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Hardbopjazz

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Ray Bryant. 

Horace Parlan.

Cedar Walton.

It's funny because Blakey's Drum Suite was one of the first jazz album that i really got in to. Ditto with Mingus Ah Um. Free For All was also a big hit for me when i heard it much later (and i loved Walton on other Blue Notes, particularly Donald Byrd's Slow Drag). 

For some reason i never really checked out their leader dates. I think i must have heard something of Walton's which put me off checking out his leader dates further, but anyway those first 3 Eastern Rebellion albums are so, so good. Now that i think about it, i remember getting one of his quartet dates on Steeplechase and really liking it but having to bin it because it had a catastrophic scratch. I wonder why i never sought more of his stuff out...

Ray Bryant... i had previously checked him out a bit on Spotify but didn't feel the need to buy an album. Recently got the trio albums on Epic and Prestige from the fifties and they are so good. Dude has such an amazing feel. I also have the Con Alma album on Columbia which is also excellent. Those three albums sit in my collection as favourites. I've actually been trying to get my head around why Bryant was not a bigger name, especially having been on Columbia. I have my half baked theories but can anyone provide any insight? 

Horace Parlan... i've only gotten started by getting Us Three, an outstanding trio record.

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20 hours ago, xybert said:

Ray Bryant. 

[ . . .]

Ray Bryant... i had previously checked him out a bit on Spotify but didn't feel the need to buy an album. Recently got the trio albums on Epic and Prestige from the fifties and they are so good. Dude has such an amazing feel. I also have the Con Alma album on Columbia which is also excellent. Those three albums sit in my collection as favourites. I've actually been trying to get my head around why Bryant was not a bigger name, especially having been on Columbia. I have my half baked theories but can anyone provide any insight? 

xybert - You might also want to look into Bryant's Pablo recording from the late-70s and early-80s -- particularly Here's Ray Bryant, Potpourri, and Solo Flight. :tup 

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(1) In the interest of showing up for some (actual) new music, I just heard this duo project yesterday: https://jonbafus.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-earthtone

Full disclosure: Randy and Jon are friends of mine, and I'm also a huge admirer of both. Randy plays as part of the inimitable chamber improv quartet Bristle (also featuring saxophonist Cory Wright, who has been on a few of Grex's records), and Jon is drummer/leader of the Sacramento prog-punk-avant quartet Gentleman Surfer. (Gentleman Sufer is--like fellow Nor Cal band Hella--both immaculately structured and awesomely, calculatedly chaotic.)

The first and simplest way in which this music strikes me is that the drums are not playing in the obvious, now rote mode of Interstellar Space-era Rashied--the music is more harried and schizophrenic than that, though not in an ironic way (ala Zorn or some of the new Dutch music). The full spectrum of ideas suggests a more hectic version of the Evan Parker/John Stevens duo, if that makes sense. The last new duo I loved this much was (Seattle band) Bad Luck, which is itself a fully realized and completely unique variation on classic late Coltrane dynamics.

(2) You guys were not kidding about the Bill Barron material. Sheesh. I'm most familiar with The Tenor Stylings of Bill Barron--a record both quirky and conventional, buoyed by some deft interplay and some brief, fleeting moments of weirdness. I've also heard and own Tears for Dolphy, a record that I admit I should (and should have) spent more time with.

This week I finally got around to Barron's Motivation and Curon's and The New Thing & The Blue Thing. The Curson material of this vintage can be a little formulaic, and I mean that in the classic sense--a lot of it is structured around Mingus's ensemble and rhythm dynamics, but without the pliancy or surrealism that make the Mingus quartet stuff so exceptional. As players, though, Curson and Barron are tremendous.

Speaking of which, Jim is not overselling Motivation. It's that good. Barron has the rounded voice and voluptuous texture of a Texas tenor, but his phrasing and command of timbral improvisation recall Rollins or early Wayne. It is weird shit--like hearing Ayler on a Kenny Dorham record or something. The compositions, too, are genuinely strange--maybe more so for trying to accommodate the format and context of a "normal" hard bop ensemble. I think it actually suggests Joe Maneri in the superimposition of these darting, almost atonal lines over a texturally static rhythm section dynamic. It's the sound of anachronism, and it's aged hugely well--guys like Tony Malaby or even Mark Turner make bread out of music like this now. 

