Gheorghe

It really is. I saw him with Kirk Lightsey in ianuarie at Porgy´s , together with Paul Zauner. Anyway the record is on Paul´s label PAO records. Had a long conversation with Kirk after the gig, wonderful musician and wonderful man....

Hello Friends ! My favourite drummer here in Austria ist the great Dusan Novakov. Reading on Wikipedia with whom he played reads like a Who is Who dictionary. I love him, he thrills me, he is a very special friend and........last not least, my own drummer since last autumn. Some month ago he gave me his CD from the PAO Label : "Tales" is a wonderful album with some of my favourite tunes, stuff like a very remarcable "Fables of Faubus", some Wayne Shorter tunes, the rare "The Best Thing For You", a stunning "Embraceable You" and the musicians envolved in that projekt also include the great Kirk Lightsey, who is on three tunes of the album.

Sure, Doug Watkins was solid, but I heard much more bass virtuose solo from Chambers, who could play horn-like solos and he was my first idol when I started to play some bass, 50+some years ago..... My first Doug Watkins hearing was on some Coltrane recordings with Wilbur Harden and when it comes to the bass solo spot, he just walked on like comping, didn´t play a "solo" so I was a bit disappointed. But let´s say, I might see it else now.

I loved him and I think the Montmatre Collection ,I mean that Dexter Gordon album with that faster version of Like Someone in Love, is my favourite Dexter recording, BECAUSE of Tootie !!! Sorry I never heard the Heath Brothers.....

Dear friends, I´m back after 17 days in Dominican Republic, and since I don´t post only from at home, but also from another place (other e-mail-adress) I always could log in with my nick and my password, and now the system want´s my mai adress and my password, I don´t understand that, how can I do log in as usual from any PC ?

Oh so sorry, I had wonderful conversations with him.

Always love to hear Bud playing Round Midnight, mostly at Birdland on the CBS recordings "One Night at Birdland" and "Summit Meeting at Birdland", And a fantastic trio version is on the ESP record "At Blue Note Café" in Paris. And one of the most moving performances is I think on a Danish video, fantastic version, and Bud seems to flirt with a young girl in the audience while playing it....

Funny, I would have said the same. I bought them both in the late 70´s at the old "Radio Kratz" on Maria Hilfer Strasse , and still love them most.

"better with horns" camp......sounds interesting. then I also might have been fallen into that camp, as early as I have been listening to jazz. My first records were Miles Quintet and Mingus Quintet and the first pianists I liked were Garland in the Davis band and Byard in the Mingus band. Even the first Bud I ever heard was with Bird and Fats so it´s natural that I miss something if there is no horns. Chances to hear OP with horns exist mostly from the Pablo Years, I have that Eddie Lockjaw disc with OP, well I also have Jaws with Tommy Flanagan and it´s natural that I like it more with Flanagan. Erol Garner I heard also first with a horn, no one less than Bird when I first heard "Cool Blues", and I have one Erol Garner album "Up in Errolls Room" which has a pick up horn section. Also most Bud Powell I have is with horns : Blue Note with Fats and Rollins, and one with Curtis Fuller, and one with Dexter Gordon, one with Blakeys Messengers, one with Hawk, with Griff I think, with Don Byas that´s what I think I have.....

Well, maybe some analysis of mine is too critical, but that´s because I admire Bud Powell so much and took the best from him to learn something about the piano and still do. It also has to do with my listening habits. I can´t just listen to some good piano lines and blend out the rest, I mean it doesn´t need to have good sound quality since I´m not an audiophile and after 50years of playing on stage my hearing is quite f....ed up. But what I need is a good performance or session where all the others involved contribute to the music: In a trio the drummer and a good bass player, in group performances .....well I like them most..... Starting from the very very first moment I heard Bud at the piano (the Birdland 1950 stuff with Bird and Fats, Curley Russell and Art Blakey), I got my standards to reach that level I hear on that recording, technically and musically. So, if you ask me about post 1958 recordings......let me see: 1959 with Art Blakey´s jazz messengers ! 1960 Essen Festival, trio and quartet with Hawk. A trio performance with Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clark at Blue Note Café Paris, with very good drumming Sideman performance with Dexter Gordon in Paris, Tribute to Cannonball with Don Byas, to a lesser amount "Blues for Bouffemont", Bud still has something to say, but is a bit slowed down, but good Art Taylor.

