Count Basie & More

As a bit of shameless self-promotion, let me mention please that I have finally managed to add several contributions by Kent to my Basie Corner - finally!

To find them, check the News section on the left or go straight to the Music post and find all of these compilations at the bottom!

Count Basie Orchestra - Burghausen 1994 (DVD)

Let me please direct your attention to the latest (of too few, I'm sorry!) post over on the Basie corner!

Malombo

Over on the great matsuli music blog, there's a post dedicated to Philip Tabane and his band Malombo - go and check it out!

http://matsuli.blogspot.com/2008/11/music-of-spirit.html

That blog is heartily recommended!

Brotherhood of Breath

In absence of new posts of my own, let me point out a live show by Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, over on that great place, Inconstant Sol.
Altena 1972

The info pulled together should now read like this:

Brotherhood of Breath
Altena (DE)
June 24 (1-3) & June 25 (4), 1972

prob. line-up:
Harry Beckett, Marc Charig - trumpet
Malcolm Griffith, Nick Evans - trombone
Mike Osborne - alto sax
Dudu Pukwana (#4 only) - alto sax
Gary Windo - tenor sax
poss. unknown (Alan Skidmore? Evan Parker?) - tenor sax
Chris McGregor - piano
Harry Miller - bass
Louis Moholo - drums

1. Call [Ismite Is Might]
2. Mra > Andromeda
3. Do It > Think of Something [inc]
4. The Serpent's Kindly Eye [inc]

TT: 36:31

Sound: A-/B+
Lineage: FM > ? > CDR > EAC > WAV > FLAC

My guess for second tenor is only because BoB usually had two tenors in the line-up. It's not based on aural evidence. For that, I'd have to dig up my CDR and play this show again...

I assume the dates to be correct now, as the guy who mentioned #4 being from the following night did not correct my date posted in the comments over there.
If anyone knows more about the location or if this concert was part of some festival etc, please post it in the comments over there!

More BoB to follow right here, I think, I hope...

r.i.p. Johnny Griffin

Johnny Griffin, April 24, 1928 - July 25, 2008



There goes another of the great ones - and a personal hero of mine. This is very sad. Reportedly the little giant has led a good life for the past decades, living in rural France with his family. Thank you for all the great music you left, I will always cherish that huge unmistakeable sound!

Mel Martin Interview
wiki
discography

I have already shared two shows of Griffin's here, both are still up for takers:

Johnny Griffin & NDR Big Band - Hamburg 1992
Johnny Griffin - Szekesfehervar 1969

The third show which I uploaded quite a while ago, I hesitated to share at all because there was so little interest in the past two offerings, however, now I offer it in memory of this great musician and I hope it finds some interest.

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Johnny Griffin
Mönchengladbach (Germany), Kaiser-Friedrich-Halle
March 10, 1976

Johnny Griffin - tenor sax
Wilton Gaynair - tenor & soprano sax
Leo Wright - alto sax
Slide Hampton - trombone
Ingfried Hoffman - piano
Jimmy Woode - bass
Art Taylor - drums

1. My Blues (21:23)
2. All the Things You Are (14:56) [Griffin & Rhythm only]
3. Music Inn Blues (22:54)

TT: 59:16

Sound: A/A-
Source: unknown, prob. radio broadcast


Notes:

Edits: divided #1 and #2

Tracklist I received with disc:
1. unknown title
2. My Blues
3. All the Things You Are
4. Music Inn Blues

Disc had two tracks, 36:19 and 22:54
- Griffin01 & Griffin02 are Track01
- Griffin03 is Track02

I am not sure if tracks 1 and 3 are correctly named.

**********************************************************

Griffin made his first recordings with Lionel Hampton's band, played R'n'B with Joe Morris, Wynonie Harris, Arnett Cobb and others, and then in 1956 started recording as a leader of his own jazz combos. It's hard to pick favourites from the years following 1956, highlights are many: his "JG Tenor" album for Argo, his third Blue Note album "The Congregation" (the opening title tune is likely my all-time favourite Griff solo!), his first quartet album for Riverside ("Way Out"), the Blakey Jazz Messengers album with Thelonious Monk, the Monk gig documented on "Monk in Action" and "Misterioso", and of course "A Blowing Session" (Blue Note) with John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, and a teenage Lee Morgan. In between he also appeared on my albums with the unsung second edition of Blakey's Jazz Messengers (with Bill Hardman and Jackie McLean), as well as on albums by A.K. Salim, Clark Terry, Wilbur Ware, Ahmad Abdul-Malik, Blue Mitchell, Babs Gonzales, Philly Joe Jones, Chet Baker, Nat Adderley, homeboy Ira Sullivan, and others, and he was also on one of Randy Weston's (now here's a giant still trodding the earth!) finest early efforts, "Little Niles" (United Artists). In 1960 he made his Riverside album "The Big-Soul Band", constantly on the brink of desaster, but turning it into a great album. And around the same time, his partnership with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis was recorded for the first time. That two-tenor team put out another string of fine albums on Prestige and Riverside/Jazzland. On his own albums, Griffin tried out some more varied settings, recording with organ on "Grab This!" (Paul Bryant), french horn and twin basses (on "Change of Pace"), with strings (the magnificient "White Gardenia" in homage to Billie Holiday), whilst appearing on more albums as a sideman, under the leadership of Wes Montgomery, Bennie Green, Johnny Lytle and others.
Then in the early sixties, after the disappearance of Riverside, Griffin relocated to Europe, playing with Bud Powell and hooking up with Kenny Clarke (again) and Francy Boland, which led to his longtime membership in the great Clarke-Boland Orchestra. Griffin's easily identifiable solo voice can be heard on many fine albums by that outfit and by related small groups, recorded throughout the sixties. In 1970 MPS recorded him with "Lockjaw" again and the partnership would continue on and off again
Griffin turned up on some European jazz musicians' albums (Klaus Doldinger, Vaclav Zahradnik, Peter Herbolzheimer) but also occasionally reunite with visiting Americans such as Dizzy Gillespie or Roy Eldridge, or he'd join in some of Norman Granz' jam affairs. In the late seventies, he recorded in the US again, around the same time Dexter Gordon celebrated his homecoming. The two teamed up for a Carnegie Hall concert in 1978, and Griffin recorded several fine albums for Galaxy as well. In 1985, he joined the celebrations at New York's Town Hall when the Blue Note label was re-founded. He continued to gig and led fine bands, recording with the likes of Michael Weiss, Ronnie Mathews and Kenny Barron. Some fine albums came out on Dreyfus and Minor Music, teaming him up in duo settings with Horace Parlan and Martial Solal, as well as in a two-tenor workout with Steve Grossman.
He left a fine legacy, and I will certainly continue to play his music for years to come, and in the days to come, he'll have a special place in my heart and in my CD player, too. Thank you for all the music!

