johnlitweiler

Most of all, there needs to be a reissue of "Sunny's Time Now" by Sunny Murray with Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, +. It originally appeared on a short-lived label (Jihad?) in the late 60s and was reissued on CD in an extremely limited edition in Japan. But there may be a disagreement about who owns the rights to this. "Gittin' to Know You-All" on MPS, conducted by Lester Bowie in 1969 - a long big-band piece with well-known Europeans and the Art Ensemble. Short tracks by Karin Krog, Willem Breuker, and Terje Rypdal on that LP, too. Maybe MPS has more from that Baden-Baden festival that wasn't issued - Braxton was there but isn't on the LP, for example. I haven't heard many of the MPS Albert Manglesdorff solo and quartet LPS, but there's surely major music among them. Kevin Whitehead wrote that the first 2 Willem Breuker Kollektief LPs were on MPS - do they have the fire and inspiration of his 3rd (Berlin) album (it's now a FMP download)? (K.W. recommends them in his book.) More Europeans that should be reissued: 2 or more Globe Unity Orchestra 1970s albums from Japo, an ECM subsidiary; "The 8th of July 1969" by Gunter Hampel w/Braxton, Breuker, Jeanne Lee, McCall, etc. (Flying Dutchman); Steve Lacy, "Threads" w/Curran, Rzewski (Horo); there's an Evan Parker with Rzewski, too. Besides being good to terrific music, all of these LPs are historic landmarks.

Jim, thanks for the article. And for the organisms. And for Organissimo.

The NEA sure took their time. Compliments are nice but will Von get any $ for this? Heard him in Feb. when he gave an advertised concert and public interview with Howard Reich. He preferred to tell stories most of the evening - the interviewer got in about 3 widely separate sentences - and did not want to play, was having horn trouble, a borrowed mouthpiece I believe. They begged him so he played 2 songs, 1 short. The whole event was because he'd received another award and he had to sing for his supper, so to speak - many video cameras around. It seemed like the people who gave him the award were torturing an 87-year-old man. I hope the NEA doesn't do something like this to him.

The Three Step? Is it a waltz?

"Spring of 2 Blue-Js" by Cecil Taylor, certainly - it briefly showed up long ago as, apparently, a bootleg recorded off the LP.

There's a terrific Baby Face Willette performance, "Song of the Universe," that may be the best jazz organ-trio piece I've ever heard. It's on his 1964 Argo LP "Behind the 8-Ball" - Willette; Ben White, guitar; Jerol Donovan, drums. To me the rest of the LP is less rewarding. But it's his last album, which sort of amplifies the Willette tragedy. Let's be careful about how we use "classic," which is a word for which certain (for example) Armstrong, Morton, Ellington, Bird, Ornette recordings set the standard. Of course the Dixon and Hemphill and Joe Daley and Carter-Bradford recordings are marvelous music and historically quite important. Bless Jonathan for rediscovering them. BTW Jonathan is yet another of the many distinguished jazz d.j.s on WHPK 88.5FM Chicago (www.whpk.org).

What? Did Dick Buckley ever actually play an Ornette Coleman record over the air? When? Did he apologize? I certainly remember the months of struggle and red tape we (and Alex Schlippenbach) went through to get the Globe Unity Orchestra to play at the Chicago Jazz Festival in (I think) 1987, the drunken m.c. that night, the audience members who booed (George Lewis wrote about this in his Globe Unity anniversary liner notes), and the viciousness of Buckley's NPR attack on the band and the festival, for booking them. I lost a lot of my former respect for Buckley that night.

sorry I missed your show, Lazaro. I heard them this noon - they're a little like the ROVA Clarinet Trio, except that Ullmann composes some distinctive pieces.

Richard Rand, a Chicago advertising-agency man who played banjo and reviewed the Art Ensemble for Down Beat, made that ad. All Threadgill got for it was some whiskey.

Thanks, Jim. I've loved Joe Turner's music, rocking and/or swinging, ever since "Shake Rattle & Roll" in the early 1950s. Finally got to hear him @ Segal's Showcase in the 70s, first with John Young, then with Lloyd Glenn. He seemed to be in poor health both times, but he still projected the sheer joy of singing like nobody else could. I tried to interview him but he was pretty far out of it. Wound up interviewing Lloyd Glenn for an hour while Joe tossed and turned in the bed next to us and a drunken woman wandered in and out and cursed white people. Quite a strange afternoon. Down Beat didn't print the Glenn interview and now I can't find it, doggone it.

On Monday, March 15 the wonderful tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson returns to Zoundz! as part of his 81st birthday celebration. Along with Fred's own words we'll hear recordings by him and by his fellow March-birthday artists Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman too. This Zoundz! will introduce the Velvet Lounge's Fred Anderson birthday festival, which begins this week and promises to present Fred himself playing on at least three nights, maybe more. Richard Davis and Amiri Baraka will join the Chicago artists including Ed Wilkerson, Jeff Chan, Ernest Dawkins, Dee Alexander, Willie Pickens, Hamid Drake, & c., & c. Whee! You can hear Zoundz!, the most dangerous jazz show in Chicago, on WHPK 88.5 FM (on the South Side) and on www.whpk.org (around the world). Zoundz! wails from 6:30 to 9 pm Central daylight savings time.

