What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Serial_Apologist]

Hope to catch jazz record requests on radio 3 later today.

Click on the Alyn Shipton link I provide on my latest thread on forthcoming jazz broadcasts for the week for the list of the requests.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Newly found Sonny Rollins & Coleman Hawkins :

Lewis Porter's substack blog has just posted a link to a further track from Sonny Meets Hawk, Rollins and Hawk going head to head on Three Little Words, blow for blow etc, well worth a listen to hear Hawkins literally do a "Sonny"! The link is embedded in the text but if you Google Lewis Porter Substack you'll find his page and indeed this.





As you know from a previous essay, I am a big fan of the album Sonny Meets Hawk. It has a mixed reputation, but I maintained that it does have some absolutely magical moments. Last time we focused on the shortest track from the album, “Just Friends.” This time I will share with you an amazing track that didn’t make it onto the album, and that Nobody has heard before!

“Three Little Words” was a specialty of Rollins during the ‘60s. He generally played inspired solos on this old song that was written in 1930. Here, as throughout this album, he uses a highly rhythmic approach—some would say that it’s choppy, but it’s also intensely lyrical, as he tosses around melodic fragments, and I love it. This take was recorded on July 15, 1963, the first of two days of recording for the album, with Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Roy McCurdy on drums.

Here’s what you’ll hear: After the theme chorus, at 0:31, Bley drops out. (At 1:27 Sonny plays what sounds like a few notes of “There Will Never Be Another You,” another of his favorites.) At the beginning of the third chorus, at 1:32, Bley plays two chords, but Sonny vocally indicates that he doesn’t want the piano. It’s hard to hear whether Sonny just grunts, or says “stroll”—which means “don’t play”—or even says “No.” But in any case, Bley stops, and Sonny continues. As Sonny finishes, Bley comes in at 3:01 to support Hawkins.

Hawk solos. Then—this is the even more amazing part—for the rest of this track, from 4:35 on, for the next 5-plus minutes, the two masters duet. First, they trade fours (four-measure improvisations). Starting from about 6:40, Hawkins “gets” what Rollins is doing, and he plays as “way out” as Sonny does. For example, at 6:55 you would never imagine you are listening to someone born in 1904. He sounds like Archie Shepp—but actually it’s vice-versa, because Shepp was strongly influenced by Hawk. Then, from 7:30 on, Hawkins begins to play simultaneously with Rollins instead of trading. He focuses on playing isolated notes for a while, and from 8:48 to the end he repeatedly uses a saxophonist’s device to make his lowest note go a little lower—he puts his knee in the bell. I wish we had a video of this!"

[Joseph K]

Yesterday I finished listening to the latter half of disk number 2 of the aforementioned Monk boxed set, which consists of the album Monk. Today, as I type, I am listening to Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins, which is great.

[teamsaint]

Far Cry. Eric Dolphy.
Recorded the same day as he played Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz , and the day after he recorded on Jazz Abstractions, apparently.
Busy chap.

[Joseph K]

Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington

[Joseph K]

Been returning to this quite regularly the past week or so....

(2) My Favorite Things (Live From Village Vanguard/1966) - YouTube

[Joseph K]

The Unique Thelonious Monk

[Joseph K]

Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners

[Tenor Freak]

Henry Threadgill - Easily Slip Into Another World

[Tenor Freak]

Taylor Ho Bynum - Apparent Distance

[Tenor Freak]

Matthew Shipp - Circular Temple

[Tenor Freak]

Paul Bley - Fragments

[Serial_Apologist]

John Surman - the entire collection of The Trio, from 1970 (mainly) all today. Easy to forget just how radical and energised Surman was at that period.

[Joseph K]

John Surman - the entire collection of The Trio, from 1970 (mainly) all today. Easy to forget just how radical and energised Surman was at that period.

I keep on being impressed by his performance on John McLaughlin's Extrapolation - I must check out his own music some time.

Today I finished listening to Monk's Brilliant Corners, now I'm listening to this -

https://youtu.be/mHgPZfNlI6I?si=2Mn8nWGvpp9qh-0u

[Serial_Apologist]

I keep on being impressed by his performance on John McLaughlin's Extrapolation - I must check out his own music some time.

I anticipate a lot of disagreement by saying I don't happen to think Extrapolation has Surman at his best. He himself said he had had to struggle with McLaughlin's complex charts on that session, my view of which is that it was a brave initial move in a direction others would push further with varying degrees of success - notably Weather Report, but also a number of British fusion groups in the 1970s and 80s - which I tag ""After you", "No, after you" - basically applying the idea first developed by free improvising groups a decade or so earlier such as the New York Arts Ensemble and our own Spontaneous Music Ensemble, where everyone is listening out for cues to re-shape the ongoing flow and then handing on before completing their own idea - as though Debussy might have improvised Jeux! The result is a further elaboration of the basic interactive principle often remarked on here by translocating the give-and-take of free improv back into pre-structured changes, and to succeed depends on maintaining the level of interest. The danger is that the tacit expectation inherent in not entirely dispensing with a pre-structured background imposes pressures that can cause the dialogue to sag: it is a hard balance to achieve then sustain, as Zawinul and Shorter would discover, hence Weather Report's growing reliance on pre-composition and their free jazz aficionados feeling let down.