Jump to content

Al in NYC

Members
  • Posts

    126
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 

Posts posted by Al in NYC

  1. Sad in a way that this has come up.  I knew a musician, gone now, who used to keep a list of folks who played with and recorded with Bird who were still around (he qualified).  Now that list has dwindled down to just a handful (a couple of whom are on this Coltrane list) and we're moving on to the survivors of the next long-gone legend.

  2. I'm in the middle of finally digitizing my dad's earlyish Mosaics.  In doing the Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker set I seem to have run into some confusion over the tune Festive Minor.  The Mosaic booklet shows it as being recorded on March 27 1953 by the group with Carson Smith on bass and Larry Bunker on drums, but previously unissued, and it is included in the set chronologically with the other cuts from that session.  But I also have a single CD comp that contains what sure sounds like the same recording and has it as being recorded at the Mulligan/Baker reunion session (not included in the Mosaic) in December 1957 with Henry Grimes and Dave Bailey.  In various discographies I see it listed both ways, but I am told that the notes in the Mulligan Mosaic Select (which I don't have) may clear up the confusion.  Does anyone here know what gives here?

  3. This is pretty much the way I've always felt about Paul Chambers' Bass On Top or Ike Quebec on Blue & Sentimental, the Red Garland trio recordings, the Dizzy Gillespie Pablo stuff, or, for that matter, almost the entire career of Johnny Lytle.

  4. Ahmad Jamal was always extremely popular in Detroit when I coming up there.  He would play Baker's Keyboard Lounge a couple of times a year it seemed.  I think I saw him with my parents at least 3 or 4 times there in the '70s.  Always in the company, if I remember correctly, of Detroit drummer Frank Gant, who my folks knew a little bit through Pepper Adams and Don Byrd.  His clean, spacious, melodic playing and interaction with the drummer and bassist always fascinated me.  Almost like using the piano as another percussion instrument at times, and using a variation in dynamics to create drama and entertain audiences.  In a lot of ways the antithesis of the Bud Powell derived school that so many local pianists were deep into.  I know he took a lot of criticism from a lot of quarters for being lightweight, nothing more than an embellisher who played standards cute. But to me, like a very different pianist, Thelonious Monk, Jamal had found a different and compelling way to use a piano as a jazz instrument. 

    I also saw him much later, in the 2000 and 2010s in both New York and Detroit, with the master drummer Idris Muhammad.  By then his playing had changed a bit and he was stretching out a lot more at times, and at other times barely playing at all, but the basic dynamic principle remained.  Those shows were even more compelling in some ways.  But always engaging and entertaining.

    I was just talking to one of my relatives about Ahmad Jamal's death and he asked me a question for which I had no answer.  Did Ahmad Jamal ever appear on anyone else's session as a sideman?  Or even record with any lead horn players on a session outside of an orchestral type context?   I don't think so, but I can't seem to find any definitive discographical evidence.

  5. Mingus Big Band tonight with Orrin Evans, Adam Cruz. Conrad Herwig, a trumpet section of Randy Brecker, Freddie Hendrix, and Phil Harper, and lot of other fine players.  Wayne Escoffery is now helming the band.  Was invited out to see them last week by someone I know who works with the band, with a somewhat different lineup (including Helen Sung and Craig Handy).  It was literally the first jazz show I've seen since I caught Ben Waltzer and Steve Nelson at Mezzrow just a week before all hell broke loose back in March 2020.  Saw the lineup for this week and said that I'd just have to come back. 

    Venue for these Wednesday night shows is the brand new Midnight Theater in the ludicrous Hudson Yards development.  The place sure wasn't ready for prime time last week (QR code menu and online ordering system not working reliably, no paper menu backup available, very amateurish service, etc.) but the limited menu of pricey Chinese snacks was OK, and the music was, of course, sublime, with just the right touch of Mingusian chaos.

