"Weird Means Something You Never Heard Before": Rolling Jazz D-bag Thread 2015

agreed, i looked up some clips of him playing straight-ahead on Youtube after listening to it. he sounds great and it's clearly where is heart is, but listening blind it could be any good jazz drummer (although to be fair, it was in the context of workshops with student combos). but his funk style is so distinct.

xp

iirc, Al Foster voiced a similar complaint, about his work with Miles not being where his heart was (brilliant at it though he was).

Bill Evans puts you to the best kind of sleep, is the thing

good call, Al Foster sounds sooo great and committed on those electric Miles records, but i really love his straight-ahead playing too. i like this one (ironically a Miles tribute):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Near,_So_Far_(Musings_for_Miles)

That one looks good; I haven't heard it, but will check it out. I really like his playing on Tommy Flanagan's Giant Steps; having only heard his electric Miles work at the time, I assumed it was a different Al Foster.

Love Al Foster w Miles, not that familiar otherwise. Evans was maybe better when responding to a leader or guest, rather than just leading his own basic combos. Also like his group's album with Stan Getz, speaking of quality snoozing/midnight mixed drink reveries.

I don't see how anyone could listen to his trio with motian and lafaro and say he was better as a sideman. Some opinions are just blatantly ridiculous.

haven't heard that, will check (said "maybe")

What Bill Evans did you not like? I don't want to be snarky about it, I'm just saying that's like the most famous bill Evans solo material so it might be premature to write him off if you haven't heard it. I'd start with the village vanguard material. With the lights low.

I heard the Vanguard material (in box form, not the original albums). Didn't do anything for me. I don't like his approach to the piano; I prefer players who swing harder, and have more of a feeling for the blues. It doesn't help that the trio also included Paul Motian, who might be my least favorite jazz drummer.

I understand what you're saying, because I felt almost exactly the same way when I was younger. I think the thing is if you listen to him wanting Wynton Kelly or Bobby Timmons or even his early idol Bud Powell, you're going to be disappointing. He does something else.

*disappointed

I think the first track I really loved was My Foolish Heart. I like him best on ballads and slower tunes -- there is something a little bit herky-jerky about his feel on mid-tempo swing sometimes, I just don't hold it against him anymore. I don't listen to Monk to hear someone shred Cherokee changes, I don't listen to Oscar Peterson to hear cerebral chord subs, and I don't listen to Chick Corea to feel heartbreak.

otm. I have problems with Paul Motian in other contexts as well, but as far as in the classic Bill Evans Trio lineup, he and Bill and Scott could do no wrong.

Well, to be fair, I'm not a piano trio guy at all, generally speaking. Red Garland, Ahmad Jamal, Matthew Shipp and Cecil Taylor are the only pianists I can listen to and not wish there was a horn player there to liven things up.

Tommy Flanagan is registering and hitting the Flag Post button from his grave.

Jason Moran's using his big group for this Kennedy Center concert (Moran is in DC a lot as he is Kennedy Center's Jazz curator):

Jason Moran's In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959
Saturday, March 28, 2015, 8:00 PM

Celebrate the legacy of Thelonious Monk as Jason Moran leads The Big Bandwagon in a full-length, multimedia work based on Monk's landmark 1959 concert at New York City's Town Hall

looks pretty great; moran's amazing live

this is the best thing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0eT6pkNhk

It is.

nice.

I got to see Moran's trio with Sam Rivers guesting at Iridium...wow, 15 years ago, when that album they did together, Black Stars, came out. Great show.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_l0B6hUcAA8DqY.jpg

Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor at Ornette's 85th birthday party.

Love it.

Any more info on that? Can't find anything online

prob a private event?

Yeah, a private event. (N.B.: I wasn't there, though I have been to Ornette's apartment—that's where I interviewed him for his Wire cover story in 2009.)

