Michael Fitzgerald

Negative - Title: The Time And The Place Artist: Art Farmer Format: LP 12" Label: Columbia Cat. Num.: C2 38232 Rel. Year: 1982 04:25 02/08/1967 CO92093 The Time And The Place 07:12 02/08/1967 CO92095 The Shadow Of Your Smile 09:01 02/08/1967 CO92089 One For Juan 05:48 02/08/1967 CO92091 Nino's Scene 05:27 02/08/1967 CO92094 Shortcake 06:58 02/08/1967 CO92090 Make Someone Happy 02:36 02/08/1967 CO92092 On The Trail 07:48 02/08/1967 Blue Bossa 08:58 02/08/1967 Is That So? 11:52 02/08/1967 Dailey Bread 02:58 06/07/1967 CO92235 Satin Doll 03:46 06/07/1967 CO92234 Misty Art Farmer (ldr), Jimmy Heath (ts), Art Farmer (fh), Cedar Walton (p), Walter Booker (b), Mickey Roker (d) ========== Mike

And here I was worried about a group hug.......

Yeah - I got thrown for a loop on another one like that - Payne & Jordan: Brooklyn Brothers. LP on Muse, CD on Prevue "under license from Xanadu Records Ltd." Mike

But would ya settle for a "good feel"?

And not to start any kind of group hug or anything, but this place beats BNBB and rec.music.bluenote (which was the jazz place to be in the pre-bulletin board Internet) - because the moderation here is on-target. When an asshole starts up, retribution will be swift. rmb is completely unpoliced and just about everyone has given up on it as a regular home (but thank God for the groups.google.com archive of it!) and BNBB (and the other current boards) have industry agendas that do not allow for a free exchange of ideas. This is the place. Mike

I believe those are the ONLY two recordings of Far Away Lands. Mike

This one: Date: June 11, 1973 Location: RCA Studios, New York City Label: Muse Jimmy Heath (ldr), Jimmy Heath (f, ss, ts), Curtis Fuller (tb), Stanley Cowell (p, ep), Bob Cranshaw (eb), Billy Higgins (d, tam), Muneer Abdul Fataah [aka Bernard Fennell] (vc) a. a-01 One For Juan - 07:03 (Jimmy Heath) b. a-02 In A Sentimental Mood - 05:07 (Duke Ellington, Irving Mills, Manny Kurtz) c. a-03 Heads Up! Feet Down! - 07:11 (Jimmy Heath) d. b-01 Far Away Lands - 05:03 (Jimmy Heath) e. b-02 Smilin' Billy - 05:48 (Jimmy Heath) f. b-03 Gemini - 07:51 (Jimmy Heath) All titles on: - Muse LP 12": MR 5028 - Love And Understanding c. listed as Hands Up! Feet Down!

Yeah, but no bells! Mike

OK - This may be my last stab. How about an outdoor show that was rained out and had to reschedule and move indoors? July 10 (was July 9), 1970? At the "Departmental Auditorium"? (was Sylvan Theatre on the Washington Monument grounds). It was part of a 3-day LBJS-DC festival. Mike

Pinned down the LBJS-DC show you saw - March 28, 1970 at the Smithsonian Natural History Auditorium. This was after the Cellar Door gig which was October 27-November 1, 1969. The band was Bill Hardman, Ramon Morris, Albert Dailey, Larry Evans, Blakey. Guests were Etta Jones and guitarist Bill Harris. Tunes included: A Night In Tunisia, Now's The Time, 'Round Midnight, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, It's Only A Paper Moon, Didn't We, and Jones sang on Fine and Mellow. Ringing any bells? Mike

He tried but the connection kept timing out.....

