What Jazz are you listening to now?

[elmo]

'Blue Spring'
Kenny Dorham with Cannonball Adderley, David Amram, Cecil Payne, Cedar Walton, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb & Philly Joe Jones
Riverside (1959)

Coincidence Stan

I chose that album today too - KD plays an absolutely beautiful solo on "Passion Spring" - we have such good taste!

elmo

[Beef Oven!]

Amazing!

Thanks for posting this Joseph, I have only heard a very small amount of this trio's output, even though there are squillions of releases. I really enjoyed this.

Does anyone have a view on the best 4/5 KJ Trio releases for a newbie to start with?

[Stanfordian]

‘More Power!’
Dexter Gordon with James Moody, Barry Harris, Buster Williams & Albert Heath
Prestige (1969)

For this evening!

[Jazzrook]

The 1960 album 'You 'n' Me' with Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, Major Holley & Osie Johnson.

Here's Bill Potts' 'The Opener':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5BEfum5ENg

JR

[Joseph K]

Thanks for posting this Joseph, I have only heard a very small amount of this trio's output, even though there are squillions of releases. I really enjoyed this.

Does anyone have a view on the best 4/5 KJ Trio releases for a newbie to start with?

You might want to check out Still Live by the KJ trio.

What I found amazing about that video was the harmonic substitutions he uses.

[Stanfordian]

'On the Spur of the Moment'
Horace Parlan with Tommy Turrentine, Stanley Turrentine, George Tucker & Al Harewood
Blue Note (1961)

[Ian Thumwood]

Thanks for posting this Joseph, I have only heard a very small amount of this trio's output, even though there are squillions of releases. I really enjoyed this.

Does anyone have a view on the best 4/5 KJ Trio releases for a newbie to start with?

"Out of towners" is really good. I think a lot of the albums have now been deleted from the catalogue. "Up for it" is pretty good too.

[Serial_Apologist]

"Out of towners" is really good. I think a lot of the albums have now been deleted from the catalogue. "Up for it" is pretty good too.

I didn't think ECM ever deleted their albums!

[Ian Thumwood]

I didn't think ECM ever deleted their albums!

I first got in to ECM around 1986 largely through Chick Corea's work starting with a duet he recorded with flautist Steve Kujala called "Voyage." I became obsessed with the label for about ten years, especially when I first got in to the label. There were a host of names like Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, Ralph Towner, Eberhard Weber, John Abercrombie and Egberto Gismonti who were totally new to me even if I had heard of Keith Jarrett, Lester Bowie and Dave Holland who were also on the label at that time. I used to order my records from a store in Southsea called Orpheus Records where the proprietor Geoff Ward would always prompt me to listen to people I had never heard of. Oddly, his taste in music was far more conservative but it was when he gave me a catalogue of ECM records that I realised how much more music there was to explore. Although I didn't have anything more than a fraction of the records in their book (I think it went up to about 1300 in their series) I always assumed these CDs were representative of everything they had released. I went up to London to buy records one summer holiday and found a crate of old ECM LP's that were on sale and rifling through them, the covers looked totally unfamiliar and not at all in line with their then intriguing photographs. Many of these LPs have never appeared on CD and I think they included early albums by the likes of Ralph Towner. There was a lot of hippy / folky stuff on their roster in the early days.

If you look up any of the recordings from the catalogue now, you will find that the music is no longer available. It is a fallacy that I too believe that ECM did not delete stuff from their catalogue and I think that they are quite ruthless. Large swathes of stiff from 70's and 80's is no longer available (probably the majority) and would not be surprised if the 1990's material suffered a similar fate. It is fascinating to see just how the label has changed over the years. It is not as good as it once was nor as original. I think that ECM nowadays is a bit like Liverpool insofar that they poach everyone else's talent from other labels rather than producing their own and make the artists less appealing. Like Liverpool, they are trying to capture the greatness of the 1970's and 80's but times have moved on. Still, the earlier stuff if great even if Eicher was quick to delete less successful material and records which have not stood the test of time. For me, some of the artists like Weber and Jarbarek sound pretty dated these days (excluding the stuff JG produced in his "jazz" days in the 1970s which is essential European jazz) and Eicher's reluctance to let artists rip out like he did earlier one makes me feel that the label has become a parody of itself. As a teenager, ECM seemed cutting edge and truly original and I still have affection for a lot of the albums. The dull covers don't help and I much preferred the photography on the original covers as opposed to the bleak, wintry abstractions they go for now.