Oh man I would have loved to have heard that. Glad they're both doing well - didn't Cecil turn 85 just a few months ago

Ornette birthday broadcast on WKCR today:
https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/ornette-coleman-birthday-broadcast-monday-march-9

The second John Carter/Bobby Bradford album, Self Determination Music, has been remastered and reissued on CD. (I was supposed to write liner notes for it when it was being reissued on International Phonograph, as their first album Flight for Four was; unfortunately, that deal fell through and Ace in the UK decided to hold onto the rights, which means SDM is just in a plain ol' jewel case, not the fancy mini-LP reproduction sleeve Flight got.)

it's official, everybody hates jazz.

http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/

https://simpsonswiki.com/w/images/thumb/4/42/KJAZZ.png/250px-KJAZZ.png

i wish this was less boring. it's in that weird interzone between composed/produced electronic music and improvised music and it's just not very exciting as either one.

https://soundcloud.com/shigeto/dave-douglas-high-risk-ft-shigeto-molten-sunset

idk, it's cool i guess?

From WSJ: didn't know he was from the Chicago New Thing scene!

Review of Jack DeJohnette’s ‘Made in Chicago’
Jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette goes back to his roots by convening a band featuring all-star musicians from his early days in Chicago.
By
Martin Johnson
March 11, 2015 6:28 p.m. ET

Drummer Jack DeJohnette has been an integral part of the New York area jazz scene for more than 50 years, long enough to forget that he’s originally from Chicago. Before moving east, he participated in the band that gave birth to the Advancement for the Association of Creative Musicians, a collective that has nurtured several generations of great Chicago jazz musicians.

On his new recording, “Made in Chicago” (ECM Records), Mr. DeJohnette goes back to those roots by convening a band featuring all-star musicians from his early days in Chicago; he is joined by saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill and by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. Each is a renowned innovator and leader who rarely plays sideman gigs. The recording documents an August 2013 concert by the band in Millennium Park during the Chicago Jazz Festival. The band will perform Thursday night at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and again this summer at the Newport Jazz Festival on Aug. 1.

In the early ’60s, Mr. DeJohnette, who is 72 years old, was a classmate of Mr. Threadgill, 71, and Mr. Mitchell, 74, at Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) on Chicago’s South Side. They played music together in school settings and at the many jam sessions that took place in the city’s jazz clubs and lounges. It was at one of these sessions that Mr. DeJohnette met Mr. Abrams, now 84, who led an ensemble called the Experimental Band; fittingly for its name, it functioned as a workshop for musicians with ideas that didn’t fit into the jazz mainstream. Messrs. DeJohnette, Threadgill and Mitchell all played in the band, which featured a varying roster of musicians and ultimately grew into the AACM in 1965.

The Chicago Jazz Festival invited Mr. DeJohnette to create a project of his choosing in honor of his appointment as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. On “Made in Chicago,” the four jazz greats are joined by veteran bassist Larry Gray, who is also a native of Chicago’s South Side.

The set list consists of Mr. Mitchell’s “Chant,” which has been staple of his repertoire for 40 years, and one less-familiar tune each by Messrs. Mitchell, Threadgill, Abrams and DeJohnette. It closes with an improvised jam. There are stellar moments throughout the recording. For instance, Mr. Mitchell’s tense coiled sounds are offset beautifully on “Chant” by Mr. Abrams’s ruminative piano chords. The pianist and the drummer engage in a powerful duet in Mr. DeJohnette’s “Museum of Time.” And Mr. Threadgill’s pungent alto saxophone is heard on several pieces.

But the record falls prey to the issues that mar many “supergroup” recordings. The product of only a few days of rehearsals, it is an uneven affair; there are moments of sublime synthesis followed quickly by moments where the playing feels measured and less assertive. Yet the best parts are intriguing. Save for some gems on imprints like Nessa and Delmark, Chicago’s avant-garde jazz scene of the ’60s was under-recorded, and this album—though made a half-century later—offers a glimpse into what might have been heard during some of those Experimental Band gigs.

