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So, What Are You Listening To NOW?


JSngry

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

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Just now getting to this one 20+ years after the fact, and after a few days with it in the car, I'm wondering what my hurry was...

I spent some time there about a 2 years ago. Luckily I started with the tribute album to Joni Mitchel which is much better IMHO. However, my take..... I thank him immensely for the effort to make jazz relate-able again to the masses. Here is an icon in jazz that is attempting to take the music back to his beginning in a modern and significant way. What I mean is this. At the pinnacle of jazz popularity we had folks leaving the Broadway theaters and traveling to 52nd (and others IK) and hearing those same tunes, and those they were listening to on the radio, deconstructed in new and exciting ways. In between the jazz artists got to play their originals but the glue that connected the audience was the popular song. We lose that when rock comes along. I know, I know, there have been a handful of rock tunes that have provided a platform for improvisation but by and large jazz went its way and the popular song went another. As the audience for jazz continues to get smaller and smaller I applaud Herbie for the remarkably insightful and talented effort to find a bridge. That is my take FWIW.

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The concept behind the record doesn't matter to me. The music is just dull.

What Scott Yanow describes as a source of triumph is, to me, a perfect summation of why the record's so dull:https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-new-standard-mw0000645371

On first glance this record would not seem to have much promise from a jazz standpoint. Herbie Hancock performs a set of tunes which include numbers from the likes of Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Sade, Paul Simon, Prince, the Beatles ("Norwegian Wood") and Kurt Cobain. However by adding vamps, reharmonizing the chord structures, sometimes quickly discarding the melodies and utilizing an all-star band, Hancock was able to transform the potentially unrewarding music into creative jazz.

Yeah, see, that's not jazz musicians trying to get popular audiences to listen to jazz, that's trying to get jazz fans to listen to pop songs. If you do it already, keep doing it, but if you don'...just don't. Train done left the station, and there ain't no train coming back, at least not on these tracks.Jazz musicians playing pop songs to relate to the public...yeah, whatever.

Possibilities is a much more fun/less dull record than this one.

 

 

 

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More of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter:

41HbD%2BMGt4L._SY400_.jpg

The Witch Doctor (Blue Note, rel. 1968)

From the The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers set on Mosaic.  (Usually, I'd rather hear the music as programmed on the original LPs, rather than just listening to the tunes in chronological order.)

It's amazing just how much stellar music this band made in such a short time. 

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13 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

More of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter:

41HbD%2BMGt4L._SY400_.jpg

The Witch Doctor (Blue Note, rel. 1968)

From the The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers set on Mosaic.  (Usually, I'd rather hear the music as programmed on the original LPs, rather than just listening to the tunes in chronological order.)

It's amazing just how much stellar music this band made in such a short time. 

Features some great playing by Wayne Shorter .... and a further proof of Jymie Merritt`s unspectacular still important contributions ....

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