One of my contributions to this project is a chronology of Circle. See it here: http://www.JazzDiscography.com/Artists/Corea/circle-disc.htm Mike

Yes, John "Star Wars" Williams. http://www.heidelberg.edu/~dbramel/jwbio.html Mike

From db 9/3/70 p.40 - =============== Blue Note threw an opening night party for trumpeter Lee Morgan at the Lighthouse. Morgan's group included Benny Maupin, tenor sax; Harold Mabern, piano; Jimmy Merritt, bass; Mickey Roker, drums. Duke Pearson sat in one night. =============== Pearson? Hmmmmmm! Mike

Really? Well, then we're even worse off. Only thing now is process of elimination: try to find some gig somewhere for him every day in September 1965 and then look at the open spaces. Mike

More or less you're going to be dealing with catalog numbers. You also have to know something about the history of the issues - 10 inch before 12 inch (and 78s first for some of them). Other sources would be reviews, Prestige ads (Down Beat, Metronome, etc.) and catalogs like Schwann and Sam Goody, though I'm not sure whether they indicated any dates at that point. I doubt you're going to pin things down much better than a few months. Mike

Remember that the CD version has additional track "Billie's Bounce", which for me is a wonderful bonus. Mike

Here's what I know - Jimmy Smith toured Europe in late May 1965 and again in late November-early December 1965, both times with the same trio. However, I don't know of a September 1965 tour. It *seems* like too much - is there any evidence to support this? Mike

What other info is there about the Jimmy Smith session? Do they give location? I'll wager the Birdland Stars date can be pinned down pretty easily in the Topeka newspapers. The tour was in Chicago on Feb. 18 and in NYC on Feb. 26. The Jamal is very difficult because it was his club and he played there so often. Was the Ruppli Chess book the source for Lord? My French copy of the LP (Vogue/Cadet 515019) says "June 1961". Mike

Shirley Horn had bassist Charles Ables for about 35 years. And she's had drummer Steve Williams for 20 years and still counting. Mike

It was at one point - on Koch, I think. Or was it One Way. Mike

Sounds like somebody got confused between the GARDEN State (New Jersey) and the GOLDEN State (California). (Can we blame this on a Japanese translation?) Mike

Composer Larry Daehn wrote a beautiful piece for band titled "As Summer Was Just Beginning" dedicated to James Dean. More info here: http://www.bsu.edu/web/jdstorer2/portfolio...tudenguide.html Never more appropriate than today. Mike

Looks like I kind of got my wish (see final paragraph) - except I wasn't there to hear it. (But kind of sad to see how low the NYT has sunk in headline creativity.) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/arts/music/28jarr.html ====================== September 28, 2005 Keith Jarrett: Alone Again (Naturally) By NATE CHINEN No living jazz pianist has wrung more drama from the solo recital than Keith Jarrett. His vaulting, improvised concerts - melodic marathons, gleaming with significance - brought him international acclaim in the 1970's, along with a sizeable audience. His album "The Köln Concert" (ECM), issued 30 years ago, ranks among the best-selling solo piano recordings of all time. But Mr. Jarrett, who has described the solo regimen as an ordeal, has devoted most of his attention to trio playing in recent years. "Radiance" (ECM), released this year, is his first live solo recording in a decade, and his appearance at Carnegie Hall on Monday night was the first North American solo recital in nearly as long. This added up to a major event. As on "Radiance," Mr. Jarrett divided the concert into discrete episodes, each pointing toward the next. He began with a rumbling overture that summoned the stern angularity of modern classical music. Then, in quick succession: an indirectly bluesy vamp tune, a mournfully chiming morsel of flamenco, and a bouquet of harplike glissandi. He was dancing gracefully around a theme, but these first few extemporizations were mere miniatures, suggestive yet incomplete. The more compelling pieces were haunted by familiar song structures. Mr. Jarrett closed the first half of the concert with a troubled but consonant melody that would have sounded at home in a movie score. During the second half, he followed a New Orleans strut with a yearning gospel hymn. The evening's most jazzlike number was a complex concoction offhandedly evocative of Thelonious Monk; Mr. Jarrett embellished it with boogie-woogie flourishes, stomping rhythms and a hard-charging bebop line in octaves. Touch is a big part of his technique; there's a buttery quality to his piano articulation that softens any dissonance. So his avant-garde gestures, which always stop short of atonality, can seem both courageous and reasonable; and on ballads, his tone fulfills a voluptuous melancholy. The final piece bridged the gap, with a round of pastel tremolos over a syncopated Middle Eastern drone. Mr. Jarrett has likened his solo concerts to athletic contests, and at times his exertions underscored the point. He grunted, moaned and sighed along with his melodies; he rose from his bench to stoop over the keys. His entire body swayed and convulsed, as if his hands were affixed not to a piano but to a source of electrical current. (In fact, he has used that metaphor, too.) The audience read these ecstasies as deeply heroic. Mr. Jarrett was called back for five separate encores: a ballad and a blues, both improvised, and the evening's first three bona fide compositions, including the vintage original "My Song" and the standard "Time on My Hands." He basked in each ovation with an appreciative good humor; he seemed to be having a good time. =============== Mike

