Arnett Gordon or Dexter Cobb?

[JSngry]

I was struck by how little it would take to turn this into a Dexter Gordon jam. The voices are unique, but the vocabulary, syntax, and perhaps most surprisingly (or not?), the cadences of speech overlap more than a little.

[Dan Gould]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

I was struck by how little it would take to turn this into a Dexter Gordon jam. The voices are unique, but the vocabulary, syntax, and perhaps most surprisingly (or not?), the cadences of speech overlap more than a little.

Perhaps but aren't more of the vocal mannerisms out of Ben?  

[JSngry]

The whispers, yes. But the declarative statements work in Dexter's voice really, really well.

Not trying to suggest "influence" here, just noting an underlying commonality between two players not generally linked together. Music as a true language instead of just a set of styles.

Spent a few days listening to that record toying with this Dexter/Arnett thing. Tried to identify a Lionel Hampton Tenor Gene along the way. Got close, but couldn't quite lock it up.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

21 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

Perhaps but aren't more of the vocal mannerisms out of Ben?  

Yeah, I hear Ben in there too. Minus the Fwuffff fwufff stuff.  But I do hear the LTD style along the way too. He bites off the notes like Dexter whereas Big Ben kinda slurs everything together.

Really not liking that organ though. Roller rink music. I feel like I'm at a Boston Celtics game in the old Boston Garden circa 1983.

[JSngry]

I love Milt Buckner. I feel like I'm at a Harlem dance ca. 1953.

Ok, I dream that I'm at a Harlem dance ca. 1953. I wasn't born in 1953, I've never been to Harlem, and I can't dance for shit. So even if I was there then, helluva lot of good it would do me.

Anyway...there's a whole other context for that sound of organ (never mind the actual substance, Buckner is one of the slyest and/or wackiest wits in jazz history) besides roller rinks and sporting events. I recently got a 10" Epic LP of Wild Bill Davis and he's got that sound. Bill Doggett had that sound, although not as blatant as Buckner. It's like saying that early-ish jazz is "cartoon music". No, it's not. If it's anything, t's the other way around.

Somewhere on this board is a nice look at pre-Jimmy Smith jazz organ, courtesy of MIA The Magnificent Goldberg (should I get a flag to put on my hog?). It's worthy reading.

[Dan Gould]

10 minutes ago, JSngry said:

I love Milt Buckner. I feel like I'm at a Harlem dance ca. 1953.

Ok, I dream that I'm at a Harlem dance ca. 1953. I wasn't born in 1953, I've never been to Harlem, and I can't dance for shit. So even if I was there then, helluva lot of good it would do me.

Anyway...there's a whole other context for that sound of organ (never mind the actual substance, Buckner is one of the slyest and/or wackiest wits in jazz history) besides roller rinks and sporting events. I recently got a 10" Epic LP of Wild Bill Davis and he's got that sound. Bill Doggett had that sound, although not as blatant as Buckner. It's like saying that early-ish jazz is "cartoon music". No, it's not. If it's anything, t's the other way around.

Somewhere on this board is a nice look at pre-Jimmy Smith jazz organ, courtesy of MIA The Magnificent Goldberg (should I get a flag to put on my hog?). It's worthy reading.

It is an acquired taste, that Doggett/Wild Bill/Buckner thing. So I don't begrudge people who put it down.  Hearing a lot of Doggett lately plus Buckner on B&B, I've grown to dig it for sure.

To get back to the topic I'd love to know what particular Dex recording, if you found one, speaks closest to this commonality that you hear.

[JSngry]

I first hear Buckner on that Cobblestone Newport In New York Jam Session Vol. 1 record, the set with Mingus & Tate & McPherson, (OMG that was a great set) and was hooked immediately. I was like THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS NUTS!!!!!! So that's my Buckner Baseline right there.

No Dexter recording in particular triggered this consideration, it was just one of those things where the record's playing in the car and, you know, the 4th or 5th time through, it was like, oh, really? Hmmm, let's delve into this a little more.

I guess you could compare the "Willow Weep For Me" on Our Man In Paris to the Arnett version on this record, if you want a direct A-B comparison. but I think I hear it more on Arnett's "Deep Purple".

That MG thing is one of the few truly invaluable contributions to this board, btw. I hope it gets archived correctly outside of here.

[Larry Kart]

I hear the Dexter semi-kinship in, as you put it, "cadences of speech," the way phrases get bitten off in a more or less hip manner. As for Buckner, whom I like a good deal, that would have had to be some roller rink. 

