All Activity

Easiest buy of the year:) Just another version of Stone/Water alone is worth the price True peak period for this music & this wide swath of musicians

Eliane Elias “Cross Currents” Denon cd Ms Elias here in her third Denon release with a great cast . . . predominantly trio and showing solid jazz chops.

Wallace Roney “Verses” Muse cd Roney’s first as a leader from 1987. What a band! 300×300 8.83 KB

I saw Alex Foster with the Mingus Dynasty Group (Jack Walrath leading) back in, I think, the early 90's, and he was pretty great. He's never reached me on record the way he did live that night.

I've wondered about Alex Foster on those albums... His best moments are amazing... But he also comes across as someone who know exactly how to respond to "let's play this as a slow bounce with a samba backdrop in sixth"... And in many ways it's great that he knows his craft... But maybe, from time to time, it would have been even better if he would have said "I don't know how to do this" with the subtext of "I know exactly how to do this but what an awful idea"

I've been waiting in vain for decades, but the long hoped for classical album Iannis Xenakis for Lovers has never appeared. 😭

That would be Nipples?

And Alex Foster...lost to studio work and the SNL band, but no small potential shown. Both slick and slippery!

I'm fairly proud of my "Ken Peplowski for Lovers" playlist on Spotify... Not saying it's better than his regular albums, only saying it works better for me...

I think Cosmic Chicken is invaluable listening in order to place the (old) Directions albums on ECM in time and space... it's even less consistent but it gives you a sense of what is Eicher and what is DeJohnette on those later albums...

What is this crap?

Same here. 'One Step Beyond' is the other one I know would be on my list of 2-3 favorites by him.

Margo Price: Maggie's Farm

👍

I know 26 from the list, some better than others, my favorites are Low Flame and You talk that talk.... Regarding Patterson's People, the tracks are not used on Shangri-la, are they? (Patterson's People got ***** in Downbeat Back in the day, I have a Dutch Jazz magazine from back then which starts out with the question how that could happen)

Thoughts on Cosmic Chicken? I like it on the Quirk Factor alone.

Not sure what to make of this one, what it's not as well as what it is; Before we laugh...

That's also a really good one. I like the push-and-pull of Grossman nudging the music into Coltrane territory and the rhythm section vacillating between modalism and abstraction. There's something special about this period in the music. There's just so much crossover in the interval between roughly '65 and the early 1970s, where the boundaries between mainstream and fringe felt porous and mutable. And there were so many sub-factors influencing the development of the music, like the death of Coltrane, the exodus of American jazz musicians to Europe (and vice-versa), the cross-pollination of ideas from Europe, South Africa, Latin America, etc., monumental political upheaval throughout the world, and so on. Our reading of this music is (almost by necessity) informed by historical understanding, as so much of it went undocumented and what we do have in hand has been litigated in writing and discussion for over half a century. I know that some of the board members were there. As far as I know, however, so many of the inherited biases of 21st century jazz friction against the reality of what was happening at that time.

Still waiting for a Peter Brötzmann plays for lovers over here 😏

I played Jackie McLean's Demon Dance these days, it's another McLean favorite with great DeJohnette...

Jack is also on Corea’s The Sun, which is a little more concise. Is feels more like a search down various tributaries, which is interesting even if not all of those tributaries bear obvious fruit.