Oxley played with Stan Getz at Ronnie Scott's according to Dog Senior.
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Yes, and he also did with Bill Evans, Evans being impressed. Not sure it (with Bill) turned out too well though.Originally posted by burning dog View Post
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One of my favorite memories of Oxley was seeing him up close with Stan Tracey in some God foresaken leisure centre/barn in Swindon (1980s) when the local "audience" was expecting a "jazz night" something akin to Kenny Ball! Very funny.Comment
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I never knew there was footage of Bill Evans with Oxley, so many many thanks for finding and posting this, BD. I guess Cecil Taylor was a more suitable coupling, but on here imv Oxo does a good job, not overdoing it. Evans's style is as per usual, just faster - the direction he was going in at the time anyway.Originally posted by burning dog View Post
BTW, Bill Evans is Composer of the week all next week, 12 noon-1 pm repeated 6.30.
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Is that Evans CoW a repeat? Because they featured him in that slot a few years back. It struck me then how he began to tread water (heresy) in the mid late seventies, only firing back up towards the end. BTW there's a wonderful TV rehearsal video (Oslo 69?) on Utube of him with Eddie Gomez and Alex Reil on drums, who had only played one gig the night before. Great to see how patient he was with Alex and then again, how exacting.
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The earlier Bill Evans recordings are the ones that I listen to including albums like "A simple matter of conviction" and these efforts made the most impression on me when I was discovering jazz. The switch to a label like Verve did him no favours and I think he almost became a parody of himself in the 1960s. My perception of his changed when I heard these efforts but it seemed to change tack in the late 1970s when the group with Marc Johnson is supposed to have been the best he led for a long while. I think that a lot of Evans' work I the 1960s is soporific , the wonderful sense of harmony remaining intact but the attack apparent in his earlier playing totally ironed out - the music as dull in it's way during this era as Oscar Peterson despite the fact that I expect both would have appealed to a less discerning jazz audience.Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post
Part of the problem with Evans was that he was very much the cut off point from which jazz piano emerged from Bop and found something else. Unfortunately for Evans, I think he got overtaken by events and a whole new generation of players as diverse as Hancock, Bley, Taylor , Hill and Tyner helped to push the door open even further and Evans quickly went from being at the vanguard of jazz piano to being the mainstream. Bluesnik remarked earlier on this thread about Getz materialising on Verve and I think that Evans' efforts for this label had a similar lack of interest for me. Verve is a bizarre label and, in it's heyday, it almost seemed to mirror what Concord produced in the 70's, 80's and early insofar that it may have had a roster of modern jazz musicians yet the best albums were often by musicians from an earlier generation such as Woody Herman Gene Krupa or Johnny Hodges whose records are amongst the best on Verve. I got the same sense with Conord which seemed to have a knack of recording consistent albums by mainstream players whereas the more adventurous musicians probably did their better work in the 1980's on other labels. In fairness to Concord, I done think there ever pursued quite the commercial agenda that Verve had albeit Granz was little enthused by more progressive players like Coltrane and Davis. The likes of Evans and Getz probably allowed him to have more modern players on the roster who were unlikely to unsettle their audience.Comment
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I'd agree that Evans was often becalmed in the 70s, but not the 60s when he was working, after Lafaro, with Chuck Isreals. And still on Riverside or Milestone. After that the energy dissipated and a prevading sense of "Billness", routine and enui was not helped by churning much of the same material night after night. There is surely only so much you can endlessly do with Deep is the Ocean, My Romance, Gloria's Step etc etc even if you are Bill Evans...
But in amongst all that and the awful electric piano, dubbing and the strings and the "collaborations" there were days when he could come alive. There's a 70s concert in Zurich where you really have to check the year and indeed if its the same pianist...
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I think he is sometimes guilty of being too in love with the harmonies he is producing and the fire / drive / ability to produce swinging lines that characterised his earlier work was dulled by drugs. It would have been difficult for Evans to seem relevant amongst the onslaught of the "New Thing" in the late 60's but I feel that the evolution of jazz up until the 1970s was so fast that the one disadvantage of the music was that a great multitude of brilliant players became overtaken by events starting right back with King Oliver whose efforts in 1923 were at the forefront of jazz but had become archaic by 1927! I think that the generation most prone to the advances in jazz were the Swing Era players who found themselves overtaken by be-bop at a time when there was a proliferation of original soloists on a scale unprecedented up to that point. Evans seems no different and I think it is only because there is no one style of jazz that dominates that allows contemporary players the ability to remain at the forefront of jazz for so long. Evans time came and went really quickly and this was even more pronounced with a lot of Hard Bop players who materialised on labels like Blue Note who had under 5 years in the limelight.
I would have been curious to see how Evans would have been received these days had he lived and just how influential he would have been. For me, Brad Melhdau has more than filled his shoes and whilst he is a bit of a marmite player, I think he has a more broad-minded repertoire than Evans over reliance of the same standards and originals. He would have had to have changed to fit in to the current jazz scene but would probably have been lionised after the same fashion as the late Hank Jones who seemed even more valuable in his later years. In some ways, I much prefer the economy of Jones' playing.Comment
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I was listening to the recentish, 2010 anyway (and the live dvd) , Chick Corea trio examination of Evans. "Further Explorations" or similar with Gomez and Motian? Can't make my mind up. Corea is a pianist who for some reason has very largely passed me by, but some of this is very good in its own right. Just something off putting and "unwarm" about CC. Maybe its his wacko (Scient)'ology.(Joke).