I would like Bud Plays Bird, it has some great moments, but there is two things that I had observed. First of all, there is some tunes Bud never played, and it seems that the label had given him sheets for Bb-instruments, which is especially true on typical Bb tunes, if Bud plays them in C. Though there are great moments, it does not really catch the spirit of Bird or of Bop in general. Art Taylor seems to be on autopilot, you don´t hear interesting drum patterns, and even if the bass is ok, if a drummer is not doin his stuff, there aint much left for me to listen..... Another point: Did you hear the Bud album where at least a half album ist done with Curtis Fuller ? I like the Fuller tracks very much, but almost hate the side with the trio tracks only. It´s really some boring stuff, a slow blues but not as strong as another blues on another album, some workman type medium tempo stuff, where Bud completly f...cks up the bass solos by Paul Chambers. You can comp a bit for the bassist when he soloes, but here it sounds like Bud want´s to destroy Paul Chambers´ solos. And the worst thing is a faster tune based on "Strike Up the Band".....but it is not even a tune, it is just runnin´ on that changes without any theme and it´s a wild cacophony, since nothing seems to work out ......

Very interesting to read about the listening preferences in your country. Yes, I can imagine it sold well in Japan, I have heard there were tea houses where they spinned a lot of hard bop, things like "Cool Struttin" by Sonny Clark and "Blues Walk" by Lou Donaldson were big hits in your country and "Cleopatra´s Dream" is a similar thing. Toshiko Akioshi is a top musician and we musicians have another situation like the avarage listener. We have learned a great deal of our knowledge about bop by listening to let´s say Bud Powell, but never had the ambition to collect each record and at least for a musician "Cleopatra´s Dream" does not offer much to do, it´s just a repeated phrase and the bridge does not offer much variation, so if we might play it with horns , with a good drummer and so on, we can "swing it" but there is very very little space to create something out of it. Same with "Danceland" or "Duid Deed" or what they are called. There is also an F-minor tune at up tempo, but it´s the same changes like Dizzy´s "Be Bop" and you can do much more with Dizzy´s tune with that tricky intro and so on, and as rhythmic pattern for drummers, than the more simple tune on "The Scene Changes". A pro pos: That title tune is quite weak, it is a bop tune in E-flat but only a far cry from "Wail". If I wanna play a Bud tune in E-flat we gonna play "Wail". The RCA records.----- well I never heard the Lullaby to a Beliver. I heard the happy stride tune on "Scene Changes" but it´s only an 8 bar pattern, repeated ad infinitum. Hear Bud doin´stride on "Nice Work" or on "Thou Swell and so on" or on some Monk tune, much better. I don´t know so much about Bud´s every day live, but at least from what I read in Peter Pullmann´s book the late 50´s was a very unhappy period for him. Hard to get gigs, after the "Birdland ´56" tour ended, he tried to sit in with Lester Young but it was not very successful, and there was very little occasions to perform in night clubs and if he did, I think he didn´t see a Cent, everything was "administrated" by Goodstein or later by Buttercup. He was not a free man.

I don´t know what reissue mine was, I had bought it in FL in 1999 at some shopping mall in Miami. I don´t think it was a RVG, it was older, but a CD and sounded fine. But more important for me is the music itself. I knew a guy who always did spin "Sidewinder" which I never did like as much as "Search for a New Land".... I consider it on a much higher musical level than "Sidewinder", which somehow bored me a little.....