Tomorrow's news today - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/arts/music/30sonn.html ==================== September 30, 2005 Sonny Rollins: A Free Spirit Steeped in Legends By BEN RATLIFF HIS face and neatly trimmed white beard shaded by a Filson hunting cap, Sonny Rollins arrived for our appointment straight from a visit to the dentist. The dentist is more or less the only reason for Mr. Rollins to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City now unless he's giving an infrequent concert. Now 75, the tenor saxophonist whom many call the greatest living improviser in jazz lives on a Columbia County farm in Germantown, N.Y., that he bought in 1972 with his wife, Lucille. Until recently they also kept an apartment in Lower Manhattan; after the World Trade Center, six blocks away, was attacked, they had to leave their home temporarily and then decided to let go of their pied-à-terre. His wife, who was also his manager and record producer, died last November. This is a period of transition for him. Mr. Rollins had agreed to my request that he choose some music for us to listen to together and discuss. In the elevator at The New York Times, I asked him how his big concert had gone at the Montreal Jazz Festival over the summer. "Well, I don't know," he answered in his froggy voice. "I look at all that from the inside, so you'd probably have to ask someone else." But on the subject of music other than his own, the basis of our meeting, he is more forthcoming. Mr. Rollins had chosen a short list of pieces for our session, the point being to listen through his sensibilities. He was careful to contextualize his responses, but essentially remained open to exploring any idea. And his responses were fairly fresh: he said, regretfully, that for 20 years he had not really listened much to music, to protect himself from too much information. "It's not healthy," he admitted. "I would like to be able to listen to CD's. I enjoy it, you know." What we did not discuss much was Mr. Rollins's new album, "Without a Song," released a month ago by Milestone/Fantasy. It is a recording of a Boston concert four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the first in a possible series of live Sonny Rollins releases. Carl Smith, a 66-year-old retired lawyer who also collects jazz recordings, has located (and in a few cases, including the Boston concert, surreptitiously recorded) more than 350 Rollins performances, going back to a tape of a three-minute solo on alto saxophone from 1948. Were these performances to be made available, they would be taken very seriously in the jazz world, especially because Mr. Rollins's studio records of the last 30 years - some would argue 40 - scarcely indicate the extent of his talent. Mr. Rollins is a powerful, grand-scale improviser who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants on the horn and achieve his momentum. But he is also a paragon of structure as he improvises. Almost every modern jazz musician is fascinated by Sonny Rollins. Yet he says he has an aversion to listening to himself play. He had to force himself to listen closely to the tape of the Boston concert, a process that he described as "like Abu Ghraib." "It's possible for me to hear something I did and say, 'Yeah, I like that,' " Mr. Rollins admitted. "Although it would probably never be a whole thing. It might be a portion, a section of something, or a solo." Mr. Rollins was born in New York City in 1930, of parents who had immigrated from the Virgin Islands. He grew up in Harlem - first in the lowlands around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then, from age 9, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, a locus at the time for jazz musicians. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in what was then an Italian section of East Harlem, and lived through an early New York experiment in bussing black students to white neighborhoods; he remembers people throwing objects at the bus windows. But it was such a high-profile case of school integration that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole gave concerts to the students in the school auditorium to promote race relations. Thinking of his childhood, Mr. Rollins wanted to hear Fats Waller's 1934 recording of "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter." From the beginning of the song he looked as if he had just stepped into a warm bath. A clarinetist began playing counterpoint improvisations against Waller's piano and voice. "Who's the clarinet player?" Mr. Rollins asked, coming out of his reverie. It was Rudy Powell. "Isn't that something?" he said. "I went to school with Rudy Powell's son." Mr. Rollins and Rudy Powell didn't know each other, although they stood about three feet apart in Art Kane's famous "Great Day in