What Jazz are you listening to now?

[teamsaint]

Team Saint

When I first heard that album at the age of about 17 I was seriously impressed. The edition I was riginally familiar with had some quartet tracks with Jimmy Knepper which were supposed to be sketches for later arrangements which never materialised. Returning to this record later, I think that parts of it are exceptional but there are pieces like "Hotel Me" which look forward to the more improvised and less arranged music that appeared later and that linger on too long. "Barbera Story" always strikes me as one of Evans' most haunting scores although "Bilbao Song" from "Out of the cool" is by far the most radical arrangement Evans produced of Kurt Weill's music. For my money, "Barbera Story" is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, one of the most evocative tracks, "Las Vegas Tango" has some really rugged brass playing at the end where the interjections are not in time and there seem to be alot of wrong notes in there too. Once you are aware of it, it does take the shine off this chart - especially after Knepper's excellent solo. I do not feel the record companies gave Evans the studio time to correct all the flaws. Had they known then how reverred the recordings would be, I think they would let him get the music right. "Las Vegas Tango" could have been one of Evabs finest tracks .

The tracks "Concorde", "General Assembly", "Barbara Story" and "Spoonful" are sufficient reason to buy this disc. If you can get the unedited version of "Spoonful", that is a bonus. All in all, this is a must have Gil Evans recording and it is strange that the record was culled from so many recording sessions and not envisaged as a single production. I used to love Gil Evans and was uncritical of his work. "Individualism" is not totally cohesive yet it always makes me sad that so little followed on after this disc until "Blues in orbit" which is probably his worse studio effort. In my opinion, the only Evans records that are essential after "individualism" are "Svengali" and "Priestess." I love the Jimi Hendix record although it is very much of it;s time. "Individualism" stikes me that there was probably alot of great music that he could have recorded between the session on this record and "Blues in orbit.

Thanks for your thoughts Ian, I will re-read when the CD , complete with unedited “ Spoonful “ ( 13 mins 46) arrives.
I’ll also check out Svengali and Priestess.

[Tenor Freak]

Last Friday's 'Round Midnight with Soweto Kinch. Now on Larry Young's The Moontrane. I have been studying Joe Henderson's solo on this for the past couple of weeks - it's bloody hard! I really must dig out my vinyl copy of The Individuality of Gil Evans some time soon (I have a reissue from the 1980s with a different cover).

[anorak]

Anroak

Welcome to the board,

This CD was getting a lot of attnetion last year when Ronnie Foster released a new record. I am quite partial to the Blue Note organ groups and feel that they offer a fascinating parallel to alot of the then current Jazz Fusion. I like the fact that the are quite funky and suppose tjis kind of jazz is a guilty pleasure for me. It is curious how this stuff runs alongside bands like Earth , Wind & Fire or even Stevie Wonder's music of that time. I know SA often points out that the there was a kind of marriage between jazz and progressive rock in the UK during the 1960s an 70s in the UK which produce a kind of hybrid which was rock-influenced music which was musical enough for jazz fans to fine something of interest. By contrast, I think the albums like Foster's were attempts to maintain the relationship between jazz and Black popular music. It is a different approach to what was happening in the UK .

Ian, thanks for the welcome! I agree with the points you make. I think soul jazz or rare groove (some call it acid jazz, but I've never liked that term) is an underrated genre, and to be honest, I'd much rather listen to this genre than all the tiresome showboating (play it fast and loud) that goes on in 70s fusion. I like the rampant eclecticism of soul jazz. I think it was Jimmy McGriff who said "pretty and gritty" which sums up soul jazz well. Some of the pretty soul stuff and pop covers get a bit too cheesy for my ears. I much prefer the jazzy funky stuff that strays into Blaxploitation soundtrack territory. As for Ronnie Foster, I think 'Freap' is his best album - his other albums, including the latest, are very patchy. He's OK, but I don't place him in the same class as other Hammond players like Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, Big John Patton, Larry Young, and the magnificent Dr. Lonnie Smith who got better and better over the years.

