Gene Ammons

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Iv'e spent a Miliband morning listening to an old Gene Ammons LP, "Angel Eyes", with Johnny Hammond Smith and Frank Wess on flute. The title track is a gem, total control with wonderful pauses, little bursts, grace notes and an almost vocal delivery. And it's a great tune, tres 50s cool..

Gene is never played on JRR. I intend to lead the charge. Dig this out Alyn, put away those awful recorders.

Boss tenor.

BN.

[Alyn_Shipton]

Would that be before the Art Pepper and Barney Wilen choices? You're right about how seldom he was on - 2006 and 2010 looks to be the two most recent. and two recorder tracks in 5 and a half months isn't really overdoing it!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

why wait ...

try this on yer new smartski phone El Senor

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Thanks Alyn, I just pick the band, you do the set list!

Great track and once upon a time Angel Eyes as a tune was a background to every seedy Soho b/w b.movie.

I always kept my shirt on.

BN.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

And thank you Calum. My "free" Spotify ran out just as I was about to copy Cecil Taylor's Contemp. album "Looking Ahead" to C90. Cant beat 'em.

Heres a free programming idea, lets have a blindfold item on JRR each week...a lot of people would guess Cecil's "African Violets" with Earl Griffiths on vibes to be the MJQ...What our Cecil?!!

BN..

[Alyn_Shipton]

BN, if we were really short of requests, then a blindfold test would be fun. But at the moment with far more requests than w've space for, people might understandably get a bit huffy if what they've asked for doesn't get played. Though I suppose in the manner of Round Britain Quiz it'd be for listeners to fox everyone else with their blindfold suggestions. I don't want to add something to the programme that is as irrelevant as the visits to posh gardens are on Gardeners' Question Time. I want more info on what to do with my cabbages, not to hear about someone's 900 year old hedges...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

yep not enough time for jazz on R3 .....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Shaw nuff, Alyn! Although you lost me a bit re. the gardens and the Hedge Fund.

The BBC has a hedge fund? Well, all those bonuses need protecting. No wonder Mark Thompson is off to head up Goldman Sachs. A top flight banker.

BN.

'Bet someone JRR requests for Eric Hobsbawm - Tanks for the Memory?

[Ian Thumwood]

Prompted by an earlier edition of "Jazz Library" I picked up a cheapo 4-CD set of Gene Ammons. The early stuff featuring charts by Jimmy Mundy (from recollection) are terrific but it is quite disappointing just how lazy he was with some of the smaller groups in the late 40's and early 50's. I like his sound on his horn yet the quality of the music is almost disposable riffs with simple, blues-based heads and a R n' B type feel to them. The sound quality if pretty lousy as well and I got the impression these were recorded for a cheap-skate record company. Some time ago there was a debate about Illinois Jacquet's recordings from this era (seem to recall it might have been a remark by Trevor Cooper where he berated Jacquet's often over-the -top style) but , whilst they are quite similar, the group that Jacquet led with Sir Charles Thompson and Joe Newman was far superior to some of the crud churned out by Ammons. In the context of a well-crafted Mundy chart, Ammon's proved to be sensational yet some of the compilations produced by the likes of Quadromania and Proper demonstrate that there was almost no quality control with a lot of the small group jazz put out in the late 40's - especially where there was an R n' B influence. There are some quite famous culprits such as Lionel Hampton and even Jay McShann, but Ammons must take the biscuit for the shear quantity of dross that labels seemed capable of churning out back then. I think he later 50's work is supposed to be better but the stuff on the Quadromania box set is only about 25% return regarding the quality of the music. Although I must admit to being hugely partial to 1940's bop and also some of the more adventurous swing era musicians of the late 40's, the period 1945-early 50's must have witnessed some of the biggest dropping off in quality of some of the biggest names in jazz. (Ellington, Lunceford, Hampton, etc.)

