Charles Mingus with Clifford Jordan, John Handy, Jane Getz & Dannie Richmond playing ‘New Fables’ live at The Jazz Workshop, San Francisco, June, 1964:
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I was intrigued to learn that the ' Bud on Bach' track by Bud Powell was actually utilising a composition by the son CPE and not the father JS. I had not been familiar with the source material and assumed that it was by the more familiar Bach. CPE Bach is totally unfamiliar to me although I am aware of his reputation.
Interestingly composition was written for piano students and is not considered technically demanding. However, the most striking element about it was how the line of the composition seems to forecasts that of Bebop. It would be fascinating to discover what classical music Powell learned when he was studying the instrument.
I am not usually much of a fan of more Classical composers of the Classical era and cannot abide Mozart. I feel this period post JSB does not have much resonance with jazz as in the case of 20th century composers so it is fascinating to see Bud Powell performing this. Recently I have been sight reading a lot of Muzio Clementi and find this composer to be fun to play whilst being fascinating to read about due to his role as a business man and his local connections with Blandford Forum where he grew up. CPE Bach remains a mystery.
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I tend to agree re the second half of the C18 Classical era (properly designated) not providing adaptability for jazz - it's too "idiomatic"; however CPE Bach is a welcome exception for me, a revolutionary without whom we would not have the symphony whose music sounds remarkably fresh today compared with the usual suspects (Haydn often excepted). Classical music then comes alive once more for me after around 1880 with the modernist precursors such as Hugo Wolf, Mahler and Debussy.Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View PostComment
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Jeff Ballards's ' Timeless Tales' which is a trio with the seriously undeŕvalued Lionel Loueke and Miguel Zenon. There is a wise range of material oh this exceptional disc but the transcription of the song of the Western Wren as a almost Ornettish theme never ceases to stagger me. An essential track for other bird watching jazz fans although the whole album is terrific . I love the drums / alto/ guitar line up. One of the most rewarding and intriguing jazz albums of 21st century .... the polar opposite of watching Scotland trying to play football at the moment ! It was a shame there was no follow up record and the bird song as jazz vehicle merited further exploration. It did make me wonder which of the three musicians was the bird watcher.
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Noah Howard, Takashi Kako, Kent Carter & Oliver Johnson playing Coltrane’s ‘Ole’ in 1975 from Howard’s album ‘Live in Europe Vol. 1’:
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Donald Byrd with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren & Billy Higgins playing the title track from the 1961 album ‘Free Form’:
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I really enjoyed that track Jazzrook. It's pretty outstanding for 1961. Not very familiar with it, but I'd presumed that album was recorded at lot later.Originally posted by Jazzrook View Post
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I love this
I doubt Adolph Sax expected a sound like this
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....lovely start to a saturday morning....rich, open, solid, looking forward....thanksbong chingComment
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I have been listening to the Avid double cd by Oscar Pettiford. The big band tracks are far better than the small group discs that have not aged well. It is interesting to see how well rehearsed the larger group is whereas the appeal of the smaller bands largely stems from Pettiford's writing.
The Avid discs fascinate and I sometimes wonder how people in this board would have been favourable. I am finding that these discs can be uneven as they continue to include long forgotten and uncelebrated albums which can be quite ordinary. Pettiford seemed to bridge the period between swing and bop. I usually love this type of jazz yet some of the music on this disc is indifferent. They can be a but under rehearsed and some of the lesser soloists are band average. It is the more familiar names like Clark Terry, Jimmy Hamilton and Lucky Thompson who come across as the stellar soloists. There are some Avid releases which contain famous records yet I am quite surprised by just how many of their releases give a picture of 1950s jazz as being quality over quantity. You can understsnd why some records are so lauded .
