What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Serial_Apologist]

Harry Beckett's 1970 debut album 'Flare Up' with Mike Osborne, John Surman, Alan Skidmore, Frank Ricotti, John Taylor, Chris Laurence & John Webb.

High time someone reissued this British jazz classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reu3pFJ-vvY

JR

What impresses about that great period was how creatively many of the British musicians who had been around The Old Place unslavishly adopted approaches from Miles's Filles de Kilimanjaro/Miles in the Sky period to make something of lasting influence to this day.

Two tracks from "Warm Smiles, recorded with that same line-up a year later, the second an atmospheric ballad -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d5zqBthuVU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2dRrFDW6Wk

And one from "Themes for Fega" - recorded live at a club date. What a band that was!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0i2R4UXOmU

[Joseph K]

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI7RbAf4Dks

Ravi Coltrane - Giant Steps & 26-2

[Stanfordian]

‘Our Man in Paris’ - Dexter Gordon
Dexter Gordon with Bud Powell, Pierre Michelot & Kenny Clarke
Blue Note (1963)

[Joseph K]

Harry Beckett's 1970 debut album 'Flare Up' with Mike Osborne, John Surman, Alan Skidmore, Frank Ricotti, John Taylor, Chris Laurence & John Webb.

High time someone reissued this British jazz classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reu3pFJ-vvY

JR

Listening now.

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening now.

I think you'll like this, Joseph - and my clips.

[Joseph K]

I think you'll like this, Joseph - and my clips.

I certainly am enjoying it! And I agree about it being similar to mid-60s Miles Davis. Jazz Rook is right, it should be reissued on CD.

[Joseph K]

and my clips.

I'll get to them by the end of today. Now - JD Allen - Barracoon.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'll get to them by the end of today. Now - JD Allen - Barracoon.

It gets difficult when people keep pushing new stuff in front of you and saying, now, listen to this!

Just to add - one thing that distinguishes those early 70s Harry Beckett recordings from mid/late-60s Miles Davis is Harry's drawings on his Barbadian heritage. For me this says something about that particular performing approach, often described as "time/no changes", however: its adaptability to other genres, and theirs' to it. And it is one of the areas where I often find myself in disagreement with Ian Thumwood. I could be wrong here, but I would expect Ian to criticise this kind of jazz as being too much based on a single harmonic root, and limited thereby.

My view is that early commentators have a lot to answer for in characterising modal jazz as a simplification of bebop by exchanging the improvising base for the scale in place of engaging the multiplicity of key relationships based on stardard A-B-A song-with-bridge or 12 bar 1/4/5/1 blues changes of preceding jazz from New Orleans to Hard Bop.

The problem with this reductionist viewpoint, based as it seems to have been on "So What", with its single modulation up and down a semitone, and especially Trane's original version of "My Favorite Things", based on just one scale in its major and minor key versions, is that, in a very short time, musicians were modifying and extending the scalar method to bringing in scales based on modes outside the Western major/minor harmonic universe, and at the same time, by drawing on the free inter-modulating approaches already evolved by Ornette Coleman in his recordings between 1959 and 1961 with Charlie Haden and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell, devising chromatically-inflected ways of transposing between scales and mode-types which effectively extended the choice possibilities far beyond either the milepost-waymarked demands of diatonic harmonies - howevermuch the bebop improviser superimposed chromatic elaborations on top of these basic chords, because they still had to be resolved at cadence points. As Ian Carr once said, "I was told, 'here's a Mingus tune we've been using; it's all based on one chord', and I thought, how primitive! I hadn't realised that one has to be quite a sophisticated musician to just improvise on one chord!" With the bass player de-restricted from always having to lay down the fundamental root, as so often heard in those classic pre-1965 Coltrane quartet recordings, and instead freed to interpret any interval on the scale as its potential root, while at the same time engaging with the pianist, who in turn is engaging with the front-line soloist in transitioning between scales in the building up and releasing of tensions, so that the underlying rhythmic and metric profile can become less all-determining in how everyone perceives the music as progressing, the possibilities unleashed becoming virtually endless.

