What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Ian Thumwood]

I have spent the best part of this week listening to the Keller Quartet's double CD of the Bartok Quartets. These works were discussed on this board a few years back (by Bluesnik?) and it is interesting to explore this music which is totally new to me albeit I have quite a bit of Bartok's orchestral music in my collection as wel as a few volumes of Microcosmos in my piano stool from when I used to play the piano. I am finding the Quartets quite awkward to get in to. On Jazzrook's recommendation, I loved the Caroline Shaw string quartet works which are constantly on my play llit when I work from home. The Bartok does not have quite the same appeal and I need to work on them before i can make a judgement. So far, I would say the music is agreable if not as immediately striking as say the Concerto for Orchestra.

[Serial_Apologist]

I have spent the best part of this week listening to the Keller Quartet's double CD of the Bartok Quartets. These works were discussed on this board a few years back (by Bluesnik?) and it is interesting to explore this music which is totally new to me albeit I have quite a bit of Bartok's orchestral music in my collection as wel as a few volumes of Microcosmos in my piano stool from when I used to play the piano. I am finding the Quartets quite awkward to get in to. On Jazzrook's recommendation, I loved the Caroline Shaw string quartet works which are constantly on my play llit when I work from home. The Bartok does not have quite the same appeal and I need to work on them before i can make a judgement. So far, I would say the music is agreable if not as immediately striking as say the Concerto for Orchestra.

I'm astonished to hear you say you haven't come across the Bartok string quartets before now, Ian!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I had the Takacs String Qrt LP box set of the Bartók quartets. Bought for me by my then partner as a 38th birthday present. At my suggestion, she although previously married to a leading British classical musician, was not familiar and not a fan when she heard them. I could only play them when she was out ! shopping! But I still think they are magnificent. As are also the Shostakovich quartets. Here's Bartók 4. Almost jazz!

http://youtu.be/NcJxDfrPDns

[Joseph K]

I have spent the best part of this week listening to the Keller Quartet's double CD of the Bartok Quartets. These works were discussed on this board a few years back (by Bluesnik?) and it is interesting to explore this music which is totally new to me albeit I have quite a bit of Bartok's orchestral music in my collection as wel as a few volumes of Microcosmos in my piano stool from when I used to play the piano. I am finding the Quartets quite awkward to get in to. On Jazzrook's recommendation, I loved the Caroline Shaw string quartet works which are constantly on my play llit when I work from home. The Bartok does not have quite the same appeal and I need to work on them before i can make a judgement. So far, I would say the music is agreable if not as immediately striking as say the Concerto for Orchestra.

Bartok is weird jazz, that's for sure.

[Jazzrook]

I have spent the best part of this week listening to the Keller Quartet's double CD of the Bartok Quartets. These works were discussed on this board a few years back (by Bluesnik?) and it is interesting to explore this music which is totally new to me albeit I have quite a bit of Bartok's orchestral music in my collection as wel as a few volumes of Microcosmos in my piano stool from when I used to play the piano. I am finding the Quartets quite awkward to get in to. On Jazzrook's recommendation, I loved the Caroline Shaw string quartet works which are constantly on my play llit when I work from home. The Bartok does not have quite the same appeal and I need to work on them before i can make a judgement. So far, I would say the music is agreable if not as immediately striking as say the Concerto for Orchestra.

Many thanks for mentioning the Keller Quartet which has had some good reviews and is much more affordable than the acclaimed Takacs version of the Bartok String Quartets.

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=40S-2mctuYo

JR

[Jazzrook]

Kronos Quartet playing Frank Zappa's 'None Of The Above' in L.A., 1985:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=qLfBmR18HlY

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I remember Peter King being a Bartok enthusiast and hearing his Janus suite on R3 and being quite taken with it. Alto plus Gordon Beck piano plus string quartet. Listening to the recorded version now on YouTube the strings sound (to me) a bit "thin" but maybe that's just me & my Nokia. Will find the inevitable C90.

[Serial_Apologist]

Bartok is weird jazz, that's for sure.

Although I don't detect any obvious influences on Bartok, he would have been aware of jazz, I would think, by way of Stravinsky's jazz-influences works; and he had worked with Benny Goodman on Contrasts in 1938, a year before he actually emigrated to the States.

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember Peter King being a Bartok enthusiast and hearing his Janus suite on R3 and being quite taken with it. Alto plus Gordon Beck piano plus string quartet. Listening to the recorded version now on YouTube the strings sound (to me) a bit "thin" but maybe that's just me & my Nokia. Will find the inevitable C90.

I have a C90 of PK being interviewed and talking about Janus. He mentioned having himself having been interested in Stravinsky, but adding that he identified more with the strength of emotion in Bartok's music, and I am on side with him on that. It's probably controversial to say this, but there is a feeling in the sheer pent-up tension and energy of music gushing out onto the score paper in the third, fourth and fifth Bartok quartets that is expiatory, rare in the classical tradition up to that time, which makes me think of a free Coltrane solo.