Buddy Collette (w/James Newton & Geri Allen) - Verona 1988

Buddy Collette (w/Jimmy Bond), Twentieth Century Fox Studio lot, 1974
(c) Donald Coy

Here's what I consider a treat: a boot by Buddy Collette (website, wiki, AMG), one of the great reedmen of what's usualy dubbed West Coast Jazz. Collette is black, and on tenor he could sound quite like that, too - a musician far above the etheric thin cliché of how West Coast sax players were to sound. He was very prolific as a doubler, not only using alto, tenor and clarinet, but also playing some fine flute. Collette recorded with everyone on the West Coast, but on me, he made his mark as a member of the great original Chico Hamilton Quintet. There were three Original Jazz Classics discs reissued by Fantasy, originally on Contemporary, all of which are likely gone for a while (at least until Fresh Sound or Lone Hill will come around reissuing them), of which I managed to get hold of the fine "Nice Day". Fresh Sound has two volumes available of more 50s sessions, "Tasty Dish" and "Soft Touch" (my own discs have faulty covers - you need both to have all of the music AND the fitting info...)
Collette's story in the 40s included involvment with Charles Mingus - check out the fantastic Uptown Baron Mingus disc, including all of Mingus' 40s West Coast recordings plus a huge, incredibly informative booklet (and don't fall for the Definitive boot in this case! It's really worth getting hold of the original, even if that means you'll have to pay a bit more!)
So quite logically, Collette turns up in Mingus' fascinating "Beneath the Underdog", which focuses mainly on his early years. In addition to that, he wrote his own book, "Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society", which a friend sent me quite some time ago and which I should have read ever since... anyway, it's available for almost nothing on Amazon marketplace. (Mingus' book is up cheap from Amazon itself, check here.)
If you're looking for the best of Chico Hamilton's quintet (the later edition with Paul Horn was still fine, but Collette is my favourite... also you get Jim Hall, who was later replaced by John Pisano), there are two discs available from the Spaniards: studio & live. In addition to that, Blue Note unearthed "The Original Ellington Suite", which was not available when Mosaic put together their Chico Hamilton box. It's another highlight from Hamilton's output and it's still available. That one though is with Eric Dolphy in place - the final version of the Ellington Suite, included in the Mosaic box and to my knowledge not available since, reunited the original Hamilton quintet, with Buddy Collette doing a great job.

Anyway, now on to the music... sound quality isn't perfect here, in fact it's far from. But I consider it listenable to say the least. I got this from dime but did some fixing (mainly correcting marks, I didn't alter the sound in any way). Also I'm not sure the drummer that was given with the dime seed is correct. There are two band intros, the name I could possibly make out is Gianpiero Prins. If anyone who downloads this could confirm, I would be very grateful!
Correction: It's Giampiero Prina - thanks a lot for the help, Giovanni!

**********************************************************

Buddy Collette
Verona (Italy)
June 26, 1988

Buddy Collette - flute (1,2), alto sax (3,6), clarinet (7) (out on #5)
James Newton - flute (5,6,7)
Geri Allen - piano
Jaribu Shahid - bass
Sunship Theus - drums
Giampiero Prina - drums (see comment from anyonymous/Giovanni below - mille grazie!)

1. Hunt and Peck (Buddy Collette) > Ann BC (7:33)
2. Emaline (Buddy Collette) > Ann BC (8:55)
3. Andre (Buddy Collette) 6:02
4. Ann BC/JN (0:52)
5. Jessie and Nelson (James Newton) > Band Intros (14:18)
6. Crystal (Buddy Collette) > Ann BC (8:51)
7. Magali (Buddy Collette?) > Band Intros (6:53)

TT: 53:29

Source: Audience
Sound: B+

Note: there's a cut at the end of #3 as Collette says "Slow Boat" (likely referring to "Slow Boat to China" as the next tune?)

South African jazz - fixed links & contributions

I noticed that some of the links in my big SA-jazz post weren't working any longer. Some of the things linked to just moved elsewhere on the wwww, and here's the place to put those links.

:.:.:.:.:

The general links are still good, and that AAJ site remains one of the best starting points. In the article section, several links aren't working any longer, though - here's a fixed list.

:.:.:.:.:

Another site about Abdullah Ibrahim:
http://junior.apk.net/~hoon/6Mantra_Modes.html

:.:.:.:.:

The Development of South African Jazz (by Hotep Idris Galeta):
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=889
also here: http://www.jazzrendezvous.co.za/special/spe2006062701.php

Forced removals in apartheid South Africa:
http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/11/05/features/SNAPSHOT.HTM

Bebop and beyond the blues – South African Jazz History:
moved to: http://www.jazzrendezvous.co.za/special/spe2006062705.php

The article on the Drum Magazine has gone. It's the one linked to (dead link!) here:
http://africanhistory.about.com/b/2006/01/31/the-significance-of-drum-magazine-during-apartheid.htm

That site where the Galeta and Bebop and beyond articles are up on is quite interesting by itself, go have a look:
http://www.jazzrendezvous.co.za/index.php

There's an interview with guitar player Jimmy Dludlu up there, too:
http://www.jazzrendezvous.co.za/readarticle.php?artcl=00000031

:.:.:.:.:

I won't double check the musician links, sorry - too much work! But if you find other interesting sites, please do post them in the comments here!

The joy and pain of South African Jazz

On an afternoon in summer, the farm Quaggasfontein in the Great Karoo. About 200 years ago, after 13 years of work, two slaves are said to have completed the building of this wall which surrounds the farmyard.
Near Graaff-Reinet, Eastern Cape. December 1966

I realized that the Megaupload way of getting the four files I compiled some time back when doing a blindfold test on the Organissimo board was still working - here are the links:

[links removed, go to this new post to find the new links, eventually - and stop bitchin' around!]

Covers:
http://rapidshare.com/files/112012052/BFT48_JazzSA12.pdf

All infos can be found here:
Disc 1 (first two files): http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34948
Disc 2 (last two files): http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34949

The old discussions can be found here, in case anyone cares to read:
Disc 1: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34529
Disc 2: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34528

**********************************************************

Photographs by David Goldblatt (wiki)
http://www.michaelstevenson.com


A new shack under construction, Lenasia Extension 9, Gauteng
5 May 1990

**********************************************************

Allow me to repeat myself - in case not everyone clicks on the above links, here's some of the info I posted back then:


:: GENERAL LINKS ::

AMG South African Jazz Page: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=1957
Homepage of photographer Jürgen Schadeberg (Drum): http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/
musig.org.za (tons of info, mainly short artist biographical sketches): http://www.music.org.za/default.asp
The African Music Encyclopedia: http://africanmusic.org/index.html
Afropop Worldwide: http://www.afropop.org/



Graves of the Griquas.
...The Griquas were coloured men and women. They were descendants of early Afrikaner frontiersmen; of the remnants of Khoisan tribes, hunters, gatherers, and pastoralists; of escaped slaves from the wine and wheat farms of the south-west Cape; of Free Blacks from the colony who could find no acceptable place for themselves in it; and of African tribesmen, detached from their tribes by war or by choice. They formed a community which attempted to discover what their role in South Africa was, or if there was none, to create one for themselves. In the end they could not do this ... (Adam Kok's Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa, by Robert John Ross, Cambridge 1976)
Philippolis, Free State, 27 August 1986


:: ARTICLES ::

The Development of South African Jazz (by Hotep Idris Galeta): http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=889
Forced removals in apartheid South Africa: http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/11/05/features/SNAPSHOT.HTM
Bebop and beyond the blues – South African Jazz History: http://home.worldonline.co.za/~afribeat/ar..._sa%20jazz.html
Drum Magazine: http://home.worldonline.co.za/%7Eafribeat/archiveafrica.html


Kite-flying, near Phuthaditjhaba, in the Qwa Qwa bantustan, now the Free State.
1 May 1989


:: MUSICIANS ::

Basil Coetzee (1944-1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Coetzee
http://www.jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost2.php3?edit=920482852

Mackay Davashe
great Schadeberg photo here: http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/jazz14.jpg

Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani (1945-1986)
album listing: http://www.kultur-im-ghetto.de/discographia-johnny.htm

Abdullah Ibrahim (*1934)
http://www.abdullahibrahim.com/ (discography there is pretty incomplete!)

