Gheorghe

Dream a little dream is wonderful, my wife bought it for me some years ago for Chrismas. Well, she picks up records like this way: She say I had only two Mulligans (Vol. 1 and 2 with Chet at Carnegie Hall 1974) and thought, well he has this artist, but only 2 records, and by the way, during that time I had to play "Dream a little Dream" with a female singer, I had never played it before but she called it for the set, so I did it...

Fitting to the VSOP thread I had opened and to my last posting about Ron Carters bass sound. This one is my favourite from Carter´s late 70s. It came out right at the time I heard Ron with his own quartet. I love it, it´s some studio musicians too at things like the title tune, but there is that stellar group with Chick, Henderson and Tony Williams too. One tune, that nice waltz .... some years ago my late mother in law was visiting us for 2 weeks and sometimes, when my wife and her mother played rummy, I went into the other room , closed the door so I wouldn´t disturb the ladies and by the way I listened to this CD, and in came my mother in law and said, wow that´s beautiful, though she never had listened to jazz, more to dance music....

Agreed ! And I love Ron´s bass sound from those 70´s recordings, also very present on let´s say "Baker and Mulligan at Carnegie Hall 74", something I mostly bought after hearing it in the famous club "Jazz by Freddie" where the spinned the best records when they didn´t have a day with live music. Many albums I bought after I heard them there. In this way I heard it and said "wow, the bass" and bought it. Also very much beloved from guys of my generation: "Milestone All Stars" (Rollins, Tyner, Carter, Foster) Maybe acoustic purists don´t like that direct pickup, or the added contra C (an extension, first I thought it´s a 5 string bass fiddle), but that´s what it was: The sound of the so called acoustic bass in an era that was mostly electric. Ron made the bassfiddle "hip" for people who otherwise didn´t not else than "Fender Bass" or so. It was the bass sound of my generation, and those glissandi and double grips, it was fantastic. Later, in 2002 I was astonished to hear that album "Four Generations of Miles" (George Coleman, Mike Stern, Ron Carter, Jimmie Cobb) and Carter obviously had abandoned that "Carter Sound" and it sounded more in the old sound. Well, I love acoustic jazz, but maybe in the more louder approach, with mikes and pick-up on the bass, and half acoustic (Gibson) guitars, so I can hear it and can get exited. The more "unplugged" chamber music with acoustic guitars and maybe no drums and so on, is not really my thing....

Sure, it was not a be-bop revival band like the "Giants of Jazz" . But especially on "Under the Sky" from 1979 (that´s the title of the album ?), there is a lot of new material, really wonderful. By the way, because Wallace Roney was mentioned here: I also saw "V.S.O.P. II" I think in summer 1983 on a 3 days festival: Dizzy was before them and in top form and got standing ovations. The very nice and articulate Herbie Hancock announced the VSOP concert with something like "we hope that we can get at least a bit of applause after you heard Dizzy...". Sure they got. Well, it was the Marsalis Brothers Wynton and Brandford, they played OK...or even more, they cooked, but it was especially for Herbie-Ron-Tony, that I remember the set. So it was 3 All-Stars with 2 "young lions" (at least from the point of view from then).

Me too. My God, WHEN was the series "Streets of San Francisco" ? I´m 62 now and sometimes I don´t know if something happened in the 70´s or 80´s . Malden and Douglas...., was it in the 70´s . I liked the funky theme at the beginning..... I liked those series, San Francisco, Kojak (Telly Savalas), oh I think Kojak was in the 70´s.....

Yes , I also thought that you might have not mentioned the Mit Jackson date. Yes, Milt Jackson was outstanding, also on the late 1954 date with Miles, Bags, Monk.

Sure ! The first double album, with the acoustic band, the band from the late 60´s to early 70´s with Benny Maupin, Buster Williams and so on, and the electric band with Wah Wah Watson..... we all listened to this and talked about it. The more electric orientated guys in my class prefered the electric stuff. Well they was it, who pulled my coat to the "Headhunters". I love all 3 bands .

