Gheorghe

I think I had this one, maybe it was one of the first Dynasty albums ? Then, most of the members still had played with Mingus, Somehow, especially because I had such an affinity to Mingus´ music who was among the very very first things I heard and led me to become the jazz fan I´ve been for the last 5 decades, I was so deeply depressed by his passing that I just couldn´t believe it. And hearing "ghost bands" play his music somehow hurt me. It even took me many months until I could buy "Me Myself an Eye", which came out in early 1979 and first I thought "A Mingus album without Mingus playing bass can´t be worth listening". Later, I think 10 years later I saw one of those "Mingus Dynasties" at Wiesen, but it was sad. Though the only left active Mingus musicians were nobody less than John Handy and George Adams, there was no fire in it, and Jimmy Knepper was conducting but seemed completly bored. Those were guys in semi coma doin some sad stuff without any life in it. As many records, I think I had sold or misplaced that "Chair in the Sky" after 2 times of spinning, I still was suffering that Mingus was not here anymore.....

Oh I´m really sorry to hear that. I just had mentioned him in the "What are you listening" when I answered on a reply about Easter European Jazz , where I mentioned Rolf and Joachim at Newport in the early 60´s ......

I think I read somewhere her version of the short gig with Mingus at the Jazz Workshop in June 1964, shortly after Jakie Byard had left the band for a short period. It must have been hard work to carry the load of such a giant. There were many hassles with the boss, and Danny Richmond tried to calm it down, talkin also to the mother of Jane Getz. The album Live at the Jazz Workshop "Right Now" is great, but not necessarly for the playing of Miss Jane Getz. The force is from Clifford Jordan (I never heard him play with more power and emotion), the incredible bass of Mingus and above all Dannie Richmond. I´m not sure now, but to encourage her to play again on the record, Mingus bought her some presents, and her mother took her to some "hokus pokus" , I don´t know how you say.....

When I was younger and had time for rehearsals, we played "Cumbia&Jazz Fusion" on at least three occasions live. With all them sections, the ostinato bass intro, the horns comin´in and the different sections from latin to swing to a short ballad time, to the satirical "Mingus Rap" and the out chorusses and all. Since the bass player good as he was, didn´t have the right hoarse voice, I had to take the role to "sing" that vocals...... I did Fables also, I have Meditations on Integration in my head and the changes of Rockefeller I know , but I don´t have the time any more. Not for rehearsals. Just get on stage and play the set list as it was discussed havin coffee before gig....... For Mingus I mostly played what I heard live when he was alive, The set order he had than. I think Meditations was no more on it, but Faubus was. Sue´s Changes also, nice chords ! As for Andrew Hill, sure I love much of his works and have two BN albums of him, I think one with Joe Henderson and one with Dolphy added, and maybe as a sideman on a Bobby Hutcherson album where he also contributes compositions which are great. But I don´t remember Andrew Hill was very much mentioned during my upcoming in the 70´s. Eveybody knew Monk and I have been playing Monk tunes all my live, but please not "Blue Monk" or "Well You Needn´t" with the Miles bridge instead of the original bridge, So I couldn´t say I could play an Andrew Hill tune "ad hoc" . He is great but maybe he was more an insider thing even during the time they recorded him. My impression is that BN hoped to discover the "next Monk" . Same with Graham Moncur III. They could sell very well Herbie Hancock as pianist/composer in the 60´s.

I love it, vintage bop tunes and ballads also from that period...... played by that too unsung hero. And I love those old BlackLion LPs, I have quite a bunch of them, all of them US stars recording in Europe. I think the producer was Alan Bates.

Yeah I remember those times very well. But many players did include very much of Eastern European Folk music in their brand of jazz. I think this was supported by the governments who would not like that their artists play stuff that was created in USA. I got to know some of them personally, mostly from Romania. I knew the guys from Vocal Jazz Quartet (Nicolae Ionescu was the leader), Johnny Răducanu the pianist who also wrote an autobiography which I fear I have misplaced somewhere, Harry Tavitian - Corneliu Stroe „Duo Creativ”, and many others. Female singer Aura Urziceanu I think emigrated to Canada....., and sure I also met some cats from Cehoslovacia, Polonia and Republica Democratică Germania (GDR it was named in English I suppose). Wasn´t there the pianist Joachim Kuhn from over there ? I think he left to the occident very early , I once saw a picture of him playing at Newport maybe in the 60´s. I think he had a lesser known brother who played clarinet. I think I didn´t meet musicians from Soviet Union, maybe from the now independent Republica Moldova (than a Soviet Republic), who had been separated from Romania after 1940..... Maybe most I liked Valeriu Ponomarev, the soviet trumpet player best known with Blakey. I liked him most because I must admit I prefer american styled jazz, I don´t really have it with "searching the own roots" as it´s about music.....maybe a question of taste...., but I think it always was a secret how he had managed to get to USA....., once he was asked and said "no comment !!!!"