"Shape of Jazz To Come" ......this is the one that has "Lonely Woman", is it ? That tune was the absolut favourite of my mother in her very last years, she died only a month short of her 102nd Birthday last year. She loved that tune and at least in her mid to late 90´s she still was movin around and loved a little wooden bench near a brook and told me "tell them burgermasters or who it is, to name that bench officially "Ornette Coleman Bench"..... My own experience with Ornette Coleman had started with "Empty Foxhole" and "Crisis" in the early 70s. When I finally found "Jazz to Come'" it sounded more like a straight ahead thing and I didn´t understand why critics or publics called that "Free Jazz" which it definitly isn´t . I was very open for Free Jazz from the very start of my listening to jazz......

The "Scene Changes" is at least for me a bit of a strange album, it has a very narrow range of moods, most tunes are medium tempo minor tunes, very similar to the style of Sonny Clark. And though Art Taylor could play very fine drums, he is pure and simple too subdued for my taste here. It sounds like a monotonic, quite metronomic brushing, there could have been done much more rhythmically, and that´s the quintessence of bop or hard bop. Bud Powell in Paris has a good drum sound, but a drummer who just doesn´t fit to Bud. It should be Kenny Clark who also lived in Paris, but Kansas Field is not really a drummer who fits to the bop tunes. I think the best tunes on this are "Little Benny" which actually is "Crazeology", and "Reets and I", and "Jordu", but on "Dear Old Stockholm" he busted the form, on "Parisian Thoroughfare" he is not really in demand. The two ballads are very fine !

I still thought a book is a book which i read..... Well about language barrier. Yeah, you said it. I can talk easily with musicians as preparing for a gig and even make the announcements in English and mostly learned English by reading liner notes, and later jazz books. But if it´s about every day´s live I´m lost quickly. It´s all about music that I can exprime in words....... Anyway, I know three European languages, German, one latin-derived language and one uralic language, so now past 60 it may be harder to be sure in non-jazz English 😉

Such a wonderful collection. This is really the school of bop. If you have Bird´s Savoy or Dial sessions and Dizzy´s RCA records, I think you have the basis to learn the bop language. At least in my case it was so, but that RCA collection did not exist 45-50 years ago. I think there was a black white cover LP with the later RCA sessions from 1949 with "Land of Oo Bla Dee" and so on. Also interesting the Victor session with all the leading musicians of bop or cool (a trumpet section consiting of Diz, Fats, Miles......just incredible....)

You are right, he obviously starts heading into the bridge after only one A-part but recovers quickly. Funny thing, such a common tune but I have played it only once last year when a singer wanted to sit for 2 tunes and one of it was "Speak Low". Well it´s a very easy tune, so I could comp on it without ever havin seen a sheet, but the girl that sang also wanted another key, so thats what we must be prepared for, you got it or you haven´t got it. I must admit that I also sometimes have busted the form of a song, mostly when I was younger and the music maybe overwhelmed me so I lost the form, I´m ashame of it but it did happen..... About Sonny Clark: Well I ´m not a collector and not an audiophile , but I like this album very much (but I think I had bought it mostly because of Trane) , and of course "Cool Struttin´" . I also had bought once the trio album I don´t know the title, it has Philly Joe Jones on it and maybe that was the main reason. I spinned it once and was lookin´ forward hearing a fine long version of that fine Dizzy uptempo tune "Be bop" but was disappointed since Clark just doesn´t do anything with his left hand. I mean I don´t want a piano player who bangs into all them keys at once but even if you play such a horn line like the impro of "be bop" it doesn´t hurt if a pianist also thinks a bit like a percussionist, you can fill in interesting rhythmic patterns with the left, not just lay it out and have only the bass playing the bass line. From Bud´s disciples many took only his right hand, and became "one handed pianists", but Powell also had built up on what Tatum had left, and also Monk works with both hands. I think I also have some albums where Clark is a sideman, it could be with Dexter or so..... But "Cool Struttin" is just my idea of a perfect hard bop album, though I listen much much more to the whole thing than to the piano itself....

in your book ? You wrote a book ?