As a lesser known or more forgotten pianist the Germany born but in Paris living Siegfried Kessler comes to my mind. I heard him quite often in the 70´s, 80´s and he was fantastic. He became known to a wider audience when he performed with Archie Shepp, and he had it all, from more abstract avantgarde sounds to straight ahead and an incredible talent to play the blues. A most memorable concert I heard was when I heard him with Jimmy Witherspoon, Dee Dee Bridgewater. I think Dexter´s bassist David Eubanks was on bass, I forgot who was the drummer, but sure a very good one.....an unforgettable evening. And Kesslers blues styled solos with those fantastic blues singers......wow....

Thanks for you statement, and especially for opening my eyes that I might consider that the VSOP was important for me on a personal level, and that THIS can be interpretated as a most important kind of importance..... You say, that VSOP was selfconsciously retrospective and Bird and Diz on Massey Hall was not. Okay, but isn´t it usually said that Massey also was a reunion of the leaders of the 40´s playing the music they composed and recorded in that decade? Otherwise, in 1953 music had allready gone into another direction. I had this fact in mind when I wondered if VSOP could have a similar historical importance, since they also regathered for playing the stuff of the earlier decade of the 60´s. As I said in my reply to HutchFan, then and also later I thought if "Massey" was a reunion of key musicians from the 40´s in the year of 1953 when other styles were coming to importance, and I thought the same about that VSOP reunion. It must be added that especially Bird and Bud didn´t change there style much until their death, Diz also will be remembered mostly as something as the "Beethoven of Bop" , even if he did some electric stuff in the 70´s, but Herbie for example became a leading voice or electric jazz. It was just showing that they havent forgotten acoustic music when that genre was almost dead. And they didn´t just repeat material from the 60´s, there are a lot of new compositions in the VSOP albums too. And my schoolfriend nicknamed "Woody", who was the first to buy it told me: "look man, sure they had played some of those tunes allready in the 60´s but pay attention to how they have developed further. This is a much more powerful Williams , and the sound and the style of Ron Carter is much more daring , and the players go further out on certain points ....".

Well wearing something on the head that lets others supose that you are a member of a certain nation or religion always can give room for speculations..... Let´s say if he wore the turban just as a gimmick, a decoration, and it had nothing to do with sikh, most will know this, and others will think he was a sikh. When I was very young and thought I must be a bit "dizzy" just to be identified, I wore a red Fez I had bought in Tunisia, and had that Eric Dolphy type beard. Especially in summertime when I was quite tanned it happend that people in clubs asked me if I´m a muslim......

Thanks for that great review of the two BN albums of Monk. My first Monk listening was the paperbag-cover double LP of Monk, that was on sale in the 70´s. I completly agree to you about the horns on the 1947 sessions, the horns are quite weak and quite obscure players, and the tracks only of the length of 78 discs. And the recording sound is terrible. It sounds like recordings I made in the 70´s with a simple cassette recorder with one very little integrated mike. Hard to believe this was made in a professional studio. So I´m quite sure it didn´t sell well, not only because the audience still was not prepared for that kind of music and sounds, even for the increasing audience of Bird, Diz, Bud and so on. The 1948 session is very interesting, but even worse recorded, and that a bit doggish voice of Kenny Hagood sounds better on the air checks with Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron, or with Bird or Diz as a ballad feature. And it is strange to hear in D natural rather than in the usual key of A flat. The "Evidence" still is not completly developed, but all the tunes were played by Monk until the end of his career. I like the 1951 tracks with Sahib Shihab and Milt Jackson ! The trio tracks........ well I always like tracks with a horn added more. Blakey sounds a bit strange. The best early Blakey I heard is on the 1950/51 sides from Birdland live. The 1952 session is very fine. But it is astonishing, how weak the recording sound still was. 1947-52 was not the beginning of recording history, but it sounds like if the technologies used here might be from some decades earlier.....I´m not an audiophile and my hearing is not so good, I had a 20% missing since my birth and now at 62 after a playing and hearing music and loving the stronger drummers á la Elvin Jones, Philly J.J, and so on, it´s worse, even if it´s strange that I don´t turn up the volume as much as I did. Only hearing dialogs on TV, especially if there are background noises, is quite a challenge for me.....