At Mr. Abrams’s urging, Mr. DeJohnette moved to New York in 1964 and quickly found elite-level work, playing in bands led by saxophonists Jackie McLean, Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter. In 1969, he joined Miles Davis’s band, playing on the classic “Bitches Brew” sessions. During the ’70s, Mr. DeJohnette made his mark not only with his own group, Special Edition, a showcase for several up-and-coming saxophonists, but with New Directions, which featured such top players as guitarist John Abercrombie and trumpeter Lester Bowie. Much of Mr. DeJohnette’s time since the early ’80s has been spent performing with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, which has become one of the most popular groups in jazz.

Messrs. Threadgill and Abrams also moved to New York in the early ’70s and still live there. Mr. Mitchell spent some time in Europe before settling first in Michigan and now in Oakland, Calif., where he teaches at Mills College. It is easy to hear the Chicago roots in their sound, but not so much in Mr. DeJohnette’s—and I suspect that is the point of “Made in Chicago.” He shows his Windy City side, and it adds a new, introductory chapter to the lengthy discography of a great jazz drummer.

Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/arts/music/50-years-on-association-for-advancement-of-creative-musicians-influences-jazz.html

NY Times covered them too.

___________________________________________

x-post

idk, it's cool i guess?

― lil urbane (Jordan), Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The question mark says it all. Haven't heard the effort yet. Saw Shigeto once and enjoyed but wasn't wowed.

gonna shill for my new york peeps and ask if you'd like to join me for a dual harp recital with an open bar for a $10 ticket:
http://www.greenwichhouse.org/announcements/uncharted-brandee-younger

Somehow missed that DeJohnette AACM connection myself until that Times Article. Guess I should have made a bigger dent in that George Lewis book.

Saw Made in Chicago last night, totally blown away, they were ragin', full on, one of the best shows I've ever seen

I should add that I love Shigeto, both on record (especially the most recent) and live.

Ted Gioia, who I haven't seen praise a living jazz musician in print in longer than I can remember, weeps for the 1950s again, this time because Verve has been absorbed into Interscope/Universal.

An adaptation of an extended Twitter blast (21 tweets in all):

Flippancy at Ted Gioia's expense aside, I have some serious thoughts about major labels and jazz. I kinda wish major labels would get out of the jazz business entirely, and leave it to the indies. Just let the catalogs lapse, and let the music shrug off the weight of history and move forward.

In the music’s perceived golden era (50s-60s), most (not all) of the best stuff was on indies Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse! & Verve. There were great records on Columbia, RCA & Warner, of course, but the indies were doing the lion’s share of the work. And majors haven’t really cared about jazz since the 70s. For 40 years, jazz has been independent (if not underground). The majors made their play later, buying the indies & reissuing their catalogs. That’s not creativity, it’s cannibalism. And it’s still like that. Reissue after reissue keeping decades-old catalogs alive, at the expense of new/living artists. Active players have to compete with Miles Davis boxes for listeners’ attention. And guess which gets a bigger marketing budget?

And OK, yeah, pop singers making boring albums of 80+ year old “standards” is a problem, too. But that’s just marketing – using the term “jazz” to grant prestige to boring crap that shouldn’t have been recorded at all. I can’t hear a difference between a Barry Manilow “standards” album and a Wayne Newton or Robert Goulet album of yore. But here’s the thing: JAZZ DOESN’T SELL. Like, it REALLY doesn’t sell. The average new jazz CD sells ~1000 copies. 5000 = triumph. So unless you’re running on the tightest of budgets, jazz CDs are a guaranteed money loser. So it’s UNDERSTANDABLE that the only “jazz” records majors are making are actually what used to be called “pop vocal” in the 60s. Major labels can’t tighten their budgets enough to make real (instrumental) jazz releases profitable. Too many salaries to pay.

Real jazz (creative, largely improvised instrumental music) is out there, being played for people who want to hear it. You’ve got to look to indie labels, though. Posi-Tone, AUM Fidelity, Pi Recordings, Criss Cross, Mack Avenue, Sunnyside, Delmark, Fresh Sound New Talent, HighNote, Smoke Sessions... So if you like jazz, don’t waste your time worrying about majors and their focus on history. The music’s alive…on indies. (S/O to Blue Note, ECM, Nonesuch, Impulse! & Okeh – major imprints doing lots of great work, too, of course.

