A Berry, a Freeman, and a Baptiste - Ghosh!

[Serial_Apologist]

Sat 29 Oct
4.00 Jazz Record Requests
Alyn Shipton with listeners' requests across the full spectrum of jazz, includinjg a swing jam session with the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, teamed up with the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry.

http://www.alynshipton.co.uk/blog

5.00 Jazz Line-Up
Julian Joseph introduces music from the South Coast Jazz Festival, recorded in late January in Shoreham-by-Sea, with performances by clarinettist Arun Ghosh and his band. Their set also features a tribute to David Bowie, in the form of Ghosh's arrangement of The Man Who Sold the World.

NB This is a repeat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075p043

12.00 Geoffrey Smith's Jazz
Trumpeter Bunny Berigan (1908-42) and saxophonist Bud Freeman (1906-91) were two of the brightest stars of the Swing Era. Geoffrey Smith surveys their work.

NB This is also a repeat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043p42c

Monday 31 Oct
11.00 Jazz Now
Soweto Kinch presents a John Coltrane special. From Surrey University's Retrospect anbd Prospect conference, Gary Crosby's quartet with Denys Baptiste revisit Coltrane's signature work. A Love Supreme , released in early 1965. Plus Al Ryan reviews some previously unissued Coltrane performances and talks to pianist McCoy Tyner.

If this is the Crosby quartet with the wonderfully musical US-born drummer Rod Youngs, this could be interesting - especially since Baptiste is stylistically somewhat outwith the "Coltrane lineage" of players such as Courtney Pine and Paul Dunmall, and arguably closer to a Joe Henderson or even to a Joe Lovano.

It would indeed be nice to have a major tribute programme or series on Gary Crosby, modest-mannered fellow that he is, who in my estimation has done as much for British jazz from a musician's initiative point of view as anybody since his co-founding of The Jazz Warriors back in 1985.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z6f8g

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I've got Lars Gullin's "Darn that dream" on JRR tomorrow, one of my suggestions to the ongoing sequence. A tune somewhat synonymous with Lars, it could itself almost be Scandinavian. Anyway a lovely quartet track from ('59 or '60) when Lars "was fully at home and not out" as Dexter sometimes cryptically alluded to his own lifestyle and er, indulgences. Its also one of my "significant" birthdays... who shouted "90!" at the back..."he ain't bought a record since Donald Byrd went disco! " No, still a baby boomer! So, very best to all.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

Totally agree about Gary Crosby. He has basically created a jazz movement outside London from scratch. I saw him perform with Steve Williamson about 15 years ago and, having attending the gig anticipating a modest performance, witnessed one of the best gigs by British musicians I have seen. Shame that he seems to flit on and out of the limelight. Williamson, however, remains an enigma. Of the four "New Neos" amongst the tenor players from the UK that emerged from the "jazz boom", Williamson seemed to leave the most fleeting impression. Pine has always remained a great ambassador for the music but I have found him to be quite under-whelming and maybe too populist. Andy Sheppard has probably succeeded the most and, with Carla Bley, has found a musical partner who has provoked some of his best work even though he has always struck me as jumping on whatever style is then fashionable. Tommy Smith was the one I anticipated hitting the big time yet, whilst he has probably worked with the musicians of the greatest calibre, I find that his music has become increasingly dull, almost to the point of being a real effort to listen to. When I heard him last in the mid-2000s, everyone left the hall bored out of their eyeballs even though the stellar line up included John Scofield. I have never heard such a good line up squandered on weak material. By contrast, Williamson struck me as being the most over-hyped at the time and his machine-like version of Coltrane didn't seem to win many fans over despite some heavy correspondence in the jazz press. I felt that he wasn't worth the attention yet, the aforementioned concert staggered me at how he had matured and, in Crobsy's quartet, emerged as perhaps the most credible of the four tenor players. Since then, he has disappeared yet again.

The Black British jazz scene that emerged in the 1980s seemed to promise a lot yet they rarely seem to tour the UK and there is a serious gap in the discography where players like Williamson, Crosby and even Julian Joseph have failed to make an impression on record. Williamson has 3 records to his name and Joseph has one. At least Gary Crosby is involved in the scene and instrumental in encouraging young musicians to get involved with jazz. He is exactly what the music needs, in my opinion and the global jazz scene would be much better off if his vision of jazz was maintained.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Steve Williamson....