In my youth or better said in my surroundings and fellow musicians it was else: Maybe the MJQ sounded else after they left BN and Prestige and got a more classical approach, but though they choose a more relaxed and more silent way to play than Diz and Bird , they all were real "cats", they formed the rhythm-section of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, they all played with Bird, and minus Lewis who was a fine pianist himself, all played and recorded with Monk and Bud. So I got to at least some of the earlier records of the MJQ through Diz, Bird, Monk. And don´t forget that fine stuff Sonny Rollins did with them also for Prestige. With Brubeck it was another thing. I really didn´t get to know one single music lover from the people I hang around or played with, who said "yeah, I dig Brubeck", and at least I learned it was another kind of society who liked Brubeck. And when by coincident one of those, maybe a school teacher who heard I go into jazz (when I started to listen to Mingus, Miles, Trane , Rollins etc. ) told me to check out Brubeck because he is GREAT, he is TOP, he borrowed me an album and despite the fact that I didn´t like the cover picture (this Brubeck looked to me like a secondary school headmaster from the early 60´s, completly "unhip"), I expected if he so "hot" as they say let´s spin it, and..... even my mother (born 1921) somehow heard it through my room and came in. She was not educated to jazz but when I would spin Mingus´ "Meditations", Ornette´s "Lonley Woman" she said that´s really great deep music , but when she heard "this" Brubeck she said "WHAT´s THAT KITSCH ? I thought you hear good music like "your" Mingus and so on, but this is NOTHING !". So even my oldish mother didn´t like it..... And I never could change my mind.... you can say it´s my fault, but I can´t do it....

Same here with Cool Struttin´ , but how could I forget about Blue Train when I mentioned my choice of 5 albums ? It was my entry in the BN-Mythos when I was still a boy. I mean, the first BN I heard. And Bud with Fats and Rollins , Monk, and Ornette Golden Circle I think were the first five I had. And that was a bitter time for the label. Many good albums were OOP, I had convinced my record dealer to order some directly from the States and after some months they arrived and I didn´t leave my house for a week because I was busy diggin that fine stuff.... The time for BN was so bad, I noticed it because my record dealer had all his LPs not in the alphabetical order of Artists, but of Record Labels, one for Prestige, one for Impulse, one for CBS, and a very small one for BN. But when I browsed through the BN´s hoping to find all them great artists, Rollins, Griffin, Mobley, Morgan, Hubbart, Herbie , Wayne etc, I was shocked when I only saw stuff from musicians I hadn´t heard about. Who was this Meredith Monk, I was interested only in Thelonious Monk, and who was Freddie Roach, I was interested only in Max Roach....., etc......

Too bad I missed the chance to see the comback of the MJQ live. Though I´m not the biggest fan of it, especially if it goes to much into classical influences which I don´t really like, I like the early albums for BN and Prestige. They played "together again" on a 3 days Jazz festival from friday to sunday, but I was in the Army and got only a day off on saturday, so I just arrived on friday evening when Miles started his set, heard all the music from sunday but had to be back on Sunday, so I missed things like MJQ and Libration Orchestra..... Lee Konitz doin´ "Oleo" might be interesting, I don´t have very much Konitz, one is the Prestige stuff with Miles as co-leader, I think one of Miles from Roost 48 with Konitz replacing Bird, and one 1977 Konitz Nonet which is very fine and has a superb rhythm section. I think it was on Roulette. Oleo sure is fine, but I would miss a drummer......

I had supposed they were brothers. Sam Dockery I only know from a Blakey LP from 1957 "Plays Lerner and Lowe" which I got coincidentally in the 70´s while looking for a Blakey Album..... Well, nice pianist, but I didn´t hear nothing so special, I mean compared with other pianists who played with Blakey or vice versa.

Yeah, me to, but from the 60´s my first choice of Dorham is "Una Mas". I like the tune and like to play it too. And Hancock and Williams of course .

