Jump to content

Nate Dorward

Members
  • Posts

    2,206
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 

Everything posted by Nate Dorward

  1. There was a time where I spun that 2LP compilation of his Riverside work several times daily. Jazz in the Space Age, though, strikes me as the real masterpiece of the period. Very sad to hear he's gone. & yes I've read The Lydian Chromatic Concept & messed around with its theories a fair bit at one time (& that little set of punchcards). It's a very helpful way of thinking about music.
  2. A pile of Rex Stout, & George Borrow's Lavengro, one of the weirdest & most interesting of 19th-century bildungsromans (topics include snakes, gypsy language & culture, extreme anti-Catholic sentiment, obsessive-compulsive disorder, epilepsy, the nefarious publishing industry, polymathic language-learning.......).
  3. Just saw them a few weeks back on their North American tour. It was OK.
  4. It'll be later this year: Mark said he'd get Mercury to send me a review copy, so I should see it right upon publication.
  5. Next they'll be telling me that you can get tattoos from swimming pools, too.
  6. It's superb. I think there was a fairly lengthy thread on this elsewhere on the board. Some of these discs were issued before (though I don't think any but the 1st disc made it to CD?) but the set does have some extra material.
  7. Nate Dorward

    Elmo Hope

    With Gambit? You gotta be kidding.
  8. Jim's & Larry's questions are the ones that everyone seems to want answered .... I didn't ask Mark about this specifically, but if I run into him at the Monk's Casino gig next week I may see if he has any preliminary revelations to share. Thanks Frank: your blessing says a lot about the book's quality. Apparently Mark's next project (man, I envy a guy who seems to always have another project waiting in the wings) is on Lonnie Johnson's Canadian sojourn.
  9. Just ran into the jazz writer Mark Miller on Tuesday at a Michiel Braam gig down at the Rex; I was interested to learn that his next book's due out soon, a biography of Herbie Nichols. I'm greatly looking forward to this: knowing Mark, it'll be thorough, pithy & carefully researched. He said that he'd dug up a lot more of Nichols' journalism and other writings (including a lot of poetry--he didn't think it was very good but it of course has a lot of inherent interest nonetheless). There's a 2nd piece on Monk apparently, aside from the famous one that is frequently quoted. Anyway, it's due out from Mercury Press sometime later this year (though their site seems not to have any mention of this).
  10. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    Thanks for the listen, Bill. I think the one album I should seek out is the Robinson.
  11. I'd be interested in signing up, either CDR or download.
  12. Interesting to see--I've read 270pp of it & was debating whether to bother finishing. Uh, does it get better? Not for me. I've got about 100 pages to go, and it still seems pretty pointless. As I said, Fuller's Best of Jackson Payne does kind of the same thing but is shorter and far, far more interesting. I have actually gotten better about dropping novels that bore me, but I guess I will finish this one, then chuck it out (it literally is falling apart on me and other library copies are doing the same -- it wasn't a well-bound book, which is appropriate I guess though probably not intentional). Hm, well, I think, since I have less pagecount invested into it I will put it aside. I think that the real tip-off is that I recently reread the review of it by James Wood in the NY Times bookreview & realized that all the passages he singled out for praise had already taken place within the first 270pp or so. So it's not like I haven't already come across the stuff that is, supposedly, going to blow me away. So: at the moment, the reading is Borges' Fictions The Laxdaela Saga & the manuscript of a book of poems by Peter Larkin & I guess I should mention two other "professional" instances of reading-- cris cheek's part: short life housing too, which I just published a collection of essays on peace & protection in the Middle Ages edited by David Rollason & TB Lambert, which I edited for an academic press this week
  13. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    I'm probably misremembering the details of the Sheppard disc with Bennink--maybe it was on Antilles? I remember I used to play it on the air at CKDU.
  14. Interesting to see--I've read 270pp of it & was debating whether to bother finishing. Uh, does it get better? Instead, while I put that on the back burner, at the moment I've been reading The Laxdaela Saga & Maurice Scully's selected poems, Doing the Same in English. & just finished a pair of Charles Stross s.f. books, Iron Sunrise & Glasshouse. Both pretty good, though the ending of the latter has several problems, I think.
  15. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    For more atypical Bennink, try sampling his work on Blue Note for an Andy Sheppard album.............
  16. Wonder if time and new material changes that assessment. I'm quite blown away by Phases of the Night, the latest by this trio. I think it's pretty good, though it's not my favourite by any of the 3 players.
  17. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    Interesting you note that it's the only track on the album you're that taken with. O'Leary impresses me as someone who's more of a "quantity" than "quality" guy (not to mention an assiduous networker: he seems to be on a mission to assemble the most impressive list of playing partners he can manage in the shortest period of time). Haven't heard a lot of his work, but so far it tends to give me the impression that this track does: some guy with lots of Sco, Abercrombie &c under his fingers who for reasons best known to himself wants to be a free jazzer.
  18. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    I'd guess that the 1st track is from the Mark O'Leary/Han Bennink duo Television.
  19. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    More comments: 1) freeform guitar/drums duo, doesn't sound like a preplanned tune, but it's very much a jazz vocab at work here anyway. Likeable without making me really sit up--I guess I would have liked to hear the drummer being a little less easygoing & hear the guitarist stepping outside familiar vocabulary. No guesses about the players. 2) tbn/pno duo, they sound fairly familiar; I think it's freely improvised, though like the last one it doesn't really seem too far from familiar vocabulary (even if the vocab is a different one). Seems like it could have, uh, gone somewhere... 8) the wonky pitching initially made me think this was Maneri, but, nah, it's not got the character I think & this doesn't sound like his kind of ensemble (the twinkling-stars piano in particular). Like track 2 I kept wondering why it was taking so long to get out of a floaty impressionist opener & then realized it wasn't going to. Eh. This is the kind of sensitive additive improv that kinda bugs me with the sense that they're too worried about coherence & mood--each gesture seems to be too closely tied to the last one, so in the end you don't feel enough mental/logical/textural leaps have been made (& on the other hand, a particular idea isn't really explored in depth either). So what. 9) Ornettish group with a tuba for bass. Don't think it's Cherry on trumpet, a little too fleet for his latterday recordings (which it'd have to be from the recording quality), though certainly this is someone who knows his work well. Nice that the alto breaks the mold with a very un-Ornette solo. It's not doing a lot for me, but s'ok. I think the player I liked most was actually the tuba player...! 10) We never solo, we always solo......... I think I needed to play this on the full stereo not my dinky computer speakers, I might have got more caught up in it. As it stands, it's OK, but not really doing much for me. 11) This is the one track I really disliked.... just sounds really untogether and unswinging, & since the ideas themselves are stuff you've heard countless times, then what's the point if the feel isn't good? I initially assumed it was 2 pianists, but I think it's just one messy one, with a very splashy drummer. Hm, a bass at the end. Maybe the bass player was the guy playing the bass line on the piano?
  20. Nate Dorward

