Beyond the Fringe? Food for thought, Mister Pee Wee...

[Serial_Apologist]

Sat 15 August
5.00 Jazz Record Requests
[I]Alyn Shipton plays music by three contrasting trumpeters - Scottish traditionalist Alex Welsh, classical and jazz virtuoso Allen Vizzutti and New Orleans-born Henry Red Allen

http://www.alynshipton.co.uk/blog/

6.00 Jazz Line-Up
Claire Martin presents a special edition from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with music by pianist Darius Brubeck. Vocalist Alison Affleck performs music associated with Billie Holiday, and Corrina Hewat and Dave Milligan play a duo set for harp and piano.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065wv1v

I would imagine Darius Brubeck's name to have been in tribute to his dad's having studied with the French composer Darius Milhaud, who composed a foxy jazz-inflected piece in 1923 called La Creation du Monde, which has been much admired as an early piece of Third Stream, though personally I prefer his Provencal Rumb-ustious two-piano work Scaramouche:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ntH_2k-aSc

12.00 Geoffrey Smith's Jazz
A tribute to Oklahoma-raised clarinettist Pee Wee Russell (1906-69).

Lol Coxhill was a great Pee Wee fan.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065ww61.

Monday 17 Aug
11.00 Jazz on 3
A concert by Food at London's Village Underground during the 2014 Emulsion Festival. With Jez Nelson.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0505zfv

Ian Ballamy told an amusing anecdote about a bloke who came up to Django Bates at the end of a gig.
"Very nice - enjoyed that".
"Good"
"Our nipper's in the school orchestra. Clarinet. Went down the other night and heard them rehearse".
"Oh, what was it that they were playing?"
"That, erm... Holst. What is it? Ah yes - Planet of the Apes suite".

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

On JRR Big Bill Broonzy (with fruity tenor sax and jazzy fills from George Barnes) sings "Its a low down shame". He is obviously describing the Guardian's current drift ever rightwards.

Some nice stuff on JRR.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

Milhaud's "Scaramouche" and "La creation du monde" are amongst his most popular works and these area amongst the compositions that turned me on to his music. However, I think he was a bit uneven as a whole. You can find some interesting compositions (There is a piano piece based on "Frere Jacques" which has the treble in one key and the bass in another, for example.) but some of his work for piano is a bit ordinary. I love the orchestral stuff and am curious about his work as a whole yet I don't feel he was as good as Francis Poulenc who I believe is seriously under-valued.

Strange to think of the idea of a jazz harp. I have heard various efforts before and hated the results. There is probably no more unlikely instrument on which to play jazz as the sound is so pure and glass like. Still, the novelty value of it and Classical associations make it palatable for "Jazz Line Up." On the subject of instruments that as more closely associated with Classical Music than jazz, I discovered the violinist James Sanders on an album by the great avant-bassist Harrison Bankhead and have been hugely impressed. His playing obviously comes out of the Stuff Smith / Bill Bang approach although there is a lot of Ray Vance in his playing too. The track "Chicago Senorita" sounds like a cousin to Duke Ellington's "Limbo Jazz" on the "Meets Coleman Hawkins record. I have been very impressed. Sanders is a new name to me and someone who I feel should be more visible on the jazz scene. Still, given that the leader of the session and saxophonist Mars Williams are similarly under-appreciated, this is a small wonder. Bankhead has a curious habit of making whatever session he turns upon sound better. The album is called "Morning sun, harvest moon" and does get pretty way out on a number of tracks although it is firmly in the "Jazzrook" style of things.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

The Kenny Dorham album Jazz Contrasts (Riverside) has Betty Glamann on harp on a few sides. I don't think she solos but there's a knockout My Old Flame with Kenny and Sonny Rollins where she plays backgrounds.

Must be a bit tricky dragging a harp from gig to gig. Still, you could "sail it".

BN

[Serial_Apologist]

Milhaud's "Scaramouche" and "La creation du monde" are amongst his most popular works and these area amongst the compositions that turned me on to his music. However, I think he was a bit uneven as a whole. You can find some interesting compositions (There is a piano piece based on "Frere Jacques" which has the treble in one key and the bass in another, for example.) but some of his work for piano is a bit ordinary. I love the orchestral stuff and am curious about his work as a whole yet I don't feel he was as good as Francis Poulenc who I believe is seriously under-valued.

I agree in part, Ian. The main difference I think was that of the two Milhaud probably had the greater spontaneous talent, but rather blew it after thinking one could get away with composing in three simultaneous keys in the Piano Sonata and L'Homme et son Desir and therefore with six, thereby creating no more than impenetrable aural mush in his Te Deum, whereas Poulenc had more limited imagination and sense of risk but in the end greater finesse.

Strange to think of the idea of a jazz harp. I have heard various efforts before and hated the results. There is probably no more unlikely instrument on which to play jazz as the sound is so pure and glass like. Still, the novelty value of it and Classical associations make it palatable for "Jazz Line Up."

Depends of course on what you mean by "harp". When I first came across recordings on which Jack Bruce (for instance) was listed as on "harp" this seemed pretty improbable on a blues album. I wonder where and when the term "harp" originated as an alternative to harmonica.

