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cybot wrote: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).

fergus wrote:

cybot wrote: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).

Yes, I really like that image as well Dermot. I know absolutely nothing of the music however....as usual!!!

cybot wrote: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.)

Seán wrote: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

Seán wrote:

fergus wrote:

cybot wrote: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).

Yes, I really like that image as well Dermot. I know absolutely nothing of the music however....as usual!!!

Fergus, do yourself a favour and get a copy of the Miles Davis/Gil Evans Rodrigo Concerto CD, you won't regret it.

mcq wrote:



That's a really wonderful review of Sun Bear. The writer really gets inside the music - "emerging from the echoes of those last, dying, noble Valhallas of sound is a small, chanting voice" - almost sounds like Lester Bangs writing under a pseudonym. And, like all great reviews, it sends you scurrying out to buy it.

One writer who had the same effect on me was the late Richard Cook who co-edited The Penguin Guide to Jazz with Brian Morton for many years as well as editing The Wire. He was a man with broad and varied interests and who really knew how to channel his enthusiasm for the music into his writing.