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I think I remember his name. The 90´s was a strange period. I think many very good players came around, but years later you must ask what ever happened to them ? Wasn´t Gary Thomas on saxophone on Miles´s last group in the last year of his live 1991 ? Didn´t know about Herbie Hancock dissing musicians like that. I always had the impressions Hancock is one of the most articulate and nicest guys in jazz history.....

I love them all, they are superb, and I have them all, but maybe "The Prisoner" is the one that fascinates me most.

Does he still play ! He is one of the most exiting bassists from the 60´s on. Love his playing on many classic BN from the more advanced level.....

Those Uncle Poe´s live sets are really treasures !

Wasn´t he the official "leader" of the Paris Reunion Band ? Must have been a gas that band, never heard them. They were booked for a 3 days festival in the mid 80´s but I had only tickets for the first two days so I missed their show. Wasn´t it Nathan Davis as the leader, Woody Shaw, Dizzy Reece, Johnny Griffin, and at least on the first gigs even Kenny Clarke ? This must have been an allstar band and I don´t know why there are no records, something like that might be historic, unique......

One of the real great innovators. When I grew up, Free Jazz was still quite in action and Cecil Taylor together with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry sure was one of the most important leaders of that great movement. His music is harder to understand than Ornette and Don Cherry, but if you get into it, it will thrill you.

I´m from Austria, so that´s also a german speaking country, though we have another accent than especially people from Northern Germany. Austrian , especially Viennese style cookin is quite famous and many tourists are visiting our country and enjoy our restaurants. Once, my wife and me made a holiday-visit to a small town in Northern Germany, where we visited some friends. We really had fun, especially if we went to restaurants and if it´s about food, ingredients and some beverages we have other expressions for them than the german people, much to the delightment of the locals . They really "studied" our funny expressions, we have other words for a lot of things that really sounds funny to them but they love it, especially since there are many Germans comin to Austria on holiday, but very few Austrians goin to lesser frequented northern german towns. So even one year later when we came back, they recognized us as those "funny Austrian people". The shop were my wife asked for a plastic bag and she said in the austrian manner "Sackerl" and the woman said " a .... what?........ you mean a "Tuetchen". The next year she recognized us as those who say "Sackerl". In Germany we ordered "Viennese Schnitzel" and they served it with mushroom sauce and french frieds, quite unusual for austrians, but we loved it. They had Schnitzel with mushroom sauce or with some picant sauce and that was "Schnitzel Hunter´s style" or "Schnitzel Gipsy Style". When the waiter asked "What kind of Schnitzel" I said "make a Hunter out of it...." and everybody laughed, they never heard that...... Wow.......... never thought I´d ever write on a non-jazz topic.........

Want to tell you we had the pleasure to play .... among other stuff......Con Alma with a wonderful trumpet player who knows and plays many many tunes from that era, Con Alma was a highlight, and he knows all those arrangements. Other great moments were Manteca, Ornithology, Groovin´ High and many others, and he has very beautiful, soft sound, so you hear that Dizzy stuff with a mellow trumpet sound, like if Chet Baker would have done a set of Dizzy compositions, or Diz himself at a later stage of his career when he played softer and more in the middle register. I´m lookin forward playing again with that wonderful trumpet player.....

Great ! Almost forgot how good it is ! Once I got to play with a group that was very very much orientated in that kind of style. I wouldn´t play that stuff every day but it´s great how people are happy if you play that....

Thank you all for your kind and very constructive replies ! Yes, I´m sure it makes sense to start from a more historical point, like Mingus´s 50s and 60´s outputs. In my own case my first real listening experience was the Mingus with Dolphy and Jakie Byard from Paris 1964, that was a 3 LP set . I liked it from the first hearing, and it was one of my first records I had, the first was Davis´ Steamin´. Imagine, I had read about Bird from the liner notes of Davis´ album and after I heard "Parkeriana" from the Mingus set I really became interested in Bird also. So in my case I started from a quite advanced stage of Mingus´ music with all them tempo changes, dissonant sounds and everything, but I don´t thing I´d be a good example, I always wanted to "study" what I was listening to, and I think my friend is more the kind of person who may enjoy some stuff but wouldn´t listen to it as a musician listens to. Anyway I ´ll give him other records , Mingus, some Miles, some Blakey Messengers as you mentioned it. I remember a person who was not a jazz buff but was crazy about "Moanin´" and "Blue March", playing it over and over again at a very high volume.......

