Gheorghe

I´ve never heard that. Maybe only a duet would be a bit too spartanic for me. I think both at that time were a bit past their prime, at least Dizzy mostly had bands, where he was "supported" by fellow trumpetists like Sandoval, John Faddis etc, so I always wondered how they could manage to make a full album . I had seen a video of Diz with Max also from the 80s, where Diz had a big band and then a vintage bop quintet with the interesting choice of Mulligan on bs, and Max was on drums and it was a wonderful set of some of the best bop standards, almost as good as the "bop session 1975".

It is possible that I have this one somewhere. Then I had bought it mostly because of the rhythm section. I think I remember on this one is a composition titled "My Friend Stan" or so.... and I was somehow puzzled since this, like some other Art Pepper compositions from his last years is just too long. I think the longest theme stuff I soloed over is something like "Cheek to Cheek" with 72 bars, but this one seemed to have hundreds of bars, I couldn´t solo over such a long theme. I have some of those "Widow´s Taste" Pepper CDs and some stuff is fine, but sometimes he repeats too many phrases. As his alto sound, he tries to have a very piercing sound and seems to want to outdo Jackie McLean but I love Jackie´s Sound and his natural soul. Sometimes he tries to get modal like Trane...

same here !

Great ! Are there more photos from that date ? I mean also with Monk ?

Never saw that . Is this the original quartet or is it augmented and if yes, with whom. Where was the Bill Hardman discussion on the forum ?

Sorry I can´t follow the link properly , but tell me a bit about the music ...... Is it Horace Silver tunes on it. What instrumentation ? I don´t have very very much Horace Silver in my repertory, two things I LOVE to play is "Strollin´" with a fine quintet, or "No Smokin´" a thing you really can burn on it.

I can´t say it is my favourite guitar player or in general my favourite music. I think I saw "Oregon" once since it was on schedule of a jazz festival but can´t remember much. And I never was a real guitar fan with the exception of sounds of Charlie Christian, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery and Mike Stern when he was with the 1981 Miles band...... Somehow I don´t really like acoustic guitar.

Not a recorded track but a live track: Two days ago I listened to the trio of my favourite Austrian pianist Oliver Kent ("Triple Ace" with Uli Langthaler who also plays with me on many occasions, and the great Serbian drummer Dusan Novakov) and they did a fantastic version of that old pop song "Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree" , but as a fast waltz, with extended solos of highest quality and going modal with a bit McCoy feeling, but very very individual. I could have listened for hours only for this tune. As I mentioned in my thread "A Great Day...in Vienna" I have the highest praise for Oliver, such a wonderful musician an human being, and it´s a big honour for me that he praises my own playing too.

I kinda had blinders regarding other music than jazz, but once a chick took me to that film "Last Waltz" which I remember quite well, though sure I was more interesting in dating that chick than in the music. In any case .... a remarkable career but of course it´s a drag if you disband a successful unit as early as at age 35.....

fantastic !!!!

The high noon of ECM was also in the late 70´s . "We" were that gang that listened to more hard driving or hard funky stuff, Bird Diz Monk, Messengers from the oldies, VSOP from neo bop acoustic, Electric Miles and Ornette´s Prime Time, and there was another group, more the first "alternative thinking" folks with more medidation or so, who loved only ECM, Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber and so on. This was two different worlds.

Interesting descendance. So Lituania during that time was part of the URSS ? Yeah, I also knew people who took vodca for breakfast. But gettin´ blind is a drag, really, but remarkable that he still checked his team´s work. Blind from alcool ? I heard things like that. But sure it was other causes....