Robbie Jansen (*1949)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Jansen
http://home.worldonline.co.za/~afribeat/cont_robbie.html

Chris McGregor (1936-1990)
Berlin 1969 by Karlheinz Klüter here: http://www.jazzphotography.us/images/musicians/mcgregor.jpg (great site, worth browsing around!)
The Blue Notes (lenghty wiki entry): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Notes
Brotherhood of Breath disco: http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedCon...;threadid=18348
A remembrance by Chris’ brother Tony: http://home.worldonline.co.za/%7Eafribeat/...chris_tony.html
A tribute (introduction to Maxine McGregor’s book): http://home.worldonline.co.za/%7Eafribeat/..._macgregor.html
(Note: a Blue Notes box set is scheduled to appear soon on Ogun records!)

Miriam Makeba (*1932)
Terrific 1955 photo by Schadeberg here: http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/a09.jpg


Shopping on 14th Street, Pageview, Johannesburg. The suburbs Pageview, which was mainly Indian, and Vrededorp, which was mainly Afrikaner working-class, were next to each other. The Vrededorpers did much of their shopping in Pageview (as did people from many other parts of the city). When the Group Areas Act was enforced in 1977, the Indian population of Pageview was forcibly removed, and their shops and homes were destroyed to make way for Whites.
Pageview, Johannesburg, Gauteng. July 1985

Hugh Masekela (*1939)
Biography & discography by Doug Payne: http://www.dougpayne.com/hmhome.htm
Biography (& more): http://www.ritmoartists.com/Hugh/Masekela.htm
Interview (2002): http://www.afropop.org/multi/interview/ID/37/

Pat Matshikiza (*1938)
Biography (from a recent CD’s liners): http://www.music.org.za/artist.asp?id=231

Harry Miller (1941-1983)
Detailed info on “The Collection”: http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/ogun/ogunhm.html
(Don't by all accounts miss the Isipingo disc released on Cuneiform! It's the best way to get acquainted with Miller these days, as the Ogun box has been out of print for a while now...)

Louis Moholo (*1940)
Biography: http://www.music.org.za/artist.asp?id=144
Article by Gary May (May 2005 of ImproJazz, no. 115): http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/fulltext/ftmoholo.html

Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi
biography: http://www.music.org.za/artist.asp?id=55
Reissue of "Yakhal 'Inkomo" (with Chris Schilder Quintet feat. Mankunku "Spring"): http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=9871

Edmund Ntemi Piliso (1925-2000)
Short bio: http://www.jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost2.php3?edit=984059354
African Jazz Pioneers: http://www.music.org.za/artist.asp?id=75

Dudu Pukwana (1938-1990)
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudu_Pukwana

Dolly Rathebe (1928-2004)
another great Jürgen Schadeberg photo here: http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/a06.jpg
Biography: http://www.afropop.org/explore/artist_info...Dolly%20Rathebe

Lemmy Special
one more by Schadeberg: http://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/jazz24.jpg

Philip Tabane
http://www.music.org.za/artist.asp?id=106



Xhosa man and V N Zote's children, Flagstaff, Transkei, Eastern Cape.
9 October 1975


:: FURTHER LISTENING ::

African Jazz Pioneers – Sip 'n' Fly (Gallo) [Ntemi Piliso & his gang back at the game in 1992]
The Blue Notes – In Concert Vol. 1 (Ogun – OOP) [don’t have this one for real…]
The Blue Notes – Township Bop (Proper) [early sessions (1964) by the group, still in South Africa – I assume this is the one Proper release I really, really love!]
**Pierre Dorge & New Jungle Orchestra – Brikama (Steeplechase) (incl. Johnny Dyani) [great, joyful and crazy small big band stuff, similar vibes in there as you can hear with the Dutch bands of the time]
*Johnny Dyani – Witchdoctor’s Son (Steeplechase) [a classic, I assume, but one I haven’t gotten yet]
Mongezi Feza – Free Jam (Ayler, 2CD) [Feza guesting with Bernt Rosengren’s group]
Anders Gahnold – Flowers for Johnny (Ayler, 2CD) [trio w/Dyani & Gilbert Matthews]
Abdullah Ibrahim – African Space Program (Enja) [one of his best, just look at the line-up: Enrico Rava, Sonny Fortune, Carlos Ward, John Stubblefield, Hamiet Bluiett, Cecil McBee, a.o.]
Abdullah Ibrahim – African Marketplace (WEA) [one of his greatest, Carlos Ward is the main soloist, Craig Harris is there as well, and Cecil McBee anchors it on bass, great blowing, plenty of spirit and soul]
Abdullah Ibrahim – all the “African Recordings” (African Sun, Voice of Africa, Tintinyana, Blues for a Hip King) (KAZ/Camden) [the early/mid 70s material from after Dollar Brand went back to SA, featuring Kippie, Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen, Barney Rachabane and others, but also a date with Blue Mitchell, Buster Cooper and Harold Land alongside Coetzee and a few other SA musicians]
Abdullah Ibrahim – African Piano (JAPO) [one of his best, an early solo outing]
Abdullah Ibrahim – Yarona (Enja) [1996 trio set from Sweet Basil in NYC, glorious!]
Abdullah Ibrahim – African River (Enja) [one of the best Ekaya albums]
Abdullah Ibrahim – South Africa (Enja) [a great live set with Carlos Ward]
Abdullah Ibrahim – Africa -Tears and Laughter (Enja) [a meditative set with Talib Kibwe]
Abdullah Ibrahim/Johnny Dyani – Good News from Africa (Enja) [duos, sublime!]
Abdullah Ibrahim/Johnny Dyani – Echoes from Africa (Enja) [more duos, almost as good]
Robbie Jansen – Nomad Jêz (Mountain Records)
The Jazz Epistles – Jazz in Africa, Vol. 1 (KAZ/Camden) [with John Mehegan date, see Masekela disography for details]
Chris McGregor – Very Urgent (Polydor – OOP) (to be reissued by Fledg'ling
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath (self-titled) (just reissued by Fledg'ling)
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath – Brotherhood (just reissued by Fledg'ling)
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath – Bremen to Bridgewater (Cuneiform. 2CD)
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath – Travelling Somewhere (Cuneiform)
Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath – Eclipse at Dawn (Cuneiform) [might be the best of these live releases...]
Chris McGeegor’s Brotherhood of Breath – Country Cooking (Virgin) [one of hist last releases, mostly with UK sidemen, pretty good!]
Hugh Masekela – Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of H.M. (Blue Thumb) [a nice compilation of mostly early material]
Lulu Masilela & Thomas Phale – Cool Down (Gallo) [short - only 26 minutes - but very sweet, contains two lenghty jams]
Harry Miller – The Collection (Ogun, 3CD – OOP) [all his Ogun albums, solo, duo with Radu Malfatti, Isipingo, the album with Breuker, Trevor Watts and the Tippet(t)ses, as well as the Harry Miller Quintet album with Charig, Wolter Wierbos, Han Bennink and Sean Bergin, originally on Varajazz]
Harry Miller’s Isipingo – Which Way Now (Cuneiform) [terrific live recording by this great band!]
*Louis Moholo – Spirits Rejoice (Ogun) [OOP?]
McCoy Mrubata - Face the Music (Sheer Sound) [a lovely 2002 album by some younger musicians, including Zim Ngqawana, Prince Lengoasa, Marcus Wyatt and Paul Hanmer]
*Benny Gwigwi Mrwebi – Mbqanga Songs (Honest Jon’s)
Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi – Yakhal ‘Inkomo (Gallo) [also contains Chris Schilder's Spring]
Zim Ngqawana – Zimphonic Sounds (Sheer Sound) [a younger man’s celebration of the great tradition, the music in all its glory and pain]
Bra Ntemi [Ntemi Piliso] – At Mavuthela Vol. 1 - 1975 (Gallo)
Bra Ntemi [Ntemi Piliso] – At Mavuthela Vol. 2 - 1975 (Gallo)
Bra Ntemi [Ntemi Piliso] – At Teal Records - 1976 (Gallo)

