So, What Are You Listening To NOW?

[soulpope]

1 hour ago, mikeweil said:

Gave this to my wife for her birthday today - now she has the complete series, and with both enjoy it immensely. For anyone interested in French musette, the perfect introduction.

Great you both can enjoy music together ....

[John Tapscott]

[rostasi]

[BillF]

[mikeweil]

49 minutes ago, BillF said:

 Walter Davis, Jr. channeling Thelonious!

[BillF]

Well, he certainly sounds a great deal like Thelonious on this one, but I don't see it as merely imitation. The obvious emotional intensity rescues it from that. A fine album IMO.

[Peter Friedman]

[soulpope]

Wonderful ....

[paul secor]

Nick Mazzarella/Tomeka Reid: Signaling: Nessa

[John Tapscott]

[soulpope]

[duaneiac]

Finally finished listening to the unabridged (18 1/2 hours!) audiobook version of Elvis Costello's memoir Unfaithful Music& Disappearing Ink.  On the hole, it was an interesting listen.  He has had musical collaborations with some legendary figures:  Paul MCartney, Bob Dylan, Tony Bennett, George Jones, Allen Toussaint and Burt Bacharach not to mention encounters with the likes of Chet Baker, Solomon Burke, Emmy Lou Harris, Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell, Roy Orbison, Anne Sofie von Otter, Questlove and Van Morrison to name a few.  One would have to have at least a passing interest in Mr. Costello's music to really appreciate this book, but the tales he has to tell about all these musical collaborators are very entertaining and sometimes enlightening.

I really enjoyed hearing the book performed by the author.  His tone of voice at times really reflected the respect and admiration he had for some of those legends.  At times, his tone shows bemusement or disbelief at the stupidity of some of his youthful indiscretions.  His voice cracks as he recounts the scene of his father's passing (he passed away while listening to a recording of Clifford Brown playing "Yesterdays" -- we should all be so lucky when our time comes).  In talking about the second and final breakup of his band The Attractions, he notes, "You know that thing Neil Sedaka said -- (his voice dropping to a whisper) -- it's not true!"  One of my favorite anecdotes was about an appearance at a music festival following Bob Dylan.  Elvis Costello had toured as the opening act for Bob Dylan a few years before, but at this festival for what ever reason, Bob Dylan went on at 8 PM and Elvis Costello at 10 PM.  From their tour today, Mr. Costello knew that Mr. Dylan's concerts could be erratic affairs as the singer often went out of his way to play some of his more obscure tunes instead of just the hits.  But at this concert, he played almost exclusively one legendary hit after another, the band's solos were kept tight and they ended with three encores..  As Bob Dylan came off the stage, he saw Mr. Costello standing in the wings and came up to him smiling, saying, "There ya go -- I softened 'em up for ya!"

There is, of course, some mention of Diana Krall and it provides a different view of her than most of us, like her or hate her, have ever had before.  I'll admit, I never expected that marriage to last, but here they are 14 years later and he still sounds very much in love and very grateful to have her (and their sons) as part of his life.

 

Edited April 15, 2017 by duaneiac

[Balladeer]

Lars Gullin 1949-52 - The Sideman (Dragon)

[alankin]

Ben Webster & Joe Zawinul – Soulmates (Riverside Records / ZYX)
— Ben Webster - tenor saxophone; Joe Zawinul - piano; Richard Davis or Sam Jones - bass; Philly Joe Jones - drums & Thad Jones - cornet 

 

[HutchFan]

Al Cohn - No Problem (Xanadu)
with Barry Harris, Steve Gilmore and Walter Bolden

To my ears, Al Cohn never sounded better than he did in the late 70s on the records he made for Xanadu.  You'd be hard pressed to top Cohn's run of three Xanadu quartet records with Barry Harris and the duo record with Jimmy Rowles.  That's one helluva purple patch.

Edited April 15, 2017 by HutchFan

[Larry Kart]

54 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

Al Cohn - No Problem (Xanadu)
with Barry Harris, Steve Gilmore and Walter Bolden

To my ears, Al Cohn never sounded better than he did in the late 70s on the records he made for Xanadu.  You'd be hard pressed to top Cohn's run of three Xanadu quartet records with Barry Harris and the duo record with Jimmy Rowles.  That's one helluva purple patch.

I caught Al a number of times in those years and a bit later on at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago. He was in great form every time, the best he ever played I agree.

Some reviews I wrote of Cohn at the Showcase:

[1979] 

Every  jazz fan likes to think he can tell who  the truly valuable players are  the first time he hears them.  But Al Cohn, one of the finest tenormen jazz  has to offer, was for years my personal stumbling block, an artist whose message I pretty much  misunderstood. Encountering him initially in the mid-1950s, I thought of Cohn as a Lester Young disciple gone awry. He seemed to lack both the lithe swing of his eventual frequent  partner Zoot Sims and the harmonic  agility  of Stan Getz,  while his big tone was (so I thought)  rather  sour  and unwieldy

. What I failed to grasp then was the individuality   and quality of Cohn’s thought. First, his harmonic imagination is one of the most profound in jazz, although he  uses it quite subtly, never dazzling the listener with effects that disturb the developing line. The feeling one gets from his solos might be described as “constant pressure,” as he outlines the harmonic pattern  of each piece and then establishes  its strength  by pushing steadily  at its boundaries. Melodically, Cohn is a structural player, too, seamlessly bonding one thought to the next. And he is drenched in the blues--or rather he must have realized long ago that the blues and the keening, minor-mode chants of Jewish cantorial music have a great deal in common. But most of all, rhythm is the area where Cohn has become a master. 