  6. I must say that I'm somewhat surprised to see no comment here on the PBS documentary on Ron Carter that aired last Friday (or am I missing something?).  It's not often that we get 2 hours on a jazz topic in the national media, let alone an extended piece on an important musician who spent most of his professional career as a (indispensable) sideman.  As usual with such things, it featured less uninterrupted music than I would like.  But it did get quite intimate with Ron himself, along with interviews with many of his fellow musicians and fans, and examined both his illustrious  history and his ongoing life as a working musician.  One part I found very affecting was to see him return after many years to the house his father built just outside of Detroit, where he grew up.

  7. I had a copy of this Wyncote Jimmy Smith/Don Gardner record, and a copy of an even cheesier record on the "Guest Star" label out of the Synthetic Plastics Co of Newark NJ featuring 2 Smith/Gardner cuts and a whole bunch of Wilson Lewes Trio fluff, both of which I bought out of some dollar or 50 cent record bin in an east side Detroit party store way back when I was in high school or college. Unfortunately my roommate was a real prog rock head and hated my jazz organ records.  He threw both of these records and a copy of an old McGriff bargain bin LP into a toaster oven and baked them until they were smooth, and gave them back to me in their covers with "this is a coaster" written across the label.  Still have at least one of 'em, weirdly enough.

     

  8. What a tragedy.  I was fortunate enough to see Joey play several times.  He was always very popular in Detroit and played the festival there almost annually for a while back when my dad was involved there, always to great acclaim.  I also saw him play here in NYC and other places.  Most memorably a funky as hell show with Houston Person and a glowing late night with Bobby Hutcherson.  He was clearly a real craftsman and always attentive to his audiences and the history of his music, and on the couple of occasions I had to interact with him he was open, affable, and humorous.  What a loss for his wife and family, for his fellow musicians who clearly loved playing with him, and for his many many fans everywhere.  

    I must say that I too was surprised to find that he was so young.  Perhaps because he's been on so prominently on the scene from such a young age, and played with so many accomplished senior musicians, in my mind he seemed quite a bit older than 51. Not to go too far into speculation, but I have to wonder if his recent swift and noticeable weight loss had something to do with his death.  We put such a big social and medical premium on just weight loss itself, but I have known several people who have suffered serious health damage from quick weight loss via drugs, crash diets, or surgery, including friends who have died.  

    He will be very much missed, most especially by we fans of the organ groove of which he will always stand as one of the absolute masters.   

    Bye Joey D.

  9. On 1/8/2022 at 7:55 PM, sgcim said:

    RIP, to one of the greatest actors who ever lived. I still cry at the end of, "To Sir With Love" when Lulu sings the title song. He was also great in "A Patch of Blue"...

    The score of which inspired this very fine album.  One of the very very rare sideman appearances by Sun Ra.

    Dickersonpatchlp.jpg

  10. 5 hours ago, mikeweil said:

    R.I.P.

    He was a pioneer for African-American actors, for sure. This is my favourite:

    910p8Izp4EL._SL1500_.jpg

    First movie I thought of when I heard of his death.  Just saw it again recently on TCM and it's not bad at all, although it's more a romance than anything else (and you can pretty clearly see the romance between Paul and Joanne), and clunks a bit in spots around the jazz parts of the story despite Louis Armstrong's interesting character and the Ellington soundtrack.  Nice role for the late Diahann Carroll here, and her romance/debate with Poitier around living black in the US and France really seems the best part of the movie today.

  11. I find Fats own organ recordings, both the electric and (especially) the pipe organ sides, much much more interesting that this JOS semi-tribute recording.  Like others, I found it rather lifeless and much too "polite" compared to Jimmy's other records of the time and have hardly ever played it.  I've always assumed it was recorded as an effort to expand JOS's audience and in search of an album hit like the (much better) 'Satch Plays Fats' Louis Armstrong Columbia album of several years earlier.

  12. I always try to fix obvious errors when I see them, and often try to straighten out the tortured prose and cracked chronologies that result from having way too many cooks (with English obviously not being a first, or second, language for many of them). Sometimes I even add a bit of sourced background material to flesh out bare-bones entries. Fortunately, most jazz articles aren't subject to the seemingly endless agenda-driven edit wars that affect so many Wiki entries on political and historical subjects, and serve to bend them further and further away from truth and accuracy.

