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Chris McGregor recordings??


Steve Reynolds

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I'm thinking of ordering "Very Urgent" and/or "Up to Earth"

Leaning towards the earlier "Very Urgent" I've not read or heard much about these late 60's records other than that they have most of the amazing musicians from the original blue notes.

Looking for comments from anyone who has heard these sessions regarding the music, sound quality, etc.

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Very Urgent is a fine first "official" foray into the Eurojazz (and wider) consciousness but it's not the Brotherhood of Breath. It's a lot starker (rugged small-group distilling its influences). It's freer than the ZA recordings of the Blue Notes, Gwigwi Mrwebi, et al, but not as unfettered as the 1970s edition of the Blue Notes that recorded for Ogun.

Up To Earth is an excellent, ragged affair that has more in line with later/BoB work. I recommend both.

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Check the South African Jazz thread for lots of recommendations and comments!

But no matter what, get "Very Urgent" - and next, get the first two Brotherhood of Breath ("Brotherhood of Breath" & "Brotherhood", reissued by Fledg'ling, same label that did "Very Urgent" and "Up to Earth") albums if you don't already have them! And don't forget the Berlin 1971 concert ("Eclipse at Dawn", Cuneiform), sans Mongezi, but really, the band is on fire!

You might also consider the Blue Notes box on Ogun ... and if you haven't done so yet, you might just as well check out some more recent recordings by Moholo, including the mighty good duo album with Alexander Hawkins!

And don't forget Harry Miller ...


oh, and the second (blue cover) of Ogun's "archival" releases by the Blue Notes is absolutely wonderful (I'm a bit less enchanted by the first, red one, with Frank Wright going apeshit ... but that might be because my CD has been scratched/damaged beyond repair by - probably - some dust inside of the silly plastic sleeves ... I've since started replacing them with papersleeves immediately, the plastic ones tend to fall apart eventually I guess that's how dust might creep in there ... sucks for such a quality label, but at least it only happened once).

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With a gun to my head, being made to choose between the two (but understand - it WOULD pretty much take a gun to the head) - I'd go with 'Very Urgent'...IMHO it has THE classic version of 'Marie My Dear'/'B My Dear' on it.

Steve - I know buying budgets are what they are, but that box is running extremely, extremely low as far as I know...and I'm biased of course, but the music throughout is astonishing. If there's a heavier recording in this world than 'Blue Notes For Mongezi', then.....................

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With a gun to my head, being made to choose between the two (but understand - it WOULD pretty much take a gun to the head) - I'd go with 'Very Urgent'...IMHO it has THE classic version of 'Marie My Dear'/'B My Dear' on it.

Steve - I know buying budgets are what they are, but that box is running extremely, extremely low as far as I know...and I'm biased of course, but the music throughout is astonishing. If there's a heavier recording in this world than 'Blue Notes For Mongezi', then.....................

If I get my order together tonight, the box set is on it

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Check the South African Jazz thread for lots of recommendations and comments!

But no matter what, get "Very Urgent" - and next, get the first two Brotherhood of Breath ("Brotherhood of Breath" & "Brotherhood", reissued by Fledg'ling, same label that did "Very Urgent" and "Up to Earth") albums if you don't already have them! And don't forget the Berlin 1971 concert ("Eclipse at Dawn", Cuneiform), sans Mongezi, but really, the band is on fire!

You might also consider the Blue Notes box on Ogun ... and if you haven't done so yet, you might just as well check out some more recent recordings by Moholo, including the mighty good duo album with Alexander Hawkins!

And don't forget Harry Miller ...

oh, and the second (blue cover) of Ogun's "archival" releases by the Blue Notes is absolutely wonderful (I'm a bit less enchanted by the first, red one, with Frank Wright going apeshit ... but that might be because my CD has been scratched/damaged beyond repair by - probably - some dust inside of the silly plastic sleeves ... I've since started replacing them with papersleeves immediately, the plastic ones tend to fall apart eventually I guess that's how dust might creep in there ... sucks for such a quality label, but at least it only happened once).

I've done the same - earlier this year I removed all of the inner sleeves from the Ogun discs I have & replaced them with the "cellophane" type I normally use - I found they were scratching & staining the discs

Get the Blue Notes box set - it's superb - before it goes OOP. It'll end up going the way of the Harry Miller set - impossible to find second hand cause everyone who owns a copy would be very reluctant to part with it.

Edited by romualdo
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No question about it--if one is interested in the Brotherhood, one needs all of the "main" Blue Notes music (i.e., the contemporaneously released albums).

Very Urgent is simultaneously a key transitional album, vestigially similar to the group's South African recordings, and a key document of European and African improvised music. Moholo is insistent that the band wasn't informed by the Americans, though judging from things McGregor has said in interviews, there's a really transparent Ornette/Cecil Taylor feel permeating the album--a lot of winding post-bop lines, a few rubato passages in an Ornette-y vein, a lot of atonal, thrashy improv.

