Gheorghe

Well it´s nice, I think I remember there is a nice waltz on it. But yeah, I have not spinned it for decades. If I want to hear early Rollins, it´s always the "Saxophone Collossus" or maybe the BN with Thelonious Monk and J.J. Johnson, and above all the trio at the Vanguard. Woody Shaw is one of my very favourites and I loved to hear him live, that´s why I´m so happy about the many live rrecordings that came out in the last few years. Normally I´m not interested in any non-musical relations, but I was astonished, that Woody looks much heftier on that picture than when I heard him, he was very very slim and dapper.....

What a wonderful story about how it was. I also remember when it came out. I had seen Miles Davis for the first time in 1973 and those Corky McCoy covers were legendary, the covers of Bitches Brew, Live Evil, On the Corner, Live in Concert and so. But 1976, 77 and so on was also a time of sadness and sorrow for us kids, since we had heard that Miles doesn´t play or record anymore, and the fact, that the then brand new "Water Babies" album in spite of the "Electric Miles related cover art" had "old" music from the pre Bitches Brew era, betraied that fact. But of course the music is ideal for those who have "Filles" and "Silent Way"..... I think I have it on a Prestige 2 LP album which I bought in the 70´s. As much as I remember the strongest tune was that "There´s no business like show business". That´s really a long theme, just try to keep the song form in mind and play on it, really a challenge. All those things that was my most substantial "learning phase". Though, I think there are two ultra fast tunes at the end, and with "ultra fast" I mean faster than Bird´s "Cherokee" or Dizzys "Salt Peanuts" or "Dizzy Atmoshpere", and honestly speakin´ though it is super artistic saxophone playing, just from the musical impression it is hardly enjoyable. Anyway I think it´s no written line but is based on other fast songs , if I remember right one basesd on Cherokee and one based on "The Way you look tonight" but I´m not sure, I have not heard it for many decades..... On which album was the two vocals with Earl Coleman ? (Two Different Worlds" and "My Ideal" I think I remember).

It´s so long time ago, they are 37 and 35... Well one thing is sure: I have two " boys" and there age difference is 1,5 years, my former wife and me wanted to have ´em with not much age difference so we might don´t have get back to that sleepless hours much later. So it was quite slick. When that marriage broke up after just 2,5 or 3 years, it was my then wife who started to wander around and I stayed quite much with the kids, which was cool enough allthough I ´m not sure if I was the most ideal father if it comes to "education". Anyway I love them and they give me the feeling that they love me just because I was the "dad" I was....... But honestly, I never had the urge to get back into that routine again. If another woman would have wanted a kid with me, I might have quitted. I have two , and that´s it.

Yes. that´s also my opinion. Well from his contemporaries I also like Buster Williams very much. He also has that strong sound, but another kind of solo playing. So, in the times I began to see live jazz those two bassists were mostly in demand. And Carter with VSOP is some of the best things I ever heard.......,

As much as I remember, they played some Mingus stuff also on that gig, since it was shortly after Mingus´death. But I think I have that Earth Beams also. Maybe on that is that Dannie Richmond composition...... I´m not a good collector, just pickin´ up some here and some there......, nowadays I purchase more stuff from the musicians I play with, them their albums and it´s good stuff.

Just a thought: As the title of the topic is "Woody in the LP Era". Did he really live long enough to get much involved in the CD Era ? I think the last time I saw him on stage (strangly enough not with the Herd, but with an all star combo of I think 8 players, among them Buddy Tate, Scott Hamilton, Al Cohn, Jimmy Bunch I think was on piano......, Woody played a lotta fine clarinet), and I think this was at the very end of his career. I´m not sure if I saw many CD´s then, it might have been around 1985/86......., at least the later Woody Herman albums I had purchased all was LPs.........

Is this the one that has Don Pullen´s Double Arc Jake on it ? I´m not sure which is which, I have heard them live in 1980 at TU and have some of their albums, one is that of that black dressed misterious lady on the cover, the other might be Earthbeams, and I´m sure on one of them is that Don Pullen tune, one of my favourites. I think on some of them there is also a Danny Richmond composition that sounds like some Carribian Islands holiday music, really a beautiful thing...., they are so strong and Danny Richmond is among my very favourite drummers. He had an increasingly strong role in the later 70´s Mingus bands. One of his trademarks was that china cymbal, oh I love every aspect of his drumming.