The other album from 1950s i have been playing is Dave Brubecks Time Out. I am much more favourable to this band that I would have been five years ago. I can appreciate Paul Desmond more and am less inclined to single out Brubeck himself these days. However, I am I increasingly impressed by Joe Morello on drums. I just feel he is THE essential ingredient to this band. Where it does date is with the compositions which no longer sound radical and maybe a bit twee these days. Brubeck's writing is better on thr Japan album in my opinion. Like the Pettiford disc , some elements no longer seem so radical. This is also a case in point with the Curtis Counce disc which includes some serious writing by a Teddy Charles group. which sounded earnest when it was recorded yet now seems really dated. It was if they were trying too hard.
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Agree about Joe Morello's drumming - for me the one thing that is indeed outstanding about those Brubeck sides, apart from "that" famous drum solo on Take Five which I always found finicky and pretentious, even as a teenager.Comment
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Not sure I agree about Morello's drum solo as I think it is an early example of a drummer trying to play a melody on his kit.
It is strange how some music ages and other musicians produce a body of work that takes a while to be appreciated. I think that a lot of jazz in the early fifties has aged poorly as Modern Jazz found it's feet. Similarly jazz from the 1970s and especially Fusion sounds really dated. I get the same impression from some ECM albums albeit i also think Eicher was responsible for producing some epoch changing music. The liked of Garbarek and Weber's music remains distinctive yet is not so edgy to contemporary ears as it may have been at the time.
The weirdest record from the 1950s in my opinion is Bob Brookmeyer's Traditionalism Revisited which accidentally predicts the jazz of musicians like Bill Frisell. I love this record.
With Brubeck, I felt the popular nature of his work discounted against him and it was only relatively recently that his truth worth has been appreciated. It is surprising that his approach which eschewed bebop was not picked up sooner. He was as much a maverick as Erroll Garner but more musically savvy of Classical music. I dont think jazz fans back in the day gave him.enough respect. He was trying to do something really different.Comment
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London-residing Marcina Arnold - she fits the Soweto Kinch programme profile, and well deserves a hearing there, in my opinion.
No idea who the rest of the musicians are but they're good, it's a cracker of a band.
Marcina is generically flexible and does free improv stuff. She also plays guitar as can be heard on this Latin track, and does vocal coaching, community music with disabled etc.
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Dodo (Michael) Marmerosa, "Mellow Mood", from Dodo's Back, Argo 1961. He wasn't back (playing) for long, illness and mental problems took care of that, stemming in part from being dropped head first onto a steel rail track by US Navy thugs in the forties. But this is a very fine album that I've been playing a great deal recently. I think it's much better that the album he made with Gene Ammons around the same which never seemed to really gell, good though Ammons is.
Mellow Mood, which I think he wrote when he was c. 14.Comment
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When it comes to Kenny Wheeler, we're all merry men
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I really like that Dodo Marmarosa track although it is a shame about the quality of the piano.
Marmarosa was a pianist I appreciated when I was first discovering Bebop when I was about 16. I had forgotten this album but seem to recall Humph once played a track from it. He is more familiar to me through his work with Parker and the second incarnation of Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five which was a great little bebop group and much better than the earlier edition with the harpsichord.
I had also forgotten that he played with Charlie Barnet and was featured in a track called The Moose which Gunther Schuller raved about. He was fired frim Tommy Dorsey's band for being too modern.
I was not aware of his tragic life and had assuned ge had disappeared from jazz as fashions changed . It was an interesting time for jazz piano as I have always felt this era was dominated by Bud Powell with there being quite a distance in ability between Bud and his contemporaries. There were other players from this generation like Al Haig and Joe Albany who slipped into obscurity. Marmarosa sounds like a real loss to jazz and I think we would have had far better support for his mental wellbeing these days. He had a tragic life and seems to have lost interest in the music even though he had been a virtuoso.
My contemporary standards, there is a clear gap after Herbie Hancock both harmonically and rhythmically so that many pianists from 40s to 50s seemed to quickly disappear from view for most of the jazz listening public.Comment
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