Even a Ghost of a Trance

[Serial_Apologist]

Sat 23 Nov

Note the performance of Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music on Saturday's New Music Show (10.30pm), plus an interview with upcoming octogenarian Wadada Leo Smith:

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

Sun 24 Nov

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

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00253c4

Mon 25 - Fri 29 Nov

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00253br

Friday's Late Junction (10pm) includes "a newly released lost recording of pianist Thelonious Monk played live in Paris in 1966".

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Re Chris Barber/Ottilie Patterson, "It won't be long", JRR.

Aretha Franklin, "Won't be long" 1960/1 pre Atlantic Her original version, a big "hit" on French "teen" radio at the time. Could be Ray Bryant on piano or highly possible Aretha herself. Classic.

http://youtu.be/_-ZhIuGTzMU?si=Na5cpnQoE9ZSPRus

[Quarky]

Tonight's Concert Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra
seems to have escaped the radar. Currently enjoying it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00253hl

[Serial_Apologist]

Tonight's Concert Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra
seems to have escaped the radar. Currently enjoying it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00253hl

Indeed - completely overlooked by me! Thanks for posting the link - I'll listen to that tomorrow.

[Quarky]

Thanks S_A.
Denys Baptiste on tenor was very good, I thought. He substituted for Camilla George on alto - not sure how that might have worked.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Just catching this, many thanks.

From the pieces I've heard so far, much better than I suspiciously suspected! Not sure the string arrangements add all that much but so far they are not too intrusive. And Denys Baptist is as noted above really excellent, not attempting to mimic Coltrane which is again what I feared.More like Dexter.

One to tape!

[Serial_Apologist]

Just catching this, many thanks.

From the pieces I've heard so far, much better than I suspiciously suspected! Not sure the string arrangements add all that much but so far they are not too intrusive. And Denys Baptist is as noted above really excellent, not attempting to mimic Coltrane which is again what I feared.More like Dexter.

One to tape!

Oh dear - really not enjoying this at all, apart from Denys's omni dependent tenor this would have been a wasted couple of hours, and a lot of dosh had one gone along! Nikki's quartet completely boxed in for most of the concert by over-the-top orchestrations until the heavenly relief of them laying out. Just because you've been granted a symphony orchestra doesn't mean you have to use it all the time whenever on - surely arrangers should by now have learned about contrast and creating textural space from Debussy, Ravel, Mahler, yes, Duke Ellington and Gil Evans for god's sake. This seems to have been dreamed up by management committee as an excuse for inexperienced to indulge power trips. Poor Giveton Gelin, reduced to noodling most of the time by overshadowing and squashed completely flat at the end of Trane's Crescent. Inflated bombast on steroids and an excess of Hermesetas - nothing whatever to do with jazz.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

This is from Richard Williams' Blue Moment blog review of the date, which he was at, and which he said, bordered on light music at times. I still think Baptiste came out of it well. I see he played a Coltrane tribute at
Bristol's St George last week as a duo with Gary Crosby. Maybe more appropriate.

".. In terms of the response from a full house, it was a great success. But there was one moment when the music went deeper, closer to what Coltrane was really about, and it came in the arrangement of “Alabama” by Carlos Simon, a composer in residence at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, and the principal begetter of this project.

“Alabama” is Coltrane’s most sacred song, a slow, heavy hymn to the memory of the four African American schoolgirls murdered by racists in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. Simon chose to orchestrate it in the way Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner might have done, had it been written in time for inclusion in 1961 in Coltrane’s first Impulse album, Africa/Brass, on which Dolphy and Tyner made dramatic use of low brass.

Here, Simon added trombones and French horns, using tympani and a gran cassa to augment Shane Forbes’s mallets on his tom-toms, thus amplifying the effect of Elvin Jones’s original rolling thunder behind Baptiste’s emotionally weighted statements of the rubato theme. Like the tenorist’s extended but carefully shaped solo on the in-tempo passage, it honoured not only Coltrane’s memory but his intentions, and will be worthy of special attention when Radio 3 broadcasts the concert later this week"