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I like that better than the Take Five with them "angry string players" 😄 That native flute player is really playin´something and compliment for having a jazz feeling with such a strange wooden flute. They all are great, but really I don´t understand why there has to be a conductor ? I think that´s a kind of music and groove that works for itself. But it is really fun. Well I wouldn´t buy it, but yeah it´s fun and fine players from a different part of the world .

I didn´t say I don´t "dig" it😉 But I can´t really say I dig or I don´t dig it. It just looks funny to me all them deadly serious guys . Music is love, even if it is "Take Five" 😜, and they look so angry..... Great picture. This must be an interesting sound . Two completly different styled sounds of tenor. Dexter had deep respect for Webster, but I don´t know how it was vice versa, since there was a story that Ben Webster hated it, when Dexter started to play Body and Soul in a more modal manner (the way he plays it on "Manhattan Symphony".

Wow, I think the only foto of Leo Parker I ever saw is on one of the two albums he made for BN. There are two of them and he plays so great ! Only I never understood why they picked up so obscure sidemen, such a music should have Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey ! This is a great photo. So sad that he died only within short time from those recordings. I had read that they had planned a session of Leo with Dex, which would have been fantastic, a re-union . He looks so fine you couldn´t believe this man was dead a few weeks/months later. I never knew anything about his live other than that he was super active in the bop years, like Dexter, and also like Dexter the 50´s seemed to be some lean years for him.

Since I saw Mingus live 2 times I didn´t have too much desire to see the "Dynasties" after his death, which was a terrible blow to me. The problem over the years was that they lost players who really HAD played with Mingus. Jack Walrath of course knows Mingus´ music more than many other Mingus Alumni and was the trumpet player who was with Mingus when I heard him. I think I was most impressed by his fantastic latin solo on Cumbia, or his boppish attack on "Three or Four Shades of the Blues". Wait a minute......I really SAW a Mingus Ghost Band one time. It was conducted by Jimmy Knepper and had former Mingus members like George Adams and John Handy , really ! So I was looking forward hearing that edition, but it was a sad and week thing. Jimmy Knepper, former one of the hottest guys on trombone, just conducted and did it in a completly vacant and indifferent manner, many of us laughed at his "conducting" which anyway was not necessary because you can play that music without a conductor. George Adams seemed to have lost all his fire, it is possible that it was not long before he died. John Handy was better. The drummer was a good one whom I had heard many times, but he is not a Mingus drummer . Danny Richmond was still alive then but he was not in that band. Of course the music was not to my liking, I can´t enjoy anything else then jazz (well maybe some old shlagers or maybe an opereta or a ballett) and this was always the same monotonous thing. But I liked to look at the audience. Reminded me of a similar country in pre 1989. You think they are poor but they have pride and they are neatly dressed and I like to see them, women look like women, and men look like men...... More of that ! Not for the music, but for seeing the folks.... this is one of the funniest things I ever saw. From what country is that, Pakistan ? India ? It´s like a parody for our eyes and ears, all those extremly serious expressions on that tune that seems to attract mostly non jazz listeners (I heard so often non jazzers say they don´t like "jazz" but they like "Take Five". All them fiddles lookin the same way and fiddlin´ with the same movements, like if it was not individual players but on thing with dozens of arms and feet and heads 😄 Again, I think the "conductor" is only for the show because I doubt you have to "conduct Take Five" 😄

This is Bird and Chet Baker, isn´t it ? I think I heard that CD somewhere. Baker seems to have been a very very shy man, his looking down reveals it. Bird, even if he still was in his early 30´s looks like an old master, very heavy. His appearance seems to be contrary to the hip fast shit he played. When I was a kid and all those guys were my heroes like maybe a pop singer would have been for a teenage girl, photos of jazz artists were very very rare, at least in my countries. I always thought that Bird, or also Bud might be very nervous, thin guys who if not playing their fast stuff loose their body index due to looking for the next shot. There was a very small back cover photo on my "Savoy Mastertakes" and a painted cover of Bud on the brown Verve Double LP. But the first photo I saw of Bud was the cover photo from the first Victor LP where he looks very very heavy so that you can´t even see his neck, and I think there was that Bird foto from Massey where he looks fat and at least 15 years older than the oldiest member (Dizzy Gillespie).