*) albums I don’t own in any form (some of this stuff has been around in the blogosphere…)
**) albums that are not actually “South African jazz,” whatever that is

Compilations
Freedom Blues: South African Jazz Under Apartheid (Nascente) [mostly classics by Mankunku, The Blue Notes, Harry Miller’s Isipingo, The Jazz Epistles, a.o.]
Africa Straight Ahead (Heads Up) [mostly younger musicians, Zim Ngqawana, McCoy Mrubata, Bheki Mseleku, Hotep Idris Galeta, Paul Hammer, a.o.]
African Horns (KAZ/Camden) [a great teaser, including “Thsona” (see below) as well as a few other lenghty jams, plenty of great sax players featured, incl. Kippie, Coetzee, Jansen & Barney Rachabane]
Jazz in Africa, Volume 2 (KAZ/Camden) [includes Kippie’s terrific album “Tshona”, as well as two looooong jams with Dollar Brand]

Further metion: Golden Afrique Vol. 3 (Network), dedicated to the music of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Sambia (Volumes 1 & 2 are highly recommended, too - for Europeans, I assume the best place to get them is here: http://www.zweitausendeins.de/suche/?ArticleFocus=3&ord=-1&alpha=1&cat=20&q=golden%20afrique). These aren't jazz releases, of course, but they contain plenty of wonderful music attractive to the jazz audience, too...

And to end things, here's the sleeve of the original King Kong album - the musical which in its cast included many of the luminaries of South African jazz:





Stalled municipal housing scheme, Kwezinaledi, Lady Grey, Eastern Cape.
5 August 2006

Count Basie w/Prez

Over on another blog, you can find some early Basie, in form of Chronological Classics discs, actually the first four of Basie's own band (the Bennie Moten material is sometimes included in Basie reissue series, such as the great French Masters of Jazz series, and to be sure it's absolutely essential, too!)

The way to get the Decca sides is by buying this box set (very cheap on Amazon US right now!), it's from the early 90s, but it sounds alright, and it has the best documentation you'll get, plus it includes a couple of alternates that aren't on the Classics. After the Decca period, things get pretty drab... Columbia has so far (and will forever, I'm afraid) refused to do the right thing and release their complete Basie sessions in any form (there were two French vinyl boxes, I think, but I'm too young to have them...), so Classics is the best way there is. I did mention the Masters of Jazz series, these were much better, including live material, alternate takes, and the best sound you could possibly get, but these are long gone... I managed to get a couple some years ago, and some others have been up on the late demonoid bit-torent tracker, but I'm still missing quite a bit. The other route to take is Definitive, they did two very crappy boxes in pretty bad sound, but at least all the master takes are there.
Then there's the RCA material, also done by Definitive, and there's a Japanese box, too. Those weren't the best years of the Count, alas.



Columbia did release a great 4CD compilation though, also on sale on US amazon right now. Sound is much better than on any other release of the same material, but it's far from complete, with more than one disc dedicated to (almost all of) the small group sessions Basie was involved with at Columbia's labels (including the fabulous "Jones-Smith Inc" session), then you get almost two discs of studio material, and on the fourth disc you get live material, including stellar Lester Young, and all three titles ever done by Billie Holiday with the Basie orchestra. Pretty nice, all in all, but not complete, and hence not enough...

Anyway, this is all material that would fit into my "For Europeans Only" series as it's all in public domain on our side of the pond, and I thought I'd just point out that some of it is available on that other site!

Woody Shaw's "Song of Songs" and Concord Music Group

So after all the ranting you have heard from me here and elsewhere, here's a good word about Concord, for a change! By chance (ok, not quite - by googling the info and a cover scan for a vinyl-rip MP3 version of Woody Shaw's "Song of Songs", a disc I had given up ever being able to find and thus went for the recent share on another blog) I happened to see that Concord had that by now - I thought - OOP and hard to find Woody Shaw disc up for takers on their site. I remembered from their special cleanout sale from last year that they'd only ship in the US, but I thought heck why not give it a try, and indeed they do now also cater to the international customer.

And now the best news: the order, sent in three hours ago, has already been shipped!

Here's the Woody Shaw disc, and a quick search yielded some other things that I tought were OOP, like the two Gil Melle CDs, and all of Gigi Gryce's OJC CDs!

Erika Stucky - Willisau 2002 - now on dime

Here's a great concert in its entirety - please check it out!
http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=170507

Stucky is a Swiss-Californian singer mixing various influences to her own special brew. 60s psychedelia (she was invited for the second edition of Christy Doran/Fredy Studer's Jimi Hendrix project and handled those songs in a fantastic way!), traditional Swiss music, jazz, folk, whatever fits in - the result is something very special, music like you've never heard it before, I'm sure!

**********************************************************

Erika Stucky Bubble-Family
Jazzfestival Willisau 2002 - Impros & Voices II
Willisau (CH)
September 1, 2002 (evening)

Erika Stucky - voice
Luli Gurgauer - keys
Oli Harting - guitar & banjo
Hansueli Tischhauser - guitar
Vonne Geraedts - vocals & trumpet
Jean-Jacques Pedretti - trombone, alphorn
Robert Morgenthaler - trombone, alphorn
Peter Horisberger - drums
Martin Schumacher - accordion, baritone sax
Jon Sass - tuba
Knuth Jenssen - guitar, bass, keys, vocals
Rodolfo Ernst - ?
Urs Amstutz - ?