I love all the stuff they did. I mean , during that time I was a teenager or in the early twens and sure, Freddie, Wayne, Herbie, Ron and Tony were my favourites and I had as much albums from them as possible. In 76,77 I was still at high-school and those who dug jazz like me, always talked about it and who had the record "Tempest at the Colosseum" sure would have visitors to listen to it together. Now I wonder if that all-star band shouldn´t be considered as being as important as let´s say was "Massey Hall", I mean 5 leaders of an era all together in a band. VSOP II still was very very fine, but since the Marsalis Brothers were very young men (and of course fantastic players then, but not as unique as Hubbard and Shorter), the real stellar band remains the original VSOP.

This must be interesting. I think french pianist Henry Renaud had something to do with gathering the remained bop pianists in the late 70´s. Al Haig playing Dizzy must be very interesting. I have a special impression about Al Haig. When he started with Diz, he still sounded very stiff, I mean it sounded more like exercises and didn´t really flow like let´s say Bud or Hank Jones, but later.......oh Boy what a wonderful pianist. I 1949, playing let´s say with Wardell Gray he had it all, and some of the most beautiful ballads I ever heard. Al Haig in 1977 with Dexter in France.....the thing I like most on it is Al Haig´s trio version of "Round Midnight". I heard rumours that Haig was a bit "plem plem" (like German speaking people say for someone a bit crazy), but he really had become a great , a very great pianist. But I always must laugh when I hear that early 1945 Diz and Bird at Town Hall, since the piano sounds the way I sounded when I fell in love with Bop , and as a pianist with Bud, and started to play all the bop tunes, but the solos sounded that way and when I listened back to it on tape I realized that something is wrong about it.... Bernard Purdie is a fine drummer of the 70´s. Do you know the Dizzy Gillespie album as a trio of Diz, Toots Thielemans and Bernard Purdie ? By the way, maybe I wasn´t up to date then, but in the mid seventies when I started serously to listen to jazz, the Prestige Label for me was the label of the great stars of the 50´s. I might say I got to jazz through Prestige (Miles Davis Quintets). I eventually heard that Prestige went on much longer but changed the musical direction....

The 1975 at Avery Fisher Hall was quite fine, Monk still has a lot to say and T.S. Monk is really a fine drummer. Larry Ridley plays a bowed solo in spite of the fact that Monk once stated he doesn´t like the bow that much. I know that Paul Jeffrey played a lot with Monk in his final years, as on the 1972 Vanguard also, but somehow I don´t like his tenor as much as I liked Charlie Rouse. Jeffrey tends to repeat ideas and sounds very soulful, but doesn´t have that cutting edge, the "Monkish" thing in it, that Griffin and Rouse had...... I read somewhere that Monk also played for a short time with Pat Patrick from the Sun Ra Arkestra. I would have liked to hear how that sounded. I also hope, that the 1974 and 1976 performances would be released one day. Lonnie Hillyier added to the Monk quartet sounds fine. 1976 I had become a young jazz freak but didn´t have the occasion to travel to N.Y. to hear him and he wouldn´t do Europe in his last years, so I missed to see him life. But I read a jazz magazine from that time and they wrote about the very last occasion on Monk in summer 1976 but only a short notice that they came on stage, didn´t pay no heed to the audience and played. I also have a book "New York Notes" with reviews about live events in N.Y. between 1972-75. Maybe some of you have this old book. There is also only a short notice about Monk at Avery Fisher 1975, that "he looked thin and grey and sounded more like a usual modern jazz pianist, and that the more abstract Monk gimmicks were gone...."...something like that. By the way: I never saw a photo of Monk in those years, mid seventies, On the 1971 Giants of Jazz he looks fine, and I noticed that he didn´t wear his hats or caps any more. How did he look like in 1975/76 or even later. Was he really so thin ?