One can thereby open the whole thing up at any given moment, and then close it up again by any one member of the group - it needn't necessarily be the front-line soloist - re-instating any underlying rhythmic and/or harmonic structure, and bringing the rest of the performers into line. I believe this to be a basic principle in operation in a great deal of "free jazz" - one that does not even have to depend on a "head" arrangement or even pre-stated rhythmc or metrical pattern or tonal centre to provide a launching pad, though these are very much in evidence in Miles's Plugged Nickel sessions - the freest point he got in the pre-Bitches Brew period, when rock patterns, loosely applied, took over from theme-based forms. The way further may well reach a qualitative tipping point of abstraction where something else comes to replace those last vestiges of thematic identifiability - as happens analogously at a certain point in the paintings of Kandinsky - that preordain a certain way of listening, based on the known. Was that a fragment of "Round Midnight" I just heard? Once gone one starts listening in a different way, acclimatising to the unexpected now being the norm. Without those signifiers, familiars, this is no longer jazz, some will say. What then becomes interesting from a jazz point of view (maybe!!) is when musicians who have gone thus far re-apply the lessons learned back to the world of pre-structured forms - be they old standards re-interpreted in the knowledge that something in the music will never be quite the same ever again, or new framing structures appropriate to the language's expansion in the meantime.

I think this would be a "modernist" view of jazz - rather at variance with one that holds to an idea of eternally recognisable (audible) principles (as in e.g. the oft-heard statement "I know what is jazz and what isn't jazz when I hear it") that just have to be re-interpreted and re-applied to past forms picked out of the archives, dusted down and polished up. It could well be what continues to attract some of the brightest young musicians towards free improvisation as a performance principle compatible with jazz being liberative in ways that are political at the same time as musical!

[Joseph K]

It gets difficult when people keep pushing new stuff in front of you and saying, now, listen to this!

Yes! I haven't yet finished listening to Barracoon - it is good, though possibly too reminiscent to me of '65-era John Coltrane. I keep hearing things that sound very similar to the epic half-hour 'One Down, One Up' and sometimes it sounds like 'Vigil', the last track of the album Transition - both his phrasing and tone, and occasionally note-choice...

Thanks for the long post, BTW. As interesting and perceptive as ever.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes! I haven't yet finished listening to Barracoon - it is good, though possibly too reminiscent to me of '65-era John Coltrane. I keep hearing things that sound very similar to the epic half-hour 'One Down, One Up' and sometimes it sounds like 'Vigil', the last track of the album Transition - both his phrasing and tone, and occasionally note-choice...

I thought so too when I heard one track from that recording.

Thanks for the long post, BTW. As interesting and perceptive as ever.

Thanks in return!

[elmo]

Hank Mobley octet "A slice of the top" Blue Note - excellent underrated mid sixties Hank in fine form with arrangements by Duke Pearson.

elmo

[Jazzrook]

Amalgam's 1969 'Prayer For Peace' with Trevor Watts, Jeff Clyne, Barry Guy & John Stevens.
Awarded a rare 'crown' in the Penguin Guide this is another 50-year old British jazz classic in dire need of reissue on CD:

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

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

Amalgam's 1969 'Prayer For Peace' with Trevor Watts, Jeff Clyne, Barry Guy & John Stevens.
Awarded a rare 'crown' in the Penguin Guide this is another 50-year old British jazz classic in dire need of reissue on CD:

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

JR

It was actually re-issued on FMR in 2002, complete with the original 1960s Art Nouveau stylee cover design - a great recording.

[Stanfordian]

‘Down with It!’ - Blue Mitchell
Blue Mitchell with Junior Cook, Chick Corea, Gene Taylor, Al Foster
Blue Note (1965)

[Joseph K]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5_8vw-nj3U

EVGENY POBOZHIY QUINTET

Heard about this guy because he's just won the Herbie Hancock guitar competition or something.