... particularly nasty weather

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

JLU

Claire Martin interviews award winning pianist Neil Cowley and profiles his brand-new trio recording 'Touch and Flee'

Geoffrey does King Oliver - the sheer idleness of this production team is astounding - never any pbi [jlu manages it]


Jon3 goes nostalgic with a Loose Tubes Reunion Gig in which they play newly commisioned works


Alyn has previewed JRR here for which many thanks

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

clip from the Loose Tubes Gig - an extra track in fact

[Alyn_Shipton]

Re this week's GSJ, farbeit from me to criticise my Radio 3 colleagues, but I'd suggest if you want a taste of King Oliver's best work, sample the Jazz Library playlist. GSJ seemed to miss out the critical post-Creole Jazz Band stages in Chicago, and many a lovely recording. I played this music all over Europe for several years with Butch Thompson's King Oliver Centennial Band (we even have a CD on Jazzology) and the Jazz Library was done with Keith Nichols who knows the stuff backwards and inside out. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008xjcz
Sadly this was not one of the editions that made it on to the downloadable list of Jazz Library episodes.

[Ian Thumwood]

Alyn

Oddly enough I can well remember the Jazz Library edition on King Oliver as I was so staggered by the performance with Eddie Lang and Hoagy Carmichael that I sat outside in the car waiting before the music finished before I went inside. I was absolutely hooked by this record. The music was mesmerising and I was prompted to get hold on this cd. The line up seems so incongruous and bizarre that anyone's interest would have been piqued - luckily, all the recordings transpired to be real gems. Being previously unaware of these recordings and discovering something so perfect remains for me one of the real appeals of listening to jazz. In my opinion Sonny Rollins was right about jazz is the sound of surprise but I often think this is not just from the improvisatory but from the sheer, unexpected combinations and material that the music so frequently offers.

Funnily enough, working at home last night I put on a record on Freddie Keppard's recordings which I haven't listened to for a very long while. Keppard played in the Original Creole Jazz Band and I've always imagined him as a precursor to Oliver even though Jelly Roll Morton is alleged to have been more enthused by Keppard. Both players seem a bit under-whelming on record as they are almost defeated by the acoustic recordings - even where they've cleaned up under modern techniques. I've always been suspicious of these recordings as an accurate record of what both musicians were about and whilst Oliver may have been eclipsed by Armstrong, the Keppard tracks and the Creole JB recordings of 1923 don't square up with how I imagine Keppard and Oliver must have sounded in a live situation. There is something a bit crude about both of their approach. Keppard's finest moment was "Salty dog" and I must admit that the later recordings of Oliver on something like "Wa -wa-wa" better capture my perception of what Oliver's fee-booting style might have sounded like in the flesh. Listening to both musicians makes me wish that Edison had pulled his finger out and invented a decent sound recording system much earlier.

I will have to give GSJ a listen.

[Alyn_Shipton]

Ian
IMHO Keppard's best is not Salty Dog but Stock Yards Strut. Give it a listen...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

[Alyn_Shipton]

Calum, They don't appear to have gone mouldy yet...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

.... funny i was just thinking that about Loose Tubes ...

[Ian Thumwood]

Calum

It is strange to think these days of recordings made in the early 1920's as being derided as something mouldy. The music is nearly 90 years old so that any musicians or fans who heard this music being performed live will have long since died. It is really difficult to understand the context in which musicians would have performed and an audience have listened to this music in 2014 and, given the way that jazz has become increasingly sophisticated in the ensuing decades, it can seem crude and primitive. However, I would have to defend this music and totally reject the notion of anything "mouldy fig" about it because to appreciate why it was so radical you need to understand what the music was like that preceded it.

There is a fantastic book called "The pioneers of jazz" by Lawrence Gushee which carries out an almost archaeological assessment of the Original Creole Jazz Band of which Keppard was a member. This was a band which tended to be part of a vaudeville review but which was influential enough to have spawn a number of imitators prior to the close of the second decade of the 20 century. For me, the likes of Keppard and Oliver were creating something new and exciting as well as producing a style of music which was a shocking as Stravinsky in it's departure from what had been performed in the preceding decades. I feel that Keppard and Oliver acted as precursors to a more widespread movement with blues whereby black identity started to manifest itself in musical styles that would have been available to American and European audiences. Socially and musically Keppard and Oliver were part of a new movement that blasted away European conventions within music so that popular music was forever transformed and formal, Classical composition found itself looking towards jazz is it wanted to remain relevant.

Setting aside my passion for history and the fact that it is easy to be under-whelmed with this old, acoustic recordings if we are not careful, I think to describe this stuff as "mouldy fig" is too simple and dismisses the radical nature of this music which soon achieved musical perfection within little more than a decade of first making itself apparent of record. What is interesting is that most of the celebrated Modern Jazz celebrated on this board remains closer from a chronological point of view to Keppard than to more contemporary styles. I would also have to argue that elements of folk music and blues have a huge part to play in a lot of Modern Jazz so that you could argue quite accurately that some works by the likes of Horace Silver, Charlie Mingus , Albert Ayler, Lester Bowie, etc are closer to the likes of Keppard that you might like to admit. In my opinion, this is a good thing. Compositions like Silver's "The Preacher" sound to my ears no more sophisticated than Oliver's work and the same can certainly be said for Ayler's idiosyncratic music. I even feel that Ornette Coleman has really tapped in to the earthiness of earlier blues in his music - his music sounds no less organic to me than Charley Patton. (To make it clear, I love both of these musicians. ) An understanding of the earlier styles of jazz is very helpful when it comes to a very good proportion of the better types of Modern Jazz / Contemporary Jazz, etc. I don't think the ideas of being "modernist" really apply anymore and whilst you can dismiss the idea of bands who play in this style as being "Trad", those contemporary players who pursue a more European aesthetic can sound compromised in comparison with those jazz musicians who take recognizance of Oliver and his ilk. (Stephen Scott, for example.) It is also worth pointing out that Wayne Shorter's music will no doubt no longer seem quite as radical as it does now to future generations, for example.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

er as Alyn noted the figs are fresh; but have an anatomical appearance no?

as matter of fact i like much very early jazz music, but Oliver never quite cut it for me whereas Armstrong Lewis Bechet most certainly do [or indeed the Chicagoans] .....the mould was British ... Ian you were never in the Town Hall in 1959 surrounded by leaping duffel coats waving pipes and pints with the banjo on full auto thud plunk

[Ian Thumwood]

Calum

I share your lack of enthusiasm for Trad but would differential between earlier , authentic recordings from the 1920s as well as more thorough and accurate assessment of that style. I think Colyer got it right but today there are plenty of bands like the Fat Babies who can still play in a more traditional style yet with a fire and belief that sounds authentic.

It's strange that I'd agree with you regarding Armstrong and Bechet yet I can't abide George Lewis. Much prefer the later bands of Kid Ory which have a relaxation and panache about them that is hugely enjoyable.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Calum

I share your lack of enthusiasm for Trad but would differential between earlier , authentic recordings from the 1920s as well as more thorough and accurate assessment of that style. I think Colyer got it right but today there are plenty of bands like the Fat Babies who can still play in a more traditional style yet with a fire and belief that sounds authentic.

It's strange that I'd agree with you regarding Armstrong and Bechet yet I can't abide George Lewis. Much prefer the later bands of Kid Ory which have a relaxation and panache about them that is hugely enjoyable.

Albert Nichols et Johnny Dodds.There is a wonderful clip of Roland Kirk (Switzerland?) where he goes into full Dodds mode.... and not as parody.

B..