By the time Air first recorded the trio had been playing together (emphasis on together) for a few years, first at the U. of Chicago then IIRC weekly at the Jazz Showcase on Rush St. The 1st 2 Air LPs were done for a Japanese label and issued in the US on India Navigation. The albums are "Air Song" and "Air Raid" and I think those 2 are as wonderful as "Air Time."

Of course, none of the records on my 2009 top 10 list (to be published elsewhere) is here. Vonski Speaks is certainly Ratliff's most glaring omission. Did he compile his list back in October?

Leni and John Sinclair were (are?) wife and husband, I believe. Yes, they were husband and wife. Interesting interview with her at http://www.backstagegallery.com/photograph...niSinclair.html. Mark, thank you for finding this photo.

IIRC, what Giddins and DeVeaux call aspects of African music are among the things that Sun Ra and company, in the film "The Cry of Jazz," cited as evidence of the decadent European music that was threatening the existence of jazz ca. 1958 or so.

Yes, Sakata was a revelation on Sat. I've been sleeping on him -- guess I thought he was a push-button-instant-intensity player -- but the amazing technique, the clarity of phrasing (even in the ecstatic alto parts you could hear every note), and the more overtly lyrical clarinet section were very real. Roscoe's introduction to "I'll Be Right Here Waiting" was beautiful, another festival high point. And James Falzone's clarinet playing was especially affecting in Vox Arcana. Sunday night I ate a big bowl of noodles before the concert, then nodded off during the opening act. Sakata returned, this time with his own trio, played much the same as on Sat. but seemed less incisive, more diffuse; maybe the unfamiliar players (electric b. and g., drums) on Sat. had stimulated him. The Joe McPhee-Vandermark Nonet conclusion was a perfect ending. Vandermark somehow inspired these players to create as well as to play together and there was harmonic color in his charts of McPhee pieces. One of Dave Rempis's alto solos broke away from the high-energy mold and made a strong melodic argument, Josh Berman's cornet solos were bright and wild, and McPhee himself sounded good. Well, they all sounded good. Dawkins' New Horizons quartet started with a bang on Friday, Vandermark-McPhee ended the festival with a bang on Sunday, lots of good music along with banging in between. Makes a body glad to be alive in Chicago in 2009.

What beautiful, soulful music. So well recorded, too.

In general my own feelings about Friday's music were much like Larry's, and also Guus Janssen's trio was a joy to hear. On Thursday, though, 3 bass clarinetists in a row were 3 too many -- they all made the same sounds and the same spacy, fragmented phrasing, though at times the Chicagoan Jason Stein at least seemed to be trying to introduce some sense of shape into the free improvisation (unlike the 2 European bass clarinetists). For me, not much sense of creating together in these 3 sets. The Lithuanian saxophonist Liudas Mockunas was the one horn player with some sense of melody and distinctive sound (his soprano must have called ducks from miles away). Bassist-guitarist-trumpeter Brian Sandstrom and drummer Steve Hunt were both quick and expansive, so at times they had real integration with Mockunas. Martin Brandlmeyer's faint taps and scrapes were the kind of empty, portentuous crap that made me wish the Hells Angels would show up. I once spent 2 hours with him and his similarly trivial trio Polwechsel, which was like putting the nerve endings through a shredder. The kind of oh-I'm-so-sensitive stuff that gives sensitivity a bad name.

A must-hear. He's also playing on Saturday with Mike Reid's People Places and Things group, another good band. Bradford sounded so lyrical and bright and poised at the Vision Festival in June. Wonderful music.

Love her last note.

Tom, this may explain the Chicago Reader editors who, over 20-odd years, inevitably managed to mangle and insert complete falsehoods into my articles and Critics Choice paragraphs (which of course were always clean copy).

Re Bukowski's fiction, earlier is better -- Post Office, Women, Dirty Old Man Notes and other stories of that period, for example. After he got rich from writing the Barfly screenplay, and after he got famous, he was still prolific but he lost a lot of his punch. (Of course, you can hardly blame him for preferring security to poverty.) Barfly is hilarious, an alcoholic's dream of the perfect life: getting his story published and gorgeous women fighting for his sexual attention. He did not like jazz.

While by far the worst of my experiences with editors was at the Chicago Tribune ca. 1988-92, there was an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times who cut my review of a 2007 Craig Taborn show by half in order to make room for an article that said Paul McCartney was sighted riding a bus in Arkansas. Grr. Had a weird situation with the Ornette Coleman book. The American and British publishers published it simultaneously but used different copy editors, Ben Ratliff in the US and the late Chris Parker in the UK. Naturally, I thanked both editors in the book introduction. But the British edition deleted my thank you (the American edition kept the thanks). Chris wrote to me about how cruelly I had hurt his feelings by not crediting him -- like me, he gigged as a free-lance copy editor, a highly insecure occupation, so those thanks would have gone on his resume -- and since I lost his address, I never get to explain that it was his London employer who had fouled up. Like Larry, I vetted books for a university press and was paid in books. Still haven't gotten to that last box of books.

Very bad news, but not catastrophic. Makes it real hard for Chicago musicians and for the festival programming committee who did such a good job last year, despite some severe obstacles. For audiences, at least the JIC and the Park District have been adding a few events to festival week in recent years.

Congratulations, Alfredsons. You're on a winning streak.