So, would you have preferred that another bass player would have taken the bass chair after Chambers, in Miles´ Second Quintet ? Who would it have been ?

Well sure I know that. But it´s something with that piece that just doesn´t open it for me. Somehow it sounds more abstract, it´s the same with some 1954 recordings I heard of Mingus, somehow they don´t move me, it sounds more "cold" for my ears. And I mean, I wouldn´t perform it. On the other hand, I ´m sure I will include "Love Bird" for a live gig...... By the way there was another thing based on "What Is This Thing Called Love" done by Mingus, I think it was on the UCLA 1965 performance, not one of my favourite recordings, it is titled something like "Ode to Diz and Bird" and my have some strong moments, but the "Ode to Diz and Bird" that I like most is that "Parkeriana" with a collage of Dizzy´s "Ow" and a potpourrie of Bird and Diz songs in the bridge, most impressive the "If I should loose you" section, where Dolphy really sounds very Birdlike. That´s a wonderful thing with all them tempo changes, and all that power. The "UCLA" performance, not the played music nor the compositions are as strong as "Townhall April 1964", "The Great Concert of Mingus", "Right Now" "Mingus at Monterey" and "My Favourite Quintet" ......, I think this was a very very creative period.....

It´s strange that if you look at three white mega junkies (Chet, Art Pepper, Doug Raney) it´s so evident that something´s wrong with them, it´s that insane look, those sick eyes and somehow almost lookin like a homeless. While other live long junkies (Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw) didn´t look like junkies. Maybe there takeins was more in a controlled manner. I mean I met both Joe and Woody and the were very articulate, classy gentlemen......

Well I only saw the album cover. Oh yeah, those overdubs, I think on the America LP I had (that was a French label that had issued most of the Mingus related or Mingus led American records from the 50´s to 1970. I didn´t know about overdubbing when I was a kid and heard this and have had one of the best experiences of my early live hearing it, I just heard the bass of Mingus, maybe overdubbed since it sounded stronger, and Mingus was my hero, anyway, he was the first jazz Musician I heard on record and live, so it didn´t mean so much to me. I later heard it was overdubbed but imagine, those two records "Massey Hall" and "Bud Powell Trio" (from the same date) where among my treasures, I never bought another copy I think....... A real milestone for us kids when it came out or someone of the older kids had purchased it. That strong ostinato bass line , I think played in unison with Joe Zawinuls organ, that sounded so great. Each kid that at least could finger four strings on guitar or bass, played that line . Just a wonderful record, I still have the LP somewhere. Thanks for sharing, I´m gonna listenin´to it again, to dig back into my own past....

I have them both but I think I had spinned the Monk album much more than the "Moving Out". I´m not sure on which , maybe on Moving out Thelonious is more sideman, can it be "More than you know"? Somehow I think I didn´t spin much of Rollins pre "Saxophone Collossus" .

Never saw it with a cover like this, with individual photos of the musicians. What means "complete". Did they play more tunes than the track list of the I think 6 tunes with Bird´n Diz and the some trio tunes (actually, on the trio album it´s mixed with tracks from Birdland ) . The only thing I also have is from the same year late spring some stuff at Birdland where Diz and Bird together with Candido on some tunes sit in with the regular Bud Powell trio (I think it is tracks like Cheryl, Woody´n You and Salt Peanuts or so.,.....)

Oh, alcool is a devil. When I was young I also drank my beers since this was the times, you did it because all other "bad boys" did it. Now I don´t touch it and never again hat had aches in the morning or blurred feeling. I have heard about Austrian vibes player Vera Auer, but it seems she was not much on the Austrian scene at least when I became involved with it. But Jimmy Raney at least looked fine until the end. An old man sure, but that´s normal. But I was shocked when I saw a later photo of Doug Raney, his son. He looked like Chet Baker in his last year, terrible. Was he also such a heavy drinker ?

Just perfect for me. On the rare occasions I can spend to listen to a record, mostly after midnight, this is the ideal stuff for me. Such great players, and such great compositions. "Sweet Love of Mine" and "Katrina Ballerina" are tunes I love so much. Some of the best players I ever heard, I had seen the group exactly on those days of early 1983. Then with Steve Turré who is not on this special date. It was THE group of the early 80´s. Some of the best things you could hear then and learn from....