From the most popular early electric "jazz-rock" formations of the ex-Milesmen Chick Corea (RTF) and Herbie Hancock (Headhunters) I think I liked them both, but I dug Headhunters more at that time. The nonplusultra Chick Corea fans were other folks then that the Hancock-folks. I think the Chick Corea fans I got to know had a more philosophical thing goin on like "Why do I live" and "How can I become a better human being" while we Hancock-fans were more "earthbound" . But both were great. It was also that the ECM buyers were other folks than the CBS, BN and Prestige-buyers. I must admit it took me decades to dig again into Chick Coreas music, when my wife chose the newer 2000´s thing featuring Jean Luc Ponty as a winterholidays present for me. I was always delighted about such surprises, which pulled my coat into other directions, like when I got "Jimmy Giuffree trio in Graz" or "Stan Kenton live 1972" , things that until then were holes in my discography. Strange that I missed to see Chick Corea live with one exception when he sat in with the Miles Davis band. I´m still pissed off that I missed the larger RTF-world tour band in 78 with Dave Liebman in it. Didn´t even find a record of that stuff...... Cumbia was one of my favourite things then, This was the times when somebody like Mingus was alive and you could find him on all European festival gigs each year. I practically witnessed the live version of the touring band since they played that almost 25 minutes long version of it with his steady quintet (Walrath, Ford, Neloms, Danny) and THEN the record still wasn´t on the market. But Mingus announced it as "Something we just recorded, it´s from a Movie Score". I think I remember the large band studio recording was a bit slower than the live version, but also the live version had all them subtitles, first the drum settin the groove, then that call and response thing with the ostinato bass, then the straight ahead passages and the Db two beat based "Mingus Rap" where he snarls "Who said Mama´s li´l baby likes shortin´ bread ?" and the strong tutti sections after that and that incredible bass solo up into the highest possible register of the bass. Wonderful, and livelong memory from the teenage days.....

Well, interesting you had the same encounter with Kind of Blue. My very first LP was "Steamin´" but I would consider "Round Midnite" in the same range, same period, same personnel, same style, so this is practically identic. Silent Way, I love it but I think I bought it after Bitches or On the Corner. About "digestible" well my second LP (3 LPs in one album) was "The Great Concert of Charles Mingus" (with Dolphy, Byard, Cliff Jordan, Danny Richmond) and this was my most semnificative entry in jazz, because I must have had that thing in me about more so called "difficult" jazz (I don´t see nothing difficult in it) . I mean that Mingus thing with Dolphy opended the way to the more free forms of 60´s avantgarde, and .... damn, I got to Bird thru Dolphy and Mingus ! Bird with Diz or Fats and Bud, Monk absolutly...... What I didn´t really like was more "easy listening comfortable" music like an Oscar Peterson trio, mainstream swing, westcoast stuff and so on, it always had to "burn" .......😉

turkish coffee as I do always in the morning, in the afternoon or even after dinner if I know it will be a long night of playing or just partying.......

He will be missed, really a tragedy to die that way. But I would have died much earlier since I can´t stand the smell of cheese, I mean especially them wheels of hard cheese . The only cheese I enjoy and eat very often is the "feta" from sheps which we call "telemea" , I like it together with black olives, with slices of capia (those long mild peppers) and Transilvanian salam, or as a "greek salad". Dying at work. I remember Mingus told that during his Monterey concert while cocluding his Ellington-Medley with "A Train" he felt something like a pain in his chest and was afraid of dying from a heart attack. I hope I´ll not die on stage, because I fear this would be embarrasing for the other musicians and the audience. But with 64 I still have a lotta plans and future I´m sure.

You might kill me for the sacrilege I say now but by all consciousness that this is one of the all time most important albums in jazz history, I had a wrong start here 50 years ago. There were not so many jazz records in the regular record stores, many went OOP in the 70´s but I was a stone Miles Davis fan and tried to find what I could. But after hearing the three albums I had (Steamin´ , "Carnegie Hall 64" and "Bitches Brew" ) I was a bit disappointed. For the old stuff, I had preferred Philly J.J on drums and Garland on piano to Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans, though I liked Kelly on "Freddie Freeloader" . I preferred Coltrane only and though I admitted that Cannoball is great, I thought as so much music Trane creates, he cannot be topped, and Cannonball had another sound than what I am used to on alto (more the McLean Thing). After hearing "So What" and "All Blues" first as the Carnegie Hall versions, the original versions sounded a bit too tame for an early teenie. As a newbie just at the beginning, maybe I was not ripe enough for the more quiet, more subdued stuff. About really slow stuff like "Blue in Green" , I did like ballads, but more with a bit a more sharper thing in it like the "Round Midnight" with the stuff borrowed from the old arrangements of the Gillespie Big Band like you hear it on the first CBS album Miles made, or .....still more......the "Funny Valentine" from Carnegie Hall........ I also dare to say that I was a too difficult and restless kid and even grown up to really get into the more introverted and meditative way Bill Evans plays...... another sacrilege.....

I have that record but I think I have not listened to it for decades. Somehow it didn´t really get to me, I considered it more third stream or how you call it. I think it was a bit over-produced. Maybe I was and still am too much into Mingus happening on stage. There were at least two albums that disappointed me or didn´t really reach me. This one, and also on CBS the "Mingus at Carnegie Hall", where I often asked myself "where is THE Charles Mingus?". Also some early 70s albums seem "lame duck" to me like most of the 1970 "America" Sessions, allthough they have some beautiful McPherson on it, but it is a very subdued Mingus, barely audible and even the presence of Byard and Richmond do not help to make things "happen"....