[Ian Thumwood]

Anarok

Thanks very much for your comments.

I feel that the whole soul jazz movement is fascinating. It did start to produce a few cliches but i have always been fascinated just how much this generated a cult following. The old blue Note website used to be full of reviews where this music clearly had garnered an almost hagiographical following. By the early 70s I feel that is had almost descended into MOR music but I would suggest that it represents the last time jazz seemed to manage to blend with popular music. It is also fascinating how this music is almost judged by it;s own criteria in a fashion that mirrors what happened with Gypsy jazz. It is as if they are their own idioms. My favourite is Fred Jackson's "Hootin' & Tootin' which is probably unique insofar that it reflected the soulful element of John Coltrane and is slightly different in it's perspective when comlared to records with Stanley Turrentine, for example.

I also think that it is worthwhile noting that there are contemporary bands like Mike LaDonnes' Groover Quartet who have taken over the mantle albeit maybe with a more obvious jazz slant even if they are able to still incorporate popular material into the repertoire. i would recommend their records. Pat Martino's "Formidable" is another excellent example from the last ten years where this style of jazz has developed. If they are still available, the trio John Abercrombie led with Dan Wall and Adam Nussbaum are worthwhile checking out as an interesting development from Larry Young's apporach. The late Joey DeFrancesco was another musician I admired.

The incorporation of the Hammond organ does come with a lot of baggage and expectation. There is always an expectation of funkiness but also I feel that there is similarly a challenge that numerous groups had risen to which is to come at the format with something fresh. it is probably the one format in jazz that remains where the need to communicate with a broader audience still has some truck. Fans of this music do judge it on seemingly different criteria than within jazz as a whole.

[elmo]

Much as I like Lee Morgan's Blue Note 'Sidewinder' album I think Lee's follow up album 'Search for a new land' is one of the finest sixties albums - amazing line up, Lee, Wayne Shorter, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman, Billy Higgins. The title track is timeless -

https://youtu.be/YDfkkRa1VA8?feature=shared

elmo

[Ian Thumwood]

Thanks for your thoughts Ian, I will re-read when the CD , complete with unedited “ Spoonful “ ( 13 mins 46) arrives.
I’ll also check out Svengali and Priestess.

Team Saint

"Priestess" was released on LP by Island Records in the 1980s but has never been released on CD. It is worth tracking down for the version of Mingus' "Orange was the colour of her dress, then silk blue" and the terrific Lunar Eclipse." David Sanborn is amongst the soloists.

"Svengali" (an anogram of Gil Evans) dates from 1973 and was the first album Evans mad that included keyboards. When I first heard it, I was really disappointed but I feel it has improved with age - largely because the material is by the likes of Billy Harper, George Russell, Miles Davis and George Gershwin so more in the jazz idiom as opposed to later discs. By and large, there are moments in th 70s and 80's output like the Jimi Hendrix album which are exciting but either fall away from his earlier output because the arrangements are by others or there are no arrangements at all - the band being caught is a world between Count Basie's heavily riffing band of the 1930s and the Free-Funk jam band world of MMW. There is a late 1980s album where Evans toured with Laurent Cugny's big band which included the likes of Andy Sheppard which is more in keeping with Evans' previous work but the magic was lost by then.

I have read that Evans was a notoriously slow arranger. I am not sure whether this was through laziness or through finding writing difficult. In my opinion, the music he made in the 50s and 60s really raisedthe bar for jazz orchestration and he was criminally under-recorded in this era. I think there are more records from late 70s / 1980s under his name where he churned out discs with the same repertoire of Mingus, Hendrix and later Sting. By the 1980s, in retrospect I feel that the rest of the jazz composition world had caught up and even by-passed him. However,there is something truly special about the work Gil Evans produced at his peak. It is a shame that there is not more of it.