Thank you for this very insightful compairing of them both. Mulgrew Miller died too early, he was not even 60 when he died. When I heard Larry Willis (he must have been still quite unknown then) recorded with Jackie McLean on BN I also had the impression that he had learned from Herbie. But later is might got into another direction, more lyrical subtle as you describe it. In this context I like to remark the two Smoke Jazz albums "Heads of State" where I mostly paid attention to Al Foster, Buster Williams and Gary Bartz, while I couldn´t really warm up for Larry Willis, same on a Woody Shaw from Basel 1980, Swissland. Mulgrew Miller sure had some McCoy thing in his playing, but he also had some Bud thing in his playing, as I observed when hearing a concert where he plays with Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson and later Johnny Griffin comin in as a second tenor. On that occasion, which was also filmed, Mulgrew Miller has a very Powell-ish approach on the more bop based tunes and he even looks very much like Bud: Heavy, head up with that moving lips like cewing a gum, maybe hollerin´ along with the lines he plays, it´s as if Bud had re-appeared so similar he looked like. A classic, even if I was a bit disappointed at first hearing. After hearing Bird´n Diz from Birdland and Massey Hall, this is a lesser exiting thing and the choice of Buddy Rich on dr is typical for Granz. It should have been Max or Roy Haynes. And those strange album designs on those old Verve records and those short liner notes that don´t really come from musical understanding "Thelonious Monk is a lesser light in modern jazz, but nevertheless an important one" arghhh.... When I was a teenager, this was on my wishlist but not available in my country. I found only a copy of the BN "Empty Foxhole" and of the Impulse "Crisis" and later the earliest Prime Time with that red cover and that coloured egg. When I finally got "Shape of Jazz" it sounded very conservative to me. But "Lonely Woman" was a favourite of my mother. She had two jazz things she liked very much : "Lonely Woman", and Mingus´ "Meditations on Integration". Many years in my youth when she came up into my appartment she would say "spin Meditations". Wow, such a great record. When I was a kid, this ..... as many BN in the early and mid 70´s was OOP or not available in my countries. One of my early mentors, the famous Fritz Novotny (austrian Freejazz Pioneer since 1959, founder and leader of the "Reform Art Unit" -short "RAU" borrowed it to me for making a tape, to learn that stuff, together with "Old and New Gospels". He was pleased that I dug Jackie and that "I´m in the right direction".....

I love the live albums of Woody Shaw. Carter Jefferson really was something. But as great as Larry Willis is, I like his later pianist Mulgrew Miller much more. It must have to do something with his touch, his sound and his lines or chords. And Tony Reedus on drums....

dreamed that my mind was somehow blurred and I played the wrong bridge on a song , much for the discomfort of the leader who told me that during intermission....

Yeah, if the solos are also played with the chord alteration in the 5th and 6th bar. The better should ! There are so many examples where you have a different bridge: Dizzy Atmosphere as that descending chords, Dexter Dig´s In has the brigde of "Stompin´at the Savoy"

Here too Billie Holiday this morning. In my case, listening is most almost for a certain purpose. I´m scheduled this evening to play at Jazzland and the leader´s wishlist includes "Crazy He Calls Me", which is usually done in F, but Billie sings it in Db so just to have the chords in my head I listened to her version. Anyway I love the key Db. And same with the title tune "Lover Man". Many folks here play it in F, and I think the RB changes are also in F, but she sings it in Db and that´s also the famous Loverman version Sarah Vaughan did with Bird´n Diz. The intro , the outing, everything....... It´s very very good to hear Billie´s treatments of certain songs if you play ´ em on instruments, I always say play a ballad know at least some parts of the lyrics of it and how the singer phrases it, to get the knowledge you must have for playing a fine ballad.....

We are playing tomorrow and tuesday at Jazzland in Vienna: Allan Praskin Quintet See here: https://www.jazzland.at/

It was my very very first jazz LP. That´s when everything started for me. It had another cover then.