" I swear to God, I actually went to live by the sea. I did a performance at Bexhill on the South Coast and there’s a listed pavilion right there next to the sea called the Delaware pavilion. I was right on top of this pavilion with a floodlight on me and I just blew my saxophone… I stayed with this lovely old couple who owned a cottage with a thatched roof – a beautiful old cottage. The sea was right there and I loved it. So I said this couple when I finished the gig, “I could live here forever!” And they said to me, “You can have it as a little bolthole.” And I said, “Really!” So I packed my bags, and the next day I moved there and didn’t come back to London for two and a half years; In fact I was there for three years"

Part of a v. long three part interview at Ukvib.org.

I met him when he was just getting a name but he played Cardiff and slept on the floor of a friend of mine, another tenor player. Nice guy but
quiet, then at least. Not anything like as outgoing as CP. If you read the interview he was really caught up in that era, right down to the Armani
sponsorship et al. I think he lost himself for a while.

BN.

[Jazzrook]

I've got Lars Gullin's "Darn that dream" on JRR tomorrow, one of my suggestions to the ongoing sequence. A tune somewhat synonymous with Lars, it could itself almost be Scandinavian. Anyway a lovely quartet track from ('59 or '60) when Lars "was fully at home and not out" as Dexter sometimes cryptically alluded to his own lifestyle and er, indulgences. Its also one of my "significant" birthdays... who shouted "90!" at the back..."he ain't bought a record since Donald Byrd went disco! " No, still a baby boomer! So, very best to all.

BN.

Will have a TDK SA 90 tape(v. expensive!) primed for your 'Darn That Dream' request. Had Gullin's 'Danny's Dream' played a while back. We should hear more of him on JRR.

Happy significant birthday, BN.

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Will have a TDK SA 90 tape(v. expensive!) primed for your 'Darn That Dream' request. Had Gullin's 'Danny's Dream' played a while back. We should hear more of him on JRR.

Happy significant birthday, BN.

JR

Thank you! "Danny's Dream" is bloody gorgeous. I had it played to close a friend's funeral. Now, there's cheerful!

BN.

BTW, just noticed Alyn is playing the longer take of Darn that dream which is very OK viv me.

[Tenor Freak]

Monday 31 Oct
11.00 Jazz Now
Soweto Kinch presents a John Coltrane special. From Surrey University's Retrospect anbd Prospect conference, Gary Crosby's quartet with Denys Baptiste revisit Coltrane's signature work. A Love Supreme , released in early 1965. Plus Al Ryan reviews some previously unissued Coltrane performances and talks to pianist McCoy Tyner.

If this is the Crosby quartet with the wonderfully musical US-born drummer Rod Youngs, this could be interesting - especially since Baptiste is stylistically somewhat outwith the "Coltrane lineage" of players such as Courtney Pine and Paul Dunmall, and arguably closer to a Joe Henderson or even to a Joe Lovano.

It would indeed be nice to have a major tribute programme or series on Gary Crosby, modest-mannered fellow that he is, who in my estimation has done as much for British jazz from a musician's initiative point of view as anybody since his co-founding of The Jazz Warriors back in 1985.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z6f8g

Interesting: Denys was listening a lot to Sonny Rollins when I knew him, though we always liked Trane and Joe Henderson. He was more of a Trane fan than I was, back then. We used to talk a lot about different albums but a favourite of both of us was Sonny's A Night at the Village Vanguard. (must send Alyn a request for "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise" for Wilbur Ware's bass solo). I will have to listen to this on iPlayer. Agree about Gary Crosby, he's really been one of the prime movers of British jazz and should be recognised for this.

[Tenor Freak]

~snip~

The Black British jazz scene that emerged in the 1980s seemed to promise a lot yet they rarely seem to tour the UK and there is a serious gap in the discography where players like Williamson, Crosby and even Julian Joseph have failed to make an impression on record. Williamson has 3 records to his name and Joseph has one. At least Gary Crosby is involved in the scene and instrumental in encouraging young musicians to get involved with jazz. He is exactly what the music needs, in my opinion and the global jazz scene would be much better off if his vision of jazz was maintained.

