Gheorghe

I don´t know who is Al Jaffé , but I had heard about a pianist whose name is Nat Jaffé. One of my grandfathas´name was "Jaffé" and he had emigrated to NY in the early 1920, but was not a musician, he had to do with art printing...... I have heard that this is quite a common name in the States.

What does "Soft Spots" really mean ? Is this an earlier expression for what they later called "smooth jazz" ? I mean you can play soft on certain points and use it as a contrast, but not a whole album or concert..... When I heard my first jazz on record more than 5 decades ago it was Miles´ "Steamin", and I loved that muted trumpet of Miles, but what really had fascinated me was that nevertheless there was a tension in it, with the rhythm section of Paul´s bass and Philly´s drums. And, listen on "Surrey with the Fringe on Top", or on "Diane" how it sounds when Trane starts his solo, and the block chords of Garland on the ballads, and Philly´s solo on "Salt Peanuts". So this was my true entrance to jazz and it has "soft spots" if you want to call it like that (I won´t) , but it´s not sleepin tunes.

I had heard very much about him, but must admit that the only stuff I heard was on one of Don Cherry´s BN albums. I think , he played piano AND vibes.

This is the Marshall Allan band I also saw a few years ago. In the late 70´s I saw the Arkestra with Sun Ra in person. Then, Marshall Allan, John Gilmore and June Tyson were in the band. My favourite album from the good old Free Jazz days is "Nothing Is" which was my first Sun Ra album when I was a kid. I had purchased it together with Pharoah Sandes´"Live at the East". And "brandnew" albums during the years I saw Sun Ra live, were the "HORO" label albums: The above mentioned rare quartet album"New Steps" was one, and the whole Arkestra album "Unity" was another.

Actually I don´t know nothing about Leo Parker´s live but I heard all his stuff on the good old Savoy albums, with Tadd, Fats, Dexter and so on. It seems that he was not very active in the 50´s. I also like his other album for BN "Rollin´ with Leo". Obscure musicians yeah. This is quite unusual for BN. I would have preferred some from the house musicians of BN. Yeah, they swing, but it could be more, better sounding bass and better drummer.....

I think in his last years he lived in Munich (Germany) and was married to a german woman. Shortly after Bobby Jones´death she was here in Vienna when I played with Allan Praskin at an open air jazz festival and he introduced me to her.

Oh, brings back memories. All those great musicians then. Jimmy Woode played a lot with my mentor Fritz Pauer, and with Johnny Griffin and the Clark/Boland Big Band, Bobby Jones was the surprise of the early 70´s when he was with Mingus. Nobody had heard about him before, and there he was. He is one of the best musicians on the two Mingus LP´s made in Paris in the early 70´s . Once I was presented to his widow and was introduced as one "who know´s Mingus´ Music very well". As I said earlier, when I was a kid, Dusko was to me in Europe, what Miles was in America. As much as I loved Miles´ trumpet, I loved Dusko´s trumpet and if I heard a big band I could say it is him who plays that trumpet solo....... Poor Bobby Jones, he died too early. I think he was just 50 when he died and it was rumored that it was something with his lungs....anyway he looked much older than he was.....

I missed a lot of what happened in the 90´s .

Bud, if he was right, was still great in the 60´s , but especially in Stockholm , maybe due to a rhythm section who didn´t know very much of Bud´s repertory, he tended to play super long blues tracks, Blues in the Closet, Straight No Chaser, Swedish Pastry, over and over again. His best performances until the end were when he could play with fellows who knew his music. But traveling as a single with local rhythm sections must be a drag....

I think I saw some video material of Dex at Copenhaga in 1983 and it sounds much better than the Village Vanguard from Dexters 60th Birthday Party, and much much better than the really weak performance I saw in Viena also early in 1983.

Very fine thing. I have it on video. If I remember right, they start with Tin Tin Deo.