Miles in Europe still remains my favourite "second quintet" record. Until then I had heard only one or two albums from the "first quintet" and I bought this one "Miles in Europe" with another cover over here. It was very cheap, only 70 shillingi, less than the half price for a regular LP back then 5 decades ago. Yes, "I Tought About You" was not on it. But I was overwhelmed by the power of Tony Williams and the fresher sound of Herbie, other than Garland who sure is very nice. I don´t know how often I spinned that fast versions of "Walkin" and "Milestones", much more exiting to me than the original Prestige sessions. And imagine: Once during that time (I was maybe 16 years old) I stayed at the place of my sister and listened to it loud in my "kid-room" and my sister just had called a craftman to fix something in the house and later told me that this guy had shouted with enthusiasm "great music, wonderful !!!!!". Those were great times. Jazz was much more popular then....

I remember I bought it really really long time ago, there were some BN-sessions that originally was in the vaults or rejected or who knows what...., they had some ugly- non typic BN covers (CD´s), all the same layout, I think another one was some Jackie McLean "Tippin the Scales". I think the Cal Massey arrangement or composition was something with a strange title, something with an animal farm and really the intro sounds like some animals on a farm, at least my wife said so and she even liked it because of that..... But in general, there are much better Morgan sessions, and it also has some sad feeling for me, since I think it was the last time Paul Chambers played on a BN session, it was late in his short live and he was near to death and you can hear it by his relative weak sound and solo. A tragedy when you think he was the most famous and most recorded bassist in the 50´s and early 60s. I have not listened to it for more than 20 years and am not sure where I have placed it, I think it was not in my separate box with BN recordings, I´m quite lousy in collecting due to lack of time.

Hard to say, I have many BN´s from bop-hardbop to modal and free. I´d say from the bop sides the Bud Powell with Fats and Sonny, that´s one of the best bebop-sessions. From Hardbop maybe "Cool Struttin", it´s the perfect hardbop sound. From the 60´s must be features something with Freddy, Wayne, Herbie, Tony or Elvin, something like "Speak No Evil" "Cantaloupe Island" or so, and from so called "Free Jazz" maybe Don Cherry´s "Complete Communion" or the Ornette at Golden Circle (which anyway have more swing that "free") or Taylor´s "Unit Structures".

Yes, and he had perfect time. He also recorded with Sonny Rollins for BN. He was in Europe around 1980 with a Lionel Hampton All-Stars where Dexter also sat in on "Flyin´Home".

oh, those strange album covers from Verve in the 50´s.... and the short and not very adecvat liner notes written by Granz himself I suppose. There is no artest named, but from the hat and the tenor saxophone I suppose it´s Lester Young

Yes, that may be the reason. Sure, I´m not stuck to "old school" bass players from the be bop days , though when listening to bop, I really love all of them , Gene Ramey, Tommy Potter, Curley Russell, Al McKibbon, and I think the first great bop solo on bass could be Ray Brown on "One Bass Hit", which is really great. And I grew up while Ron Carter and Buster Williams where top and I love them both, and many many others who play today. So I think it must have been painful to have such a great recording history and then it´s over. I´ve heard that Gene Ramey became some clerk at a bank office , but still played occasionally. Did Curley Russell also take a day job, because I think otherwise he couldn´t have survived ....? Great you did know him personally. Especially when I was a youngster and just had discovered bop because I had heard Mingus´ Parkeriana with Dolphy and wanted to know who is "this Charlie Parker" who had inspired Mingus.....sure....,.......I would have whished to get to talk about people who lived and worked during that time. And as busy as Curley Russell was, he might have had a lot to tell about all those nights at Birdland, at Royal Roost , about Bird, Bud, Fats, Dameron and all those who were dead when I started to listen to jazz. Thanks God other key figures like Diz, J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Dex, Max Roach, Klook were alive, recording and performing at that time