Listening to his older recordings, I realize that occasionally  he did have problems with swing because his  heavy   tone needed  an   agitated  base to keep it aloft. Now, however, his lines rumble forth with irresistible rhythmic power, and one hears an artist who truly thinks in sound-- reminiscent, if the comparison isn’t  too farfetched,  of Johannes Brahms, another musician who achieved mastery  after a lengthy,  sober  apprenticeship.

[1980]

It’s the first set at the Jazz Showcase, and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, as he has done so often throughout his career, is coaxing sounds  out of silence. Or perhaps silence is coaxing sounds  out of him, for Konitz’s gravely  sincere  art seems always to have been based on the assumption that music of requisite purity can emerge  only  when  the corresponding purity of silence is given its due. The song he plays is the charmingly cobwebby  standard “Weaver of Dreams,” and Konitz, accompanied by bassist Jim Atlas and drummer Wilbur Campbell, approaches it  as though he were  rediscovering that  improvisation is possible. His solo begins with abrupt  tongued phrases that then are smoothed out into longer, flowing lines so firmly rooted in the theme that  the point  at which Victor Young’s melody has become Konitz’s personal creation is difficult to define.

Then tenorman Al Cohn  joins  Konitz  on  “Yardbird Suite” and is simply ferocious, a man who seems to have been born again as a musician since he cut back on his labors as an arranger. Initially inspired by Lester Young, Cohn has built his sound into a huge, elementally  dark force.  And the rhythmic undercarriage that supports all this tonal and melodic weight is so imposing in itself that one feels that Cohn, in his rebirth, has revived the  aesthetically  rather  dormant soul of Sonny Rollins as well.

Cohn is alone with the rhythm section now,  and he plays “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” at a very  down tempo, as though he were out to prove that his recent gains in rhythmic power enable him to set into useful motion what seems  likely  to be inanimate. And he does just that, roaring like a lion of Judea. (Cohn and Konitz may be the two quintessentially Jewish jazz musicians--Cohn a fierce Maccabean  rabbi of the tenor saxophone, Konitz  the alto’s Talmudic scholar.) 

 

[1982]

Dented here and there and almost devoid of their original bright  finish, the tenor saxophones of  Al Cohn and Zoot Sims look like they’ve been  through the Thirty Years War, which in one sense is true. It was more than three decades ago--in January  1948--that Cohn met Sims, his new sectionmate in Woody Herman’s Second Herd, and began a musical partnership that has grown steadily  in meaning. Both were  first-generation Lester  Young disciples, and each had found a personal style within Young’s fruitful universe--Sims favoring  a light,  gliding,  almost breezy approach   while Cohn’s manner is deep-toned and rhythmically aggressive, with a moaning  lyricism at its core. 

Several years ago a friend half-seriously suggested that each of the first wave of Lester Young disciples built his style on a specific Young solo. Al Cohn was “Tickle Toe,” Zoot Sims was “Blow Top,” Brew Moore was “Pound Cake,” and so forth. Listening to Cohn and Sims at the Jazz Showcase Wednesday night, that notion seemed to make a good deal of sense, especially when Cohn quoted “Tickle Toe” toward the end of a fast bossa nova. And it made  even more sense the next day, when I played the original “Tickle Toe” and “Blow Top.” There, on “Tickle Toe,” were the hallmarks of Cohn’s style--the dense, burrowing harmonic sense and the urgent, driving swing--while the sundrenched ease  of Young’s “Blow Top” solo was equally in tune with Sims’s lighter, more lyrical approach.This type of influence  redounds to the credit of all parties concerned--reminding us, on the one hand, how multifaceted Young’s  art was and, on the other, how subtly and honestly Sims, Cohn, and all the other “brothers” were able to respond to their master’s voice, or perhaps that should be “their master’s voices.”

Today, of course, Sims and Cohn are fullfledged masters themselves. The latter, especially,  grows in stature with each  passing year, to the point where it’s hard to think of another tenor saxophonist who plays with such consistent seriousness  and weight.  Not that Cohn is an unduly sober improviser, for his sense of humor is as sly as S.J. Perlman’s. The “Tickle Toe” quote, for instance, was sandwiched into a very unlikely harmonic cul de sac, as though Cohn wished to prove that he could state any  idea at  any time and get away with it--in the same way that Perlman would place a foppish, Anglophile locution alongside a phrase that spoke of the world of lox, bagels, and pastrami  on rye. 

