What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Tenor Freak]

The WNUR livestream here:

https://onlineradiobox.com/us/wnur/?cs=us.wnur&played=1&msclkid=b89b5808b01311eca45c4578de0a9d41

Always play some good stuff in the early mornings, Chicago time. NP: Jane Ira Bloom, "Change Up" from LP Mighty Lights (Enja, 1982).

[Jazzrook]

Dizzy Reece Quintet with John Gilmore, Siegfried Kessler, Patrice Caratini & Art Taylor playing 'Krisis' from the live album 'From In To Out' recorded in France, 1970:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=Wbfem832OeM

JR

[Joseph K]

Kurt Rosenwinkel & Jean-Paul Brodbeck - The Chopin Project

I feel like I'm going to have to check out the original Chopin pieces to compare these arrangements. It's nice music, though not much distinctiveness across the album as a whole - though perhaps the pieces seeming to blur into each other is just my failure rather than the music's. Anyway, I'm giving this album a second listening, and the first piece is quite beautiful, lots of subtle harmonies - I think the project is a success, actually, taking these pieces and enriching a jazz language with them. I feel as though giving this album multiple hearings will pay dividends.

[Joseph K]

Allan Holdsworth - Frankfurt '86

Smashing record, this. Holdsworth's tone is iridescent and the band is cooking.

[Serial_Apologist]

A C90 of the Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Barbican on 26 Jan 2004 on Radio 3 - Dave Holland on bass and Brian Blade, drums. The BBC sound engineers did as good a job as was possible to achieve on that day, I reckon. Truly, truly wonderful stuff which will never date.

[Jazzrook]

A C90 of the Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Barbican on 26 Jan 2004 on Radio 3 - Dave Holland on bass and Brian Blade, drums. The BBC sound engineers did as good a job as was possible to achieve on that day, I reckon. Truly, truly wonderful stuff which will never date.

The same brilliant Quartet at Newport J.F., August, 2004:

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

JR

[Stanfordian]

‘Laughin' to Keep from Cryin' – Lester Young
with Harry 'Sweets' Edison, Roy Eldridge, Herb Ellis, Hank Jones, George Duvivie & Mickey Sheen
Verve (1958)

[Joseph K]

Kurt Rosenwinkel Plays Piano

I wouldn't have bought this had there not been the opportunity to get it signed in person by the man himself - and I am pleasantly surprised, it's nice...

[Stanfordian]

‘Bossa Nova Soul Samba’ – Ike Quebec
with Kenny Burrell, Wendell Marshall, Willie Bobo & Garvin Masseaux
Blue Note (1962)

[Joseph K]

The same brilliant Quartet at Newport J.F., August, 2004:

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

JR

Listening now.

[Joseph K]

Thelonious Monk - Ugly Beauty

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

I've started transcribing Kurt Rosenwinkel's version of this tune, which brings out the tune's wistful, melancholy nature. I knew the Rosenwinkel version first, but this one by Monk's band itself is also very nice, just different...

[Tenor Freak]

"Forgotten Love" by Mike Nock p, Eddie Gomez b and Jon Christensen d. From LP "Ondas" (ECM, 1982).

[Joseph K]

Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (first disk)

[Ian Thumwood]

Kurt Rosenwinkel & Jean-Paul Brodbeck - The Chopin Project

I feel like I'm going to have to check out the original Chopin pieces to compare these arrangements. It's nice music, though not much distinctiveness across the album as a whole - though perhaps the pieces seeming to blur into each other is just my failure rather than the music's. Anyway, I'm giving this album a second listening, and the first piece is quite beautiful, lots of subtle harmonies - I think the project is a success, actually, taking these pieces and enriching a jazz language with them. I feel as though giving this album multiple hearings will pay dividends.

Joseph

I started to appreciate Chopin when I started to learn to play jazz. One of the first "instruction books" was John Mehegan's four volume series on jazz piano. I used to have three volumes but they are probably a bit old-fashioned in how they impart the knowledge these days. I believe that Mehegan was a pupil and close friend of the great Teddy Wilson and his books went in to great length explianing how the (then) contemporary jazz harmonic language borrowed from A and B type voicings which had their origins in Chopin.

I have listend to some of the Rosenwinkel tracks on Amazon and felt that the choice of Preludes was pretty obvious. They are really short and the chord progressions are suitable for jazz I used to think that the Preludes were throwaway pieces but I really see these Preludes as Chopin giving himself limited material to play with and seeing just how much he could achieve. It is like he gave himself x number of notes to use and played a game on that basis. Jazz versions of the Chopin Preludes are pretty common and you can almost select which of the 24 will be converted in to jazz. The other, longer form pieces would form much more of a challenge.

I would also add that I feel that the whole idea of a "Chopin" was necessary. For me, I feel that Beethoven had taken piano music as far as was possible and a radical change was needed. I really like the composers who were influenced by Chopin too such as Faure and Scriabin - his early stuff is like industrial strength Chopin. A lot of jazz harmony comes from these kinds of composers as well as the likes of the Impressionists. Ifnyou take the jazz pianists from 1950s throug the likes of Herbie Hancock, this is where they get their inspiration.

[Joseph K]

I really like the composers who were influenced by Chopin too such as Faure and Scriabin - his early stuff is like industrial strength Chopin. A lot of jazz harmony comes from these kinds of composers as well as the likes of the Impressionists. Ifnyou take the jazz pianists from 1950s throug the likes of Herbie Hancock, this is where they get their inspiration.

... Stravinsky too. If you explore scales like the whole-tone and diminished (known in classical music as the octatonic) then you might come up with something similar to Debussy etc. In fact, I have a piece which exists in a few different versions which features Scriabin-esque harmony, including some chords that defy a chord-scale jazz-theory analysis (but which of course will still have to be improvised over). I just need to get down to figuring out how my loop pedal works to create my own backing track... then I can begin practising it properly...

Over on the other thread you mentioned Messiaen; I believe quite a few jazz guitarists these days are borrowing ideas like the modes of limited transposition from him (though, unfortunately, he hated jazz)