*** complete concert ***

1. (5:43) >
2. (5:51)
3. (2:40) >
4. (5:12)
5. (8:03) >
6. (6:02)
7. (2:15) >
8. (4:31)
9. (2:13)
10. (1:59)
11. (7:55)
12. (4:22)
13. (7:45)
14. (3:20)
15. (3:18)

TT: 71:17

Sound: A
Recording engineer: Martin Pearson
Source: DRS 2 live broadcast / 2002-09-02
Lineage: FM > minidisc > analogue to HD > GoldWave > FLAC (8,asb,verify)
Taped, transferred & seeded by ubu

r.i.p. Jack Wilson (1936-2007)

I have been a bit confused about this, there has been some discussion on organissimo, but only today I realized it's actually a fact that Jack Wilson has died early in October - the following post from another board has been repeated, in this recent organissimo discussion:

Jack Wilson, a Jazz pianist and composer who played tenor saxophone, vibraphone and organ, with such musical luminaries as Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Jackie McLean, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sonny & Cher, died Friday, October 5, 2007, in Northport, NY.

His death, at the Northport Veteran’s Administration Medical Center, was caused by complications of diabetes, said his wife, Sandie Boerum-Wilson, of Sayville, NY.

Here's the correct wiki entry (there's another one for an english pianist of the same name).

I love Wilson's album Something Personal (Blue Note, reissued on CD in their Connoisseur Series). Wilson has another disc out on Blue Note, Easterly Winds (also part of the Connoisseur Series), which I still have to get. And Freshsound Records have reissued his fine album done for Vault in 1966, Ramblin' (out of print, alas).

ubu's Max Roach Memorial listen

Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker

Here are some impressions about the tough but rewarding ride I just finished... (relaxin' with Sonny Stitt's "Deuces Wild" now, a gift I just got from a friend).

Thanks a lot, Max, for all the great music!

I started with Percussion Bitter Suite (covered in the previous Roach post), then went on with the following albums:

It's Time (Impulse!, 1962) - one of the best of those chorus albums. Max stands out here, his playing is so poised - awesome! Jordan has many fine spots and so has Richard Williams - too bad he wasn't getting more exposure, a very fine musician in any context I've heard him in (Jones/Lewis big band, Gigi Gryce, Mingus, his sole leader album on Candid, Lateef...)

Speak, Brother, Speak! (Fantasy/OJC, 1962) - Much better than most reviews want us to think! Jordan is on fire, Waldron does his long meandering lines. And Eddie Khan holds his own with a much earthier sound and delivery than Art Davis, more a felt bass player, but very much there, all of the time! And again Roach is doing great! This is a fairly simple, blowing album (though the two long numbers, or at least the first 25 minute long title track, are some kind of suites with various parts in changing tempos), other than the music preceeding it - the last Mercury albums, the Candid and the two Impulses all had larger line-ups and/or more thorough concepts and arrangements. Here they just blow, and it's good to hear them doing that! And the music is earthy and soulful, and yes, it swings!

The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (Atlantic, 1964) - a weird one... all the hype about that Hasaan chap is more hot air than anything - not really a huge loss that he remained legendary... however, he's a fun pianist to listen to, there's no denying that! The main point of interest here though, is Roach's highly creative drumming and Art Davis' bass providing a great bottom for the music - their playing together is simply terrific here!

Drums Unlimited (Atlantic, 1965/66) - Very nice one! The short solos are terrific, and the groove hit by Jymie Merritt and Ronnie Mathews (he sounds a lot like Bobby Timmons here) on "Nommo" is terrific! Freddie Hubbard is at his aggressive best - I quite like him as a sideman on most album's I've heard him (he appears on so many important albums!), while I don't like his leader dates that much... or I rather listen to them for the bands, not for him. Anyway, he's serious here! There's also the live date from the band's tour in late '66 where Hubbard asks the (white, of course) audience in Graz, Austria, to kiss his black ass... I'll have to play that again soon!

Lift Every Voice and Sing (Atlantic, 1971)- A collection of spirituals (except for #2 by one Patricia Curtis and Max Roach), arranged for choir and the Roach group, at that stage (1971) including Cecil Bridgewater and the great Billy Harper who does some apeshit soloing here - great! George Cables is on electric piano. I like this one a lot. It's more of its time and less a great piece of art than "It's Time", I think, but it has a lot going on, there's a certain aggressiveness in the music that reaches out and grabs me!

Now playing Members, Don't Git Weary (Atlantic, 1969) - and guess what, this (and also Lift Every Voice) is where for me - unintentionally - the focus while listening shifts away more and more from Max, towards the other musicians. Tolliver is great, Bartz also contributes a few nice solos (and his composition "Libra"), and Stanley Cowell is great to have on any album from that period... I'd have preferred Merritt on double bass, though... his sound on "Nommo" (Drums Unlimited) is so fat and boomy, he'd have had a better groove than on electric bass... and about Roach, I guess this is where he kind of started losing his great, aggressive, individual style of drumming (now this is crap, put in such general words, I know...) ... now this doesn't mean "Members" is a bad album, not even a mediocre one, there's plenty of good music on it, but Max' own playing ain't quite so exciting any longer... (even though - I doubt I could, though - some may hear it's Max within one bar from any of the tunes...)

Addition: Merritt is partly on double bass (for instance on the title track) - but I'd wished he'd be on it on the funky opening number, for instance!

Max Roach (1924-2007)

Maxwell Roach, January 10, 1924 - August 16, 2007

Some background reading on the era and the civil rights movement:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/aopart9.html


:: New York Times obituary ::

August 16, 2007
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
By PETER KEEPNEWS

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York. He was 83.

His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.

He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.

Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.

He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.

In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.

Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.

Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”

In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.

Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.

By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.

He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”

Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.

In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.

Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.

The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.

Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.

The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.

“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”

“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”

As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.

Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.

He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.

Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”

This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.

By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.


:: ubu's notes ::

These are copy-pasted from several threads over on Organissimo.

I've been digging a lot of Max Roach's music, lately. Put most of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet material from the great 10CD box onto my iPod (omitting some alternates and false starts). Then I just recently got around playing most of the Mosaic box, combined with the albums he did for other labels in between the Mercury albums, including Max (Argo), Deeds Not Words (Riverside), the Time album, Award Winning Drummer, and just this morning while commuting the great Prestige album of Sonny Rollins' heading the Roach +4 band (Sonny Rollins Plays For Bird) with Wade Legge and Kenny Dorham (including the magnificient Bird-medley, which probably was the idea for the Mercury album Max Roach Plays Charlie Parker, I assume?). Later I also played the Booker Little 4+ Max Roach album (United Artists/Blue Note CD).
The earlier Mercury albums on the Mosaic, Max Roach +4, Jazz in 3/4 Time (this one's easily available on CD, the only one besides the Jazz in Paris edition of "Parisian Sketches" that is, from the Mercury output), Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker, Max Roach +4 on the Chicago Scene, fit right in with the Argo, Riverside and Time album. The last of the Mercury albums before the Turrentines arrived to replace the Booker Little/George Coleman frontline, The Many Sides of Max, is a minor masterpiece.

