What Jazz are you listening to now?

[eighthobstruction]

Nucleus : Under the Sun

....I am joy ....joy....I bring joy....Funky....

[Serial_Apologist]

Nucleus : Under the Sun

....I am joy ....joy....I bring joy....Funky....

That's the one Nucleus album I've never heard.

[Serial_Apologist]

Jan Garbarek, with just bass & drums 1967..."Mr PC" live. The "jazz" past is another country...

http://youtu.be/9CrlgJ6w-EE

To be fair I remember him answering my question via Jez Nelson as to whether he himself considered what he does now to be "jazz"? I think the answer was negative. Jazz having lost its meaning or some such.

I think there have always been tensions among the musicians about the J word - sometimes for commercial reasons, ie "Who wants to promote their music as such an unsaleable commodity"; sometimes when black American musicians wanted to disassociate themselves from a form associated with the white establishment. Was it Miles who thought up "black classical, or black American classical music"? Then there's that story about Freddie Hubbard launching a tirade against disrespecting critics referring to what should be referred to as black classical music at Ronnie's, and, after some minutes of this, Phil Seamen interjecting, "Shut your fckng cake hole!". After which, everything proceeded smoothly!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

What is Jazz...https://youtu.be/N31eUyeh5ok.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

What is...Jazz : http://youtu.be/N31eUyeh5ok

I don't ...know

[Serial_Apologist]

What is...Jazz : http://youtu.be/N31eUyeh5ok

I don't ...know

[eighthobstruction]

That's the one Nucleus album I've never heard.

....really impressed you I can tell....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (duo) - "Why was I born" (1958, New Jazz, the album all tracks otherwise with Flanagan, Chambers and Cobb, unreleased for five years).

I've had this for years and only really realised now just how truly masterful (from both) and exquisite it is...

http://youtu.be/3R6RrmlbB38

Btw, I think the Kenny Burrell appeal has reached its target and is ongoing.

BN.

[cloughie]

Young man with a horn Album - Doris Day and Harry James - he could play and she could sing!

[Joseph K]

Alexander Claffy (Feat. Kurt Rosenwinkel & David Kikoski) - "Blues On The Corner" written by McCoy Tyner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k50IisRCng

[Ian Thumwood]

Early Garbarek - He started going downhill (imv) with "Spaces" of 1977, where nothing whatever happens, and the talents of otherwise exellent team (including our own John Taylor) were completely wasted, mostly playing synth washes. For me that recording was the start of the ECM slide (pace Ian) For good Garbarek see Kenny Wheeler's "Deer Wan" - a big influence on subsequent tenor saxophonists including Mike Brecker.

I had never heard Garbarek's music before I went to hear him as part of the Edinburgh festival in 1987 and was blown away by the experience. His music was so different and had an immediate appeal. However, I would have to say that no other musician has so readily captured my imagination and lost it quite so quickly. The one album that staggered me was "It's ok to listen to the grey voice" which I must have worn out. The follow up album by his group was the kind of thing you might put on in the build up to Christmas! I liked it at first but by the time I had snapped up him following album , it started to dawn on me that he actually wasn't any good. In the interim, I saw his group a second time and then caught him perform with the Hilliard Ensemble at Salisbury cathedral where the music very much complimented the setting but had nothing to do with jazz.

If I am honest and wanted to vilify ECM for it's pretentions as a credible label that truly promoted "Editions of Contemporary Music", I would cite Jan Garbarek. I think it was Stuart Nicholson who described his work as pointless in "Jazz: The Modern Resurgence" and famously compared it to the submarine made of rubber tyres. Nothing has quite dated like the records put out by Garbarek in the 1980s onwards which are a cross between New Age and music put out with a Waitrose Christmas commercial. I am aware that Garbarek once mentioned Johnny Hodges as a big influence because of the sound he produced on his instrument and, for me, Garbarek seems more interested in the sound of his instrument than the music he produces. I think a lot of the recordings he has put out are extremely lightweight and have not stood up at all well with the passage of time.

With regard to his earlier "jazz" work, I have a copy of "Esoteric Circle" which has always struck me as a painful listen. I have never bought in to the praise heaped upon "Afric Pepperbird" as well which just sounds rough and none too interesting. From recollection, there is one track on the former where they just play one note! (I think it is called "Gee" - I haven't listened to it for years.) Garbarek's best jazz playing is surely with Keith Jarrett's quartet with an album like "Personal Mountains" being quite sad insofar that you wish he had produced more in this vein. The recordings with Egberto Gismonti and Charlie Haden are also great. I am not sure I have heard "Deer Wan" so cannot comment on that. I would not say that everything he recorded was rubbish as there are records such as these which I think are right on the money. However, most of the stuff produced under his own name is pretty vapid and often has little connection with jazz. It is the kind of stuff that makes you think that Windham Hill was a "happening" label.