Jimmy Raney is one of my favourite guitar players. But he must have had a hard time in his later years since I read that he was almost deaf. Such a terrible blow for a musician. I think I read about a later studio record he made for Timeless records at the famous Max Bolleman Studio in Netherlands. His son Doug was also a fantastic player but he didn´t live long enough.

Very interesting thoughts. Well I think the sound of Ron Carter was part of my early listening in the 70´s . It was the acoustic sound of that time when an acoustic bass was used anyway, which was more seldom since even older established masters like Diz and Sonny Rollins mostly used electric bass during that time. Ron Carter appealed to us boys, he was Mr. Supercool and it´s natural that we listened to all the VSOP recordings and many Milestone recordings where it was most possible that Ron Carter was playing the bass. But I think that Ron changed his sound somewhere in the early 2000´s . As someone said earlier they got a new tehnic to capture the bass sound, where the pickup is not attached directly to the PA sound system, but to a mike. So when I heard that strange album "4 Generations of Miles" (George Coleman, Mike Stern, Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb) the sound was more subtile. Of course, if I´d listen to a typical "hard bop era" stuff from the 50´s and Doug Watkins would be on bass, it would be a safe thing. But my first , my very first listening experience of bass (when I was maybe 12 years old) was Paul Chambers, and since I wanted to get myself a bass it was his sound and his soloes that fascinated me most. What Chambers and Mingus did on solo bass just seemed incredible to me. Among about the next ten albums I purchased for little money was some Coltrane, and I had the comparation between "Blue Train" and some lesser known stuff of Trane with Wilbur Hardeen and so on, where Doug Watkins was on bass. While Chambers on "Moment´s Notice" just left me out of breeze, on those bootleg Coltrane-Hardeen session when it came to Doug Watkins´ turn to play a solo, he just walks on, same like in the ensemble playing, so at least then my thought was that it was a "lost occasion" to let me hear what this man can do on bass....., I heard a lot of Doug´s really solid playing on many sessions, but as a soloist I think Chambers at that time was no 1. Eventually when my Grandma died, I got some money and bought a bass fiddle I still have. At least then I thought to adopt the bass as a second instrument to play gigs where they already had a piano player. I practiced a lot and being a pianist I had the sense for playing changes and melodies on bass as soon as I mastered to pluck them strings. When it became clear that my really mission is playing the piano, bass gigs or bass practicing became more rare. Now this is 40 and more years ago and I still have the bass fiddle at home. Pickin it up again would me a lotta blisters on my fingers, which I can´t risc as a pianist..... But even now, 40 years after my last gigs on bass I still "feel" the strings and the grips and last week while standing at the bar during intermission and explaining the bass lines of a composition of mine to a bass player I just sung the bass figures and mimicked them with my left hand and right hand, so he said "you play bass too? You just mimicked the right left hand positions when you sang the bass line...."

You are right. And I think Bud really was in top form if he had the possibility to play with old comrades who came to visit Europe. Bud with Hawk is fantastic, but I would also include "Blakey in Paris" with Bud playing "Bouncin with Bud" and "Dance of the Infidels" on his highest level. They are among Bud´s very best performances.

I´m not sure. I think French audiences were hip enough to dig Dolphy , but that piece somehow "doesn´t have it" . I mean Mingus could bring the music out to be a liink between straight ahead and "avantgarde" but it had to cook more than "What Love". Listen to "Fable of Faubus" four years later in Paris, they love it. And it´s also "difficult" for more conservative ears with all those atonality in Dolphys solos and in the chords, and has all them changes of tempo, but "What Love" somehow sounds more like western 20th century classic chamber music than "Jazz".......

Yeah , JEB´s Jazzbock was the first jazz book I head, of course in German since at that time I didn´t know enough English to read a jazzbook (now I can read em , but my vocabulary is quite limited to jazz so I can´t read other books 😉). At first reading I noticed one thing: For JEB and of course for a lot of other hard core jazz fans and musicians of that time, the names (Brubeck, Peterson) that sounded great for people who otherwise didn´t listen to jazz , were mentioned only as sidelines in Behrends book. That´s how I still somehow think about Brubeck : Music for people who don´t really like "other jazz" . But it keeps my mind on that impression on the video footage: That blonde chick, mighty fine, that´s our "bad luck" as jazz musicians 😄 Those kind of chicks listened to let´s say "Brubeck" not so much to what I´d listen to or play 😄 Same with my lady: Stunning blonde, long legs, beautiful face, and......if she hears somewhere as background music in a bar or a shoppin´ mall some "Take Five" or "Mercy Mercy".... she say´s "that´s fantastic, why don´t YOU play stuff like that ? ". Well dude, that´s our fate. Took me quite a long time in my youth to combine somehow to get the right mixture. beeing "weird" but somehow managing to get straight enough to keep a fine girl.....😀