Harlem" photograph from 1958. "I remember hearing that song around the house, and on the radio and everything," Mr. Rollins said. "Wow, I haven't heard that record in so many years. It's one of my earliest memories of jazz. I believe in things like reincarnation, and it struck a chord someplace in my back lives or something." It's very restful, I said, as we listened to the song again. It's not the other Fats Waller, the boisterous one. "Yeah," Mr. Rollins agreed. "He could be raucous, but this is very, very much - mmm." (Waller was singing: "I'm gonna write words oh so sweet/ they're gonna knock me off my feet/ a lot of kisses on the bottom/ I'll be glad I got 'em.") "Yeah," Mr. Rollins said, still impressed by Powell. "But the thing I want to stress is that this is evocative of the whole Harlem scene. Where I was born, when I was born. And his playing, that stride piano style, which of course comes from other people. It's overwhelming to me, really. When I hear him, to me it just says the whole thing. It encapsulates jazz, the spirit of jazz, what jazz is about. In a very overall way." Along Came Hawkins We moved on to Coleman Hawkins. If Waller represents Mr. Rollins's childhood, Hawkins represents his maturation. (An infatuation with Louis Jordan came in between.) When Mr. Rollins became really interested in the saxophone, as a teenager in the mid-1940's, Hawkins was especially hot. In late 1943 the yearlong ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, preventing commercial recordings, had just been lifted, and Hawkins, nearly 40 and very competitive, was making up for lost time, collaborating with the younger beboppers. (In 1963 Rollins would make a record with his idol, performing with a kind of brave, modern idiosyncrasy.) "The Man I Love," from December 1943, is one of the greatest performances in jazz, though overshadowed by Hawkins's much more famous recording of "Body and Soul." It was released on a 12-inch 78 r.p.m. record - a detail Mr. Rollins remembered - because Hawkins had too much to say and started a second chorus. It ended at 5:05, too long for the normal 10-inch format. We listened to Hawkins's two voluminous choruses, ambitious from the very opening phrase: an E natural chord jostling against an E flat. "You know, he's doing a lot of stuff in there, man," Mr. Rollins said. "Very far-reaching, too. Coleman was a guy that played chord changes in an up-and-down manner. He sort of played every change, let me put it that way. He had a phrase for every change that went by. So in that solo he was not only playing the changes, he was also playing the passing chords, which is another thing he was ahead of his time on. And still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving, so he was building and building and building." "It's a work of art," he concluded. When did he get around to Coleman Hawkins? "Well, 'Body and Soul' was ubiquitous in Harlem, on jukeboxes. They could have turned me on to him. But since I moved up on the hill, where so many of these guys lived, I even had a chance to see him driving around. He had an impressive Cadillac. He dressed well. And, you know, there were certain other people that acted more on the entertainment side. There was even a time in my life when I had a brief feeling about Louis Armstrong, that he was too minstrel-y and too smiley. That didn't last long. I was a young person at the time. But what impressed me about Coleman was that he carried himself with great dignity." A lot of Mr. Rollins's heroes lived in his neighborhood; the tricky part was getting their ear. "There was a great photographer named James J. Kriegsman, who used to make these pictures of musicians, and he made a beautiful picture of Coleman. So I had my 8-by-10, and I knew where he lived, up on 153rd street, and one day I knew when he was coming home. He signed my autograph. I was 13 or 14." "I was a real pest, as a young guy," he recalled. "It's sort of embarrassing to think about it now." Parker Cuts Loose Inevitably, Charlie Parker was on Mr. Rollins's list. But the piece, "Another Hair Do," from 1947, was an unusual choice. It is a 12-bar blues. At the beginning, Parker and a very young Miles Davis play a repeated line for the first four bars. But after that Parker cuts loose and improvises at double-speed for the next five, before the written part resumes and the theme-section ends. "Another Hair Do" is nothing canonical in jazz history, but for Mr. Rollins it was. "The thing about this song was that the form of it was revolutionary even for bop," he said. He backtracked a little. "First of all, this guy's rhythmic thing was definitely on another planet. You don't find people doing that, the way he was doubling up there. There was a lot of free improvisation in the melody there." (By melody, Mr. Rollins meant