Ornette Coleman's Beauty Is A Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings box is being reissued on 3/31, in less-lavish packaging (a clamshell case, with the discs in slim cardboard sleeves). You do get the original booklet, though, and Amazon's got it for $40. If you don't already have it, it really is a must-own.

Pi Recordings is indeed a good example, and I was thinking about the valuable older indies when I saw the mention of Nessa on that xpost WSJ De Johnette piece, as one of the few labels (along with Delmark, which you also mentioned) to provide us with excellent evidence of the early 60s Chicago avant-jazz community.
Early evidence of spring led me to the Neon Art trilogy of previously unreleased Art Pepper albums, the press sheet for which I posted upthread. Nice roomy but never overblown live tracks, from Seattle and Japan, in 1981, and more indications that he seems to have been rolling right through his ninth life 'til its end, in '82. "Red Car" starts with terse, genial phrases, then gets rougher-edged, like a Noo Yawker putting his two cents in, maybe a cabbie in an old movie; later tracks find him going for more of a cool lyricism, hard bop, new thing, mambo, "Over the Rainbow," blues---here's most of the sheet again, minus the visuals:

Neon Art: Volume One contains two tracks recorded at Parnell’s in Seattle, Wash., in 1981, with Art accompanied by Milcho Leviev (piano), David Williams (bass), and Carl Burnett (drums). “Red Car,” originally released on 1977’s The Trip, appears in a stunning 17-minute version, while “Blues for Blanche,” first heard on 1980’s So in Love, sees the original version expanded to 18 minutes. Street date for Volume One is February 17, 2015.
Neon Art: Volume Two includes three tunes drawn from the unissued performances of his 1981 tour of Japan. The album features Art’s composition “Mambo Koyama,” as well as his very personal and soulful rendition of the classic “Over the Rainbow” and the bebop workout “Allen’s Alley.” The band on Volume Two, which also appears on Volume Three, is composed of George Cables, piano; David Williams, bass; and Carl Burnett, drums. Volume Two hits the streets March 10.
Neon Art: Volume Three features three more tunes drawn from the unissued performances of his 1981 tour of Japan. Pepper funky originals “Make a List (Make a Wish)” and “Arthur’s Blues” are joined by the standard “Everything Happens to Me,” which has previously been recorded by Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday. Release date is April 7.
“Art hated the idea that people put jazz in a pigeonhole. He wanted to make people forget the categories and ‘make them open up and listen’,” says Laurie Pepper. The release of these three albums of previously unissued Art Pepper recordings, now available in all configurations, will allow anyone the ability to ‘open up and listen.’
The three albums, now available on CD and digital, as well as in their original colored vinyl, form an entry point into the multifaceted, colorful world of Art Pepper.
Track Listings:
Neon Art: Volume One
1. Red Car (16:52)
2. Blues for Blanche (17:57)
Neon Art: Volume Two
1. Mambo Koyama (18:39)
2. Over the Rainbow (14:37)
3. Allen’s Alley (9:17)
Neon Art: Volume Three
1. Make a List (Make a Wish) (24:41)
2. Everything Happens to Me (8:36)
3. Arthur’s Blues (10:29)

Milcho Leviev (piano)new to me, and immediately engaging on "Red Car." I see that Pepper's a sideman on some of Leviev's own albums; anybody heard those??

i don't know anything about art pepper. is "neon art" a good place to start?

It shows his range and appeal, but he was pretty prolific, especially considering several stretches in prison, and I sure haven't heard it all. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, with Miles Davis's sidemen, is a good example of his 50s sound, but I'm more familiar with his later work, like one of his post-jail comebacks, Living Legend, where he's absorbed the influence of Trane, and he's got Hampton Hawes (always good to have more Hawes; he didn't exactly flood the market), Charlie Haden, and Shelly Manne. Also The Trip, with Elvin Jones etc.

he's a west coast guy though, right? that always sort of puts me off for some reason ...

Ornette reissue great news!

Speaking of Pepper and reissues, I would love to have Complete Vanguard reissued. That is fantastic stuff

RIP Bob Parlocha :(