The dog trots freely thru the Rolling Jazz Canto Thread 2016

The latest Jane Ira Bloom album Early Americans is rather lovely, I probably need to check Sixteen Sunsets as well.

Didn't think I was going to listen to the new Miles Davis Bootleg Series set (raw session tapes from the 1965-68 quintet, paired with the finished tracks), but someone's paying me to, and...it's kind of interesting to hear the band spend 25 minutes figuring out what they're going to do with "Freedom Jazz Dance," for example, but this is probably the set least aimed at the casual fan. The previous four, you could see someone picking up cold and being into. This one is strictly for nerds.

i saw shipp and kapp play (in a backyard!) last weekend and it was excellent. live at least kapp is a pretty assertive drummer and would push shipp out of the kind of moseys he gets into sometimes--but left room for a little moseying. probably the best non-bisio set i've seen shipp play.

In October, a David S. Ware/Matthew Shipp duo, recorded live in 2004, is coming out on AUM Fidelity. It's really good. Ware is blowing so hard the microphone distorts at several points.

Heard through the grapevine that NPR Music is restructuring their online offerings and dropping "A Blog Supreme," their jazz page (edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon) (but they're looking to hire another person to write about hiphop)

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/

argh, that sucks.

Saxophonist James Brandon Lewis is putting out his fourth album, No Filter, next month; it's his first with his working trio (bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren G. Crudup III), after albums featuring, respectively, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, and Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Rudy Royston. I think it's a digital-only release, and it's on BNS Sessions, not OKeh/Sony like his last two.

now on the radio: "John Coltrane", from Billy Higgins' Mr. Billy Higgins (Riza, '64): 12' 45, but somehow concise, crisp (committed but not overwrought) excursion on the version and distillation of that JC Quartet vibe, with no imitations. Performers, aside from the leader, mostly unfamiliar to me Gary Bias on sax William Henderson at the piano, bassist Tony Dumas. Composed by Bill Lee (Spike Lee's father, I think). Some goosebumps at the moment.
(more of this LP is on the 'tube, will have to check)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL4X3XXze9A

Up next on the radio: Jazz Night In America rerun of that time Jason Moran and The (eight-piece) Big Bandwagon played their take on Thelonious Monk's Town Hall big band concert, w some multimedia, incl. samples of Monk's comments---still posted too, where you can watch, listen, download:
http://www.npr.org/event/music/446866440/jason-moran-plays-thelonious-monks-town-hall-concert

And the Monk talk is from his own tapes. He recorded all sorts of stuff, incl. teaching his songs, "one chord by one chord" (with listeners' insights much later, when tapes were finally retrieved), also ambient sound of the stairwell etc.

Listening to the new Cookers album, The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart. Came out last week, I think, on Smoke Sessions. These guys aren't doing anything new at all - they play acoustic post-hard-bop in a very 1970s mode, but if you love, say, Woody Shaw's Muse and Columbia albums as much as I do, you should absolutely be listening to these guys. What I really need to do is start digging up the albums the members of the group (Donald Harrison, Billy Harper, and George Cables in particular) made back then.

Dig the way they do that kind of stuff. Need to listen to the new one.

So this new collection of unreleased later Erroll Garner material, Ready Take One -- just do yourself a favor and listen to Caravan, holy shit

Thanks. Wonder if that will show up in my Release Radar?

yeah that's where I found it actually

his dazzling virtuoso style reminds me of Phineas Newborn a bit, very very nice. I'm guessing he might have had a much higher profile if he had lived a couple more decades. Wiki says his Misty was the one dj Clint Eastwood played in the movie.

Wasn't Concert By The Sea one of the perennial big selling jazz albums at one point?

Yeah, and it got a deluxe reissue earlier this year, right? (I've never heard it, or any Garner for that matter. Probably a big oversight on my part, but I always tend to give horn players more of my attention than piano players not named Shipp, Taylor, or Jamal.)

Love the original cover of Concert By The Sea, which they fucked around with on later issues:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/ConcertByTheSea-ErrolGarner-Cover.jpg

I'm sure in the UK at least all of Garner's best work is out of copyright

A Blog Supreme was a jazz thing published by NPR Music from May 2009 through September 2016. It presented news, features, aggregated content, historical primers, opinion and analysis, recommendations and other types of music journalism. It was twice named the Jazz Journalists Association Blog of the Year.

It was founded and edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon, who was also its chief writer and a producer for NPR Music's Jazz Night In America.

...A Blog Supreme ceased publication when the position of jazz producer at NPR Music was eliminated. Friday was his last day.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2016/10/01/496016442/what-was-a-blog-supreme

that's a real loss imo

for a mainstream jass album this year I really like Josh Redman & Brad Mehdlau - Nearness, this is a nice version of "Ornithology" (good track but not necessarily one of my favorites)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Kl2nBNV0A

Revisiting Wynton Marsalis's Hot House Flowers today. It's interesting to hear the fairly powerhouse production job the band got (Jeff "Tain" Watts sounds like a metal drummer at times) paired with the Hollywood-movie-soundtrack strings.

Seem to remember discussing the production of jazz recordings with somebody I know and him telling me he gave that CD to his producer/engineer/mixer and said "make the drums on my record sound like that!"

