felser

So are Joey DeFrancesco, Marlon Jordan, the Marsalis Bros. and others, but Columbia had a thing they were doing on those albums which didn't do any favors to the musicians involved. And a lot of them weren't ready to be leaders 35 years ago.

$40 vinyl!

Magnificent. As indispensible as anything he ever did.

Amen.

"A Fickle Sonance" was the holy grail for me. Even Jerry Gordon at 3rd St. Jazz didn't have that one around.

Agreed. Not just that Winwood kid (and whatever became of him, anyways, did he do anything else ), but Eddie Hardin was also really good.

Infation factor between 1985 and now is 2.42, so that is like a $72 album today. It was enormous, but a great choice!

With you on Dexter, give me the best of the Steeplechase's for the decade. I also am glad for "Homecoming", with the Woody Shaw/Louis Hayes group doing the honors. They were one of my favorites of the era. I like Anthenagin/Buhaina also, dig Cedar's Rhodes and Mickey Bass's electric bass, as well as the Woody/Jefferson front like. I also really like this one for Watson's playing and Watson and Walter Davis's writing ("Time Will Tell" is one of my all-time favorites). I'm with you on Schnitter and Pomeranov. They were certainly competent, but not inspiring. Wynton actually brought some real fire to that group at first when he joined, for a while. The "Live at Bubba's" semi-bootlegs are my favorites. Things really blanded out with the recordings on Concord (as if that's a surprise). I wasn't finding a lot of great cutouts by the 80's (I did in the 70's), but was finding a lot of wonderful used records.

Tough era to start, lots of young guys in nice suits and hats doing polite albums on major labels. And cassettes at that. The CD revolution later in the decade into the 90's was a miracle.

PM sent with request for Three Sounds - Live at the Lighthouse.

I like those Joe Bonner albums, forgot about them. And "Essence" is the Kloss album I was thinking of. Fire with Hannibal on that one. 32jazz put out three extensive 2CD sets of Mark Murphy's Muse work, which seem to contain just about everything he did on the label, but in haphazard form. I would have much preferred them arranged chronologically by album. What a strange label 32jazz was, so very right and so very wrong at the same time!

Nice Dex set. Tough to pick just one from his 70s output. And I like the Byard.

Yep. Including gems by Eric Kloss and Charles Earland and the Visitors. Also some nice titles from the predecessor Cobblestone label.

Teddy Charles is, to me, one of the most underrecognized musicians in modern jazz history. He did some amazingly forward work in the Fifties, and 'Tentet', recorded for Atlantic in 1956, may be the best of the lot. 'A Word From Bird', recorded in 1957 for Atlantic, is also excellent, as are his earlier 'New Directions' recordings for Prestige. His subsequent work seemed to lose the vision of these mid-50's albums, taking on more late'50's commercial considerations ('A Salute to Hamp', 'Plays Ellington', 'Russia Goes Jazz', etc.), though 'Jazz in the Garden', with Waldron, Booker Little, and Booker Ervin is fine, though not up to the standards of these dates. Charles was an accomplished vibist, but his primary contributions were as a writer and arranger (he also was a busy producer). Working in a "cool" mode with a very advanced harmonic vocabulary, the writing and arrangements on these works is stunning. In addition to Charles, other arrangers on this album include Mal Waldron, Gil Evans, George Russell, and Jimmy Giuffre, other very forward thinkers of the time. Another underrated musician making similar inroads at the time was Gil Melle. I'm hoping some of the musicians and other more learned members on the board can explain in better technical terms what was going on in these recordings in this era, I just know this type of work from this era sounds great, and sounds unlike anything else before or since. Musicians in the Tentet include Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, J.R. Monterose, Mal Waldron and Jimmy Raney. Farmer, Raney, and Charles Mingus are among the musicians on 'A Word From Bird'.

Not a masterpiece, but an interesting listen:

I actually like the early WB albums ("Breezin" etc.) quite a bit, but they are a different bag.

Nice haul there. I consider "Beyond The Blue Horizon" to be the greatest jazz guitar album ever made, "White Rabbit" is a CTI gem, and "Body Talk" and "Bad Benson" are really strong. I also love the version of "The World is a Ghetto" on "In Flight", which you passed on.

Mathis was my mother's favorite. "Johnny's Greatest Hits", "More Johnny's Greatest Hits:, and "Merry Christmas" were the soundtrack of my youth, and I still have a nostalgic soft spot for them. I play that Christmas album while we decorate our Christmas tree each year.

Agreed. Getting from, say, "Afro Blue" to, say, "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" or "Every Step of the Way" (the climax to Santana's 'Caravanserai') is not a long journey. And of course Santana then blatantly recorded Coltrane in that album with John McLaughlin.

etc. Not that it's terrible stuff at all (it's not), just not enlightening.

The clip sounds great, would love to see that band! To me, the guy who really comes off great in the article is Azar Lawrence. Where was he for the 30 years between the mid-70's and the mid-2000's? Loved his work with Tyner in the 70's, and his albums since his return to the jazz recording scene have been strong.

That is the best of the later Sassy albums. And that is a really good Tapscott (as is everything he released in the decade). Nimbus West is a unique and fascinating label.

A lot of artists I have complete "official" leader sessions by, but I don't even attempt complete sideman work. And then you have the issue of grey market bootlegs, etc. Do those count towards completion?

I'd be patient and buy it used from ebay or discogs. Bear Family stuff is prohibitively expensive to buy new. Thiset would go for well over $200 new.