What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Serial_Apologist]

The first item I ever ordered from Amazon was the Lonehill CD of "The complete Dick Twardzik" and this included some solo rehearsal performances. Amongst the tracks were a number of free improvisations rather in the same way of working at Lennie Tristano. More than any other jazz musician of that generation, Twardzik is easy to categorise incorrectly and the partnership with Chet Baker somewhat obscures the fact that is recorded work is effectively just youthful musings. The "official" recordings such as "Crutch for a crab", "Albuquerque Social Swim" and "Yellow Tango" are amongst the most intriguing of the early fifties but the privately and poorly recorded rehearsal material featuring a badly out of tune piano on this CD maybe offer more clues where he would have ended up. I think had he avoided drugs he would have moved away from the kind of players he had performed with in his early twenties and would have probably had a place in the avant garde akin to someone like Paul Bley. He was a virtuoso pianist and maybe the most tantalising "what if" in jazz at that time when many players died way too young. The stuff on the Lonehill record might have seemed like an interesting starting point had he gone on to record in the 1960s and beyond. "The girl from Greenland" with Chet Baker would seem like a curiosity performed with a more conservative leader as opposed to a defining performance. He was ahead of his time but even more unfortunate than Herbie Nichols in leaving a poorly documented presence in the studio. You cannot say with any certainty where his career would have landed yet given that he died when he was only 24, the potential would have been for him to come to artistic maturity at the same time Free Jazz started to dominate. For me, the recorded output seem like the youthful explorations of someone whose musical development would have been far more interesting as the Bud Powell influences would have eventually have been shed for something more personal.

Insightful stuff there, Ian.

[Joseph K]

Miles Smiles

[Jazzrook]

Jeanne Lee & Ran Blake playing Ornette Coleman's 'Lonely Woman':

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=_shPbYmgdKQ

JR

[Jazzrook]

John Coltrane Quartet in Belgium, 1965:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=IsBbM5PIAHk

JR

[Stanfordian]

‘Blue Hour’ - Stanley Turrentine
Stanley Turrentine with Gene Harris, Andrew Simpkins & Bill Dowdy
Blue Note (1960)

[Jazzrook]

Billy Harper's tribute to John Coltrane in Philadelphia, 2016:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=FVGDGwgt9MA

JR

[eighthobstruction]

....lovely acoustic in there...

[eighthobstruction]

,,,,saw this in the margin of yr Billy Harper post....very enjoyable...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll5ITrMfo50

[Serial_Apologist]

,,,,saw this in the margin of yr Billy Harper post....very enjoyable...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll5ITrMfo50

That group was covered in Saturday's J to Z. I like the group - Jimmy Green's brittleness reminds me somewhat of David Murray, but stays just on the right side of clumsy.

[Ian Thumwood]

That group was covered in Saturday's J to Z. I like the group - Jimmy Green's brittleness reminds me somewhat of David Murray, but stays just on the right side of clumsy.

I was really impressed by Greene. This is the first time I have heard him at length. I caught some of J-Z on the way back from the Saints game and I initiallly thought it was Branford who was playing.

The track that disappointed me was the Tineke Postma track which was like very low-key Steve Coleman. Not sure what to make of the Jeff Parker tune. I liked it but think it said more about the studio than the music. I have the earlier CD dedicated to his father which is pleasant but alcks the depth of his best stuff with Nicole Mitchell and Fred Anderson. A musician who cover so many bases.....

[Serial_Apologist]

Just now listening to the Trevor Watts Moire Music Group Live at the Athens Concert Hall CD from 1999. Trev or ran a succession of groupings under the Moire title from the start of the 1980s, gradually whittling the number of melodic instruments down to himself and a bass guitarist of the Pastorius tradition - the under-recognised Colin McKenzie - while increasing the number of percussionists of varying African traditional backgrounds into an eventual chorus line. Watts's approach to generating materials had served him well since the mid 170s band Amalgam, evincing out of a free jazz background a way of bringing in musicians outwith jazz and working up melodic ideas out of funky rhythmic figures superimposed, arrived at spontaneously in the course of collective improvisation over a number of years and different line-ups - a procedure possibly closer to how African tribal music had evolved long before colonialism.

This morning I was listening to Stan Tracey's memorial concert on Duke Ellington's birth centenary, at the QEH, in May of 1999, and finding myself surprised at how uplifting Stan's slam-it-to-'em ensemble arrangements could be: late Basie on steroids. Two of Duke's Sacred Concert settings, performed by a black male opera singer, were equally enjoyable from the impression that Duke's tongue must have either been firmly in his cheek in setting them or, less probably, that he had no ironic insight into just how funny they are. Good playing by an extended roster of soloists, especially John Surman on baritone for a couple of Ellington/Strayhorn ballads, the contrasting smooth trombone of Mark Nightingale and rouggh-and-ready Malcolm Griffiths, who it seems is no longer playing, and the equal contrast between the smooth Peter King alto delivery, and the breathlessly chopped tenor of Art Themen on Tracey's concluding Lay-By.

[Joseph K]

Joe Henderson plays the old Milestones with John Scofield on guitar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V22WD2l_X0g

[Jazzrook]

Pharoah Sanders with Lonnie Liston Smith, Sirone & Majeed Shabazz in France, July 21, 1968:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8rX54ZhweU

JR

[DracoM]

Bitches Brew. What a strange and revelatory Cd.!

[Joseph K]

Bitches Brew. What a strange and revelatory Cd.!

That's an incredible album. So magical and profound. 'Pharaoh's Dance' inspired me to write this:

The ominous approach of the impending
horizon; binary duality
dissolves into absurd conundrums blending
each sense, perceiving no disparity
between the enigmatic forms of gnosis
revealed in plumes of dreamscape sound which capture
eternal mysteries’ apotheosis
and the bizarre illimitable rapture
of riffs revolving round symbols transcending
all earthly knowledge. Awesome cosmic dance
that speaks of numinous life, never ending
wondrous firmament, induce this trance,
to contemplate its facets’ endless bliss
the absolute and fathomless abyss.