Also, think Tain is playing with Pharoah Sanders tonight and tomorrow at Birdland.

When that album first came out, Carla Bley told interviewer Ben Sidran that she got it and went, "eeeuuuw", gave it to a friend:"Ohhh, thank you Carla!"--but then the friend listened to it and was like "Ha ugh bitch whatcha dumpin that on me for."

Might have just been snarking the big label dude but anyway I didn't check that one out. Started liking him more when he became more of an artful entertainer, like with the surreal horn charts for the live Ray Charles tribs w Willie Nelson (and Norah Jones with the occasional blue oasis interludes, rather than full-on Snorah)

Listening to Clifford Jordan's Firm Roots on Spotify. He made about five albums with the same band heard here: Cedar Walton on piano, Sam Jones on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. Three of them were recorded at a single concert—On Stage Vols. 1-3—and then there's this disc and The Highest Mountain. I can definitely see listening to all five; this is a great band, and Jordan's tone is fantastic.

Went at last minute and Friday to see Pharoah Sanders and gotta say this time he was a little too on the mellow side for me. Sounded fine playing the melodies on the heads but played abbreviated solos that didn't go anywhere deep on every tune. Tain was killing it throughout though.

Yeah, that's why I'd really only want to see him in a context that guaranteed weirdness, like that Pharoah & the Underground thing he did with Rob Mazurek in Portugal a few years ago - him, Mazurek, and members of the Chicago and São Paulo Underground(s). There's an album and a CD, both on Clean Feed, with completely different music on each. I've never been able to find a DL link for the LP.

I saw him a few years back at the exact same venue and he was grebt. There was a palpable moment in every tune were he went from the pretty, inside playing to the overblown, outside playing. You could hear the saxophone sound slowly breaking up, you could imagine the white wisps of his beard to be smoke coming out of the bottom of a giant Saturn rocket upon liftoff, you could feel the earth tremble. Maybe this time he was a little tired or ill, or saving his energy for the second set, or some combination thereof.

Slightly regretting not implementing my alternate plan, going to see Scott Robinson at Kitano.

Throughly enjoying Monk Birthday Broadcast on WKCR.

About to check out some early Ahmad Jamal stuff I've never heard (his drumless trio recordings with guitarist Ray Crawford, and some later quintet stuff the two did together).

Chamber Music of the New Jazz is the one I often go to from Ahmad's early stuff, it's delightful.

Speaking of xpost Erroll Garner, heard his "Fandango" on the radio last night, got pulled into it pretty quickly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEj6UdQsKao

M-W online entry for "fandango":
1: a lively Spanish or Spanish-American dance in triple time that is usually performed by a man and a woman to the accompaniment of guitar and castanets; also : music for this dance
2: tomfoolery

Maybe also with Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Scott Joplin somewhere in the family tree.

(And Monk?)

New Yorkers might want to check out this Fri. October 28th event at Symphony Space

“The American Slave Coast: Live” is a spoken word-and-music performance piece drawn from the pages of the book. Alto saxophonist and composer Donald Harrison will lead the band. Speakers will include Jonathan Demme, Nona Hendryx and Carl Hancock Rux, plus the authors Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette.

This dude is obviously insanely talented, although it sorta ends up sounding like Squarepusher with worse sound design in the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saX2-OHr__M
https://kimcass.bandcamp.com/album/kim-cass

I had assumed I'd heard Brilliant Corners already for some reason. I hadn't. I know it's canon and everything, but my god.

In other Monk news, apparently on this day in 1947 he first recorded "Well, You Needn't." Think I just might have to order that Monk fake book I have been eyeing after all.

my Monk listening of recent times is the '61 album with Coltrane or the Trio album with Roach and Blakey playing half each.

Listening to a new BGO (Beat Goes On) reissue of 3 early 80s albums by fusion guitarist Steve Khan on 2 CDs: 1981's Eyewitness, 1982's live Modern Times, and 1983's Casa Loco. It's smooth in a yacht-rock sort of way, without being so greasy it feels like it's dribbling out of your headphones. Some occasionaly dubby echoes around the margins. Not something I'd have been happy about paying for, but mildly diverting.

BGO is the same label that reissued Arthur Blythe's first four Columbia albums as a 2CD set earlier this year. I also have a disc from them that combines Muddy Waters' Electric Mud and After The Rain, so they're OK by me.

Playlist is updated through October; we're at over a hundred songs and 13+ hours. You could do worse if you want something to walk around to.

ILM's Rolling Jazz Thread 2016 Spotify Playlist

Trumpeter Terell Stafford has a new album out, Forgive and Forget, on a tiny label run by saxophonist Herb Harris (he was one of the Tough Young Tenors back at the dawn of the '90s, but dropped out of the scene). All the compositions are Harris's; the band is Stafford, Tim Warfield (another ex-Tough Young Tenor) on sax, Kevin Hays on piano, Greg Williams on bass, and Rodney Green on drums.

I liked his Brotherlee Love album last year.

Yeah, me too. And I've liked his playing on a bunch of Warfield's albums on Criss Cross.

"Streams" is a beautiful album on ECM by Jakob Bro with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron, you can hear some of it on http://player.ecmrecords.com/bro-2499