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Nate Dorward

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Everything posted by Nate Dorward

  1. Yeh, I should really post more about music rather than just films...! I guess that should be my new year's resolution. Thanks everyone for the bday wishes...! (I guess I might as well take the opportunity to say that if anyone's so inclined, I'm taking signups for February's BFT #62 over in the Blindfold Test forum.... the usual compilation of out-of-the-way things that have caught my ear.)
  2. Good to hear a few snatches of this, though unfortunately I had guests visiting so missed a lot (including the Ayler!). Caught Jan Johansen, Fats Waller, Ornette on Tenor, & a pianist playing "Everything I've Got" (didn't catch the name), among other things. Great to hear your voice, & your thoughts on the selections.
  3. Thanks folks--another milestone passed! .... #35, to be precise. Best wishes to everyone at Organissimo in the new year, too.
  4. Trepidation? Any reason why? Probably most of this will be in my usual zone of not-quite-mainstream, not-quite-avantgarde, hopefully all fairly userfriendly. Plus there are a few tracks that I keep leaving off past BFTs that will surely make the cut this time round....
  5. Truthfully, it's not the electric bass that bothers me, but just the general rhythmic feel of the track--it just seems really flat and untogether. Well, maybe I'll have 2nd thoughts once the identity of the players is revealed..........
  6. Glad to see I added to the total of i.d.'d tracks -- Takase is a pretty interesting pianist--I know her duo with Conny Bauer (saw them live), the very interesting trio disc on Leo with Aleks Kolkowski & Tony Buck, & the OK disc of covers on Psi. 5: not my thing, I'm afraid! 6: some blistering playing on uke, I believe. Pretty damn amazing. 7: odd phrase structure to this tune, which keeps making me think it's losing half a bar at one point. The guitarist is good, & I liked the somewhat strange (non-Grappelliish) violin playing with (sorry I'm not one for technical terms) the quirky bow weight & phrasing. 8: hm, electric bass?? aside from questions of instrumentation, this is so terribly unswinging I can't take it. & what's with this non-solo by the tenor? At points this is so clunky that I assume these guys are doing it deliberately..... I hope?? 9: I'm no expert in this kind of traditionalist jazz but, yeah, I liked this track. 10: I like the way the trumpet straightens out the kinks in Dizzy's break...! This is knowing stylistic reversion, but, yeah, it's fun & it's done well--the rising harmony in the last chorus is a nice touch. [more to come]
  7. Just saw that Ben Ratliff gave a nice writeup of the disc in the NY Times (link here). Good to see, as so far (Drip Audio being a Canadian label), virtually all the coverage has been north of the border.
  8. OK--time to start this thread. I will try this time to create a downloadable version, but anyone who wants a physical CDR mailed to them should just ask. I will keep this to a single CDR's worth of material, as I think two CDs are simply too much to digest & comment on. No overarching theme, just some music I like. Probably to vary the pace I'll include some older tracks along with recent stuff (whereas my last two BFTs were all new material). Signed up so far: The Magnificent Goldberg Bright Moments JSngry Durium Bill Barton relyles sidewinder Big Al king ubu RDK mikeweil stereojack John B Thom Keith
  9. OK, haven't looked at this thread yet..... 1: Well, it's definitely Rudi Mahall on the bass clarinet, no idea about the rest, but a guess (given the material) would put this as Aki Takase's Fats Waller album. Ehhhh.... they seem to be trying too hard to be wacky. 2: Jiminy cricket! No idea, maybe Bud Shank, hard to get a bead on given its brevity. 3: So it starts MJQ style before switching to the hot club swing of the dedicatee. The flash is enjoyable, though there's none of the lyrical abandon of Django. 4: This is much more my speed than the preceding tracks. Ahmad Jamalish pianist, I forget the name of the tune. It doesn't strike me as really lifting the roof off, but I liked it. [more to come]
  10. They're all good. The sound on Coventry is the worst of the bunch, alas, but the music's probably the best.
  11. How about an entire band playing something other than their usual instrument? Don't think Sun Ra's Strange Strings has been mentioned yet...?
  12. Hm, never heard of it, & tend to have a skeptical view of anyone who appends "Ph.D" after their name.... still, 4 volumes suggests he's put in a little spadework, at least. I note that he's published with the Mellen Press, which adds substantially to my doubts--it's a quasi-academic vanity press. (What press is the 4-vol set from?) He does seem to have a clunky way with titles--I note that he has a CD called 21st-Century Musicism.
  13. Yanow was doing some reviewing for the magazine under Daryl Angier's editorship. I haven't seen the most recent issue or two--I no longer contribute to it, though I did send in a year-end top-ten anyway--but my recollection was that Yanow hadn't been seen in its pages for a while. Ken Dryden, Ken Waxman, & Kurt Gottschalk seemed to be some of the main contributors.
  14. Apart from the front piece on Allen, there's also a really nice LOOOONG piece on Delmark Records & Bob Koester.
  15. Stuart Broomer, most likely.
  16. Sure, I'll sign up. Hmmmm.... considering my grief in the past with broken CDRs, maybe this time I'll give the download a shot.
  17. Truthfully, except for taking the little one to see Bolt, I have no plans to see the current slate of films in the theatres. Somehow none of them looks that appealing.
  18. The current fave for me & the daughter is a banana & Nutella sandwich on toast. If I have time to make them in the morning, then ham & cheese muffins are nice. It's a modified version of a recipe I found in a cookbook with the unappetizing title "Grey Poupon muffins"--I don't think you could sell the kid on the idea of mustard-flavoured muffins, but if you describe it a little differently then it beomes her favourite snack.
  19. Hm, figured that Allen'd weigh in on this one -- Well, no, it's not rough-edged & sloppy but in many ways I feel like that would be an affectation for this group of musicians; they don't sound like they're only concerned about getting it right, which is for me where "stiffness" would set in. (Actually, I've heard plenty of sloppy performances that sound oddly "stiff" at the same time...!)
  20. Chords are not copyrightable, but melodies are.
  21. My friend Captain Hate (who was on Organissimo for a bit but I haven't seen him in these parts lately...) is a big fan of trumpeter Steven Bernstein's work, so when I spotted this one on a review-copy list I was sent I gave it a try. It's a marvellous disc which has been in frequent rotation in this house for the past week. It's a 9-piece band (with guest vocalist/banjoist/guitarist Doug Wamble making it 10 on the last couple of tracks)--Peter Apfelbaum, Doug Wieselman, Ben Allison, Charles Burnham & Ben Perowsky, among others, in the band (of the familiar names--& I was also quite impressed by the guitar work of Matt Munisteri & trombonist Clark Gayton, new names to me). Aside from a rocking electric blues opener by Bernstein (wonderful fiddle intro by Burnham), the rest is covers of mostly fairly unusual repertory: some items from the 1920s and 1930s (Cecil Scott's "In a Corner", Fats Waller's "Viper Song", Preston Jackson's "It's Tight Jim", Prez's "Dickie's Dream" [stunning version!], Don Redman's "Paducah"), plus a little Ray Charles & one of the best Beatles arrangements I've come across, "All You Need Is Love". There's nothing about the arrangements that seems self-consciously clever or "postmodern"--they don't try for either authenticity or knowing updates (the Scott version is pretty straight, though Allison happily throws in some substitute changes), but they care very much for warmth of sound & for making smart connections between R&B and early jazz. Wonderful stuff. It's dedicated, by the way, to the memory of the late Joel Dorn.
  22. The Marcus is fine--not brilliant, but it's solid (& I speak as someone who by & large doesn't like Marcus).
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