the opening 12-bar theme section.) When Parker comes back to play the theme again, I said, he's not going to play that fast bit the same way. "No," Mr. Rollins said. "It's an open space. See, Miles is trying to do a little bit of it, too" - improvising in double-time over the steady pulse - "but he can't quite do it yet. But, you know, Miles was a genius. He was playing with Charlie Parker and not able to do some of the technical stuff, but yet making it sound like he's in the same ballpark." He whistled, and laughed, then went back to Parker's achievement. "It's not just the computer saying four notes against two notes. It's what Charlie Parker's doing within that thing. It's music that can't be written down. You have to feel that to make it come out. So what Charlie Parker accomplished was, he made an open-ended song which was not open-ended. It wasn't like playing anything you want. But within that there was so much freedom to play what you wanted to play. And still he made it to sound like a regular blues song." Mr. Rollins himself wrote some open-ended pieces, like "The Bridge." "Well, I probably got it from my idol there," he responded. "People playing jazz have to try to understand where he was coming from, what that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz is freedom. I don't think you always have to play in time. But there's two different ways of playing. There's a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or, you can have a fixed time and play against it. That's what I feel is heaven - being able to be that free, spiritual, musical. I would say that's an ideal which is underappreciated." Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. "I mean playing free without any kind of time strictures - there's nothing wrong with that either. I'm not saying that's inferior. But I guess I'm getting older now, so I'm getting to be a person that's steeping myself in the tradition of Fats Waller and all of these people we're listening to today, who are playing time music. I'm probably going to be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of our audiences still relate to time. I'm still in the era of time being an important component of jazz. I'm still there, O.K.? So kill me." The Storyteller Finally, we got to Lester Young. "Afternoon of a Basie-ite" was recorded in 1943 - five days after Hawkins's "Man I Love" session - with a quartet including Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Slam Stewart on bass and Sid Catlett on drums. It is almost lotus-eater music, light and gorgeous, geared toward dancing. "Boy, I'm telling you," said Mr. Rollins, smiling. "That's the Savoy ballroom there." "It sounds very free and easy," Mr. Rollins said. "But we know it's not, because what he's saying is deep as the ocean. There was a beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through. So when I first heard that, I mean, this cat was talking." When you talk about improvised storytelling, I asked him, what are you really talking about? "Well, I guess it's making sense," he replied. "It's like talking gibberish and making sense. That's on the very basic level. Then beyond that, of course, it's a beautiful story. It's uplifting. It's emotional." He wanted to illustrate it further with an observation a writer once made about his own playing, but then he stopped himself. "I don't want this to sound self-aggrandizing," he said. "In my later years I've become very self-effacing. I have decided that I know what greatness is, and I don't want to put myself in that category." Understood. "Anyway," he continued, "somebody wrote that what I was doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the question. I think he was talking about harmonic resolutions. So that would be sort of what I think telling a story might be: resolving a thought." I asked if there were any of his own recorded performances he felt comfortable with, that didn't pain him with thoughts of how it should have been better. "It's hard to say, because I haven't listened to any of my stuff in a long time," he said. "Unless it's on the radio, and I can't leave the room. But I seem to like 'Sonnymoon for Two,' with Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware." (It can be found on Mr. Rollins's 1957 album "A Night at the Village Vanguard.") I asked if the increasing self-effacement had any musical implications. Does it come out in his work? Mr. Rollins looked embarrassed and tickled by the idea; he started smiling and looking at the corners of the room, as if wondering whether there was an escape hatch. "Wow. Well, I hope that it's going to be expressed in my work. But I don't know how. These things come out, you know." His hands flew up to his face, and he twisted the white strands of beard around his mouth, grinning. ================== Mike