Very very interesting indeed. Fela Kuti: I only had read about him in JazzPodium where his music was described as uninteresting and that he had focussed more on his arrogant stage behaviour, having a kind of "servant" who handed him his saxophone and his cigarettes. I never had heard his music. I have one of her books, I think it is titled "Jazz People" and has some great interviews with musicians I really love , Jackie McLean, Cecil Taylor, Howard McGhee, and the best, the very very best interview about Monk, that I have ever read. His answers are so quick and hip and they are truth, I mean I understood his answers very much, as his music is among my favourites . I think she did a great job doing that interview, even if she tries to ask questions in certain directions Monk wouldn´t discuss: Races, Politics etc. He says something like "I´m a musician, I play and get paid for it, let the politicians worry about politics, its them their job they get paid for it...." , and where he says "I got a wife and two kids to cloth and feed". I understand that so well.......

My relation to Brubeck is a very difficult one, "we" didn´t have a good start. When I was very very young, in my earliest teens and just had discovered jazz and was crazy about Mingus, Dolphy, older and new Miles Davis, Ornette, Rollins and did not know other "names" , somewhere the name of Brubeck was written and someone told me that he is some of the very best. When I heard it, from track to track I was "waiting" for something that might bring emotions to me like the before mentioned but in my case it didn´t happen. I think later on the weekly jazz radio show for new records they spinned a live set from some University, where they play two standards and it sounded a bit rough but well enough. It is possible that it was from 1953 or 1954 and appeared on a Bellaphone LP from the "Jazz Tracks" series. First I thought it is much better than the studio LP I had heard, but later again a problem for me: The drums sounded to straight and metronome like, as the bass, and the piano was intented to be very powerfull, with block chords and so, but somehow a bit more stiff than a natural "jazz feel", at least that´s what I heard. What I like on that short video footage is the blonde chick in the audience, in general the mass of the chicks was much better dressed than in comparation to audiences of today 😉

Because you mentioned the Newport Rebels: I got it two years ago from my wife and I was astonished it´s such a thick cover, until I discovered it had all other Mingus dates of that period , I mean the cover photo in colour shows Mingus at Newport, and on the inner Sleeve is those other two records I had not known, one is the one that has Fables of Faubus on it, and I think Folk Forms and What Love. And the other has Mingus dressed in a more British style and I think it has that "All the Things ...... something with Sigmond Freud...." and "Hellview from Bellevue" , I had not heard those before. But Fables of Faubus is at such a slow pace. I heard it live in the late seventies and it was much more dramatic, and until then I had heard it on the Paris Live with Dolphy, which I also like much more than the version on that Candid Session. The "What Love" I heard on a live thing I think from Antibes France, but other than the hot stuff of "Wendesday Night Prayer Meeting" etc, , the Audience does not seem to like "What Love", they even booed the performance as it seems you can hear.

Is this the old Miles album from 1964, with Sam Rivers playing ? Miles surely was on many occasions in Tokyo. But I think in the 60´s were many live albums on CBS, I think I also have one in Berlin and so..... they are fine but have very similar set lists......, anyway, gimme Tony Williams on drums and it is great ! I love him.

I don´t really know the chronology of the Candid recordings, but the track "Reincarnation of a Lovebird" is very very interesting and a challenge to play. Beautiful changes, and great with the slow tempo section in it, which happens on more than one of Mingus´ compositions. I love them all and would like to re-perform the one or other...."Reincarnation" would be among the top of my "wishlist" but you got to have time and money to rehearse it, since I´m not sure if every musician just can check it kinda impromptu during a soundcheck, which usually is the case if you gotta play somewhere. Another point: Since "Candid" was quite unknown over here in the 70´s when I built up most of my historical records knowledge, the actual version I heard was on the 1970 session in Paris, for the "America" label. My impression is, that or it was played a semiton lower (not starting with G-minor, but with Gb minor, which might be quite a challenging key for many instrumentists) , or it was recorded on a speed a bit too low......