    BFT 65

    Just downloaded it--well, a lot of this is in my record collection or has passed through. Some quick notes: 3: well, I know this one. 3rd track off this one. 4: familiar Nichols tune, obviously the Dutch crew. Probably Nabatov's Autumn Music, an album I didn't like much (no longer own it, so can't check if it's right). Truthfully I find the archness offputting here--it's such a self-consciously smart take on Nichols' style that I wish he'd just be less of a know-it-all. Original writeup here, assuming I have the right album in mind. 5: well, this is familiar enough, Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio doing more Nichols, off their lone Hat Art album. Much more like it, without that annoying cuteness/faux-brutality of the previous one, Douglas's lines actually making sense on their own terms. & let's hear it for Black & Shepik/Schoeppach! 6: just guessing that rather than a Middle Eastern guy this might actually be Gordon Grdina who's done some stuff in this vein. Can't decide how much I like this one. 7: most interesting track up to this point for me, simply because the sound quality & style leave the date & provenance completely mysterious--basically older-style playing grafted onto an ambitious hard-bop set of chords & line (I'm impressed he gets it down that far, even though the bridge is too much for him). A nice feel to this one, but can't even guess who it is. The bass player could ease back a little on the solo. 12: well, this is an easy one, the late Steve Lacy with Cecil Taylor's trio. One of the great debut albums of all time.
  21. Well, I hope I can get out to see your next gig here, then........ I can go out to concerts again now, which is the one good thing about losing my job on the night shift ...
  22. Hi Ned! You coming to town again soon?
  23. It may be terrible, but it's GOT to be better than the trailer.
  24. I believe it was Mark Barnes you talked to, the mag's current owner. Hm, I think he would be wise to post something about the magazine's delay on its website.
×
×
  • Create New...