Oh interesting. I had forgotten about the fact that once in Germany were stationed US soldiers. As much as I remember (as I said I was more a record listener than a radio listener because I wanted to hear albums not tracks), when I was a boy and had that old radio that existed then (with that wooden frame and those white yellowish buttons it was only the O3 that I "listened" to. Seeking for music by chance on MW, LW or KW was stessing, because those always had them "parazites" in them to avoid proper listening. It always cracked or beeped (but not bopped😄)

Wow, I fear I have to admit I had to run your statement thru google translate to fully understand it. I think I was listening to radio only until I bought more LPs myself or stopped completly when I was 17,18 and went alone to the clubs or started to perform myself. I fear I never really was "in tune" with radio listening because I want to decide, when and what music I hear. There were some jazz hours on Ö3, and I listened only to one: "Jazz Shop by Herwig Wurzer". This was only jazz LPs (spinning one or two tracks from an LP so folks might buy it. There was also "Jazz by Erich Kleinschuster" but this was mostly his own music. And "Fatty George" was not my music. Music is such a thing I can´t listen to it just coincidally or while washing dishes or reading a book, so I fear I never really was the tipical radio listener. Since many decades I don´t even own a radio. I have a turntable, a CD-player. Is AFM what we called "UKW" when I listened to radio. We had UKW, KW, MW and UKW had Ö1 classic, Ö2 "volkmusic" and oom pah pah, and Ö3 was mostly pop and a few hours jazz. Ahmad Jamal I fear was not so much on the direct focus when I got my education. I think that mentors mentioned him as a stylistic influence for Miles and Garland thru Miles, but I fear they didn´t make efforts to pull our coats directly to Ahmad.

Allan Praskin is booked here in Vienna next week at Jazzland. We work as a quintet format, and it´s me on piano. Freddie Hubbard was THE trumpet player everybody talked about during my boyhood and youth. He had left a big impression here since his first appearance in Graz with the Max Roach Group, where he is recorded including his cursing the audience as "jive assed muthaf+++++s" but he was damn right because they laughed during a solo cadenza of him. But we knew this kind: The more the artist "hated" the audience, the more the audience loved him, same with Miles here in Austria during those years. It´s strange that Diz was not mentioned much in the early 70´s by us hipsters, well yeah in context with Bird, but I doubt many had his albums of the 50´s, 60´s or early 70´s. But Hubbard, well mostly when VSOP started and we were crazy about VSOP after years of late free jazz and electric jazz.

I have read so much about Ahmad Jamal and never heard him. From the first Davis LP I had, and from the first Jazz Book I had, is is mentioned as one of the few musicians Miles Davis admired or said he was influenced by. I am not sure, for what labels he recorded since I fear that the labels that were available during the time I bought records, had featured him. I read that stuff like "Gal in Calico", "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" , those light hearted medium swingers with them light touch piano solos alterated by block chords (Garlands trademark) was influenced by Jamal. And that Miles said that he liked Garland because he had some influence from Jamal. Is it possible that on one of those Davis records there is a tune "Ahmad´s Blues". But I think that though it was on a Davis album it was only a trio feature and how it was as a young boy: no Davis, no Trane, lesser attention, same thing with the trio track "Billy Boy" on "Milestones". So I only had read about Jamal. It is possible that in those years when was busy to learn to play Ahmad Jamal was lesser active. It was more the years of the beginning of electric jazz, and those who played acoustic, were the heavy weighters like MCoy Tyner with his various Milestone recordings, and Herbie with VSOP.

We all had this ! It was shortly after the similar former band. It´s only that Dave Liebman was replaced by Sonny Fortune. The Aghartha was easy to purchase but somehow I managed to get also the more difficult to find "Pangheea" where the first tune was the same as the first tune we had heard live here in Vienna before. The fact that I was the guy who also had "Pangheea" and "Dark Magus" somehow upgraded me in our community 🙂

I heard her once in 1985 at Hollabrunn Jazz Festival. The remarkable thing was, that the first musician scheduled was Miles Davis, and after that was Astrud, and the musicians of Davis´ group all were in the audience listening to Astrud. I don´t know if Miles also listened from a more hidden place. I know that Miles once praised the Getz-Gilberto album and one of his themes from the electric period "Maisha" also was a pure bossa nova with that light bossa feeling.

Roman Schwaller, one of my favourites and such a great musician. I have jammed with him on some occasions, just a few weeks ago he sat in on a wonderful "Lover Man" in the original version in Db. So many stories. He was part of the Viena Art Orchestra, and around 1980 I saw him after a concert of Sonny Stitt when they tried to build up a Three Tenors Jam at a famous nightclub here in town. Roman and Harry (Sokal) were great but a very drunk Sonny Stitt fooled around. I love the album, the repertory and the fellow musicians. That drummer Freddie Waits is great !