Anyway, it's most fascinating to see how Max evolves.
Also it's very interesting to read the liners in the Mosaic and compare the music, play it in chronological way, check out how Roach's solo conception changes and grows... he seems to have been one of jazz' sharpest minds back then - a very intriguing character, to me.
Looking forward now to continue the trip with more of the Turrentine Bros./Julian Priester Quintet (incl. Tommy Turrentine's self-titled album for Time adding Horace Parlan on piano, and the live album on Enja, Long As You're Living predating the last of the Mercury albums recorded in Paris). Next then what I still think are his best albums (besides the Brown/Roach material), Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Suite.
What a great body of work in so few years! Too bad only that Mercury had more of a project-based approach and didn't document the working quartets/quintets more thoroughly! They're clearly on fire on the 1958 Newport (Mercury) set!

*****

Max' huge contribution to Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus - that's the first album I ever heard with him on drums. The solo he pulls on "St. Thomas" is jaw-dropping (as is the whole album... Blue Seven!)
Beautiful sound on that album too (even on the 80s Fantasy version), it's so deep and blue - one of my very favourite albums to this day!

I was able to catch Max live, in a weird concert with Abdullah Ibrahim. First both of them played half a solo set, and after the break they made a lame attempt at a duo. The Roach solo portion was the only part that was convincing and partly very good, but the whole event was a big letdown, even though I love both guys when they're on their own (or working with more sympathetic partners).

To The Max, the 2CD set, is a nice showcase of more recent Roach, including M'Boom, his 80s quartet, the double quartet and more. Covers all the variety of things Max did in his later career.
Nothing of it comes close, in my opinion, to the stuff he did in 55-63 or so, though... in fact probably most of his post Brownie material isn't coming close to their quintet in 55/56, except maybe for the Candid and Impulse albums mentioned in my first post.
But then, luckily, it's not just about "greatest" albums all the time... he did so many good and great ones besides those classics, too!

*****

Art Davis (December 5, 1934 - July 29, 2007)

I have been playing the Roach Mosaic set with additional other discs in between and have just entered the tuba band months... Davis was a monster player! His playing on the Newport live set (with a broken index finger) is terrific!
He always struck me as a terrific musician when playing with Roach - and as "just" a very good bass player in most of the other contexts I've heard him in. Magic at work when he and Roach got together!

Probably he was just too strong a musical personality. I mean his walking lines, his timing, all of it is too personal for him to just fit in on any kind of jam session or loosely arranged studio date. With Roach though, he's very inspired and inspiring, I find - much more so than George Morrow, who just happens to play the bass in the band, most of the time, Davis is there, you can feel him at any given moment and he's actively shaping the music, not just accompanying - that's how it feels to me, at least...

... is that there are statements about George Morrow in the montage of quotes by musicians/sideman in the Roach Mosaic booklet, that state that he was the only one to really cope with the fast tempos at that time (before Davis joined, that is - no negative words about Boswell, but he's not exactly your greatest bass fiddle virtuoso either, though he did a fine job with what was one of Roach's most underrated bands, in my opinion). There are statements that mention others sitting in, including Oscar Pettiford, and simply being unable to keep the tempo... so Morrow was no slouch, I guess... rather he wasn't a great solo player (not at all... there's one bass feature on the Brown/Roach band, not such a great track, but quite alright), but it seems he's respected by his colleagues if just for his able walking at breakneck tempos.
That tempo thing is one of the slight letdowns of these Roach bands, I think - Billy Wallace makes that point (and he seems quite certain that his own circle of musicians in Chicago was far better than the Roach group he played with... I don't think that makes too much sense, speaking of being better musicians, on that level, but I wouldn't doubt Wallace's statements per se). Anyway, the band so often just playing as fast as they can brings a certain sameness to the music that not even guys like Booker Little and the great (underrated? I guess so even if it's a stupid tag and I already used it in this post...) George Coleman can help getting over that. It's possibly some kind of restlessness, that would again make it interesting... a nervousness, a sensitivity? I don't know, though... looking forward to get through the Turrentines band and then on with the Freedom Now Suite - the 5/4 opener with Hawkins rough and stunning tenor solo most definitely offers one of those fat swinging grooves that Wallace seemed to miss in the Roach band... maybe it's like Roach has lost that nervous edge, gone a step further around that time (Freedom Now and also Percussion Bitter Suite from 1961)?

*****

Anyway, back on topic: enjoying the shit out of those albums with the Turrentine brothers and Julian Priester. Stanley Turrentine is so good at this early stage of his career! Tommy may not be the greatest technician and doesn't have stealth chops and all, but he's got a way of playing that I think is all his own. I played the Quiet As It's Kept album, plus Moon Faced and Starry Eyed (with Abbey Lincoln guesting on two tunes) from the Mosaic, then the Tommy Turrentine Time album, and now getting close to the end of the Enja release, Long As You're Living, from the band's Kaiserslautern 1960 concert - more great playing there! Then I'll end my Roach Mosaic trip with the Paris date, Parisian Sketches, on the last disc... and continue with Freedom Now Suite, of course!

Oh, and let me put in a good word for Julian Priester! Definitely one of my favourite trombone players of any time and style - his sound is so beautiful (highlights being his features on Quiet As It's Kept, I'd say... but most of his solos on these albums are great)!

Another observation about the Turrentines/Priester edition of the Roach quintet: Max seems to loosen up quite a bit by that time. He's still *very* sharp (he always is!) but on some of the bluesier tunes tending in a bit of a "soul jazz" direction (such as the 5/4 groover "As Long As You're Living" or some of the material on the Tommy T Time album), he really lays out a fat groovy bottom that swings almost in the kind of way that Billy Wallace seems to have missed in Roach's playing, I guess...

*****

A few impressions on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Candid 1960):
Coleman Hawkins' tenor solo on "Driva Man" smokes! It's one of the strongest statements ever committed to record by Hawkins, in my opinion. It's full of raw emotion, once he even squeaks, but doing a re-take was no option (I think they offered it to him but he didn't want to do it again).
Also how Max stresses the first beat in this 5/4 number, so as the old Hawk doesn't get lost is creating a great kind of groove, kind of a stop and go feel which I love.

Then there's Abbey Lincoln... I never liked her, the one two/third of her Riverside albums and the Candid album are just so-so, I think. But hell, that was a long way from the bar singing stuff she did, looking cute and singing nicely, to the extremely emotional "Tryptich" on this album! That track is still now hard to take for me, it's just too much, actually, too much emotion, too much screaming... but it's real.

One last thought for now: the afro stuff on the second half fits in with the general black movement and all in all this album is one of the highwatermarks of politically engaged jazz, for me. But then it's so good on a musical level, it could be about any kind of crap... but probably if it had been, it wouldn't have ended up being so good on musical terms... anyway, there's the Rollins Freedom Suite and a few other things from the era that I love, most notably the 1960 Randy Weston album "Uhuru Afrika" (Roulette, reissued on the Weston Mosaic Select). That Weston album should be much better known and be part of the "canon" together with the Rollins and Roach Freedom Suites, in my opinion!

