Gheorghe

That´s a damn good personnel here. I saw Flanagan with Mraz, and on that occasion Art Taylor was the drummer. But Al Foster is one of my very favourite drummers of all my life.

I remember the wild young years at high school when we was a bunch of kids crazy about jazz , but still not well informed. Somehow we didn´t really know WHAT is "Cool Jazz". We had heard about "Birth of the Cool" but hadn´t still heard it. So most of us thought, that the special harmon muted vibratoless sound of Miles´ trumpet on the early Prestige albums is "Cool Jazz" or that he had "invented Cool Jazz". Other exponents like typical west coast coolers where not so much present in our generation. Later I "discovered" Tristano and spinned it for my friends, and when there were some more atonal lines they said "no Gheoghe, this is "Free Jazz" 😄

He was a legend.

Wonderful !

Oh, I understand ! It must have been great to still see him. I saw him only when it was around the recordings of his famous "Amsterdam after Dark". By the way: About the photo I had posted I must get the information when and where it was made.....

I think I found the blue Atlantic album back in the 70´s and it was very rare. I already had BN "Empty Foxhole" "At the Golden Circle" , the Atlantic "Free Jazz" and the Impulse "Crisis" and "Ornette at 12" and found that this album is the most easy listening to. It´s just straight ahead swing. A very nice album, though nothing special, a good hard bop album. Both Bags and Trane are great.

Might be a gas, Joe Henderson and Al Foster are among my favourites on their instruments. Charlie Haden might be interesting as long as it is group playing. I love his playing with "Free" Musicians but as soon as he starts to solo at least for me it becomes quite boring. But sure others might see it opposite, it´s a question of taste.

I´m a quite old fashioned guy in that context. The stuff was around everywhere when I was a teenager, and users would get busted by police and it was a natural thing. But I never had the urge to try it. I think in context with "drugs" I was a more mundane person, smoking normal cigarettes and drinking beer was all I was intrested in. I have or had the impression that reefer-smokers had a more "spiritual thing" in it. Some where into meditation or stuff, and I think that though I have education I was more the workman-type of consuming "goodies" , I mean just cigarettes and beer or wine or „țuică” or „palinca” (prune schnapps or marille schnapps). After the stupid "drinkin contests" in the teenage and early twen years, gettin married I reduced that stupid alcool thing and eventually cut it out completly , I drink my alcool-free beer each evening. But I don´t really understand why they legalizize reefer smokin if they try to forbid cigarette smokin. Well I don´t have no idea what effect reefer has, but I couldn´t imagine having a coffee withouth enjoying a cigarrete with it. This has been so for the last 50 years. So, if everybody is smokin reefer now .....let em do what they want, but I don´t like that "half morale" where militant non smokers tell me how dangerous is my goddamn cigarette combined with coffee drinkin, or after dinner or after sex😄, while the same politic parties want to legalize reefer .

is that old bald headed gentleman also a musician or an fan ?

I can speak only about the Miles Davis album. I love that session with Monk and Bags. And how Monks lays out on Davis´ trumpet solos ......he lays out but you FEEL his presence. And though Miles is not a Monk alumni, his solo on "Bemsha Swing" is the best trumpet solo I ever heard somebody do with Monk. It´s quite strange that they also included one classic Miles Davis Quintet track (Round about Midnight), which must have been recorded later .

Yes ! This was my first Dexter Gordon LP. In those early 70´s years, those Black Lion albums were a good entry to listen to typical "Americans in Europe". The Dexter Album, after Dexter´s solo on "Blue´n Boogie" with Diz in 1945 was the first Dexter under his own name and still years before I saw him live in the late 70´s. Yes, the sound was great, you hear Albert Heath´s cymbals so fine. That´s really a quite fast version of "Like Someone in Love" done in Ab ! And Kenny Drew is very fine on those tunes. I have several of those old Black Lion LP´s : Bud Powell " The Invisible Gage" , Coleman Hawkins (featuring Bud !) : "Hawk in Germany", Don Byas "Anthropology", Philly Joe Jones "Trailways Express" , all of them are great and have great sound quality.

To dye so young is a drag. I had not known his name before reading about Mingus´death.

Interesting remark and you may be right ! Maybe Blakey would have fitted in, since he had played numerous gigs and recording sessions with Leo Parker in Leo´s best years, the 40´s. With Tadd, with Mr. B. ..... About pianists it´s hard to say, with Bud on the other side of the ocean I couldn´t imagine another better 40´s rooted piano player. With bassists, well BN sometimes gave veteran bass players a session so it´s astonishing that the then "modern" Sonny Rollins for a typical 50´s hard bop session would be combined with the veteran Gene Ramey, or Griffin with also veteran Curley Russell. I don´t know absolutly nothing about sports, but is this the "Lou Ghering" about whom I had read in context with Mingus´ terminal desease which is also called "Lou Ghering Desease" until I learned that this was a sportsman.

I´m not a Peterson listener but the combination Roy Eldridge, Sonny Stitt sounds like a good idea.

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/