[Larry Kart]

8 hours ago, JSngry said:

I first hear Buckner on that Cobblestone Newport In New York Jam Session Vol. 1 record, the set with Mingus & Tate & McPherson, (OMG that was a great set) and was hooked immediately. I was like THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS NUTS!!!!!! So that's my Buckner Baseline right there.

No Dexter recording in particular triggered this consideration, it was just one of those things where the record's playing in the car and, you know, the 4th or 5th time through, it was like, oh, really? Hmmm, let's delve into this a little more.

I guess you could compare the "Willow Weep For Me" on Our Man In Paris to the Arnett version on this record, if you want a direct A-B comparison. but I think I hear it more on Arnett's "Deep Purple".

That MG thing is one of the few truly invaluable contributions to this board, btw. I hope it gets archived correctly outside of here.

Just ordered Cobblestone Newport In New York Jam Session Vol. 1 & 2.

[Chuck Nessa]

Buckner is a "band". Davis a bit less so.

[JSngry]

On 11/14/2019 at 5:16 PM, Larry Kart said:

Just ordered Cobblestone Newport In New York Jam Session Vol. 1 & 2.

There will be no hurry to get to Vol. 2/ Just look to spent some quality time with Vol 1.

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

There will be no hurry to get to Vol. 2/ Just look to spent some quality time with Vol 1.

Will do. Vol .1 & 2 are an LP twofer.

A brief review I wrote in 1980:

 

There could be no better proof of the importance of sound in jazz, the tone or timbre one gets out of an instrument, than the music of tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb. A native of Houston and one of the great Southwestern tenormen, along with Buddy Tate, Ben Webster, the late Herschel Evans, and Illinois Jacquet (who preceded Cobb in the Lionel Hampton  band), this sixty-two-year-old master has a sound that no recording studio is equipped to reproduce.

It is, to begin with, simply huge, perhaps the darkest, most imposingly  rich tenor saxophone tone of  all. And what Cobb does with it--the range of chortles, whoops, cries, trills, swells, slurs, shouts, and just plain honks that he has at his command  is such that  he could say, with Walt Whitman, “I am vast, I contain multitudes.”

Not that Cobb is limited merely to purveying that sound. He is, by  any standards, a rhythmically agile, harmonically sophisticated player who shapes his melodic  lines with surprising delicacy. But because the significance of sound per se is so often overlooked in jazz, as though it were a seasoning rather than an essential ingredient, it is his sound that I want to concentrate on for the time being.

When a man has a tone like Cobb’s and can manipulate it so freely, he has at hand an almost literal musical language, a collection of  timbres that each take on a specific emotional meaning.  And that specificity of emotional tone-color--which any listener can hear, even if one doesn’t wish to analyze it--also ranges outward to affect every other aspect of the music: rhythm, harmony, melody, etc. For example during Cobb’s solo on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” he began a chorus with a seemingly simple  two-note phrase, which might be rendered onomatopoetically  as “Yah-duh.” Now I suppose you had to be there to hear what that “Yah-duh” did, but let me assure you that within  its apparent simplicity there was more musical meaning than  words  could exhaust. Aside from the way he attacked the first note, creating a catapulting sense of swing, there was the way its relative density--its heavy, centered sound--contrasted with the grainier, more oblique tonal texture of the second note. The effect of this might be compared to  a gymnast’s second, more easeful bounce on a trampoline. And listening to it one could feel a literal loosening in the knees, an invitation to enter a realm of sensuous physicality.

The creation and control of such effects, in which the abstract and the emotional aspects of jazz become one thing, is what Cobb’s music is all about. And if the principles at work in that “Yah-duh,” which must have lasted no more than a second, are expanded to cover an entire performance, it is easy to imagine just how  richly varied this master’s language can be.

 

[Late]

On 11/14/2019 at 5:47 AM, JSngry said:

I love Milt Buckner.

Then you must own this, if you don't already. 

This 4-CD set might seem like overkill at first, but with each session Buckner gets progressively ... weirder? This, rest assured, is a good thing.

I picture Jimmy Smith, Big John, Shirley, and Johnny Hammond all over at Shirley's house in the summer of 1973 for vegetarian lasagna and piña coladas. They put on some of these records and start cracking up — not because they're laughing at Milt, but because they're laughing with Milt. That should've been the title of one of Milt's records: Laughing With Milt. The guy exuded optimism, sly humor, and swagger in equal doses. Perfect music for pool parties (as Shirley well knew).

[JSngry]

Yeah, I  got that. Damn straight.