Yes, I heard that when I was in the States and dudes told me about it. Well I was never on the West Coast. My main McPherson impressions were with Mingus after Dolphy´s death, on "Mingus at Monterey" and "My Favourite Quintet" and on some of the 70´s albums, I think he was on the "Carnegie 1974" on those to jam tunes, and maybe on "Me Myself and I" or "Something like a Bird". I think I had an album where he was the leader, it could have been around 1972 and I think it had the standard "While we were young" on it, very fine 1970´s "third generation bop" . But I fear I never saw him live.

Well maybe this is one of the reasons why I didn´t go there, First of all during that time I never heard a mentor tellin me about Dorothy Donegan, they might tell me to listen to Tatum, Bud, Monk, Garland, Wynton Kelly, McCoy, Cecil Taylor, Herbie Hancock etc. , but I think Donegan was not mentioned much among musicians or even music lovers of the scene then or now. And.....as it was told to me it was over-pianistic, while I want to hear if a piano player connects well with the bass player and the drummer, each of the instruments very important to me. It also may explain, why Mr. Axel Melhard (boss of Jazzland) later complained, that there was not enough audience for Dorothy Donegan. Some one told me that when she banged the final chord of a tune, she lost her "peruca" (don´t know how you say for artificial hair), it was a tragic-comic thing with a woman too "overdressed" for a small cellar club.

Oh man, Dolphy ! My first alto I heard as a kid. Damn, I heard and fell in love with Dolphy before I had heard a note of Bird !!!

I have two Alamacs I think. Bird with the Herd and Bird 1949 . I bought them in the 70´s and was a bit astonished they were so expensive and had quite modest cover design, no liner notes . The Bird with the Herd is quite funny though the more heavy swing style rhythm of the drums doesn´t fit to Bird, but it is a fun record. I saw Jay McShann at Jazzland and it was great. Dorothy Donegan also played once ore twice at Jazzland but I must admit I hadn´t ever heard her name. I learned that she was a very tehnical pianist and brought up as a wunderkind, could play licks of Errol Garner and others but seem´s to have been quite absent in the active jazzscene were you play and record in different groups . The boss of Jazzland, Mr. Melhard once told me it was quite stressy with her, since she thought she must have hundreds of evening robes to play and didn´t understand that this is just a smaller but outrite fine cellar club. She travelled with much luggage with robes and stuff and seemed to be lost away from the piano. Brought up as a wunderkind and kept that way..... Dick Wellstood´s photo is also on the walls of Jazzland, but this must have been before my time or a style earlier than what we heard and studied.

If I´m in the mood for some good old hard bop it´s very possible that I spin "Sonny´s Crib" (for the participation of Trane) or "Cool Struttin". Maybe I couldn´t listen to more in about the same kind of style, but they are great, especially since they have some of my favourite horn players on it. One thing that always was in my mind is that the Bud on "Scene Changes" sounds so close to Sonny Clark that at first listening I couldn´t believe it´s Bud. I think I got that from the widow of a late friend. I remember it´s very very hot playing, Griff in top form and going a bit into new areas on "Tunisia".....right ? But it seems to be a very very obscure label.

It was bumped by me since I always wanted to post a photo of me on stage but it took me months to have time to manage to make photos smaller, so this and the Peter Pullman-Photo in the "Jazz in Newspapers etc." had to be posted much later, just yesterday. Glad you are successfull with stretches. In my case it would hurt my hands, but I think I can reach 10th because of more than 60 years playing piano (I started to lay my fingers on piano when I still was in (how you say, "pampers" didn´t exist in the early 60´s ). My dad could "play" a handful of pieces, one was some sonata in Db by Beethoven or so with very deep notes, and one was I think a funeral march written by Chopin and to the surprise of my fatha I jumped on his lap and played the line with my little hands. At 4,5 I was pissed off that my hands are so small I can´t reach what I have in my head. So I think 60 years of playing, 45 years of active playing on stage, and somehow the hands get adapted, especially the left hand for decimes if you play a solo ballad or so.

Glad you like it ! The photo was shot by the club management. I´ll play there next week, a fine unit with tp, as, p, b, dr.....always nice to be there, so many young jazz students there, that´s really good audience......