[Serial_Apologist]

I have read that Evans was a notoriously slow arranger. I am not sure whether this was through laziness or through finding writing difficult. In my opinion, the music he made in the 50s and 60s really raisedthe bar for jazz orchestration and he was criminally under-recorded in this era. I think there are more records from late 70s / 1980s under his name where he churned out discs with the same repertoire of Mingus, Hendrix and later Sting. By the 1980s, in retrospect I feel that the rest of the jazz composition world had caught up and even by-passed him. However,there is something truly special about the work Gil Evans produced at his peak. It is a shame that there is not more of it.

I think that there is a case to be made for some of the greatest big band jazz composers and arrangers up to the present day to have profited more from Gil Evans's orchestrational innovations of the 40s, 50s and early 60s than from anyone else. While he himself gained from the great orchestrators of early 20th century classical music, especially Debussy and Ravel, I have a feeling that they too would have sung his praises, had they lived, for his phenomenal gift for conjuring new textural combinations from extending Ellington's concepts, as opposed to starting from classical precepts, even modern ones. Ian Carr certainly thought so in the case of Kenny Wheeler, and of course we must not overlook a certain very much still living American woman composer and big band leader, a great favourite of your own if I am not mistaken. The only alternatives have come up through the free, lets' say post Sun Ra route bridging free and post free jazz improv and an avant-garde described in terms of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Penderecki's transformation and expansion of sonority, sometimes using electronics (pre-recorded and/or real-time) and the ebb and flow of massed free improvisation, of which Evan Parker undoubtedly has had more to say. I happen to think of the latter as having an importance equivalent to that of Gil Evans, notwithstanding an unfortunate growing divide, symptomatic of commercial packaging, between the two "schools of thinking" that has come about since Carla Bley's "Escalator", Westbrook's "Metropolis", Surman's big bands of 1966-72 and Braxton's Creative Music Orchestra of the mid-70s. Often when I hear new big band music with hip-hop breakbeats, MCs and samplers they seem like stylistically throwbacks to Parliament/Funkadelic and even earlier. Not that I in any way blame George Clinton!

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I would totally agree with you up to a point. The arranger I feel that has probably done more to take Evans' concept and run with it has been Mike Gibbs. I would not be unreasonable to suggest that his work in the 70s and 80's perhaps eclipsed his mentor's in the same era. I feel Mike Gibbs is seriously under-rated and , like Evans, has been under-recorded. Post 1980's, I feel that the possibilities of what big bands can do has been enhanced and writers as diverse as Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, Bob Brookmeyer, Guillermo Klein and John Hollenbeck have taken the concept well beyond the parameter within which Evans was working. You just have to consider how modern arrangers have tackled issues such as form to understand just how much beyond Evans the possibilities of orchestral jazz has evolved in the 50-70 years when Gil Evans was in his prime. No one other than Mike Gibbs has matched the palette of Gil Evans' orchestrations but I think that contemporary jazz composers have a greater grasp of musical language. I wondered if you had hear Guillermo Klein for example ? He deserves to be better known.

I totally agree with your comparisons with Ravel and Debussy . Evans was one of the greatest masters at orchestration , not only in which is assigned the different instruments but how he thought to push the boundaries by having instruments like tubas playing well outside their traditional range. I would also go further than this and say that , as well as orchestration, there is also a harmonic language that Evans used which was all of his own. This was something I had not considered until I can across a Michel Portal album where he used a small ensemble to recreate a passage of Evans' writing where the penny dropped for me that Evans' skill went far beyond assigning different combinations of instruments as it also dealt with how the harmonies were spelt out. You can hear this very well on the "new bottle, old wine" recordings plus "Svenagali" where he ditches the use of woodwinds for more traditional reeds. For me, Gil Evans is really special.