Oh, he was a very early idol of mine. I loved his sound. "After Hours" and "Balkan Swing" where my first entries. And I heard him with several Big Bands also. He was really a master !

When I bought it in the 70´s, it had another cover with a foto of Miles where you see a big ring on his finger. The music was played in a "film polițist”, where a young girl had it in her record collection and the police wondered why a 17 year old girl listens to this kind of music. She had bought it because she was in love with a much older man (one of hear hi school teachers) and the music, at least parts of it was played in the film. Some days later in the newspaper was an article, where they explained what it was, since a lotta viewers had asked what it was. In my case, of course I bought it but for a young teenager then it was "too quiet", I was used to Miles with Tony Williams or to electric Miles.....

I love that Max Roach Quartet and it was my first Max Roach LP. But it had another cover with a big colour photo of Max Roach. It´s interesting, that two musicians in the setting were Mingus-involved (Mal Waldron in the 50´s and Clifford Jordan in the 60´. I think I bought it together with "Right Now" (Mingus from about the same time also at the Workshop in Frisco)

Of course, then I bought each new Miles Davis album. I think I was a bit disappointed by "Big Fun" which was just a collection of stuff, that was remainders from earlier sessions, like part of "Get Up with It". But I like the long "He Loved Him Madly" , it was the band with Dave Liebman that I saw, as well as "Calypso Frelimo" which was part of the tour programm. Other stuff from that double album was much older. One tune I think was called "Red China Blues". It never was played live and is just an old fashioned blues in G if I remember right. Isn´t "Rated X" that thing with organ only, very minimalistic, but dense chords the way Miles played chords on organ......, and wasn´t there a tune called "Billy Preston" , which seemed quite old, like the stuff that had been on the 1972 recordings ? I didn´t really know who Billy Preston is, I had thought there was a more obscure trumpet player who is on Mingus´ recordings from 1970, who has this or a similar name.... Is it possible that this was Miles´ last studio album until 1981 ? His other records of that time all was live recordings like "Agharta" and "Pangheea " . My favourite is "Dark Magus".

Most of my knowledge of ballads comes from what Billy Eckstine sang with his Band in the 40´s . This one, together with "Mr. B. and the Band" (also from Savoy") are my favourites of vocal jazz. I listen much more to male singers like Mf. B., Kenny Hagood, Earl Coleman, Johnny Hartman, than to female singers and I would like to do a gig with a male singer who knows that stuff, but you can find female singers very easily, but not male singers in that genre......

IMHO the best of Dexters CBS recordings, and one of the best acoustic jazz albums from the time of the renewed acoustic boom in the late 70´s. I don´t have that album, I think it was pretty fast OOP. But I like George Cables´ piano. I heard him do fantastic solos, like one special on "A Moment´s Notice" and his gimmick of playing some rubato piano on ballads and then get back into swing with the bass and drums comin´ in again.....really sharp. I heard George Cables also an a lot of other records with other artists. Saw him once with Diz, and his album "Four Seasons" with Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Lewis and Philly J.J. is wonderful. Okay, I also liked Kirk Leightsey playing with Dex. I don´t know many other pianists who might have played with Dexter after his homecoming to N.Y., first it was Cables, then it was Leightsey. Only on one 1981 album "Gotham City" there is a completely different band, it´s more an all star thing with Blakey, Percy Heath, Cedar Walton and George Benson, also very fine. But this was no touring band. I don´t see nothing adventurous in it. Those two albums "Love Call" and "N.Y. is Now" are like "Free Jazz for Starters", I mean what he did for Impulse! was much more advanced. Here there are a lot of swinging passages and he uses Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, who were in Trane´s band before he went "free" (replacing Jones with Rashid Ali). My favourite for all times here is "Garden of Souls" one of the most beautiful and moving compositions I ever heard.

