What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Ian Thumwood]

The David S Ware ballads album is great. There was some great music on the Thirsty Ear label and it captured a lot of the stuff that was being played in the first decade of the 2000s which returned to explore the jazz of the late 1960s. In my opinion William Parker was involved in a lot of this music and there was a point when I was picking up loads of his recordings. The last disc of his I had was an organ quartet with Cooper Moore which I never warmed too and was an expensive import with a very small number of imprints.

Another musician from that group of players who I really liked was the pianist Eri Yamamoto who was sometimes added to Parker's quartet but who has also made some impressive recordings in her own right. I believe she was a former pupil of Tommy Flanagan but I would say that Paul Bley must have been a massive influence on her playing. There was an article I was reading on line in the last week which spoke about the huge influence Brad Mehldau has had on is instrument which , at one point, threatened to become ubiquitous. Mehldau his probably the most influential musician on one instrument since Michael Brecker and has probably stretched well beyond this now to become as significant as players from the past such as Bix, Lester Young, Bud Powell, etc. I think Mehldau's impact is on this kind of scale. A lot of the appeal for Yamamoto's playing is that she has cut against this and her music is much more stripped back and immediate. The fussiness of Mehldau's playing is absent and I really like the fact that what she plays is so direct.

[Stanfordian]

‘Page One’ -Joe Henderson
Joe Henderson with Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Butch Warren, Pete La Roca
Blue Note (1963)

[Jazzrook]

Sun Ra Quartet with John Gilmore, Michael Ray & Luqman Ali playing 'My Favorite Things' in 1978 from 'New Steps'(HORO):

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=jLOB5sh98wQ

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Ray Charles - "The Danger Zone" from 1961, the 45 flip of "Hit the Road Jack", great stuff...

"Just read your papers and you'll see, just exactly keeps bothering me, world's in an uproar, Danger Zone is everywhere, everywhere..."

http://youtu.be/D-4FAxIqCr4

[Joseph K]

[Joseph K]

Herbie Hancock - Speak Like a Child

[Tenor Freak]

NP: Alice Coltrane - Blue Nile

[Joseph K]

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Ray Charles & *the* band..."Lil Darlin", Newport Jazz Festival, 1960, oh weeeeee...."http://youtu.be/zHZnt8S6Xzc

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Duke Ellington & Paul Gonsalves, together, not for the first time but, very moving and so GREAT.http://youtu.be/xVZfUTga4dc "stinky, you juiced again?"!
When Gonsalves hits that trill at c 3.10 joy.

[Ian Thumwood]

Duke Ellington & Paul Gonsalves, together, not for the first time but, very moving and so GREAT.http://youtu.be/xVZfUTga4dc "stinky, you juiced again?"!
When Gonsalves hits that trill at c 3.10 joy.

That is an incredible performance. Gonsalves was unique and difficult to place stylistically. Sometimes you can hear a bit of Ben Webster creeping in but the phrasing is almost post-bop. I have read comments by the likes of Julian Prester that the Ellington band was "old fashioned" when he played for it but you can listen back to anything from the 1940s onwards and see than Ellington was always "modern." He never really followed anything modish and, with the benefit of hindsight, this means that it hasn't really dated. I think Gonsalves had a brief tenure with Basie's octet that briefly existed and there is more to his playing than "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" which is deservedly famous.

I always see Gonsalves and Jimmy Hamilton as the more progressive elements in Ellington's sax section. Hamilton's tenor playing came out of the Coleman Hawkins tradition whereas I think his work on clarinet produced some of the finest playing on this instrument post - Goodman. By all accounts, Hamilton was extremely accomplished and a good reader who was perhaps more informed about more contemporary styles of jazz than his section mates. From recollection, I think his last work was a studio session with John Carter. Procope had a pedigree that stretched back to playing with Jelly Roll Morton as a teenager in the 1920s before he established himself with John Kirby's band. I am not sure of where Carney and Hodges came from but I think they were both in the band from late 1920s. In both cases, they were so instrumental to the sound of the band that you can never say they belonged to any particular era.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Gonzalves played with the Dizzy Gillespie band from 1949 to 1950, and I've always felt there was a touch of that milieu about him. And not just the habits. You can certainly hear there where David Murray etc comes from. I've got a CD of what was quite a late & rare album, "Hummingbird" cut in Britain with Stan Tracey, Kenny Wheeler etc. The guy who wrote charts for it said it was the worst jazz album every made. Gonsalves himself is audibly spaced, but it has its moments, mainly from Wheeler.

[Ian Thumwood]

I was aware of a record Gonsalves made in the UK and seem to recall he might have recorded something with Tubby Hayes. I might be mistaken about that.

I have been playing Steve Coleman's "Synovial joints" record which features a large ensemble. I am finding this music really re-assuring. There is something of a contradiction about his music insofar that it is extremely catchy but so complex that you would never be able to whistle it back in the shower! Now playing Steve Coleman & the Five Elements "Live at the Village Vanguard volume 1."

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I've got the concert DVD of Steve Coleman with the Dave Holland group. One of the best lineups of that outfit. Gonsalves did record with Tubby Hayes "Boom chika Boom"? And Hayes famously stood in with the Ellington band when Paul was "indisposed". I think Gonsalves was a close friend of the British saxophonist, Jackie Sharpe?

[Joseph K]

Herbie Hancock - The Prisoner