Oh I see ! And not to forget his huge rings on his fingers. Some people might wonder how he could play with it, but I know how that is, since I also wear more rings than just my wedding ring

It is on a DVD of Monk in Paris (quartet), and 3 tracks Monk solo in Berlin playing Ellington. The Paris stuff is also interesting, it is one of the last occasions where Charlie Rouse played with Monk. And it shows a backstage encounter with Kenny Clarke. And at one point, Philly Joe Jones sits in. The drummer on that occasion is a very young boy, Paris Wright, the son of bassist Herman Wright. The only thing is that he seems to speed up, some tunes start at a certain tempo and than Wright starts running and it becomes faster, that´s quite disappointing. The really magic moment starts, when Monk calls Philly J.J. and Philly lifts the stage up. Then there is a very nice interview of Monk, done by french bassist Jacques Hess (who also played with Bud Powell in 1961 in Italy). Monk seems to enjoy listenig to the french commentaries of Jacques, since Monk himself knew a little French from High School. The best point is when Hess asks Monk which of his compositions he himself likes most and Monk says "I didn´t rate them!" And there is a solo version of Monk doing "Sweetheart of my dreams" with a wonderful stride piano. The last three tunes are the Berlin stuff Monk plays Ellington. Fantastic !!!!!

I saw a video or DVD of a film about Monk and Orrin Keepnews is seen and talks about Monk and says exactly, what @jazzbo posted: That it was his idea, to get Monk out of obscurity. I like the Ellington album. If I play myself "I Got it Bad", it also sounds like the Monk version because that´s how my fingers land on the keyboard. For all who like Monk playing Ellington the recordings from late 1969 at "Berliner Jazztage" are highly recommended. The Motto of the "Jazztage" was Ellington´s 70th Birthday and Monk agreed to play solo, only Ellington tunes. It´s even greater than the Riverside album, because of Monk´s fantastic left hand. That´s first class stride piano. especially on "Cararvan". It was a huge success at a late stage of he career.

I first saw him with Lou Donaldson and he really impressed me. And I saw a film from German TV about Lou Donaldson with Lonnie Smith. There was a sound check without Lou and Lonnie Smith played a very fast version of Dizzy´s "Blue´n Boogie". That was first class bop on organ !!! I didn´t know he was "only 79" when he died. When I saw him around 2000, maybe due to that strange turban and that long an weird beard he looked much older than the maybe 50+ he was at that time. And he had that really hoarse voice like Miles Davis. I saw later fotos of him with a cane, so maybe he really had been quite frail or sick for some times.

I also have this. My wife bought it for me last Chrismas, since she knew I have a lot of Diz but never saw this one in my collections. I like it mostly for the fact my wife bought it, yeah it swings and you can really close your eyes and relax listening to it. But I must also state, that it doesnt really work together Basie and Diz. First of all they didn´t seem to get a lot of common material, most of it is blues, with the excepetion of "Ow" based on Rhythm Changes. But IMHO Basie has a too spare piano style to make such a small group album. His little phrases, a note here, a note there is mighty fine with the Basie Big Band, and maybe on the Basie All Star Jams for Pablo, but here, let´s say playing a very slow blues, there is not very much happening . He even plays lesser notes than Tadd Dameron, who sometimes was critizized for is lack of pianism, but Tadd really plays stuff on the quartet album with Trane. And somehow, Ray Brown always is too loud. The cover photo...... well that´s some pseudo 70´s scene. Dizzy might have been in his late 50´s but tries to wear 70´s closes and hippie like sittin on the floor.

Me too. I still have them. Only one time I was quite angry: There was one with orange cover titled "Bird, Bud, Fats 1949" and as the drummer was listed Max Roach. I already had the CBS double album "One Night at Birdland" (Bird,Fats,Bud,Curley Russel, Art Blakey) from 1950 and thought it might be an ideal thing to hear Bird,Bud,Fats this time one year earlier with Max Roach on drums. Especially for Max Roach I bought it and then heard that it´s four tunes (one even incomplete!) that are identic with those on the CBS album. So eventually I sold that LP but kept all the others that I still have (mostly bop stuff and one Coltrane with Wilbur Harden which might have been a Savoy session...