This must be great ! That´s the quartet with Dewey Redman ? Who was the others ? Haden and Ornette jr ? The Ornette Coleman of the late sixties is very interesting. While his late 50´s /early 60´s records for me don´t sound like "free jazz" since they still have much swing rhythm, is style in the late 60´s became more "rubato" playing and maybe that´s what I understood more as being "free jazz". Well, on the two BN´s "NY is Now" and "Love Call" their is still much swing, but this may have been ordered by Lion and Wolff (it must "schwing"). I prefer the two Impluse! albums from that time. Maybe Roma-Italia is similar to that ? I bought that under very strange circumstances, it was a little bus that sold records, near the festival cort of "Velden Jazztage 1979" , where there was a lotta records of more advanced players, but from very very strange small labels. That´s where I got this double album. It is somehow the first one, that got Shepp back to more conservative forms like the straight ahead blues "for Donald Duck".

sounds like a great evening. About lyrics in German, I can´t say much. There was an aged amateur singer and jazz sessions sit-inner here, who wrote lyrics in German to American standards. "Our Love is here to stay" became "Unsere Liebe bleibt bestehn" . Reading your event I´m sure that your german friend does a better job singing in German.

Yes, Herbie-Chick...that was a big deal in the late 70´s. Their album sold very well. Maybe it was not the players who mostly bought it, it was more the audiences. But it was part of our collections. Most of us were big fans of VSOP, some of the not strictly jazz bound folks were more into RTF, but I remember that each new record on the marked was discussed and spinned in company. We all had typical well selling records of that time, mostly from the Milestone or CBS label. VSOP, McCoy´s "Supertrios", "Milestone Stars in Concert", and sure the Hancock-Corea duo album, though in my case it got lesser spinning . But I still like to listen to it, mostly for recreating the "mood" of those days......

Some young jazz students today seem to re discover "Serpent´s Tooth". It´s interesting how some of Miles´ compositions from those early fifties are mostly bop lines but they have that little "Miles Davis" touch in them, somehow capturing the one or other sound from "Birth of the Cool".

All of Miles´ Prestige albums are great. I can´t say about different sound quality from different editions since I only bought my LPs or CDs once. Actually, one of the four classic first quintet Prestige albums was the first jazz I ever heard when I was a kid. It´s strange that "Steamin´" was the only album available then. I learned later about "Cookin´" "Relaxin´" and "Workin´". Is this the one with a version of Dizzy´s "Woody´n You" ? I love that tune and I love the arrangement of the out chorus, which I think was originally written by John Lewis for the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. I have not listened to those albums for a long time. The only thing I can say about good sound quality is, that I think all Prestige records have a good sound quality. One of those albums I think has a blues "Trane´s Blues" and I remember that Philly J.J.´s fantastic cymbal sound is well recorded, and that´s what is very important to me. When I first heard it shortly after it came out, I didn´t understand the lyrics or only a few fragments of it and surely not the other implications. And anyway Dexter´s speaking voice in those later days was not easy to understand, or almost un-understandable for "auslanders" 😉 with only some self taught english from dictionaries and liner notes. I remember I "understood" : "Baby I just called you w o n d e r f u l " (instead of "on the phone") and the ending of "so bye bye now" ..... Most lyrics of any kind sounded like "rhabarber" to me. But the thing I quickly remembered on that track was that really relaxed easy listening blues in F. The singing voice of Dexter here is wonderful, he could have done more of it. I heard him "try" it again in 1983 when he "closed" a miserable and extremly short set with this. Then I still didn´t understand the lyrics (I only read them in the Billy Eckstine book". Usually I don´t listen to very loud music in the car, but on that early morning I was in such an exuberant mood that I really turned the volume up, while standing in a little "stau".

That´s a great statement. I have that album under the title "Dig". "Conception" is a tune I love, but usually I perform it in the original AABA form (12 bars A section, 8 bars the bridge) in Db. The Miles Davis version is a quite assymetric form, and there are different opinions how many bars it has. I heard so many live version of Miles doing it and I think there are more than one occasions where the musicians busted the form a little. "Out of Blue" is very nice, based on "Get Happy" and we love to perform this. And yeah, those old records we bought when we was young always have a certain place in our hearts. Pharoah Sanders has a special importance for me. One of my first LP´s almost 5 decades ago was "Live at the East". I saw Pharoah on more occasions maybe similar to this one (I don´t know that album), and it was similar to Archie Shepp, that during the late 70´s they switched from free to classic quartet, featuring standard material. I love Pharoah´s version of "On A Misty Night".