It is quite interesting how Garbarek's stock as diminished critically. He used to be producing records quite regularly but they are increasingly few and far between and you don't hear of too many musicians being influenced by him. I suppose the biggest impression he made on another musician was Tommy Smith who is frequently anodyne in the extreme.
Garbarek was on JLU one evening when I cam home from football as few years back and it sounded like it was 1987 again. His music had not changed one jot in thirty years.

Personally, I went off Garbarek's music almost as quickly as I discovered it. The "golden days" of ECM coincided with his best work for the label yet, like Eberhard Weber, some of the records they issued back in the 1970s and 80s sound really dated, especially where keyboard have been employed. George Russell once famously described Garbarek as the most distinctive European jazz voice since Django. This might have been a keen observation in the 1970s but it now seems extremely generous.

The comparison with Mike Brecker is disingenuous. Both musicians had exceptional tones but Brecker's playing is far more harmonically and rhythmically aware regardless of the fact that he swings much harder than Garbarek. There is far more "music" within Brecker's playing whereas Garbarek always seems to play fewer notes. There is no comparison between the two.

[burning dog]

, for me, Garbarek seems more interested in the sound of his instrument than the music he produces..

Surely the sound of his instrument is part of the music he produces?

Are you suggseting that, unlike Richard Wagner, Garbareks music sounds better than it is?

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Interesting looking at comments around Garbarek on the US Organissimo web site. They elicit as much pro and con, and expletives as the "arch devil" Wynton Marsala! Claims that Americans don't "get him" because all they care about is Bluenote matrix numbers and who played at the Blue Morocco in April 1967. It confirms my highly cynical view that a lot of arguments about jazz are often anything but, they are surrogate culture wars and identity positioning. A bit like the EU, which hardly bothered anyone's ACTUAL lived lives, but has become a hill for both sides to die on. Kids, just say no.

[Serial_Apologist]

From recollection, there is one track on the former where they just play one note! (I think it is called "Gee" - I haven't listened to it for years.)

Funny that your should say that Ian: a musician friend of mine who shall remain nameless once told me in no uncertain terms that "One note coming from Garbarek is worth far more than all the notes coming from Coltrane" And certainly "Places" confirmed that for me; I gave away that record to my friend. He admitted that Garbarek is someone you either love or hate (like the proverbial Marmite) - and I remember ECM being described in similar terms in the 1980s. I had a 3-hour telephone conversation with another friend who had had ideas about writing a book about ECM, and had ended up not knowing whether she actually liked the label's production values. By the end of the conversation we were in agreement, and she had decided to drop her idea.

The comparison with Mike Brecker is disingenuous. Both musicians had exceptional tones but Brecker's playing is far more harmonically and rhythmically aware regardless of the fact that he swings much harder than Garbarek. There is far more "music" within Brecker's playing whereas Garbarek always seems to play fewer notes. There is no comparison between the two.

Andy Sheppard, Tim Garland, Julian Arguelles, and, yes, Michael Brecker, are just a few of many (especially) tenor saxophonists who at one time were quite strongly influenced by certain nuances specific to Garbarek's style: the chromaticism, the edgy tone admired by some supposedly for its resonating Norwegian landscape bleakness, and especially that sliding way of alternating between neighbouring tones. Listen again to Brecker's solos on Kenny Wheeler's "Double, Double You": that sound is distinctively Garby and, to my ears, doesn't come from anywhere else.

[Serial_Apologist]

Surely the sound of his instrument is part of the music he produces?

Are you suggseting that, unlike Richard Wagner, Garbareks music sounds better than it is?

It certainly is in Garbarek's case - more so than is immediately apparent to a certain viewpoint about style that places prime importance on note choices rather than seen in terms of timbre and context. This is why I believe one should be as much on about the actual sound produced as "intellectual" coherence, as exemplified in "this Bach piece is as good whatever instrument it is played on" - in part a reflection of attitudes that came to distinguish the greater "purity" of instrumental sound brought about by bebop saxophonists, trombonists and trumpeters than their New Orleans and Swing predecessors. Lester young marked the transition and Coleman Hawkins the older tradition based more on weight, heft and timbral richness than complexity, which tended to get in the way and sound "uncool" by the late 1950s. One needed to be a Lee Morgan to get away with it, possibly because he used vocalised timbre sparingly rather than blaringly. Now, with the coming of free jazz, I would argue, the deployment of a wide timbral range of expression in players such as Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Lester Bowie, was in my view as important as actual note choice - a development arguably reaching its furthest in Evan parker's innovations being extensions of sound, inasmuch as extending both back into the vocalising roots of the music in early blues and gospel and sideways glancing at contemporary developments in electronic music, which have since gathered pace, but less so in new jazz of the past 30-40 years, where there has been some rolling back, and wah-wah, ring modulation and other pre-digital (especially re-drum machine!) technologies effectively hark backs to the "Bitches Brew" era.