I think Steve Williamson has suffered on and off with mental health problems, hence the long career breaks. This is tragic because he was actually the most interesting of the young black British tenor players that emerged in the mid-80s. I saw him years ago at a late gig in Brentford (1987) and thought he was excellent, yes Trane-derived but he had been working on some other things as well. He was still quite young so it was going to be interesting to see how he was going to mature. It was all going nicely for him when he released "A Waltz for Grace". That he's not a world-leading musician now, is a real pity.

As for the others mentioned above, Andy Sheppard

[Serial_Apologist]

Rap is regarded as rather a dirty word in certain circles on this board, but one aspect not often remarked on is the way in which its speech patterns engage with its normally heavy rhythmically defined framework, using samples, drum machines. There are live bands which have sought to "humanise" these interactions by way of live replicating of complex machine-made hip-hop rhythms and those produced by the competitive interactions of MCs operating turntables to see who can outcut whom in terms of piled up sub-beat elaborations. These bands seem to come and go - the whole area is a competitive minefield with its subculture, egged on with a strong accent on machismo display - but high art music has been influenced by speech patterns, especially in its more nationalistic guises, whether colloquial or structured formally in poems: one thinks especially of the music of Janacek in which the pacing and rhythmic asymmetries would not exist were it not for them. Steve Williamson has attempted to apply the "feel" of rap rhythmics to improvisation, which I think is one of his distinguishing merits, given that not many in jazz have done this on tuned, in particular wind instruments, this having largely been limited over here to drummers such as Seb Rochford, Steve Arguelles, and Mark Sanders. Something similar started happening a decade or so earlier in America through the work of drummers such as Jim Black and Bobby Previte, though given musical and cultural differences in the mixes each side of The Pond, with Reggae and Dub stronger on our side, the results are distinct. My impression is that the results are better integrated here than in the States, possibly as a consequence of having learned from their mistakes.

[Lat-Literal]

Rap is regarded as rather a dirty word in certain circles on this board, but one aspect not often remarked on is the way in which its speech patterns engage with its normally heavy rhythmically defined framework, using samples, drum machines. There are live bands which have sought to "humanise" these interactions by way of live replicating of complex machine-made hip-hop rhythms and those produced by the competitive interactions of MCs operating turntables to see who can outcut whom in terms of piled up sub-beat elaborations. These bands seem to come and go - the whole area is a competitive minefield with its subculture, egged on with a strong accent on machismo display - but high art music has been influenced by speech patterns, especially in its more nationalistic guises, whether colloquial or structured formally in poems: one thinks especially of the music of Janacek in which the pacing and rhythmic asymmetries would not exist were it not for them. Steve Williamson has attempted to apply the "feel" of rap rhythmics to improvisation, which I think is one of his distinguishing merits, given that not many in jazz have done this on tuned, in particular wind instruments, this having largely been limited over here to drummers such as Seb Rochford, Steve Arguelles, and Mark Sanders. Something similar started happening a decade or so earlier in America through the work of drummers such as Jim Black and Bobby Previte, though given musical and cultural differences in the mixes each side of The Pond, with Reggae and Dub stronger on our side, the results are distinct. My impression is that the results are better integrated here than in the States, possibly as a consequence of having learned from their mistakes.

I am pleased to say I didn't spend this morning listening to Michael Buble explaining why he wanted to take an Eminem disc to his desert island. However, I did read "De La Soul keep below the sample police radar on their first album in aeons" - https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/rev...onymous-nobody. De La Soul's albums - for example "Stakes Is High" (1996) - weren't available on Spotify etc for a long time because of the sample police who would have no doubt have picked up on Ahmad Jamal's "Swahililand" among other things:

De La Soul - Stakes is High - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj-vPcCfQ6k

See also "Dinninit" with "Enchanted Lady" by Milt Jackson & the Ray Brown Big Band.

It also makes sense to mention in the context of R3, rap and jazz "Adrian's Ballad" etc from Soweto Kinch's "A Life In The Day Of B19", an album I enjoyed when it was released.

[burning dog]

[Tenor Freak]

Funny, when I linked to an entire album of Pete Rock the reaction here was largely "meh"...yet I find this whole album compelling...sample (sic) track:

[burning dog]

Funny, when I linked to an entire album of Pete Rock the reaction here was largely "meh"...yet I find this whole album compelling...sample (sic) track:

That wasn't my reaction though I'm not sure I posted a comment