What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Bert]

Came to this only a few years ago, looking for more Bobby Hutcherson performances. However, I became totally awed with the reeds boys, who were unknown to me! The drummist and the basser are superb musicians, again although not unknown to me, were not especially familiar. Methinks Soft Machine listened to this album.

Fabulous free/avant garde/post bop ........

And fabulous recording/sound quality. One of my most happy CD purchases.

This again, this morning.

[Serial_Apologist]

I just don't buy the idea that Davis ever really played "Hard Bop." The earlier quintet was a class above a lot of what else was being recorded mid-late 1950s and, to my ears at least, seems markedly different to what a label like Blue Note was putting out at the time. I think Davis' influences were cast with a wider net as is typified by the employment of the decidedly un-boppish Red Garland. At that time Davis was listening to people like Ahmed Jamal with the result that the dynamics and structure of what Davis was producing is far more sophisticated than anything else in the era. The results are a million miles away from the kind of high octane music produced by the likes of Silver, Blakey, Brown, etc who were working in the 1950s. Nice to have the ability to choose, though. There is an element of theatre in Miles' work which marks it out , at least until the time of groups such as The Art Ensemble of Chicago. I find both groups to be hugely dramatic.

I think that SA made a comment some while back that "Milestones" represents the point at which Miles bid adieu to more Bop influences. Surely Miles' most obvious "bop" recordings stem from the period in early-mid 1950s and before the first quintet ? It is also quite interesting to look at the kind of players he employed. Chambers and Philly Joe fit the bill as coming from a Bop tradition and they were both mainstays on many Blue Note sessions. As to the pianists, I think only Wynton Kelly really fits as a Bop musician and , given that he was easily the best "band pianist" of that generation, you can see why Miles employed him. As for the horn players, I just feel that he wanted musicians who he could mould but also personalities who would motivate and push him. If I recollect the biography correctly, he was really frustrated that he couldn't find musicians original enough to achieve this in the early 1960s. This is why this clip is interesting because it is an experiment. The two most obvious Bop players were Cannonball and Mobley and the latter went because he could not be bent to Miles' whim. Mobley was a big name and I suppose you can draw parallels with say Paul Pogba at Man Utd - incredibly talented but a "wrong fit."

It is really interesting hearing a clip like that from a period which is really a creative hiatus. Shame that Miles never trusted the avant garde to pursue that avenue. The second quintet is jazz nirvana yet it passed far too quickly for my liking and it would have been fascinating to hear him explore acoustic jazz more fully. I sometimes wish that these innovations were slower and that a few extra years could be added to the 1960s to see how Miles could have reacted to working with musicians like Cecil Taylor, Bobby Hutcherson or Andrew Hill. I do wonder how much of the "failure" with Sam Rivers stemmed from his playing or were due due appearances and what would have bee achieved had be been retained. For me, this is one combination which i think should have worked although I do think George Coleman's contribution are also under-rated. Not sure it a flirtation with these players would have worked but the scene was so fertile then, you wish there had been more opportunities for him to interact, especially when he had found so many of his contemporaries uninspiring in the first 1/2 of 1960s. Shame he was afraid of becoming irrelevant and went electric at a time when there was still plenty to be said for acoustic jazz even if he was suspicious of Free Jazz.

I do think however that Joseph K is right to single out Miles's recordings from the early 1950s, when he was indeed working with the likes of Blakey, Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, even (dare I say?) Monk at that point, and Sonny Rollins, the veritable establishers of hard bop at that very time. The early Red Garland was really indistinguishable from the mass of sub-Powell bop pianists until (I believe) Miles pointed him in the direction of Jamal and those block chords. Garland developed that way of regularly punctuating with staccato left hand chords around the same time, around '56, while working with Miles - in other contexts he was still the adaptable bop stylist as and when - interesting comparison with Cannonball in that sense. Indeed the "Miles conception" from between '55 and the second quintet's inclusion of Shorter had remarkably little influence on small group jazz. Others ploughing new pathways found areas that sought to bridge the worlds of hard bop and the emerging second wave avant-garde with Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson etc. My guess - purely from listening to the recording of the Tokyo trip, mind - was that one reason why Sam Rivers proved unsuitable or unsuited to Miles's conception at that stage was that his own conception was closer to Dolphy's than George Coleman had been, and Shorter's would be, namely more in the Coltrane mould. Miles did not have much positive to say about Dolphy and afaIk never worked with him. I've always felt that it was people outwith Miles's alumni who developed his "time-no-changes" approach to freedom jazz - many of them musicians in this country such as John Taylor, Norma Winstone, Kenny Wheeler, Henry Lowther, Ray Warleigh and Stan Sulzmann: Kenny's 1975 "Gnu High" and Sulzmann's "On Loan With Gratitude" of 1977 providing enduring examples; also a number of those who emerged from Soft Machine links in the middle 1970s who pursued very singular, often folk-inspired jazz-rock directions that had little to do with the emergent Fusion in America at the time and still sound relevant and not dated to me. Insofar as others were still able to find much capable of further development, I often think of Miles in the mid 60s providing a similiar role as Stravinsky had for younger composers outside the Schoenberg circle in the years following "The Rite of Spring" (1913) before Neo Classicism took a grip. People such as Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger were basing their approaches very much on Stravinsky's Paris period well into the 1920s, by which time Stravinsky had himself moved on elsewhere - similarly Miles in the 1970s and 80s. Fascinating, the parallels there!

