happen to be two of Jan Garbarek's best as well - Belonging and My Song. Glorious exercises in group empathy and simple melodic invention.

I am in complete agreement.

mcq wrote:Here's Jarrett speaking about the Koln concert. I think it's from the documentary, The Art of Improvisation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9rTZLjBOfI

He refers to an unsatisfactory piano, but, like you, I heard reports about an out-of-tune piano and I think he's also mentioned at some stage having severe back pains during the concert. Whatever happened, he produced some outstanding music that night. There's another story that comes to mind about the great Cecil Taylor about a solo performance about his at Basel in Switzerland in 1981. The powers-that-be (cloth-eared philistines that they were) at the concert hall locked away the house grand that all visiting pianists regularly used and refused him access to it. Instead he had to resort to a rented, out-of-tune piano with which he had limited rehearsal time. The result was, in my opinion, one of his greatest performances and is immortalised on the classic live album, The Garden (available on Hat Hut). It's truly amazing what these guys can do in the face of adversity.

Great stuff Seán! Thanks so much for that, I'll look forward to listening to Keith's talk later...That's a lovely story about Cecil Taylor's piano and in my own experience it's so true - you do play better on broken down gear or perform better when you're really up against it. I fondly remember a broken down and cheap three string guitar that was used as a stage prop;Well, I had more fun with that yoke than anything good I ever had :-))

Right after Keith Jarrett, I reached for two of my favourite albums from one of the great tenor saxophonists of the last thirty years, David Murray - Ming and Home. Murray is a fantastic talent who is as comfortable in the mainstream as he is in the avant-garde and I think it's instructive that one of his biggest influences was the great Charlie Mingus who had a unique gift of mixing the old and the new.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g0tzdDgcgM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YvV6P6-9vM

And here's the great man's heartfelt take on the evergreen Body and Soul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2hdTVr_ZRU (Absolutely wonderful. The backing band is a bit too static and limp, but Murray is his usual mercurial self, as unaffected by his band as Eric Dolphy was when he was playing in Europe in the early Sixties with local pick-up bands. This would be even better solo.)

And here he is chuffing away on another standard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Dyg1Hf ... re=related

A great talent. I love to see the great performers absolutely possessed by their music, playing as if their lives depended on it.

Thought I'd share this with you lot.Hope it inspires you as it did me all those years ago and still does....






"There's an astonishing wealth of music here,much unlike anything Jarrett has done before or since.His grace,power,insight,majesty and sheer virtuousity were at their peaks in 1976, when this set was recorded at five concerts in five diferent Japanese cities.The self indulgence of Bremen/Lausanne is tamed, the Romanticism that offended so many hard boppers in the stupendous popular Koln Concert is cut with a new astringency, and the concerts flow with an undeniably organic seamlessness.
Nowhere is all this so evident as in the very first disc, Kyoto.here are 78 minutes of music with but a single break,the whole beautifully linked.Here's the tale Jarrett tells:

A mysterious,chromatically descending motiff sets a tone of awe and grief that evolves into a singing lament,then rises through melancholy to reverie,eventually surfacing on the rolling waves of Gospel syncopation,which quickly doubles on itself,the rhythm growing increasingly angular until it breaks through and takes over,driving the music into key after new key,finally virtually abandoning tonality,soaring ,rhythms and figures chasing each other,tumbling over and over like eagles furiously mating in flight.Then comes churning counterpoint,simultaneously ascending and descending melodies,wheels within wheels ,Jarrett's notorious ostinato left hand as active as his right.Gospel chords crash in from time to time,but the stressful stasis is finally unraveled by a single blue,lyrical thread that leads to a place of dusky rest,some local spirit singing an endlessly evolving melody whose final form is never and always stated.A chorus of of chorded elementals joins in at last,the key changes,and quiet,modal tribal chanting is visited by a simpatico,gone native anthropologist(who used to be a piano player called Bill Evans)taking over the lead in cascades of crstalline notes until he plays a folktune from home which gathers funk until it suddenly drifts apart into a silent shower of shooting stars piercing the barely there curtains of the aurora borealis,just as a rushing mountain stream,full of snow melt, suddenly overflows its banks and just as suddenly recedes.



Intermission




The concert's second half begins with polytonal irregularities,rhythmic cubism showing all sides of the beat at once.Through crashing chords and colliding rhythms Jarrett works works out a long,complex formula in the calculous of the soul,until,finally,an endlessly modulating tonality emerges:major,minor and diminished chords revolve in a kaleidoscope of inevitable conclusions,and I know at last what bob Dylan meant by "the chimes of freedom flashing". Then,following a peaceful moment of children's songs and lullabies after the high moral drama of warring musical eras,a graceful double waltz dances us back into church with swaying,sweaty Gospel that grunts and groans with the birth pangs of clean washed souls dropping the karma of centuries:music to work your heart out to.But finally the heart has learned its lessons the final time and is ready to get off the wheel of fate at last,or begin all over again.Jarrett rises through the sliding, intersecting realities between death and birth,passing the spirit of Gershwin eternally singing his white and black blues;Jarrett rises to the stars,their soft,hard,cols,tiny voices high and pure,driving the galaxy in slow spiral,around and round,running down and out,the great surround finally dying in alast paroxysm of tonal order - chords against chaos.But emerging from the echoes of those last dying,noble Valhallas of sound is a small,chanting voice - yes, the same mysterious,descending elegy with which this musical hejira began.and on the simpllest,gentlest of muted major chords,as much a prayer as performance,Jarrett's boat touches silent shore.