Saw him once in 1983 with that great quartet with Michel Petrucciani, Palle Danielsen I think and the young drummer Sunship. I also have the album they did for Electra Musician shortly after his comeback. But I think he had the most succes just before I became interested in jazz. When I started to study all that music and heard all the day long Miles, Mingus, Trane, Ornette and all of them, I didn´t really know about Charles Llyod but guys maybe 5 , 6 years older were from that flower power generation when Charles Llyod was something like a hero, best selling jazz artist or very near to it. I got to spin two of his albums from the 60s with quite straight ahead stuff, with the great group Keith, McBee, Jack DeJohnette. I liked them though I must say if I want to hear something from the 60´s I listen more to Trane, to Joe Henderson, Sam Rivers, Wayne Shorter .

A request I got from a stunnig beautiful lady was "When I fall in Love". I think I never played it better...... Otherwise, I like to play bop and if there´s a hip audience and a guy wants to hear our rendition of a certain tune, I remember one guy from the audience wanted "In Walked Bud" so I like requests of that kind.

One of my all time favourites. Maybe the first listening experience besides the classic Ornette Coleman stuff was his playing with Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Henry Grimes in 1963 in Europe. Wonderful drummer. And I saw and heard him life at least two times. One time it was with George Coleman Quartet, with Hilton Ruiz, Ray Drummond and Billy Higgins. But the most powerful thing I heard, and I tell you one thing, it was one of the very very best concerts I ever was blessed to witness, it was an all star band led by Jackie McLean, with Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Lewis and Billy Higgins. I remember it as if it would have been yesterday: The first tune was a very extended version of "Blue ´n Boogie" with everybody soloing, and after a very interesting somehow very percussive bass solo from Mr. Lewis Billy Higgins started his solo with a powerwork starting on the snare I never heard something as sharp and hip and powerful as this solo. A second huge solo spot for Higgins was on Salt Peanuts.......,

I have them both but bought the Mini-Lp-format Japanese BN, many years ago. Wonderful albums like all of Freddie´s albums..... I noticed that Blue Spirits as a very very strange amplified sound of the bass. It sounds almost like a boosting synti bass. But still enjoyful to hear, even if I doubt it was the original sound. Strange thing on two of those reissues then. Two of them have that strange bass sound: Blue Spirits, and Dizzy Reece "Sounding off" . I haven´t noticed that on other items and I have dozens of them......

But not his last recorded documents. I think the very last "recorded" Monk was 1975 the quartet with Paul Jeffrey, Larry Ridley and Monk jr. . One year later Monk performed for the last time but I don´t think it was recorded.

But all of them ar good. Though for me BN means the period from late 40s (the Monk, Bud, Fats stuff etc.) the 50´s (all that Hard Bop ) and 60´s until maybe 1970 (hard bop, a few of the better boogaloo, and of course more advanced stuff´). When I started to be aware of jazz, BN was something like a magic word for me, though it was the worst time for that label I think. At least in Europe many classics were OOP, and I remember I went to a record shop where the LPs were sorted by Label Name. I hurried to the BN section but to my embarassment there was no artist I might know, most of it seemed to be grossly overproduced mid 70´s studio stuff. Once I bought by mistake a Lou Donaldson album from 1974 and after one painful listening experience I threw it away...., I wanna say : Nothing against 70´s electric jazz, but not that kind.

Right. But as good as Bob Cranshaw is and I think he must have been part of the dream team of many sessions, nevertheless I dare to say, that he is mostly on the more "straight ahead" sessions from the label´s 60s period. Let´s say: Albums like "Idle Moments" and so on they are wonderful music, timeless beautiful things, but from a certain point of view I´d pay more attention to the more advanced efforts, stuff that maybe did not sell as well as "Idle" "Sidewinder" "Song For My Father" and so on, but more the stuff men like Wayne Shorter, like Sam Rivers, like Andrew Hill would make, or the Jackie McLean projects with Graham Moncur III , and so on. Bob Cranshaw was steady and very very fine, but Ron or Richard Davis or some of those guys would fit better into the more advanced stuff. Joe Chambers he was very very good and is a very sharp drummer and would push the music. There were other drummers who never did exite me really, though they good and steady, Al Harwood had a good timing, but he would not exite me......., other stuff with Tony, with Elvin, with.... yeah ...Joe Chambers.......