*****

Then there's Percussion Bitter Suite - the presence of Eric Dolphy alone makes this Impulse album from 1961 a special thing. Booker Little returns on trumpet, Clifford Jordan is now on tenor (he succeeded Walter Benton who was present on the Freedom Now Suite, holding his own next to Coleman Hawkins), and Julian Priester is still around and heavily contributing. Mal Waldron is on piano, Art Davis still doing great work on bass. Booker Little's opening solo on the first track, "Garvey's Ghost" (dedicated to Marcus Garvey) is so plaintif, so moody, one of my favourite solos of his.
On "Tender Warrior" Dolphy contributes some of his mad bass clarinet playing, the highlight for me, though, comes with "Mendacity" - one of the most haunting pieces of Roach music I'm aware of, right up there with "Driva Man" from the Freedom Now Suite. Dig Dolphy's alto!

*****

Let me end this for the moment. I was actually playing Bill Evans recordings for two days now, but I'll continue my Roach trip where I left off, with Speak, Brother, Speak!, Max Roach Trio featuring the Legendary Hasaan, Drums Unlimited, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and Members, Don't Git Weary (all on Atlantic, except for It's Time, Impulse, and Speak, Brother, Speak!, Fantasy/OJCCD).
I might do another post dedictated to those albums.

Tete Montoliu & Dusko Goykovich - now on dime

The last two shares of my Tete flood on dime are up now:

a fine trio show: Tete Montoliu Trio - Köln 1990
and a sideman appearance: Dusko Goykovich - Schwabach 1971

Tete recorded two fine albums under Dusko's leadership, in quartet they did "Ten To Two Blues" (Ensayo), also known as "After Hours" (on Enja under that title), and "It's About Blues Time" (Ensayo - CD reissue on Freshsound Records) inquintet with Ferdinand Povel on tenor sax. The rhythm section on both is Robert Langereis (bass) and Joe Nay (drums), the albums were recorded in November 1971 in Barcelona. Both are recommended!

Original cover & Ensayo CD reissue:


Enja reissue, and finally the second album

Check out the Dusko Goykovich Discography on the Cosmic Sounds site!

And if you really feel like checking out Dusko, don't forget his classic album, "Swinging Macedonia" (I just got the CD version of that, courtesy of Enja, while I was in Vienna). A great album!

Bright Moments - Roland Kirk on dime & right here, too!

In between the Tete flood, I put up some Roland Kirk shows on dime, some with Tete and/or Walter Bishop one with George Gruntz, and one with Andrew Hill (yup, the Newport 1962 concert).

Here are the links to the dime seeds:
Roland Kirk - Berlin, Milan & Paris 1964 (with Tete & Walter Bishop)
Roland Kirk - Copenhagen 1963 (with Tete)
Roland Kirk - Bremen 1963 (with George Gruntz)
Roland Kirk - Newport 1962 (with Andrew Hill)

These shows further include some very fine rhythm sections, such as Paul Rovère/Daniel Humair (w/Gruntz), Vernon Martin/Clifford Jarvis (w/Hill), Jimmy Woode or Tommy Potter/Kenny Clarke (w/Tete & Walter Bishop, add Sonny Stitt and J.J. Johnson for some tracks, too), and of course NHOP/J.C. Moses on the Copenhagen show w/Tete, the same band as on the official live material released as "Kirk in Copenhagen" and in its entirety (well, almost) on "Rahsaan", the fantastic 10CD complete Mercury box.

Now the Newport and Bremen shows have partly been released: one title from the Newport set appeared as a bonus on the Rahsaan box, and several Bremen titles have been part of a great 3CD set on one of Joel Dorn's doomed operations, 32 Jazz, titled "Dog Years in the Fourth Ring", which was a fantastic compilation of 2CDs worth of live material from various concerts, and on disc 3 brought the great Atlantic album "Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata" into CD age. This came out in 1997 and is highly recommended (but I guess it's also highly unlikely to stumble over by now).

Anyway, look for the download links in the comments to fill the gaps in my dime seeds - these tracks have *not* been lifted off the Mercury and 32 Jazz sets, but are from the same source my dime seeds were taken from - hence sound is less good, it's just that I find it nice to have these shows in their entirety, even more so as the Bremen seed has some announcements for tunes that then don't follow...

Bright Moments!

Tete Montoliu - now on dime

I just put up some short Tete shows on dime:

Tete Montoliu Trio - Leverkusen 1993-10-17
Tete Montoliu Solo - Hamburg 1994-10-11
Tete Montoliu Solo & Trio - Marciac 1987-08-14
Tete Montoliu Solo - Marseille 1983-07-24

Tete Montoliu (Vicente Montoliu Massana) was born March 28, 1933 and died August 24, 1997. He was a great piano player from Spain. He did lots of good recordings, many of them for the Danish Steeplechase label.
A friend of mine compiled a discography that's online here:
http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Montoliu/index.htm
Of course I did help as much as I could. To my knowledge, the discography will need a major update and hence will become even better!

During his career, Tete played with many great musicians, Americans and Europeans, such as Lucky Thompson, Dusko Goykovich, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, Chick Corea, Bobby Hutcherson, Harold Land, Herbie Lewis, Billy Higgins, David Murray, Jackie McLean, Ben Webster, Peter King, Roland Kirk, and many many more. However, his best discs I find, are usually his trio or solo albums. I can't really name a favourite disc, but if you want to check Tete out, you may go for "Catalonian Fire", "Tootie's Tempo", Dusko's "Ten To Two Blues" (also known as "After Hours"), or his album with Lucky Thompson, "Soul's Nite Out".

There's a good book on Tete, written by Miquel Jurado: "Tete. Quasi Autiobiografia" (first edition by Pòrtic Proa, Barcelona, 1998 - I received a copy of the Spanish translation from said friend).

There's also a modest wiki entry.

insubordinations - lê quan ninh & much more

just found out about the netlabel insubordinations.

please let me know if any of these downloadable releases are good or great!
I bet [insub11] MARTINE ALTENBURGER & LÊ QUAN NINH love stream is great, but as I'm still on vacation for yet another week, I won't do any downloading...



the direct download link is here (51 min 35 / mp3 @ 256 kbps + cover / 96 Mo)

George Russell Fest on dime

I'm trying to squeeze in a little George Russell (wiki) festival on dime before leaving for two weeks vacation in Vienna (July 1 to July 16).

Here's the listing of planned seeds:

instalments:

#1 - George Russell - Lenox 1960 (re-seed)
#2 - George Russell - Newport 1964 (edited re-seed)
#3 - George Russell - Paris 1964-10-01 (I seeded this before - won't re-seed it now, hopefully someone else steps in)
#4 - George Russell Berlin 1970-11-05 & Don Ellis Berlin 1968-11-08
#5 - George Russell Living Time Orchestra - Perugia 2002-07-15 (edited re-seed)
#6 - Lydian Sound Orchestra w/Charles McPherson - Vicenza 2005-05-21 (re-seed)
#7 - Swedish Living Time Orchestra - Stockholm 2006-05-15 (re-seed - maybe someone else helps me on this one, time may end too soon for this to be included...)



As for George Russell... I consider him one of the most fascinating characters of our beloved music. His albums - I own most of his 50s to early 60s work - belong to the most cherished ones.

