colinmce

If someone could help to direct me to information about the handmade box set of Lacy's "farewell tour", I would appreciate it. I forget the title and am having trouble turning it up.

Looking forward to grabbing the Ottoviano CD. I know you're not just "playing Waldron", so that should make things quite interesting. If anyone is interested, I have a spreadsheet of Steve Lacy's recordings that is as complete as I know. I included only leader dates, or albums where he makes a significant contribution, so a few marginal things are missing. I also skipped over the early Dixieland stuff. I hope to flesh this document out as time goes on, but I use it as a guide for which recordings I have, which I need, which I'd like, and which I will skip. Just drop me your email address. (FWIW the count stands at 166 known works available!)

Yeah, Fritz Hauser. Unfortunately this much-discussed album took me many years to track down. But it's well worth the effort.

Thom Keith:

I was thinking this as well. Will have to pull out the album of the same name tomorrow.

This looks to be something else. They put the right musician pictures on the "sleeve" at least, but streaming euro bootlegs for certain.

I would also vote yes (though I don't own it...yet, but have sampled it). I think it will reward you for many years to come. I do get the feeling this is as advanced as the GTM music gets and the ensemble is redoubtable.

I think we've been over this before, but I wonder if Jonathan Horowich could do anything with this one.

Enjoy!

Would love to if I had the cash. It was physically painful having to let this one go during some hard times.

Just got it recently. Very absorbing; one I know I'll return to a lot.

Put in an order for a Braxton Willisau set on Amazon for a very low price. No mention of it being a partial...here's hoping it's not.

Likewise the titles from the 2011 box set are available from the usual resellers in the US.

I will never stop beating myself up for passing on a $30 copy.

Forgot Opulence, the do with Weasel. A good one.

Right. I would argue that's it's done... not so well.

There are two new volumes of Lacy-Centazzo-Carter from 1976 out on Ictus April 21: http://www.amazon.com/October-Steve-Carter-Andrea-Centazzo/dp/B00TAFFO20/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1424278427&sr=8-5&keywords=steve+lacy+centazzo

Agreed that you can't go wrong with any of the leader dates, or the work with Braxton. Seconding Clifford on the trio with Peter Evans and Weasel Walter, which is my favorite outlet of hers. People, the duo with Jessica Pavone, and Thirteenth Assembly are shakier ground AFAIC.

Definitely Kofsky. You're right that there's valuable info in there. I learned a lot reading it but the perspective is unhinged.

I actually enjoyed that book when I read it, although I certainly didn't take the parts on avant garde and more recent jazz very seriously. I keep it around because it does a good job untangling the MCA/RCA/Bluebird/etc reissue scene of the 80s and 90s, but his tone re: free jazz is total bullshit. He dismisses Cecil Taylor with such confidence. To so fully conflate one's taste with the objective truth is delusion on a grand scale. There's a book about Miles Davis and Coltrane that is so doltish I can't believe it was published. The author repeatedly refers to MD as "The Chief" and insists that he was widely known by this nickname. I have literally never seen or heard that anywhere else but you'd think it was Pres or Pops the way they lay it on. Bizarre. I also think the Richard Cook Blue Note book is largely a waste of time. I once read a long book about free jazz by an author whose name I forgot that was so bombastically anti-white that it could only have been written by a white man, if you know what I mean. Cranky and pointless.

In the context of the film, marvelous. On its own I think it'd be a bore.

I can't explain how much Levine's poems have meant to me over the years. He was one of the great American artists. He was also a prodigious lover of jazz. Here is one I especially like: Call It Music by Philip Levine Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.