A lot of big names from what was considered the young generation, when I was young myself. But strange the cover. It looks like those old abstract coverarts that were on a lot of late 40´s early 50´s albums from BN, Prestige, Verve...... It took me much time to fully appreciate the MJQ. When I was young, it sounded to quiet, to chamber music like for me. But some of my confusion when I started to listen to jazz was my complete lack of jazz history knowledge. "Modern Jazz" I thought is Freejazz, post Free and Rock/Funk-Jazz, so when I became curious and asked someone to spinn that "Modern Jazz Quarted" I was disappointed since it didn´t sound "modern" to me. Now I love some of their records, but not so much if it goes to much into Bach or Rokoko or how you call it..... I don´t know why but Miles sure is one of the musicians from whom I have more than 5 records, maybe 10 or even 15, but somehow I never wanted to buy this, maybe I was not sure, I had or have Miles Smiles, Filles de Kilijmanjaro, Silent Way from the 60´s , and maybe I thought that Sorcerer might be something "in between" , I mean not such a landmark like Filles or Silent, which make the transition to electric, or "Smiles" as the quintessence of the acoustic quintet from the 60´s.

This and "Drum Ode" are the only ECM albums I have. I was crazy about Lieb and tried to hear him as often as I could, since I had heard him with Miles. That flute solo on "Ife" in those years 73/74 was outstanding. I think I love "Drum Ode" even more than "Lookout Farm", but "Lookout Farm" was not only the album, it was the touring group that we heard in the mid 70´s after Lieb had left Miles.

Archie Shepp ?

Brings a lotta memories back. I was in the middle of it, combining my love for acoustic jazz with a growing interest in fusion, and as a musician......"doin´both".

@Dan Gould : Wonderful fotos, and I have the albums they did in the same year for Steeple Chase, also recorded live in Netherlands. @soulpope I don´t remember the incident, I think I remember it was Lou Levy on piano. I wouldn´t say I am Art Pepper´s biggest fan, I like some of those from late 70´s to early 80´s but not all , but at least he inspired me to include for a short period "Your´s My Heart Only" in setlists. I´m not Mr. Right and love Bird, Fats, Woody Shaw and almost all musicians that where drug victims, but for me they have at least something symphatic. I can hear Art Pepper, but I can´t look at him, he has .....I don´t know what, but that sly or silly grinnin´ I don´t like. One of the most hidous pictures is that where they all where those Art Pepper Quartet T-Shirts, and it looks like they all pissin´ and Art Pepper has that ugly face he had.....

I have heard it somewhere, I remember the title tune is something in the style of Silver´s "The Preacher", but I think this LP was lesser known. From the 50´s I only have "Blowing Sessions" two albums on one double LP, it is the thing with Trane and Mobley, and a Clifford Jordon record with Sun Ra´s saxophonist John Gilmore. I think I also remember or have read, that the "Congregation" is too short for an LP...... Strange thing with Blue Note and with Lou Donaldson .....after 1970. As you know I have been a fan since the 70´s but somehow I never got a real feeling for what BN did in that period. All those records (and it seems they were not so much sold or seeked after in Vienna) somehow were the same, a lot of instruments, and quite thin stuff at least for my ears. I love a lot of BN albums from the earlier decades and we knew LD from his recordings with Monk, Horace Silver and Art Blakey, and his own "Blues Walk" , but I think he was not very much touring in the 70´s , the first time I heard him live was in the 80´s and that was mighty fine..... My impression was, that other labels had more interesting 70´s years jazz, like CBS, Atlantic or what you call them. If BN wanted to sell us electric jazz, rock jazz, I think CBS with electric Miles was much better on that, and others like Headhunters or RTF were much better and more interesting than those many "one kind of style 70´s BN recordings". Once I did a mistake and bought a LD BN album from 1974 and after listening one side it landed in the garbage can, the only time I did something like that with a record.....