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AllenLowe

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Posts posted by AllenLowe

  3. Photos of Nessa, Kart, Uncle Skid

    in Live Shows & Festivals

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    I heard Freeman only once in person, sometime in the 1980s at the CHicago jazz fest - wow - I think of him in Tatumesque terms. Such a complete command of harmony and, for all the idea of storytelling, told in such an unconventional way. Of course, his pitch is another thing that adds tonal ambiguity (in much the same way that latter day Jackie MacLean's does). It's a very brilliant adaptation of bebop, as I see it - beboppers had a way of circling the basic harmony and a few saxophonists (like Freeman and, in a much different way, Eric Dolphy) found a method of using the chords as particularly oblique signposts - I'm not surprised at Gitler's lack of understanding but am a bit by Dan Morgenstern's -

  5. The Complete Lester Young Studio Sessions on Verve

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    Prez was definitely a changed man after the war - BUT - you have to pick and choose - first of course post-War is the session with Nat Cole and Buddy Rich (1946?) - also, some of the 1950s broadcast stuff is sublime, and there are good studio sessions from the early 1950s - Onyx put out that Lester Young LP which covered, I think, 1956-58 and had some superb things recorded "live" - Dave Schildkraut used to play the "live" 1950s stuff for me and say "this is where I went to school" - Prez had lost some of the energy but there is some rhythm play, repeated notes, etc on those things that is priceless -

  6. Roscoe Mitchell & Dave Sanborn ?!

    in Artists

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    I tend to agree with Mike on this - Sanborn certainly has command of the horn, but I got a similar impression from those Night Music shows (boy that was a great show - Ivo Papasov, weird Ukranian rock and roll groups, etc). All of this makes me quite nostalgic, because I saw that Butterfield band in Central Park ca. 1969, Sanborn and Dinwiddie were the horn players; I don't remember about the drums but that was a fantastic group - (Buzz Feiten on guitar) -

  15. Pat Metheny

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    on the steel thing - well, historically I'm not a real expert on this stuff - I did once have a conversation with Eddie Durham, and he said the early resonator guitars were just, really, made in an effort to be heard above the band. I think the steel body follows this, and has a different kind of resonance from electrics. The early electric guitars strike me as basically just acoustic guitars with pickups stuck on them. As players got more serious and wanted to play louder, they dealt with things like feed back by narrowing the guitar body, than playing solid bodies (some of the smaller hollow bodies are referred to as "semi-hollow" and do, in my brief experience, have a very interesting sound with the right pickups).

  21. Pat Metheny

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted · Edited by AllenLowe

    JSangry is very right in those distinctions, though I wonder if it may be not because of equipment used but because of the WAY it was used (and I do like Johnny Smith, but understand his point) - another distinction might be types of guitars, good archtops versus cheap ones, good pickups vs lousy pickups - those older blues guys were working in muich different types of clubs than jazz guys, noisier, probably, maybe more dancing less listening than the place a Johnny Smith (or Jimmy raney) may have been playing - driving those amps more, cheaper, lower-powered amps - and I also really believe a big part of the older sound is speaker; the older speakers had much less coloration than current (and for the record I have 3 amps, a Hilgen, which is an old Ampeg-syle amp, a re-built Bassman/'59 bassman, and a head that's been built to Fender Pro/Deluxe specs - I have only been playing about 4 years, I don't work "out" much but have been recording - and I use only NOS tubes )

  23. Pat Metheny

    in Jazz In Print - Periodicals, Books, Newspapers, etc...

    Posted

    I'm awake again (more or less) -

    to me it is a matter of sound - the classic jazz guitar sound is neck pickup, humbucker, dark, high end rolled off. Much different from the classic rock and roll sound which can be either neck or bridge pickup in combination (twang) - or by themselves (shrill and trebly for the bridge, bright and plumby for the neck). Jazz guitarists tend to like it mellow and round - and have since the days of Charlie Christian. Rock and roll and rhythm and blues guitarists since the late 1940s have tended to be different, particularly rockers starting in the middle 1950s. Both jazz guys and rockers, in the old days, used exclusively tube amps, which have a nice sense of natural compression as volume is achieved; while jazz guys tended to avoid that kind of distorted overdrive, rock and rollers welcomed it, used it as a musical technique. Than came the 1960s and rock's unprecedented popularity, which made jazz guys perk up and listen - rock guys started using more effects, fuzz, wah, etc and etc. More than a few jazz guys (Coryell, Hahn, Sam Brown, McLaughlin) started pushing the instrument more, and started using effects. In many cases, even in the early days, the result was not great, was too slick, with a sense of musical slumming, as though some of the jazz guys were overqualified and could not achieve the same sense of basic blues-touch as a lot of the rock (and older blues) guys. As digital technology developed it became easier and easier to achieve "rock" effects - distortion and/or overdrive, delay, fuzz, etc. In all of this something very nice about the guitar's original sound was lost, IMHO; the use of digital effects results in a series of conversions - ie. the analog guitar signal is converted to a digital signal and than back again to an analog signal. The result is a loss of original tone, sometimes a digital sheen - it loses the sound of the string itself vibrating over the pickup and then being amplified through the pre-amp and power stages (assuming a tube amp is used) - add solid state amps and you get an even greater loss of guitar signal.

    Now all of this is not necessarily bad - as the saying goes, if it sounds good it is good. It's just not to my tastes and sounds more and more like the guitartist could be playing anything, a keyboard, a wind synth, anything. Personally I find that there is a warmth and natural compression to the direct signal of a guitar through a tube amp, a power and presence in both clean and distorted sound that has been largely lost (by the way, this applies to not just jazz but to most rock guitarists) - and even though I'm not even crazy about the classic jazz sound (too rolled off, too quiet) I still find it preferable to the multi-pedaled way of most contemporary guitarists -

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