[Ian Thumwood]

I am not too familiar with Miles' work between the BofC nonet and the first quintet so I will have to beg to your greater awareness. I have been playing "Kind of Blue" the last few days. It is one of those records that is so familiar that I sometimes feel I know it so well that there is no need to play it. I had forgotten just how good it was, not only with regard to the calibre of the soloists, the the excellent time kept by Evans, Kelly , Chambers and Cobb. This afternoon I followed it up with "'Round midnight. " The calibre of these bands is exceptional.

Not quite sure if this is the correct thread but there was an article in this month's BBC History magazine about August Abgoola Browne who came from Lagos but ended up working in the pre-war Polish jazz scene in the 1930s before becoming involved in the resistance against the Nazis. He ended up living in London. It is a story about which I had never been aware and which would form the basis of an excellent film. I had no idea that there was a Polish jazz scene that early on. Here is an article about him here:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54337607

I had never heard this story before but you can appreciate where Esi Edugyan got her inspiration for "Half Blood Blues" from. It also crossed my mind when former early 1980's Saints footballer Reuben Agboola was a relative.

[Stunsworth]

Tubby Hayes: Tubbs

This is from the 11 LP box that was released in I think 2019. The remastering is excellent and the playing sublime. Originally released in 1961.

[Joseph K]

Joe Henderson - The State of the Tenor Vol. 1: Live at the Village Vanguard

[Stanfordian]

‘Battle Stations’ - Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis & Johnny Griffin
with Norman Simmons, Victor Sproles & Bill Riley
Prestige (1960)

[Joseph K]

Joe Henderson - The State of the Tenor Vol. 1: Live at the Village Vanguard

The performance of Isotope is especially good on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhzGzR_L8mc

[Stanfordian]

‘Elder Don ’- Don Wilkerson
with John Acea, Grant Green, Lloyd Trotman & Willie Bobo
Blue Note (1962)

[Bert]

Frank Zappa - Sleep Dirt 1979 (recorded 1978)

'It's Jazz Jim, but not as we know it' (Dr Spock 1980 (misattribution)).

[Jazzrook]

Frank Zappa - Sleep Dirt 1979 (recorded 1978)

'It's Jazz Jim, but not as we know it' (Dr Spock 1980 (misattribution)).

Agreed, Bert.
Here's 'The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution' from that album:

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

JR

[Bert]

Agreed, Bert.
Here's 'The Ocean Is The Ultimate Solution' from that album:

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

JR

Yes, an amazing track - just this minute finished listening to the whole album again. That Zappa lad can really play!

Btw, it's the non-vocal original album that I've been listening to - tomorrow it'll be the Thana Harris, vocals/Chad Wackerman, drums overdubs 1991 version ....

[Stanfordian]

‘It’s About Time’ - Clark Terry
with Jimmy Hamilton, Britt Woodman, Tommy Flanagan Wendell Marshall & Mel Lewis
Swingville (1961)

[elmo]

Lucky thompson playing Soprano on his own composition"Frosty Summer" with Harry Arnolds Orchestra in 1960. Such a great Saxophone player on both horns.

https://youtu.be/CLef13wShmU

elmo

[Joseph K]

Joe Henderson - The State of the Tenor Vol. 1: Live at the Village Vanguard

Volume 2 now. On track 2 and it's proving to be most sick... check it out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTuG_yQgeZY

[Joseph K]

Joe Henderson - So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles) ... with John Scofield, Dave Holland and Al Foster