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Merry Christmas!

Since nobody osted this so far as I can see: Merry Christmas to you all!

Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most - when sung by Helen Merrill on her 1969 Milestone LP.

Junior Cook Quintet, You Leave Me Breathless (Steeplechase) The only Christmas album in my collection.

It's not about flagging members. Of course politically motivated decisions affect the jazz world, but experience showed that discussing these here does not lead anywhere.

+1.

Hard to respond to this without getting flagged for political content!

You made no mention of the Horace Silver Band with Mobley. I find it a close call between the Bands with Cook and with Mobley. I prefer both to the the ones that came later.

Percy plays great there!

Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Show Cancelled After Trump Name Change

That definitely sounds like an interesting area for exploration and explanation/analysis. I’ve only recently come to the conclusion that Cook (plus Mitchell, with an honorable mention to Louis Smith) were really the best — and maybe even ideal — front-line for Horace. I slept on Horace quite a bit for a decade or two because — for me — I usually found his albums with JoeHen slightly lacking. Don’t want to overstate that — but for me they never seemed to quite click as well/hard as I felt they should. But it’s only been in the last half-dozen-years that I went back and really spent some time with the Mitchell/Cook Silver band — which ON PAPER (for me) always seemed like it ought to have been somehow ‘lesser’ than the Silver albums that came after Mitchell/Cook. (And that’s entirely my own biases that frankly let me come to that utterly wrong conclusion.) Now I think Cook maybe did some of his very best work with Silver — and those bands with him were among the best things Silver ever recorded.

More Bobby Gordon, with another Bob. Booby Gordon and Bob Wilbur “Yearnings” Arbors cd

Very happy to share two tunes featuring Percy France and Papa Jo Jones ... I learned a couple of months back that Percy was the last tenor saxophonist to play in Papa Jo Jones & Friends but was so disappointed to not find any recorded examples of those gigs to date. But a WKCR Benefit at The West End is better than none. With Loren Schoenberg (piano) and Skinny Burgan (bass):

“Bobby Gordon Plays Joe Marsala: Low Register” Another great Bobby Gordon cd on Arbors. He’s a great interpreter of 'thirties swing music in particular by clarinet leaders. Bobby Gordon-clarinet Randy Reinhart-trumpet Keith Ingham-piano, celeste and arrangements Russell George-violin James Chirillo-guitar Vince Giodano-bass Arnie Kinsella and Steve Little-drums

I like to tell my students that when they solo they're a guest of the song and to treat their host with respect. As a soloist you're there to enhance the song, not to use it exclusively for harmonic gratification. A tune's identity is more than a set of chord changes. Charles McPherson, who in addition to being one of the great instrumentalists is also IMO one of the best verbalizers about jazz. From one interview: "See, here we go with, “There’s a lot of ways to be a typewriter,” because a lot of people chase chord changes. But harmony and chord changes are just there as collateral. They tell you what group of notes might be valid for the moment, but they don’t tell you what’s the best note for the moment. Your eyes can tell you right notes if you know harmony, but your ears — if you got some — will tell you the best notes out of the many right notes. It’s up to the melodic ear to eke out the greatest four or five notes for the moment. That’s when the phrasing and rhythm comes in.... ... But Bird and Dizzy played so well and so correctly that it was very easy for the younger players to start treating chord changes as the greatest thing of all. There’s a danger there because chords are not the “reason why.” Chords shouldn’t be the jumpstart of your creation. Your jumpstart of creation is your melodic ear and rhythm. The chords are there, they’re like parts of speech. Nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, adverb phrases: they’re meaningless on their own, but they’re there to create sentences, paragraphs and stories. But parts of speech are not the reason for your creation. When you get ready to speak your thoughts and express your feelings, you’re not saying, well now let me use a noun or a verb or an adverb. It’s the same when you play an A minor seven. An A minor seven has no dignity unto itself. It just is what it is. The A minor seven is just acting as part of speech, helping you express your emotion. A lot of the players after bebop on became top heavy with the harmony. Now we have a bunch of players who will basically chase chord changes, that’s all it is. If they’re grammatically correct, they think they’re great, you know? And that’s part of it, of course. At least you’re in the ballpark if you outline the changes. But that ain’t the main event!"

Very nice Ken.