  13. I've been out in rural Ontario for the past couple of weeks, so I'm just now catching up on this sad news.  Oddly, just before I went out there I was back in Detroit for a few days in November and had a conversation with a friend of mine about, among other things, Barry Harris.  We talked about our favorite recordings of his (Magnificent! is my choice) and our experiences seeing him play, especially his annual Kwanzaa benefit concerts in Detroit and his luminous 2014 performance at the Detroit Jazz Festival.  Then my friend told me of a memorable night he spent in the early 2000s with his friend, the late Detroit pianist Bess Bonnier, which ended up at Barry's Detroit house at 2 AM. Great food and drink were provided by Barry's wife and daughter, while Barry and Bess sat at the piano trading songs, lines, tricks, and old war stories of the Detroit jazz scene of the 1950s until the sun was high in the sky.

    As many here have said, Barry's death represents the winding down of so many threads in jazz history, especially bebop and the direct Bird and Bud lineage.  For as much as Barry Harris was one of the great flame-keepers of the music here in NYC, for us Detroiters and ex-Detroiters his passing also represents the sun now setting quickly on the most fecund and vital period in the city's jazz, and musical, history.

  14. The Great Day in Harlem poster, which has long hung over my Dad's music collection in what is now, by inheritance, my cottage in Ontario.  In my Queens apartment: a couple of framed album covers (Birth of the Cool, Brilliant Corners), some 'slicks' I picked up from Mosaic (Miles' Complete Bitches Brew and Louis' Complete Decca are the ones I have framed), a poster done by one of my cousins for a jazz festival in California, and a few posters from past Detroit jazz festivals, including the Andy Warhol/Keith Haring number from 1986.

     

  15. 2 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

    Wait until the ones with disposable income are rap fans. They'll be moving to places that cater to them, like in south Florida.  That catering includes an active circuit of performance spaces that nobody really knows about except residents. My wife's degree is in audio engineering and she used to pick up gigs running sound at shows in places like that. Now, its blue hairs standing and swaying to doo-wop or 70s soul. But imagine when its rap shows, one hit-wonders popping out on stage for a moment in the spotlight, Gen. Z nostalgia instead of boomers. (Not everyone will get to broadway but a package of rappers in their seventies? I can definitely see it.)

    Does this mean that we'll soon have annoying PBS fundraisers full of cheaply recorded concerts by superannuated former hip-hop stars?  What a future to look forward to.

  16. Kenny Burrell was someone my parents went to school with and knew.  They would always go to see him when he came back to Detroit to play and Kenny would unfailingly come by and greet us very warmly.  One time when he was doing an extended gig in town another friend of my parents who was closer to Kenny brought him and some of his local family members out on a Sunday for a day at our cottage on Lake Erie.  He was warm, talkative, and very friendly and relaxed, and really enjoyed a day swimming at our beach with some of his family and some old friends from WSU.  Later, when we were grilling some burgers etc. for dinner he even strummed out a couple of short songs on my mother's old rarely-played acoustic Gibson with a teenage friend of ours who had her flute. I understand he could be a real stickler on gigs for musicianship, but he sure didn't seem to be upset about those amateur circumstances, It was a low-key memorable day which, alas, despite promises to return, was never to be repeated.

  17. I think I may have a copy of this somewhere in my currently inaccessible mound of 78s.  Although, if memory serves, it doesn't have the bit about the Ship's Service Store in Alameda on the label.  A good friend of my father's was in the Coast Guard during WWII and either plays on this record or knew some of the guys who did.  The Coast Guard recruited a bunch of swing musicians for its touring band during the war, and, again if memory serves, this is a sort of swinging dance version of Semper Paratus, which is the Coast Guard's anthem.