Though he made many BN albums under his own name, I want to mention Joe Henderson: After listening to some BN-albums from the second great decade of that label (60´s), I noticed again, that his presence as a sideman would create most exiting moments on albums where he was a "sideman". This is the case on his solo on Hancock´s "The Prisoner". I think this highly emotional solo is the highlight of that tune, that album...... And on "McCoy Tyner´s" 1967 album "the real Mc Coy" I think I paid most attention to his playing. And "Unity" with Larry Young......, and all those others , with Andrew Hill that one from 1963 I forgot the title but it´s fantastic, all the stuff with Kenny Dorham, just fantastic what this great musician did........, one of the giants......

It´s hard to say that, I think. So many "sidemen" made their own albums under their own names, using the leader of another album as "sideman". So ..... this was the "Blue Note Family", right ? I would have said Art Taylor. But he also made an album under his name. Maybe James Spaulding, I think he is on some very substantial albums but as much as I know he didn´t record under his own name for the label.

Incredible ! Such a great drummer. It seems strange to me that I had heard him only one time live, a few years ago with his own quartet, but though he had played with almost everybody, I don´t remember that i would have seen him in other seetings. He was fantastic in any style from the 40´s on, with Lester, Bird, Bud, with Trane......

I must admit the name Marcus Belgrave occurred for me the first time on that vocal version of Duke Ellington´s Sound of Love on Changes, he was an additional trumpet and the singer was Jackie Paris. Jack Walrath..... I think he may have had quite a hard time at the beginning. And he was not allowed much solo spot on Changes. But later he became a very very much involved member of the band. I still remember his fantastic trumpet work on "For Harry Carney". "For Harry Carney" is played at a slower and softer pace on "Changes" but became a tour de force on most of the Mingus Concerts we could witness. Very often it was the first tune of a set, and it was so exiting, each soloist had a spot where he played only with the drums, I mean sections where the bass laid out. Dannie Richmond, fantastic ! I ´ll never forget those hot versions of "Harry Carney". Usually the band played this, and "Fables of Faubus" and "Sue´s Changes" (also from the Changes album), and sometimes if it was a longer set, they might add a fast "Remember Rockefeller at Attika" (later titled Just for Laughs). And on the last tour in Europe (I can speak only bout European concerts) they still had "Harry Carney" in the book, usually as the first tune, and then they played much better versions of "Cumbia" and "Three or Four Shades" than the overproduced studio albums.....

This one is great. Though Brew Moore was heavily influenced by Lester Young I always thought he´s original enough and as much saxophone he played he could stand his own from the forties on. I love the stuff he did with Machito together with Howard McGhee, the legendary live sessions with Miles and J.J.Johnson, with Bird himself and his role in Europe. Here I like very much the tracks from Stockholm. I think all of it was done torwards the very end of his live, but he still plays fantastic. But he was a difficult man, and his "offending the audience" as you can hear him say something between two tunes, was legendary.

Yes that´s possible. I think in one of the biographies about Mingus (I think it was the one written by Brian Priestley) Dannie Richmond is quoted as saying some words about the album, that it was done just after he came back into the band and though it´s obvious that Mingus was not in full action on that album, Dannie was so kind to tell the press, that he thinks it was his own fault that the album didn´t come off that well. I have not seen the Mingus bands from the early 70s, but I think from 1975 the bands were really powerful, first the one with Adams/Puller, and then the one with Ricky Ford and Bob Neloms. But between Pullen and Neloms at least for a short time was Danny Mixon, I think that´s the band that did Europe in ´76....., one year later it was Neloms .....

It´s natural that I like very much Mingus 70´s work, which is natural that was the time we heard him...., But "Changes 1 /2" I would say would set the pace for the tour programm. Sue´s Changes was part of every show. On Mingus Moves it sounds that the group still had not arrived. If I remember well, the trumpet player still was not Walrath, it was somone else less known. And what I miss most is that though Dannie Richmond had just returned , you don´t have the famous drums bass interaction. The Don Pullen Composition "New Comer" is the best work. I hard them perform it after Mingus´ death.

I don´t remember where I did read it, but somewhere it was reported that Mingus performed it even much later, maybe mid 70´s and went as far as even doing some dance steps along with it, and that heavy as he was, his feet were really fast...... Excerps from Isabel´s Table Dance appeard also on other occasions, I think I remember he inserted parts of it on "Fables of Faubus", mostly on "Right Now at the Jazzworkshop".