[Stanfordian]

‘Soul Street’ – Jimmy Forrest
with Art Farmer, Ernie Royal, Idrees Sulieman, Jimmy Cleveland, George Buster Cooper, Jerome Richardson, George Barrow, Pepper Adams, King Curtis, Seldon Powell, Ray Bryant, Gene Casey, Hugh Lawson, Chris Woods, Tiny Grimes, Mundell Lowe, plus bassists & drummers.
(Compiled from 4 different sessions. The CD edition has bonus track from 1958)
New Jazz (1960/62)

[Joseph K]

Miles Davis - 'Right Off' from Jack Johnson

Sounding especially euphoric today.

[Serial_Apologist]

I've linked to these rare home tapes of a trio consisting of Dick Heckstall-Smith, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker from 1962 before, finding myself repeatedly drawn back to it since I find something of the miraculous about it. It is customary for writers to reference Joe Harriott as almost a solitary beacon in the story of jazz outside America breaking with its established conventions, parallelling the developments of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor et al within the States. But here there were others too - Group Sounds Five, the New Departures Quartet, Mike Taylor's quartet - likewise outsiders to a scene that had hardened out its own conventions and was in need of fresh thinking. Many came out of homegrown Trad and Mainstream bands, such as Alexis Korner, one of the key disseminators; others were soon destined for participation in the so-called British R&B scene; but there was a brief interregnum in which would-be jazzers finding their feet got together in rehearsal spaces and pubs and cafes, mainly around inner London, this being one such - they never officially recorded, and few would have known of their transitory existence before fame came their ways to various degrees and through different means. While the main influences were characteristically from the fringes of modern American jazz, Mingus and stirrings of Ornette, one hears hints here and there of indigenous folk and classical. What strikes me in this recording is the melodic as opposed to harmonic (bebop shaped) drive in Heckstall-Smith's way of dealing with the mainly standard materials presented here - there is a modulatory freedom that in some ways parallels Ornette's approach without going so far as Coleman in departing from or obscuring underlying changes, or offering alternative structures; and in terms of tone and rhythmic nuance one is minded of Rollins's trio recordings of a few years previous, though it should be remembered that Sonny was in self-imposed purdah, reformulating his approach on the Williamsburg bridge, at this time. There is no sense of gatecrashing in this two hours of precious music - the protagonists explore and interact, creating space and time for themselves, never courting the expected: the cramming of a couple of choruses into a blues jam was but a couple of years away, Cream further down the line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3sQxKbgr4

[Stanfordian]

‘Nice an' Cool’ – Gene Ammons
with Richard Wylands, Doug Watkins & JC Heard
Moodsville (1961)

[Stanfordian]

‘Boss Guitar’ – Wes Montgomery
with Melvin Rhyne & Jimmy Cobb
Riverside (1963)

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I've linked to these rare home tapes of a trio consisting of Dick Heckstall-Smith, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker from 1962 before, finding myself repeatedly drawn back to it since I find something of the miraculous about it. It is customary for writers to reference Joe Harriott as almost a solitary beacon in the story of jazz outside America breaking with its established conventions, parallelling the developments of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor et al within the States. But here there were others too - Group Sounds Five, the New Departures Quartet, Mike Taylor's quartet - likewise outsiders to a scene that had hardened out its own conventions and was in need of fresh thinking. Many came out of homegrown Trad and Mainstream bands, such as Alexis Korner, one of the key disseminators; others were soon destined for participation in the so-called British R&B scene; but there was a brief interregnum in which would-be jazzers finding their feet got together in rehearsal spaces and pubs and cafes, mainly around inner London, this being one such - they never officially recorded, and few would have known of their transitory existence before fame came their ways to various degrees and through different means. While the main influences were characteristically from the fringes of modern American jazz, Mingus and stirrings of Ornette, one hears hints here and there of indigenous folk and classical. What strikes me in this recording is the melodic as opposed to harmonic (bebop shaped) drive in Heckstall-Smith's way of dealing with the mainly standard materials presented here - there is a modulatory freedom that in some ways parallels Ornette's approach without going so far as Coleman in departing from or obscuring underlying changes, or offering alternative structures; and in terms of tone and rhythmic nuance one is minded of Rollins's trio recordings of a few years previous, though it should be remembered that Sonny was in self-imposed purdah, reformulating his approach on the Williamsburg bridge, at this time. There is no sense of gatecrashing in this two hours of precious music - the protagonists explore and interact, creating space and time for themselves, never courting the expected: the cramming of a couple of choruses into a blues jam was but a couple of years away, Cream further down the line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3sQxKbgr4

Would like to have heard that, but YouTube or someone seem to have scrambled the sound subsequently. Copyright? My recollection of DHS apart from seeing him with Graham Bond a few times, was him coming down the stairs at the old Place when Mike Westbrook was playing, asking to sit it, Westbrook being a bit reluctant as it was the orchestra/written, Smith doing so anyway and being fantastic. Really impressive. Looking back, I know he had an affinity for the blues but I wish he'd cut more straight jazz records. His autobiography is also excellent.