And that's just disc on. The four other concerts, if slightly less concentrated, as Jarrett explores more and more closely a smaller heap of of raw materials,are just as rewarding.The master tapes have not fared well over the years:there's print through,and the sound is somewhat dry,chalky,boxy:in louder passages the piano has an almost xylphonic character.In comparisons,the Lp's sound deeper (as usual) and the piano's middle register rings more clearly,cleanly bell like.
these days,now that it's digitised,The Sun Bear Concerts costs about $90.00.But even if I still made a mere $3.50 in now far less valuable bucks (1991),I'd go without lunches for this one.As recommended as they come. (R.L.)

Listening to this amazing Live in Sweden Lp circa 1970 with it's equally amazing cover (Cliff and Clouds,Cohab Canyon,Utah 1966 by Minor White).




George Russell: Piano
Jan Garbarek : Tenor saxophone
Stanton Davis :Trumpet
Terje Rypdal : Electric Guitar
A.Anderson : Bass
J.Christensen :Drums

I've been dipping into one of my favourite box sets tonight - Eric Dolphy's Complete Prestige Recordings. Basically, this contains most of the great man's work apart from his Blue Note masterpiece, Out To Lunch, and his classic recordings with Mingus.

First up were his 1960 recordings at the Five Spot with the sadly short-lived Booker Little on trumpet, Mal Waldron on piano and Ed Blackwell on drums. (What a line-up!) It's an absolute tragedy that Little died a few months later at the tender age of 23 - the empathy with Dolphy on one of the great versions of Like Someone In Love is uncanny. If I remember correctly, I believe Dolphy was distraught on learning about Little's passing - as well as the extraordinary musical empathy, the two men were great friends who had planned to continue to work together. Aside from that, there is a jawdropping solo bass clarinet version of God Bless The Child and stunning workouts on Little's Bee Vamp and Aggression and Waldron's Fire Waltz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFXF3FCOH4 (Part 1 of Fire Waltz)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6E7FXz8 ... =1&index=1 (Part 2 of Fire Waltz)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CjrbIkWQ68 (Part 1 of The Prophet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PChBKQViprk (Part 2 of The Prophet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YG5jMMQZgU (Part 1 of Bee Vamp)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0suFRPWZHlA (Part 2 of Bee Vamp)

And then I played Far Cry which stands as Dolphy's greatest solo statement before Out To Lunch and comprises Dolphy's glorious homage to Bird (Bird's Mother, Ode to Charlie Parker and the title track) as well as the incredible solo performance, Tenderly, which stands as one of the definitive moments of recorded jazz in my opinion and reaches back to Coleman Hawkins' classic version of Body and Soul whilst looking forward to Anthony Braxton's For Alto. And don't forget the wonderful contributions of Booker Little and Jaki Byard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH2tYTPJ ... re=related (a genuinely incredible achievement)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBUNepCY ... re=related (another wonderful performance - it's hard to believe that the flute was his third instrument after the alto sax and the bass clarinet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viiOyVDR ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd8p3cFT ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXlAuRt90KE (I love the interplay between Eric's flute and Booker's trumpet - just beautiful)

It's hard to believe how much he achieved in 1960. Remember, this was a man who only came to prominence while working with Chico Hamilton in 1958 before joining Mingus two years later. 1960 saw him record his first two solo efforts - Outward Bound and Out There - in addition to Far Cry, as well as an astonishing live album with Mingus at Antibes in France with Bud Powell guesting, some very significant studio albums with Mingus for the Candid label (including the classic Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus), and finally ending the year by recording the epoch-making Free Jazz with Ornette Coleman.


There are some absolutely cherishable things on YouTube. Here are some superb moments with Coltrane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUzFbT5JT1M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DED43jx8o8M (words fail me - music doesn't get much better than this)

And some immortal moments with the great Mingus 1964 touring band:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzqVXvwMHCU (perhaps my favourite version of Take The A Train - I think Jake Byard was feeling the spirit that night. I went through a phase once of collecting every show on their 1964 European tour. One of the truly great jazz bands.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzqVXvwMHCU (more from the 1964 tour - the classic Meditations on Integration)

And a classic solo performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYJ_4vSruog (nobody else can make the bass clarinet sing like Dolphy)

There really was something special about Dolphy and you see that in these videos. Not only does he have absolute respect from giants like Coltrane and Mingus but there is also a certain aura surrounding him as he plays but also as he sits quietly and listens to his fellow musicians. He was apparently a very humble man who never bragged about his considerable gifts and always encouraged other musicians. Look at Johnny Coles and Clifford Jordan gasping at his acievement but also take note of him listening to the same two musicians with the utmost respect - always learning and ears wide open. The man achieved so much in four short years and the music world is poorer for his absence.

mcq, it is lovely to read of your admiration for Eric Dolphy, I have always loved his work. At times, it feels like one (me) is ploughing a lonely furrow here until you happen along with these wonderful posts, well done and thank you.
Seán