I love the title tune. It´s a very simple tune you can play just from a single listening, it sticks in your head. Could be a suggestion for a gig..... This was my first Ornette Coleman album when I was a teenager. It was my first "so called free jazz" album, but I was very ready for it, since until then the stuff that had impressed me most was Eric Dolphy in Mingus´European Tour band". It´s easier to listen to, because it is not all with open metrum and atonal, so you have swing playing on "Good Old Days" and "Zig Zag" if I remember right, and fine trumpet and violin on the title tune and "Sound Gravitation". It was a milestone in my listening experiences.

I didn´t purchase that and was reluctant to buy some "remainders" from the BN vaults, since I´m not really a completist. Besides that I don´t know who is Fred Jackson and since I have not heard from other guys or mentors here that I´d have to listen to him, I may not have been aware of him. Tadd Dameron would be interesting, but I have read too many bad reviews, that the arrangements were a mess and so on. But it would have been the last time Tadd Dameron played himself on a record. I have a special liking for his comping and learned something from it, and his solos are nice miniatures. The only studio album from his last years (where he does not play) doesn´t really kill me. Somehow his tunes didn´t have that flair they had in his most creative period, the somehow had smoothed out. To hear Dameron compositions without himself playing I prefer to listen to the sides that Philly J.J. made with his "Dameronia" band....

I have not listened to the 4 classic "First Quintet" sessions for decades, but "Steamin´" was my very first Jazz LP in the early 70´s. Cookin´, Relaxin, and Workin where not easy to be found then. The "Steamin" I think was a Bellaphon reissue with another cover. those funny Verve covers. I think I saw this one with that yellow fish on it, but don´t know which of the 8 LP-Volumes it is. I got to listen to Bird with Strings for the intro of "April in Paris". Not that I like strings, but I need a good intro for "April in Paris" since it will be on a concert set list next thursday and I got to get some idea for good chords for a piano intro.

I this Siegfried Kessler on piano ? Such a great pianist, I saw him twice, with Archie Shepp, and once with Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jimmy Witherspoon. Is this Hamid Drake, great drummer.

Me to, though I doubt it would have happened. I´m not sure if Jaws would have been open for it, but at least in the hard swinging passages of his long compositions Jaws would have been an interesting voice. Mingus was ....I could say so.....my center of jazz understanding. At an age, where I just had heard only one jazz record (I think it was Davis´ "Milestones" from the late 50´s" , Mingus with the 1964 touring band really was my "guide". It was '"Parkeriana" that led me to search Bop´n Bird, it was the Jakie Byard stride section that let me listen to Fats Waller and Art Tatum, and it was Dolphy´s outbursts, that led me to listen to Free Jazz....., so it was "everything" for me and a living memory when I finally saw Mingus live....

That´s some interesting remark, really ! Eric Dolphy was the first alto saxophonist I ever heard, when I was in my early teens. And I loved him from first hearing. I mean I heard Dolphy before Bird, before Jackie McLean. I admired that musician so much that when my beard started to grow I let it grow like Dolphy had it. Looked terrible, but that´s how I was. And.....though a complete other style, I loved Jaws playing from the first moment. My first listening experience was the session where he plays in an allstar Birdland line up with Miles Davis. And shortly afterwards I saw Jaws life. though I don´t think there would have taken place a record with them both, I think the times was not ripe for that, but if Dolphy had lived longer, who knows.......

I don´t see a difference in my case. It depends on the key I´m playin´ in. I let the music tell my fingers what is to do. I had to think over what you said: Maybe my statement was a subiective one, since it´s me myself who thinks or thought that my hands is small. I look to the beautiful hands of my wife, who is 175cm (me is 187cm ) and her fingers is longer and thinner, and the long nails makes it even look longer. Those are really delicate fingers so that mine look somehow short and blunt in comparation. She has them "double limbs" or (how you say to it) and always say why can´t I also be blessed with such fingers, since I´m the piano player.

I also have quite small hands, well I can play decimes easily , but I think my hands are quite small for my length (1,87 meter). In any case I always played with flat fingers.