[CGR]

ECM is now under Universal Music Group. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...c_Group_labels

So no surprise that they are not the label they once were.

Interesting rant on the state of the music industry & jazz:

[Stanfordian]

'The Big Beat'
Art Blakey with Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons & Jymie Merritt
Blue Note (1960)

[Beef Oven!]

Wayne Shorter - All Seeing Eye

[Stanfordian]

'Indestructible'
Art Blakey with Curtis Fuller, Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton & Reggie Workman
Blue Note (1964)

[Jazzrook]

Gene 'Clarence' Shaw's 1962 album 'Breakthrough' with Sherman Morrison(tenor sax); James Taylor(piano); Sidney Robinson(bass) & Bernard Martin(drums):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6KQ4fmsUi4

JR

[Ian Thumwood]

I would have to be brutally frank and own up to the fact that probably the least appealing kind of jazz for me would be the mid-1950's West Coast which is generally as much of it's time as 1940's Glenn Miller or 1970's fusion. Typically, there is a breezy politeness about it that signifies for me much of that hiatus between the heat of late 1940's be-bop and the kind of hard bop that became fashionable in the latter part of the decade. The shear casualness of the music and the wearying pursuit of a cool sound renders so much of the West Coast jazz uninteresting although there are records like Shorty Roger's "Cool n' Crazy" which have a kind of hipness about them that elevates the music above so many of their contemporaries. As a rule, the West Coast jazz of the 1950's has been marooned by future developments whether you are talking about Ornette, Charlie Haden, Gerald Wilson, Horace Tapscott etc, etc.

Out of curiosity I snapped up a re-issue on Avid of four albums by Curtis Counce's groups. Something of a cult figure, these records have hitherto only been know to be by their period album covers - "You get more bounce with Curtis Counce" being a classic of it's kind! It is a shame that the first Counce quintet album is missing from this compilation but I would have to say the music is staggeringly brilliant. It sounds a lot like Harold Land's "The Fox" and , in my opinion, Land's tenor playing is a large part of what makes these recordings stand out. I would also have to say that Frank Butler is really useful on the drum-set and belies his performance on Miles' "Seven steps" where he sound anachronistic. In this context, the quintet sounds like a West Coast response to the then current MD first Quintet albeit Carl Perkin's piano playing is earthier than Red Garland's more fleet approach. The "future" pressing is not so sharp and "Bounce" on this double CD but "Bounce" is the pick of the bunch even though the album largely consists of standards including a definitive "Strangers in paradise. " More surprising is the trumpet player Jack Sheldon, an ex-alumni of Stan Kenton and Benny Goodman who also worked as a comedian. I am really impressed by his playing and maybe more deserving on this performance than the cultish Dupree Boulton hwo appears on "The Fox" On this performance alone, Sheldon is clearly woefully under-rated but the whole band is pretty sensational and totally unlike anything else you expect from the 1950's West Coast. Part of the appeal is the fact this band had it's own identity and, if you have a downer on 1950's West Coast jazz and struggle to see what made this music so appealing at the time to people like my QS teacher at college, this Avid collection will change your perception.

The sound reproduction on some of the Avids have come in for a bit f flak on line. The first CD sounds really clear and sounds re-mastered. The second disc sounds a little unfocused and fuzzy by comparison. I have a few of these Avids in my collection and never noticed a problem before but this set, whilst perfectly playable, has a wonderful sounding first disc someone diminished by the "Future" re-master. Was this a problem on the original, I wonder. For £4, it was worth the punt.