  18. Sadik Hakim spent some time in Montreal in the late '60s and early '70s. He wrote and recorded music for CBC radio in 1973 that was released on a couple of records, which were, as far as I know, the first recordings to come out under his own name after East Meets West.  The most interesting of these is his long-form 4 part London Suite, which has been put out on a number of issues under different names (Transcriptions, Canada, London Suite, Grey Cup Caper, Hakim's own name, etc.) with an array of covers and a varying number of his other small-group compositions included.  These performances also feature the rather mysterious US/Canadian multi-reedist Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabyyr, the great tenorist Billy Robinson, and guitarist Peter Leitch.

     

     

    IMG_1619__00276.1628572293.jpg?c=1

  19. On the very first morning that I was a resident of NYC I set my clock radio alarm to the very first station I could pick up clearly on the FM dial.  I awoke the next morning to the unmistakable sound of Charlie Parker in full flight, followed by another Parker tune, then another.  I couldn't believe that someone was playing Bird, lots of Bird, first thing in the morning on a Tuesday, in 1987. It seemed to me some sort of New York miracle and I just lay there listening to it rather than get ready to go out and look for the work I'd need asap to supplement my very paltry grad student stipend. 

    Then this guy came on, talking and talking enthusiastically a mile a minute about some minutiae involving the music we just heard. I was fascinated listening to him go on and on, bringing in side stories and personal anecdotes and the most unlikely bits of knowledge.  That was my introduction to Phil Schaap and he has been a core part of my New York soundscape ever since. 

    Yes, he could be comically, tediously, and even infuriatingly pedantic. Playing a tiny snatch of music over and over again to hammer on some point or bit of phrasing or sound in the background that only he could actually care about.  Or launching into a seemingly endless soliloquy to explore some arcane area of musical or social or technical history that, with even a modicum of conciseness, could have been thoroughly discussed in a few minutes.  But it all came from that overwhelming enthusiasm, and very real very deep love, for jazz music and its history that was at the core of his work and his life. His spots during the various WKCR birthday broadcasts were often amazing fonts of information and insight about important artists, but his real love of the music shone through on his Traditions in Swing programs when he would joyfully shine his little spotlight on, and share so much background knowledge about, recordings and artists long forgotten by the world. 

    I only met Phil a few times, all but once for very short periods of time.  The longest I ever spoke with him was after a Benny Carter show in Tompkins Square when he saw me standing mesmerized by the side of the stage. I told him my dad had seen Benny Carter at the old Paradise Theater in Detroit (aka Orchestra Hall) on a bill with the King Cole Trio (Nat, that is), and Phil instantly gave me a month and year for that event based on his top of the head knowledge about those 2 bands (later research showed he was off by a month). The last time I spoke to Phil was at Junior Mance's last show at St. Peters and I was very surprised that he remembered me, and even more so that he recalled I share a birthday with Charlie Parker. 

    In the spirit of Phil I guess I have gone on way too long here, but crazy fixations and all he will definitely be missed.  It will take a long time, most likely all the time I have left, to get used to a New York without Phil Schaap.

     

  20. Like a few folks here, my dad went back with Mosaic to the original Monk set.  He had belonged to a couple of those old style record clubs like Columbia and Musical Heritage, and I guess Mosaic must've bought into some lists at the start because one day in the mail came the solicitation from this new outfit to buy this Monk set.  Dad had a lot of it already on the old 10 inchers, but he was a huge Monk fan and the lure of having all of those recordings in clean sound on new LPs was too much to resist.  I remember him sharing the exciting news with my then-college student self and sending cassettes to me.  He then bought the next 2 sets, Mulligan/Baker Tenetette, and Albert Ammons/Meade Lux Lewis, of music he also loved and had a longtime relationship with.  So someone in our family had the Mosaic bug early.

    Tina Brooks was someone who Kenny Burrell had hipped my dad to back in the old days, but of course Tina had all too soon faded away.  But when a complete set of his unobtainable dates magically appeared in the Mosaic catalogue it was an easy sale.  Dad loved that set and played it in regular rotation for months hipping us all to Tina's work.

×
×
  • Create New...