:: A couple of albums on RCA ::
Jazz Workshop (his debut from 1956) with Russell not playing himself, but on board are Art Farmer, Hal McKusick & Bill Evans!
New York N.Y. (1958), an ambitious and probably only partly successful project with appearances by John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Jon Hendricks (don't miss the recent Pacific/EMI reissue of his great "Another Git Together" with Cannonball, Pony Poindexter, Wes Montgomery & others!), Al Cohn, Art Farmer, Jimmy Cleveland, Bob Brookmeyer, Benny Golson and many others.

:: Three on Decca ::
First there's his 1960 album Jazz in the Space Age, one of the crowning achievements of his career, including Bill Evans again, but also Paul Bley (they're both soloing together on one tune!), with a big band featuring Ernie Royal, Dave Baker, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, Hal McKusick, Charlie Persip, Don Lamond, Bob Brookmeyer and others.
Then he also did two small group albums, only one of them I have: George Russell Sextet at the Five Spot, a studio album, its title notwithstanding. This album features a Russell working band for the first time: Dave Baker (trombone), Al Kiger (trumpet), Dave Young (tenor sax), Russell (piano), Chuck Israels (bass) and Joe Hunt (drums). They play a bunch of fine tunes, including Carla Bley's "Dance Class" and "Beast Blues", as well as Miles' "Sippin' at Bells", Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" and two originals, one each by Baker and Russell.
His third Decca album, In Kansas City, came in 1961. I am not sure if it's ever been on CD, at least it has never been readily available.

:: Four albums for Riverside ::
This group of albums (I have all except "The Stratus Seekers" - it's on my painfully long Fantasy buying list...) features some great musicians and lots of great music with the definitive Russell sound!
The first one was Stratusphunk (1960) - it features Russell with five of his Lenox School of Jazz students: Al Kiger, Dave Baker, Dave Young, Chuck Israels & Joe Hunt (same band as on the Five Spot album). There's another early Carla Bley tune here, and by now the Russell signature sound is in full blossom!
Ezz-Thetics (1960) has Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy (outstanding bass clarinet on "'Round Midnight"), but also Russell mainstays Dave Baker and Joe Hunt again. Steve Swallow is on bass this time, and Russell has finally settled on the piano bench by this time (he started out on drums - you can hear him on a few tracks on another OJC disc, the reissue of Lucy Reed's Fantasy album This Is Lucy Reed, recorded in 1957). This album features the Miles Davis tune "Nardis" (presumably written by Bill Evans), another original by Baker, as well as three great Russell compositions, including "Lydiot" and the title-tune.
The Stratus Seekers (1962) is by a slightly more obscure band, with Bill Pierce (alto sax) making this a septet. Present again are Ellis, Baker, Hunt and Swallow. Paul Plummer is on tenor. The menu is all originals this time (one each by Kiger & Baker, the rest by Russell).
The last of the four, The Outer View (1962) features Don Ellis, Paul Plummer & Steve Swallow again, with Garnett Brown (trombone) and and Pete La Roca (drums). There's a wonderfully lydianized take on Bird's "Au Privave", the great "D.C. Divertimento", Carla Bley's "Zig-Zag", Russell's title-tune, as well as his arrangement of "You Are My Sunshine", adding Sheila Jordan on vocals (seems this was her recording debut - quite an audacious one!).

:: later albums ::
My collection is still *very* thin there... in fact I have only two additional albums:
The great MPS double album At Beethoven Hall (reissued in the 90s on Motor Music's MPS CD series, which also included albums by Mangelsdorff, Sun Ra and others). This great live album features Don Cherry, Bertil Lofgren (trumpet), Brian Trentham (trommbone), Ray Pitts (tenor), Cameron Brown (bass) and Albert Heath (drums). The concert includes a remake of "You Are My Sunshine" and also a lenghty Lydian suite including Russell's re-workings of "Bags' Groove", "Confirmation" and "'Round Midnight" (by Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, respectively).
The last one I have is one of this two 80s Blue Notes: The African Game (1983). This is a big band affair, again a rather ambitious and only partially successful work (but hey, New York, N.Y. is still considered a classic, and rightfully so - this one, however not... also rightfully, I guess, but it has a bunch of good moments).
The main beef of Russell's later years has been released on the Italian outfit Soul Note - however, these albums rarely turn up here and I haven't tried yet to find them online. There are too many things I want to buy all the time anyway...

Colin Vallon Trio - Zurich 2007 - now on dime

Samuel Rohrer / Colin Vallon / Patrice Moret

Colin Vallon's a very talented young piano player from the Romandie. He played at the jazzclub Moods in Zurich two days ago. Yours truly was there right at the front taping the proceedings and I'm happy to offer them on dime now:

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=149871

The trio's drummer, Samuel Rohrer is a force of nature, one of the greatest drummers I ever heard, truly! Bassist Patrice Moret was a bit low in the mix alas, I tried to fix that a bit in Cool Edit, but since he was low at the actual concert, not too much could have been done. Moret has played with Erik Legnini, for instance, and also with Patrick Muller's trio.

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Colin Vallon Trio
Zurich (CH), Moods
June 6, 2007

Colin Vallon - piano
Patrice Moret - bass
Samuel Rohrer - drums & little instruments

CD1/Set1/64:22
1. Stage Intro (1:07)
2. unknown (19:09)
3. unknown (29:31)
4. unknown (14:33)

CD2/Set2/46:22
1. Trenke, Todorke (Bulgarian folk song) 31:16 *
2. Announcement CV (1:00)
3. Je ne sais pas (Jacques Brel) 14:05

TT: 110:44

Sound: A-/B+
Source: audience recording
Lineage: crappy sony mic > MD > HD > Cool Edit Pro > FLAC (8,asb,verify)
Taped & seeded by ubu

* cut out dropouts: @ 1:01.49 (1.37sec), @ 14:34.15 (0.6sec), @ 16:02.86 (1.09sec)


Notes:
Taped in front row, center.
Bass in centre, drums on right, piano on left side of stereo spread (very modest stereo spread, as usual).
I did some tweaking to get a bit more of bass, but the bass was often hard to hear in the actual concert, so it can't be too great on the recording, anyway. Moret has a beautiful and actually big sound - he played without pick-up, just had a microphone in front of his bass, which is something I adore and far too many bassists do nowadays (I saw Buster Williams with Benny Golson's Clifford Brown tour, and of course Williams is a giant, but the sound he got with that pick-up was downright ugly and a huge letdown). Anyway, the sound honchos that evening obviously didn't really care about the bass being audible... too bad. But to hear Moret better, go listen to my Patrick Muller trio EspaceJazz seed, recorded almost exaclty a year ago, June 19, at RSR studio in Lausanne.
The drums are too loud in some spots (CD1#4 at the beginning, for instance), but that, too, reflects the balance of the actual sound at the concert.

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Check out Colin Vallon's new recording with this same trio on hat hut records:

hatOLOGY 636
Colin Vallon Trio
Ailleurs

The members of this band all share a strong awareness of sound quality and timbre, which sets them apart from other musicians. Three distinct instrumental voices – Vallon’s «singing» piano, Pat Moret’s «full reverberating» bass and Samuel Rohrer’s «polyvalent» drums – blend into a highly complex ensemble sound; here, too, the band has hardly anything in common with the traditional jazz piano trio conventions.
— Tom Gsteiger

view backcover here