What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Stanfordian]

‘Headin’ South’
Horace Parlan with George Tucker, Al Harewood & Ray Barretto
Blue Note (1960)

[Jazzrook]

Wonderful footage of Sonny Rollins & Don Cherry with Henry Grimes & Billy Higgins playing '52nd Street Theme' in 1963(?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_U0yHKavn0

JR

[Ian Thumwood]

Wonderful footage of Sonny Rollins & Don Cherry with Henry Grimes & Billy Higgins playing '52nd Street Theme' in 1963(?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_U0yHKavn0

JR

That track is brilliant.

It is weird to hear Don Cherry in this context as the most striking thing about his playing is his intonation as opposed to more outside playing. He is a player that I have mixed feelings about as he can be compelling when on form but is sometimes a bit unpredictable. The track is a storming performance but it sounds really orthodox and straight ahead. The shock value has diminished and this just seems to make the music easier to appreciate nowadays.

[Serial_Apologist]

That track is brilliant.

It is weird to hear Don Cherry in this context as the most striking thing about his playing is his intonation as opposed to more outside playing. He is a player that I have mixed feelings about as he can be compelling when on form but is sometimes a bit unpredictable. The track is a storming performance but it sounds really orthodox and straight ahead. The shock value has diminished and this just seems to make the music easier to appreciate nowadays.

Cherry was much more versed in bebop orthodoxy than Ornette - which is why his mastery of Coleman's concepts is to be regarded as the achievement it really was.

[Ian Thumwood]

Cherry was much more versed in bebop orthodoxy than Ornette - which is why his mastery of Coleman's concepts is to be regarded as the achievement it really was.

I think Cherry was more of an eccentric and his approach to music was broad enough to go beyond jazz. He is one of those players who can be very much the icing on the cake with a performance and not that compelling on others. I suppose I like him best when he is the odd-man-out in a group or where what he is produced is against the orthodoxy.


I never saw Cherry as a player who came out if be-bop so the video was a surprise for me. I have no idea what he did before working with Ornette who similarly seemed to come out of nowhere with a unique concept. Oddly enough, I can still see the elements of bebop in Ornette's playing and you can still find the "building bricks" ideas of building a solo which is not too dissimilar to how Sonny Rollins went about improvising. Wondered if you had heard any of the Cadona stuff which seems to me to be more typical of Cherry's work? There is a terrific album by Don Cherry called "Art Deco" which is very much in the Ornette feel of things but I think this more straight forward stuff was only one string to his bow.

One of the things that I find sad about the current jazz scene is that the kind of experimentation that ECM produced in the 70's and 80's was fun. All the humour seems to have gone from that label and it is difficult to imagine them releasing something like this which is probably far removed from jazz but a lot of enjoyable than the rather dour stuff they release these days. Not sure what you call this music !!

[Ian Thumwood]

Just going to sit down and watch this film as I am so fed up with football.

This has got to be one of the best film scores ever - a cracking Western too featuring Mr Monkey Scrotum Facelift himself. The music was written by Jerry Goldsmith who was a brilliant composer for film and someone I believe who cut his teeth with big bands in the 1950's.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

If you listen to the Ornette and Cherry's Hillcrest live recordings* (the Paul Bley Quintet), at times it's almost like a Charlie Parker airshot. Ornette may not have had the (orthodox) chops but he had certainly listened. As for Cherry, he was the one that got the first attention, he played Canada with George Newman and was quite regarded, just pre Ornette. There are also bits on Ornette's first official album, "Something Else", where he is forced, or pushed by the piano, into playing more conventionally, and doesn't seem too pleased. A good Ornette story is a bemused Dexter Gordon going up to the Paul Bley band at the Hillcrest and saying, " Do you guys play any standards?" "Embraceable You? "Yeah, that was that last number we just played".

* Paul Bley apparently had a load more of the Hillcrest stuff on tape but they were never issued because Ornette never got paid for the first tranche.

[Stanfordian]

‘Blue’s Moods’
Blue Mitchell with Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones & Philly Joe Jones
Riverside (1960)

[Serial_Apologist]

If you listen to the Ornette and Cherry's Hillcrest live recordings* (the Paul Bley Quintet), at times it's almost like a Charlie Parker airshot. Ornette may not have had the (orthodox) chops but he had certainly listened. As for Cherry, he was the one that got the first attention, he played Canada with George Newman and was quite regarded, just pre Ornette. There are also bits on Ornette's first official album, "Something Else", where he is forced, or pushed by the piano, into playing more conventionally, and doesn't seem too pleased. A good Ornette story is a bemused Dexter Gordon going up to the Paul Bley band at the Hillcrest and saying, " Do you guys play any standards?" "Embraceable You? "Yeah, that was that last number we just played".

* Paul Bley apparently had a load more of the Hillcrest stuff on tape but they were never issued because Ornette never got paid for the first tranche.

From what I've read, Ornette was self-taught on his alto (and later on the trumpet and violin), discovering and practising his own exercise patterns going up and down on a lift (elevator). One read of his exclusion from the R&B bands he started out with, but I've always thought that any player attempting bebop phraseology in said context would then and doubtless subsequently have had a bad time of it. But it was those "alternative fingerings" that resulted in the concept being different from Parker, Stitt, Cannonball and even Dolphy; what actually led to the break away from chord changes has always puzzled me: not that it wasn't already implicit in the period when Ornette was still working over changes, as can clearly be heard, or that it made no sense, which it clearly did and was a natural and welcome evolution, but that Coleman felt the necessity, when he could well have continued working within the format.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Well David (Fathead) Newman, who went to school with Ornette and played with him in those days, said he, Ornette, had all the Parker licks down. It's odd but in the early "Ornette" recording days, his compositions were picked up as much as his playing. Art Pepper doing "Tears inside" , MJQ doing "Lonely Women" etc. Jack Wilson doing "Ramblin'" "He's not much of a saxophonist but some of his tunes are interesting"...I remember that critique.

[Stanfordian]

‘A Fickle Sonance’
Jackie McLean with Tommy Turrentine, Sonny Clark, Butch Warren & Billy Higgins
Blue Note (1961)

[Quarky]

Simon Lasky Close To Ecstasy

This won the small group Jazz Category in the British Composers Award, ahead of Ivo Neame, etc.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0001hp2

I guess there is a sub-category of Jazz, Classical Jazz, or Jazz for Classicists. Not to my taste, but good luck to them, says I.

[Stanfordian]

'Solid'
Grant Green with James Spaulding, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw & Elvin Jones
Blue Note (1964)

'Cross-Platform Interchange'
Misha Mullova-Abbado
Edition Records (2017)

[Stanfordian]

'Cross-Platform Interchange'
Misha Mullova-Abbado
Edition Records (2017)

Yeah!
Charlie Rouse with Billy Gardner, Peck Morrison & Dave Bailey
Epic (1961)

[Ian Thumwood]

Tom Waits - "Swordfish trombones" with the unlikely pairing of Victor Feldman and Greg Cohen in the lune up/