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Bluesnik
Chick Corea is another player like keith Jarrett who can be fantastic or uneven depending upon the project. I must admit that I have seen Corea perform live on about five occasions and the performance last year with Kenny Garrett was staggeringly brilliant. This was easily the best gig I have heard him perform and the music immediately got straight down to business. I have also heard him with the Electrik Band and found this the worst kind of fusion.
After I discovered Bill Evans, the next pianist I moved on to was Corea after hearing a brilliant duet album called "Voyage" with the flautist Steve Kujala. Eventually I arrived at the trio alum "Live in Europe" which featured Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes and this remains for me the very greatest record Corea ever issued. This was another ECM disc but staggeringly full of vitality and swing. Haynes is amazing on this record but I was always blown away by the solo piano set which takes a Scriabin prelude and transforms it into a Corea original where he plays inside the piano before arriving at a hugely infectious theme. I would have to say that this record is essential listening and ine of the Great jazz trio albums. It is available for about £4.50 pp on Amazon and I strongly advise you get snap up a copy before it disappears as it is easily one of the most exceptional jazz records of the 1980s. I have never heard anything by Corea match this effort but I realy think very few jazz trio albums are as good as this one. It is a "must have" and an album I could not live without. The treatments of the standards are sensational.Comment
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Ian, thanks very much. I will definitely get that. I don't know why I've never taken a lot of notice of him, I think maybe I heard one or two records back when that I didn't like and that was more because of the recording with the bass through the board. I've watched his current stuff on Utube and he certainly has the chops and ideas...and as you say, a remarkable rapport with Haynes. Oh, well, never too late...
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For me, Corea had his day back around 1970 whern he formed his trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, Circle. Corea had taken over from Herbie Hancock two years before, just prior to "In a Silent Way". Corea's and Holland's idea for Circle was to (a) be acoustic (Miles always insisted Chick played Fender Rhodes - "Acoustic piano's Beethoven, man") and to take further the freeform experimentation Miles was moving away from by 1969. Anthony Braxton joined Circle in 1971 to make a quartet which Corea disbanded shortly afterwards to form his electric Bossa Nova band Return to Forever with a completely new line-up: Holland and Altschul joined up with Braxton, soon joined by Kenny Wheeler to form the Braxton Quartet, and Sam Rivers to form Rivers' Trio - two of the (imo) musically most consequent free jazz groupings to come out of Miles's transition period and the Little Theatre Club/Ronnie's Old Place scenes before that. Chick's Return to Forever transmogrified into a slick sub-Mahavishnu simulacrum by 1974, since when Corea has alternated between latter-day jazz-rock Fusion which has not advanced greatly, and acoustic groups. One could broadly characterise his vocabulary as strongly influenced by that of his friend Herbie Hancock - they toured as a duo in the late 1970s - but with more Latin leanings more befitting his own ethnic roots one could say. Of the "European" modernist influences from the Circle period (Boulez and Stockhausen among them along with Braxton's) little now remains. Without Hancock's bigger (and let's face it more charismatic) presence Corea would have achieved a bigger prominence on the scene, I guess; but he needed that influence on which to construct his own identity, without which for him there would have just been Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, I would estimate.Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post
PS - Ian's added some info about Corea's more recent output (I presume), not being acquainted with which I can't comment on. Did you ever come across Circle, Ian? Especially the 1971 Paris Concert in the double gatefold yellow sleeve?
PPS - The more I hear of Corea the more he reminds me of our own Gordon Beck. Both elaborated more virtuosically flambuoyant rhapsodically sweeping styles out of Bill Evans at around the same time.Comment
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I am aware of "Circle" but never really explored their music as I have an aversion to Anthony Braxton!
I agree with you about Corea. RTF was the point at which I had doubts about Corea. When I was exploring his stuff he was involved in acoustic projects incuding working with strings. I think ECM have since deleted the records from their catalogue. Hearing RTF for the first time I was choked because it sounded so dated around 1985/6 when I was exploring Corea. Anything remotely fusion in those days was considered to be really naff. From the perspective of the 1970's, Corea and Hancock were the main influences of pianists and perhaps the point at which the technical prowess of pianists went up a notch from Evans who was pretty impressive himself.
For me, I think that Hancock represents the apogee of jazz piano but , when in form, I think Corea is not far behind. His use of harmony is informed very much by late 19th century Romanticism and I think that the Spanish composers from that era were an obvious influence. Oddly, I had never heard of Scriabin prior to Corea's re-working but I think he is another influence - a kind of super-strength Chopin mixed with some psychedelic abstraction. I remember someone from Loose Tubes remarking about Django Bates being the first pianist they had heard who was no longer influenced by Corea. Corea has always seemed a major player to my ears but one who is capable of some lapses in taste. I connate stand his fusion projects even though they have their adherents and probably a greater following amongst amateur rock players than might be imagined. I can appreciate that Corea must have been a bit influence on John Taylor .
Corea is good entertainment value. He is charismatic but also has a keen sense of humour. I was once told a story about how he gently ribbed an audience member at Ronnie Scott's who was really getting in to the music and how funny he was. He has always seemed like one of jazz's nice guys, a marked contrast to the curmudgeonly Oscar Peterson and the volcanic Keith Jarrett. It is intriguing how Jarrett managed to take the crown as the pre-eminent jazz pianist in the 1980s as he is a far more simplistic player than either Hancock or Corea. I admire Jarrett's ability at long-distance improvisation but he can be hit and miss. At the top of his game, Jarrett is pretty incredible but there aren't many pianists around these days who can match the creative intensity of these three pianists. All three owe something to Evans but all have rejected the introspective and inward looking nature of Bill Evans' playing and to the advantage of the music. Evans is far to introverted but, strangely, this seems to be a quality much revered today .Comment
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