[Alyn_Shipton]

BN You can hear me discussing Hobsbawm and jazz here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n11ql round about 15.59 into the show.
Ian, some of the early sides for Chess in particular have real recording quality issues. And because at some stages of his career he was taking any session that came along to support his habit, they;re variable in quality, but there are some absolute gems of playing from almost all periods of his work. I disagree about the Jacquet - if you listen through the Jacquet Proper box, it's incredibly formulaic. I had real trouble doing a Jazz Legends on him, despite a lovely interview with Illinois because the recordings were so samey. If you want Joe Newman's best work, seek out his sessions with Freddie Green and Al Cohn. All masterpieces....(well, almost).

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

There was a v.good piece on Hobsbawn, life, work and evasions, by Perry Anderson in the LRB a few years back.

Oh, what will the Guardianistas do now...

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

The only book by Hobsbawm that I have read is "Industry and Empire" although I am generally a big reader of history books. This was quite entertaining when I did "O" level Social & Economic History back in 1983. It is quite good to read some books that have an agenda or want to press forward an idea (thinking about Richard Fletcher's "Bloodfeud" which suggested that the reason for the destabilisation in 11th Century Northumberlandthat lead to Stamdford Bridge and ultimately the failure of Hastings was due to a dynastic feud between two families or the recent "Unroman Britain" which offers compelling evidence for the tenuous state of Roman Britain) but , by and large, to look at something from one political position without considering all possible views has had it's day. I'm not quite sure just how well the likes of Christopher Hill, E J Taylor, AJP Taylor or Eric Hobsbawm stand up to scrutiny today. The likes of earlier historians like Sir Mauriice Powicke's account of 14th Century England was a hard slog for me and it is amazing that books like Stenton's account of Anglo-Saxon England are still around as archaeology must have made huge swathes of this book redundant. From my perspective, I generally tend to have more interest in anything from Pre-historic history through to about 1348 (Black Death) but not much enthusiasm for the next three hundred years. I like 18th and 19th Century history becuase this is what I studied to "A" level and tend to avoid military history as this is a bit boring, unless it concerns World War One. (I also studied a bit of Medieval economics which was pretty hopeless with regard to getting an appreciation for the 300 years of history after 1066 - didn't really make any sense until I got an understaning of the social and political aspects of this period.) To be a "good" historian in 2012, I feel that you need to cover all possibilities and arguments and garner information from as many sources as possible. To a large extent, I can't see how you can do this successfully with many aspects of history without acknowledging the strong input of archaeology especially as you go further back in time. For these reasons, I think the likes of Hobsbawm don't stand the test of time and the ready availability of original sources / records that has been made possible by the internet and public availability of information in country records offices means that much of the history from this era isn't rigorous enough for my taste. It's telling that contemporary historians like Simon Schama who appear to have followed in the footsteps of these writers now seem equally suspect. In my opinion, his "History of Britain"was erratic and a bit of a waste of time. The Pre-history section was almost dismissed in a matter of a chapter. He is a pretty poor historian in my view. I don't think that the "wider view" of history generally works these days and most history books seem increasingly more insular or dedicated to one topic - and all the better for that. The only exception I can think of is Micahel Wood's exceptional "The story of England" which refracts our national history through one village. I think this book is a masterpiece.

Curious then, to hear Alyn's comments about Hobsbawm as a jazz critic and to find these kind of failings in this writer albeit far more manifest. It's quite interesting to apply the same criteria to books about the history of jazz and I feel the same way too in that the best and more rigorous histories probably date from the 1980's onwards.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Ian, despite my contempt for many of Hobsbawm's political positions, he remains a master of synthesis and the use of comparative data. You would do well to read him...and think.

Try reading EH Carr's short What is History beforehand.

Straighten up and fly right.

BN.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

And...the story of an ENGLISH village is not "our" national history even for the bloody english! For feks sake.

BN.

[charles t]

Seeing as I was around during the days of 'Jug' - who (possibly) was also residing - while performing - in Chicago...

Having a front table view (at McKee's Show Lounge on E. 63rd St.) of Jug's cut-off shoe...maybe because of the onset of diabetes; but what does a kid understand?

Yea, way back in the days when tenorists swung hard, man...really hard

A few years later Elvin would leave Trane - commenting:

'... (he's) playing music that only the poets can hear.'