Edited by ep1str0phy
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Strange as it may seem since these are all cds in my collection but I never closely listened to Roy Eldridge. I mean I had listened but not listened.  Today I listened to Little Jazz and I discovered I had a Hep record, Hecklers Hop, that still had the plastic wrap on it.  Amazing stuff. 

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12 hours ago, Brad said:

Strange as it may seem since these are all cds in my collection but I never closely listened to Roy Eldridge. I mean I had listened but not listened.  Today I listened to Little Jazz and I discovered I had a Hep record, Hecklers Hop, that still had the plastic wrap on it.  Amazing stuff. 

Love Roy in the fifties. His work with Krupa/Anita O'Day is a bit early for my tastes and his powers had declined in his late Granz recordings. My favorite of all is his playing on this one. Perhaps the unusual company was an inspiration!

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Really listening to Fred Frith & Louis Sclavis on this awesome CD on Victo from 5/21/2000

"I Dream of You Jumping"

as good as free music gets - plus this percussion dude named Jean-Pierre Drouet - wow 

saw Frith for the first time last November and it was the best night of music for me of the whole year or decade?!?

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4 hours ago, Steve Reynolds said:

Really listening to Fred Frith & Louis Sclavis on this awesome CD on Victo from 5/21/2000

"I Dream of You Jumping"

as good as free music gets - plus this percussion dude named Jean-Pierre Drouet - wow 

saw Frith for the first time last November and it was the best night of music for me of the whole year or decade?!?

My personal ties to Fred notwithstanding, I think it's difficult to overstate the importance of his contribution to a certain school of free improvising. Along with Keith Rowe, Derek Bailey, Sharrock, and a couple of others, he was one of the first dedicated and significant free players on electric guitar--and he was one of only a handful of guys to emerge from that late century wild west period of sheer invention with a series of technical innovations that have had a lasting technical impact--e.g., preparation, extended techniques, mechanics that enable sustain, alternative methods of amplification, textural improvisation, and so on. On a completely different level, I don't think I've ever met another guitarist with as complete a knowledge of practical sound production on the instrument--I had detailed conversations with the guy about Clapton and Bill Frisell. Dude is legit.

Fred's been touring with two really great friends of mine--bassist Jason Hoopes and Jordan Glenn (they also feature as the rhythm section for a sister band of ours--Jack O' the Clock--and I played with them in a Blood Count-type quartet called Host Family). Again, I can't listen to this music with any sort of impartiality, but some of the spaces that they get into are just in another universe. The group recalls Massacre, the heavier days of Material, and even a bit of Last Exit in a way that can't be done justice in words. They just released a record (called Another Day in Fucking Paradise): 

 

Edited by ep1str0phy
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  • 3 months later...
2 hours ago, Hardbopjazz said:

Pianist Jodi Christian. I just got a copy of his duo session with Louis Smith, "The Very Thought Of You" on SteepleChase. It is a very fine recording. I liked his playing and I will look for some more by him.

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Louis Smith is great too!!

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  • 1 month later...

Been listening to a lot of Peter Evans tonight! First came across his playing on Scenes From The House Of Music with Parker/Guy/Lytton. What an immensely talented and exciting player! 

I've since listened to a couple of Only Other People Do The Killing albums, his quintet album Ghosts, and am currently "spinning" Carnival Skin, which is a different quintet. 

I haven't been this enamored with a player since, oddly enough, I first discovered Nate Wooley. 

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Blues guitarist/singer Larry Davis. Not entirely new to me as I had a comp of most of his Duke work but I heard one of those tunes on a Norton comp, the flip to Texas Flood, "I Tried" and was knocked out. Don't know why it never hit me before but within a couple of weeks I had received the handful of releases he cut from the 80s to 2000s. Strong stuff, and I am also finding the 45s he cut for BB King's label to be pretty good too.

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Maloya is such great stuff...have really fond memories of a gig with Mulatu Astatke (also some great stuff on Strut!) out on Reunion a number of years back, and we all went to a tiny bar out in the countryside one evening, and heard and jammed with some fantastic maloya guys...

Edited by Alexander Hawkins
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21 hours ago, kh1958 said:

Strut is a fine label. A couple of other rather good ones on Strut:

Spirit of Malombo https://strut.greedbag.com/buy/next-stop-soweto-presents-spirit-0/

Sunburst, Ave Africa https://strut.greedbag.com/buy/ave-africa-the-complete-recordin/

Yeah, there's some really nice stuff on the 'Next Stop Soweto' compilations!

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