[Serial_Apologist]

On JRR Big Bill Broonzy (with fruity tenor sax and jazzy fills from George Barnes) sings "Its a low down shame". He is obviously describing the Guardian's current drift ever rightwards.

BN.

Could also describe the consequences of a double-decker bus driver complying with "cost-saving" schedule changes by driving the shorter route under a low bridge.

(I'm sure this happens: "See how you can speed up the journey by cutting off a few miles")

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbL8M3wNxLc

[Serial_Apologist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbL8M3wNxLc

And, less we forget, The Missus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYLpz2HPk0U

- Debussy's Danses sacred and Profane on LSD?

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Go ask Alice....


"I like the sound of it. I would spend a lot of
time with the instrument, and I also wanted
to bring the harp out for John. It was his
idea and what he wanted. In fact, one
evening he was playing at the Village
Vanguard and we took the harp, so that was
kind of fun."
Did he like the harp?
"He said, 'I like the sound of it'. If at home
and it was by an open window, the breeze
coming in would cause the strings to sound
and he could hear the wind playing through
the strings. He liked it! The harp has to be
played with the fingers plucking the strings,
but it uses air and that's what I liked so
much about it."
So a harp and a saxophone aren't that far
apart.
"No. I think it's even closer, because with a
piano the notes meet with a mallet inside
and that meets with a string but it doesn't
breathe. It's such a wonderful instrument.
With the harp, maybe that's why we think of
heavenly things and divine things, because
we get that rush of the wind."

BN.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

JRR Banjo -- Gus Cannon! The first banjasta on BBC radio I like. Shades of John Lee Hooker's Boogie Chillun at the start....and hey, now here's Comrade Broonzy, "Yes Yes!"

BN.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And, less we forget, The Missus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYLpz2HPk0U

- Debussy's Danses sacred and Profane on LSD?

Alice Coltrane was married to Harpo Marx??!!!

Quite liked that piece, but the Harp part was a bit "uppy-downy", wasn't it? I preferred this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XNG7tmIQx4

[Ian Thumwood]

Can't say I'm a great fan of Alice Coltrane's work even if she is the "ultimate" jazz harpist. The comments about the sounds made by the wind blowing through the instrument is salient but the opposite side of the argument is that you can't bend and distort the string like you can with a guitar / violin / bass where there is a fret board involved. This is the one big failing with the piano as a jazz instrument where the "non-Classical" timbres have to be achieved more through the style of playing than the physical approach. Granted that there is a variety in the type of touch featured by pianists as diverse as Pete Johnson , Bill Evans or Don Pullen but the harp just sounds wrong. In the context of the clips, it still seems very much if the late 1960's. I like the solo effort best as there is an attempt to play overtones yet , out of context, it isn't great jazz and a bit repetitive. The same glissando is played time and time again. I'd be curious to hear someone comment on her technique. By all accounts, the harp is one of the most difficult instruments to play well . The overall effect is a bit like those Pharoah Sanders records from the late 60's and all that "astral jazz" malarkey.

I think the violin works far better in a jazz context but it has always had a life outside of Classical Music.

[charles t]

Saw Pee Wee Russell in a small group which included Gerry Mulligan...at Newport.

Pee Wee sounded very contemporary and was having a hell-of-a-time (exclm mark assumed)

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"astral jazz" malarkey." Yep, well put! I do get tired of shimmering bells and chants etc. And then there was the endless bass riff. I was listening to some earlyish Marion Brown records, very good, but a simple bass figure running unchanged for some twenty minutes. His hand must of been dropping off. For art.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

It must have been intriguing being a jazz fan around the last 1960s as, to quote John Surman recently, "the lid came off the music" but I think some of the freer stuff from that period hasn't always worn well. The music that came our of Coltrane seems to have fared worst in my opinion as the music actually became a lot simpler with the ubiquitous bass riffs and jamming on one chord. I've always thought it amusing that so many critics seemed to lump the Free Jazz of this era together, only really reserving separate categories for the likes of Jimmy Guiffre. I don't think the likes of Pharoah Sanders or Archie Shepp have much to do with the likes of Cecil Taylor who, like him or loath him, really got to the nub od free improvisation in the way that "Coltrane's angry brood" did not.

I must also have to say that I think most Free Jazz performed today is miles better that the music produced in the 1960's. The last CD I bought was by Harrison Bankhead and his music is just well beyond what the likes of Shepp and Sanders tried to do. I feel the same about the AEoC whose music sounds cohesive and structured and technically more sophisticated than the Coltrane disciples. It is a weird situation with people who emerged on the tail end of the 1960s like Oliver Lake, Hamiet Blueit, etc, etc being standard bearers for jazz nowadays whereas the generation of players like William Parker, Hamid Drake, Billy Bang, etc who established reputations in the 1980's have produced a body of work superlative so much Free Jazz of the 1960s. On top of that, I'm increasingly intrigued by the likes of John Carter who deserves a far better reputation that he does. I wouldn't trade anything by Parker, Bankhead, Bang, etc for Archie Shepp. The "Astral" stuff probably sounded good if you were on drugs but now seems like an embarrassing curiosity of the era like "Hair."