When I was young, I bought a lot of those Musidisc LPs , and on some tunes to composer is listed as D.R., and I never knew who "D.R." is, or what that abreviaton means. You can find it for example on the LP "Tadd Dameron and Fats Navarro". By the way, on the cover it shows as "Birdland 1949", but actually it was "Royal Roost 1948). Or Bud Powell "From Birdland 1956" listed with Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, while it actually is from February 1953 with Oscar Pettiford and Roy Haynes.

He was also a great composer. There are some of his compositions on "Ghetto Lullaby" where he doen´t play (Kenny Drew is on it), but his compositions are great. Anyway, "Ghetto Lullaby" is one of my favourite Jackie McLean albums. Didn´t he also compose one tune on "Ode to Super", that one where Jackie McLean sings ?

I already mentioned this, but didn´t have the time to listen to it until Monday and Tuesday (after I got it as a present from my wife for our 25th wedding anniversary). What can I say ? It´s the best VSOP stuff I ever heard. And I love that VSOP, in my opinion it can be compared with "Massey Hall 1953" since it also is an absolute top gathering of the very best musicians of the acoustic era from the mid sixties on. To have Freddie, Wayne, Herbie, Ron and Tony together in a group and to witness this when they toured, was some of the greatest musical experiences in my live. Each of them my absolute favourites of that style. When it started 1976,77 I was still at high school and the jazz fans in my school (there was lot of them) discussed it and we changed experiences and albums (I was the first to purchase "Tempest in the Coloseum"). Highly recommended !!!!

Sadik Hakim is also on Dexter´s first recordings for Savoy in 1945. His playing there is very similar to the sides for Bird from the same year. About his playing: Since the Bird sides were about the first bop I heard when I was around 15, I heard the Sadik Hakim piano solos also. But my impression is, that Hakim maybe at that early stage of his career didn´t know how to play bop properly. It sounds like someone, who until that point played other music, maybe classical music and tried to keep up with the "new sounds of bop" without really understanding what´s bop about. People then thought bop is weird and so on, but hear Bird or Diz or Fats or Bud, and it flows, it has that beauty in it and tells us a story. When I myself started to try to play that music, it sounded very similar to what Hakim did, without wanting to sound that way. When I listened back on tape recorder, what I had played before on piano, I was shocked. It sounded like chromatic exercises in a stiff collard way to play syncopes. Like if a classical pupil has to play cromatic scales under severe looks of those oldish ladies who used to give piano lessons (I quit after a few times, when I was a kid, cause that was not "music" for me). It was frustrating: I heard "Bouncing with Bud", would memorize to line and the chords, but it sounded like a copy of Sadik Hakim when I played it. Ugly, with eccessiv use of descenting cromatic lines and stiff. Until someone (I think it was Allan Praskin) told me: "Read the title: BOUNCING with Bud. Do you know what a bounce is ?". That helped me very much. If I listen to a tape of what I played when I was a teenager, I have to laugh a lot now.....

I love it. And Benny Green, yeah ! Hank is so fantastic , I love to hear his solos, each aspect of it, and the nice quotes from other songs. Never heard a better version of "Lullaby at Birdland" than this one. And Benny Green, really nice to hear, as Dex said once: The very very.......slippery ......trombonist ..... Benny Green ! The only downer for me is the Gene Krupa like drumming of Charles Persip. Well, he was a big band drummer, but hear it is uncomfortable to hear that old fashioned use of the bass drum so you almost can´t hear the bassist. So, while Hank is so hip, that rhythm section with a Gene Krupa like drumming really sounds stiff and does not support the soloists, but forces them to keep in a certain direction. In my case, I try to avoid to listen to this drum style, but its hard for me since a band is as good as the drummer is.......