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Cowell, Harper, Workman, Hart - Such Great Friends


mjzee

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2 hours ago, jlhoots said:

I have this on CD!! Recorded 1983.

I do too! - just found one on eBay (a seller out of Hawaii, of all places), just a couple months ago.

Best of all, only $17 including shipping! And I’d been looking for an affordable copy for over 10 years.

It’s both quite a good date, but NOT (quite) a stunning/fantastic date.

The whole thing is on YouTube, iirc, if anyone wants to check it out.

Most of it’s a solid “B+“ though I’d maybe give one or two tracks a “B”. (Given the players, though, I probably had my expectations set a little too high.)

A pretty solid date though.

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56 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

I do too! - just found one on eBay (a seller out of Hawaii, of all places), just a couple months ago.

It’s both quite a good date, but NOT (quite) a stunning/fantastic date.

Most of it’s a solid “B+“ though I’d maybe give one or two tracks a “B”. (Given the players, though, I probably had my expectations set a little too high.)

A pretty solid date though.

I also have it on CD, and agree with every statement Rooster has made.   It's a collective date crying out for a leader to take charge.  The whole is less than the (incredibly substantial) sum of the parts.

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Yeah I was a bit surprised as all of these guys are among my absolute favorites. But it really sounds more like a jamsession than a real album. It’s not bad at all, but did not meet up to my expectations. The session with Sonny Fortune is better in my opinion.

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4 hours ago, felser said:

I also have it on CD, and agree with every statement Rooster has made.   It's a collective date crying out for a leader to take charge.  The whole is less than the (incredibly substantial) sum of the parts.

Yeah, the earlier quartet date doesn’t hang together as an true “album” really, even though the lineup is consistent on all four cuts.

But there is quite a bit of lovely playing throughout. It just doesn’t fit together, in terms of pacing and sequencing.

The later album with Sonny Fortune is uniformly excellent, and definitely stronger.

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6 hours ago, felser said:

It's a collective date crying out for a leader to take charge. 

Well, look at the composer credits. That kind of tells me that the intention of the project was as a co-op, specifically to NOT have a leader.

Fair to ask, though, do those type of things EVER work?

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Jazz at Massey Hall was a one-off gig, a club date in an auditorium with a superstar band. This was a band for a tour, kind of like the Milestone Jazz Stars.

A co-op group is fine when they present a coherent program, but when you get a bunch of strong individual styles and can't get a balanced/unified)presentation, you get a record like this one. Any one cut is just dandy, but with longer tunes, you can only include so much on a record. On this one, I think they could have used shorter tunes to create a more balanced/effective program.

But they didn't, and it is what it is.

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On 10/22/2020 at 4:39 PM, JSngry said:

Well, look at the composer credits. That kind of tells me that the intention of the project was as a co-op, specifically to NOT have a leader.

Fair to ask, though, do those type of things EVER work?

SUMMIT CONFERENCE with Workman, Sam Rivers, Julian Priester, Andrew Hill and Pheeroan Aklaff is really good.

IMHO Jazz at Massey Hall is good but falls far short of any participant’s best work.

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1 hour ago, Rabshakeh said:

I'm a big fan of Tenor Conclave with Hank Mobley, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and young John Coltrane. 

Funny to see how different peoples experiences could be. I never really liked that session and in my opinion it suffers from exactly that what here is spoken about. 
 

I do love Summit Conference but that session is really led by Workman as HutchFan noted.

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1 hour ago, Pim said:

Funny to see how different peoples experiences could be. I never really liked that session and in my opinion it suffers from exactly that what here is spoken about.

I know that a couple of people on the board are a bit lukewarm about it. 

I always saw it as one of my favourite cases of four very different stylists being put together and clicking. It's got more of an energy than most of those Prestige jam sessions, at least to my ears. The only downside to it as far as I am concerned is that Coltrane's not yet really at his best. 

I don't know Summit Conference but I'm excited to listen to it. Five of my favourite players.  

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