Where I differ in your opinion is that I strongly feel that what applies to Gil Evans also applies for Duke Ellington but ten-fold. It is really interesting to me just how far reaching Ellington's influence has been - not just with obvious writers like Mingus or Stan Tracey but also with more outside groups like Jason Roebke's ensembles which took it;s cues from Ellington's small groups but with musicians from the Chicago avant garde of the mid 2010s. In my opinion, Ellington occupies the same role in establishing the DNA of jazz language in the same way that yu could argue Bach did for Classical music. I feel that Ellington's influence will always be a cornerstone of jazz.

Many years ago I read a book about Gil Evans which included interviews which explained the impact of "Miles Ahead" when it was released and how the jazz comminity of the time was bowled over by the record. It was a major event at the time. This affected a wider range of musicians than you might have anticipated with Dizzy Gillespie, himself a pivotal figure in big band orchestration in the 1950s, being particularly impressed. The other notable name was Louis Armstrong who Gil Evans once described himself as his greatest fan. Feelers were put out between Evans and Armstrong to make a record together and they were both very keen to proceed but the project was dashed by Armstrong's manager Joe Glaser who felt thata collaboration with Evans would be derimental to his client. Given that we know how good the records with Miles Davis were, I feel that a similar collaboration with Armstrong is probably the greatest jazz album never made. A similar project with Bill Evans also went nowhere although there are editions of "Individualism" which have two tracks with a quartet with Jimmy Knepper which sounded out ideas for this particular project.

All in all, I love Gil Evans' work yet there is a sadness about the fact that his discography could have been ever better and should have included more records. I would have loved to have heard an album with Satchmo.

[Tenor Freak]

A very cool and enjoyable live set from the group Palladium, which specialises in the Wayne Shorter book. I am enjoying this one very much as the band is excellent too; impressed with tenor Nicole Glover and Sasha Berliner on vibes. Victor Lewis on drums, Russell Hall on bass and Joe Block on piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFdLCVRP70s

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Steve Kuhn, Pete LaRoca, Scott Lafaro, "Bohemia after dark", 1960. Six minutes in.

Wonderful bass, wonderful all round.

http://youtu.be/GzS0PN_bkMk?feature=shared

[Serial_Apologist]

Steve Kuhn, Pete LaRoca, Scott Lafaro, "Bohemia after dark", 1960. Six minutes in.

Wonderful bass, wonderful all round.

http://youtu.be/GzS0PN_bkMk?feature=shared

Really enjoying this! Anything with Lafaro on which I haven't previously heard is gold dust. If there is a gap between Bill Evans and Paul Bley, Steve Kuhn occupied it before anybody else came along in many ways: I'm surprised he's not as recognised as he should be.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Steve Kuhn was the first pianist with the classic Coltrane quartet. Trane then said, "I'd like to try something different" and so in came McCoy! He played with Kenny Dorham (happily) and with Stan Getz with Lafaro etc. He made some orchestral albums for Impulse, including one with what has been called his excretable poetry. Then he moved to Sweden and worked and had an longish affair with Monica Zetterlund (lucky him) and stayed in Europe for a good time. I was surprised how big his discography is, loads of albums including a ECM stretch.

There's a solo (ish) 80s ballad album that is terrific. And a live album with Ron Carter and Billy Drummond where he combines Waltzing Matilda with Bird's Constellation - and makes it work.

Very impressive guy.

[Jazzrook]

Steve Kuhn, Pete LaRoca, Scott Lafaro, "Bohemia after dark", 1960. Six minutes in.

Wonderful bass, wonderful all round.

http://youtu.be/GzS0PN_bkMk?feature=shared

Wish I could find a copy of that album, BN!
Here’s Steve Kuhn in a fascinating interview talking about Scott LaFaro, Stan Getz & John Coltrane:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=TX17vkuV5x0

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

Phew!!!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Wish I could find a copy of that album, BN!
Here’s Steve Kuhn in a fascinating interview talking about Scott LaFaro, Stan Getz & John Coltrane:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=TX17vkuV5x0

JR

👍 There's a used copy on Amazon for £81! Japanese label. Out of my reach!