In the details, though, there's nothing like Very Urgent. Don Cherry has gone on the record about Mongezi Feza's skill, and there were few trumpet players operating with the level of facility and aggression--even in the late 60's--that he conveys here. And no one--then or now--sounds like Dudu, who is pure funk, riffing, and recklessness--he's like someone hybridized Benny Carter, Boots Randolph, and Archie Shepp, but for the purpose of playing in James Brown's band. Also, I'm pretty certain there are things Moholo does on the album that were either totally new or unprecedented at the time, especially the use of "found" percussion. Judging by the vintage, he really was up there with Murray and Milford Graves as one of the first truly free/pulse-no-meter drummers--and maybe the first one who could play so facilely both "in" and "out." There is a sextet bootleg circulating (with Dave Holland in place of Moholo) that is even more insane than Very Urgent--this is clearly some of the most powerful and oddly coherent free music of its era.

Up to Earth is good but extremely ragged--more than Very Urgent, it sounds like a transitional step between the early Blue Notes and the Brotherhood. The charts are compellingly written but chaotically played and much less comprehensively arranged that the Brotherhood material. What carries that album and its sister trio album (Our Prayer) over are the committed improvisations, most of which are more or less formless but also unafraid of rhythmic mobility and spontaneously generated motivic material. It makes the music sound neither European or American, which is exactly the case.

The music on the box is certainly not cut from the same cloth as the early sides--the absence of Mongezi and a tenor deprives the music of a bit of its former coloristic depth, and the arrangements are largely skeletal (and often played very tersely and vaguely). That being said, there is a level of spontaneity and transparency in the Ogun recordings that is lacking from the earlier music. The band is all at once freer with the notated material, often eliding stops and starts, and more committed to synthesizing freer flights with grooves and vamp-based structures. Dyani had come out of Don Cherry's band and work with Abdullah Ibrahim, Moholo had of course spent time in and out of ensembles with Keith Tippett, Dudu had been guesting on rock and pop albums, and McGregor had hit his stride as both a composer and solo pianist. It's beautiful music that is strangely decompressed and unhurried--even when (on the Blue Notes For albums) it is emotional and incendiary.

Beyond that, my favorite music is Moholo-Moholo's Spirits Rejoice, which carries over both the explosive free improv of the Brotherhood and the more involved and nuanced arrangements of the early Blue Notes, Mike Osborne's music with Moholo (especially Outback, which employs the Brotherhood rhythm section and Harry Beckett to great effect), Harry Miller's Isipingo (which blends the breathy grooves of the late Blue Notes with some of the Brotherhood's funkier aspects), and Elton Dean's sublime quartet music with Moholo and Tippett.

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Nice write-up. It's taken me until very recently to "get to" this music, and I'm amazed so much is available; given the kind of Vocalion/FMP axis of this scene I used to assume most of it was impossible to find. I am certainly making the Blue Notes box a priority and will also try to get Very Urgent very soon as well.

Any Elton Dean album you'd particularly recommend?


I just placed an order for the box via Amazon/Import CDs. They said they had one left at this $49 price.

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Nice write-up. It's taken me until very recently to "get to" this music, and I'm amazed so much is available; given the kind of Vocalion/FMP axis of this scene I used to assume most of it was impossible to find. I am certainly making the Blue Notes box a priority and will also try to get Very Urgent very soon as well.

Any Elton Dean album you'd particularly recommend?

I just placed an order for the box via Amazon/Import CDs. They said they had one left at this $49 price.

You dog, I am hopefully ordering tonight and you might have "stolen" my copy!!!!

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I love "very urgent" and "spirits rejoice"...as well as the first two Brotherhood Lps on Neon and RCA. I used to have the 70s Blue Notes albums on Ogun but I found them a bit unfocused. The only album I kept was "in concert" with the grey/silver cover.

I can see how the 70's Blue Notes stuff can seem unfocused--I think this is more a matter of how you "read" the albums than something intrinsic to them, to be fair. Yes, they're a little sprawling and the improvisations often go on for a pretty lengthy period of time (especially on Blue Notes for Mongezi, which is essentially a "jam"), but looking at it within context, the music makes a lot more sense.

The later Oguns were essayed in the mid/late-70's, when the dint of both mainstream jazz and creative music had begun to push away from ecstatic freedom. You had many musicians reverting to acoustic jazz and championing later, low-impact forms of fusion, what was (essentially) the avant-garde of American creative music (the AACM, BAG, etc.) already working with extreme space, silence, and alternative instrumentation, the Europeans negotiating the rift between anarchic energy music and post-Webern-y, minimalist/atonal/"non-idiomatic" (that's contentious) improvisation, and people from all over the world confronting the existentialist crisis of making expressive music in a post-expressionist era.

Instead of getting nihilistic or more noisy, the South Africans withdrew into their heritage. Those later Ogun albums are characterized by infinitely repeating vamps, recursive, lengthy improvisations, and these looping melodic lines. If you take into account the lingering and intense pain of exile, the fact that a few members of the Blue Notes had already died, that the remaining members were suffering from marginalization, limited work opportunities, lack of bread, etc.--this reversion to hymnal music, traditional melodies, mbaqanga and kwela harmonies, etc. was both a sort of coping mechanism and an assertion of identity--ultimately, an act of defiance. I find it deeply moving that, in a period when comrades were dying and the future was uncertain, the Blue Notes began moving toward a kind of musical infinity.

To be fair, as a listener, I go back and forth on the ultimate "listenability" of this music--I think Clifford said something to the effect that Blue Notes for Mongezi was intense but hard to listen to (please forgive the paraphrasing, dude). It's admirable music with a ton of value, and in the right state, it's amazing to hear--but I can also very much appreciate when people can't get with it.

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