Sims is more variable these days, perhaps because his music depends so much on the freshness of his lyrical impulse. Swinging comes so effortlessly to him that Sims can give pleasure even when he falls back on familiar patterns. Yet when he really “sings,” as he did Wednesday  night on his own  familiar piece “The Red Door”--linking each phrase to the next so gracefully that the entire solo seemed  a single thought--one realizes that beneath Sims’s familiar  rhythmic  ease there is another, richer  level of invention. Circumstances dictate how often that side of Sims rises to the surface; and playing alongside Cohn is one of the circumstances that does the trick, for both  men were at or near the peak of their form. Cohn and Sims  must have played “The Red Door” many thousands of times, but every time it swings open on something new. 

 

[1986]

As magnificently as Al Cohn played Tuesday night at the Jazz Showcase, I’m sure that even Cohn would admit that attention must be focused on his tenor saxophone partner for the week,  Allen Eager. While Eager did venture into town in 1982, it would seem that this engagement marks his real return to action--one that, in jazz terms, might be compared to the news that Arthur Rimbaud had stumbled out of Africa to present  us with a book of new poems. Eager, you see, is among jazz’s  mystery men--a precociously brilliant  disciple of Lester Young who made his first recordings in 1946, when he was only nineteen, and then played alongside Fats Navarro in Tadd Dameron’s band on 52nd Street before he wandered off into different realms. Among other things, Eager became engaged, as he once put it, “to a girl from one of the wealthier families in the United States,” hung out in Paris with the international jet set, turned himself into an expert  race-car driver,  and, in the 1960s,  encouraged Dr. Timothy Leary  to  use LSD wholesale and for “kicks” rather than in a controlled, experimental  fashion.

It was, one assumes, quite  an odyssey. But playing the tenor saxophone had less and less to do with it--until, in the late 1970s, Eager ended up as a night clerk in a Miami Beach hotel and once more decided to pick up his horn. The road back was not easy, and in 1982, Eager’s musical reflexes seemed a bit out of synch. But now the battle seems to have been won, because on Tuesday night Eager sounded quite lovely from the very first: oblique, unique,  and intensely swinging. 

The first tune of the night, based on the changes of “Exactly Like You,”  found Cohn in the lead--and his leonine, almost  oratorical, rhythmic power left his partner grinning with pleasure. Then Eager took over, and one was transported to another, more intimate, realm--one that is governed by  the Young-derived dream of a melody that need never end.What that means in purely musical terms is that Eager often plays through the changes--anticipating the next harmonic shift by finding an ambiguous area that enables him to be where he’s going to be harmonically before he really gets there. And so the line sweeps on without a break, while Eager seems at once bemused and delighted by the whole affair--as though he were regarding his handiwork from a coolly distant point of view.

Cohn, on the other hand, is passionately present at all times--an urgent dramatist who highlights his noble ideas until each solo has the weight and shape of a full-fledged composition.  As much as any improviser who comes to mind, Cohn perfectly balances rhythm, melody,  and harmony so that at every moment he is moving forward on all three fronts. And as for his tone, on “O Grande Amor” Cohn’s descents into the lower register had a bassoon-like richness that brought Serge Chaloff to mind. Obviously inspired by Cohn’s example, Eager grew stronger and more inventive throughout  the night. One hopes that his return is permanent.

(P.S. I half-lied about Eager. While he was not uninteresting, he also was fairly weak, and Cohn played so forcefully that it was as though he were taking revenge on him -- both for the way Eager had f---ed up his great musical gifts, and his life in general for that matter, and also, perhaps, because Eager often had been a flaming jerk back in 52nd St. days.)

[soulpope]

Motivated by this thread`s recent posts playing this one .... :

[HutchFan]

Thanks for sharing those reviews, Larry.  Great writing -- and right on the money!  

[alankin]

John Prine – Fair & Square (Oh Boy Records)
— Mostly originals, including "Crazy as a Loon" & "Some Humans Ain't Human".

John Prine – In Spite of Ourselves (Oh Boy Records) 
— Duets with Iris DeMent (4), Connie Smith (2), Dolores Keane (2), Melba Montgomery (2), Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless and Fiona Prine; covers of country tunes and Prine's title song.

 

In a mood for some John Prine.  He makes me feel good...or, at least, somewhat better.

Edited April 15, 2017 by alankin

[HutchFan]

Andrew Hill - Live at Montreux (Arista Freedom)

[BillF]

[optatio]

MODERN JAZZ QUARTET: OCTOBER 28, 1957 NDR STUDIO HANNOVER (NDR 60 YEARS JAZZ EDITION. 04). MOOSICUS N 1304-2 [2013]

[xybert]

Joe Farrell - Penny Arcade

If you skip the corny first track, this album flows on from Moon Germs much better and becomes a better album in general.

[sonnyhill]

[Peter Friedman]

3 hours ago, soulpope said:

Motivated by this thread`s recent posts playing this one .... :

I have just been reading the Mel Lewis biography. At one point Mel says that he is disappointed that he was never able to get any Al Cohn arrangements for his jazz orchestra. But explains by indicating that Al's eye problems prevented him from writing, so he decided to focus on playing.

Not mentioned in the thread on Al Cohn is that having either Barry Harris or Jimmy Rowles  on piano added a highly significant element to the tremendous success of these Xanadu sessions.