I don´t know how the situation is now, but during the 60´s there was a kind of people from intellectual or semi-intellectual level, who embraced everyting that´s "modern art". They had those modern paintings at home and went to concerts of 12 tone music and I sometimes wondered if they really can figure out what this modern painting want´s to say or what that 12 tone music want´s to express. My father, who sure was an intellectual person, he was interested in "difficult" classical music like Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, read heavy stuff like Nietsche and played chess, once went to a concert of some 12 tone music, and while smoking a cigarette during intermission another gentleman who didn´t have the musical ears of my father said "gee, that´s wonderful (the "music"). My father answered: "I don´t know, since I don´t have musical ears". "Why ? You supposed to have musical ears" My father "I also thought I have, but now after listening to this I know I don´t have musical ears". And we didn´t have modern paintings at home. I have heard some - at least for me "atonal" sounding string quartet on Ornette Coleman´s "Prime Design - Time Design". The opening is wonderful with that theme that appears as "New York" on an earlier album "Ornette at 12", but after that I couldn´t figure out nothing until the end that again makes sense to me". I also have a strange Max Roach CD from the 80´s with a string quartet. Only Roach and strings. Well I thought, maybe it is like the "Double Quartet" which I dug, but it was completley abstract fiddlin´ and I listened to it one time and that it was.... And about painting, well I saw some strange OC painting on the cover of "Empty Foxhole" and can live without that painting, but the music is great. And there is a lot of Miles Davis painting from later years, but I can live without it but couldn´t live without the music of Miles....

Of course Erich Kleinschuster was a very important personality on our jazz scene here in Viena. He also had his radio program "Jazz with Erich Kleinschuster" and did a lot of teaching and was such a fantastic trombonist. He was originally from Graz, another town in Austria with some jazz history (Sonny Rollins-Max Roach in Graz, Coltrane 1962, Jimmie Giuffre 1961 and a lot of more, and an own jazz conservatory. He had his own sextet in the seventies/eighties, and I remember once he sat in with another great musician from the States, I don´t remember who, and called "Move" at a really fast tempo. I was a bit too young and shy then or didn´t feel "ready" so I had no musical encounter with him, sad.

You are right, I had read about that tax thing and I remember Woody Herman in 1985 looked very tired and maybe he also had some heart condition or breath shortness, he gasped for air after the short clarinet solo he played on a slow blues. Anyway there was an air of death since George Duvivier was scheduled for bass and I would have loved to see him, but he was nearly dead and had to be replaced. Later I heard that he died right around the same time, july 1985 I think...

Big Band was never my strongest point, but during my time, I mean my generation maybe the first choice was Thad Jones-Mel Lewis. I saw the Thad-Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band and it was a wonderful experience. After Thad Jones left, I saw it as "Mel Lewis Big Band" but maybe two good tunes from the old Thad Jones days were played, the rest was Bob Brookmey compositions and most of us were very disappointed, it didn´t appeal to our tastes.... Of course, I also saw and loved the Sun Ra Arkestra in the late 70´s still with John Gilmore and Marshall Allen featured, plus the very nice singer June Tyson (singers normally are not my greatest love, but Tyson was wonderful). Oh yeah, and I saw the Woody Herman Herd of 1979, with Nick Brignola playing, they played quite modern jazz. It was on a festival feature and others scheduled were Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Chico Freeman, so I was not sure what it will be like. The typical pre bop swing bands was before my time and not really played during my youth, so I had expected an old man with some very old stuff you sometimes saw on old black white films, and was very surprisesd that it sounded modern....well Woody himself was really an old man, playing one or two short shots on his clarinet, but the band played a different style.....

I have read so much about that tour, I think mostly in some book about Chet Baker. The music must be great and it has a fantastic rhythm section. But I heard it was almost impossible to make it happen, because away from music they almost were fighting, I mean two live long junkies with bad temper, and though Chet was playing better than ever since his comeback and mostly over here in Europe, Stan Getz was the bigger name...

Amen to that. First of all I listen if the drummer is good. Only a very good drummer makes things happen. Yesterday I participated at a jam session and the first drummer who played was just mediocre and anyway left after one tune. Later in the evening the fanstastic drummer from the opening band got back on the drum chair and it was heaven on earth. Ellington and drums......I must admit I don´t have much Ellington on record. I love to play some of his ballads, but must admit I got to Ellington through the "Monk plays Ellington" so I have more the Monkish touch and voicings in those things. I further have Ellington-Mingus-Roach....... and I mean Roach. Best choice and like Mingus one of my all time favourites. On the other hand, the second Ellington I have is a Trane and Duke on Impulse, which my wife bought for me. Very nice on the tunes where Elvin Jones is on the drum chair. But there might be one or two tunes, where the use Elllington´s regular drummer, I forgot his name, but I didn´t like it. I mean he plays rhim-shots constantly behind an otherwise great Coltrane solo. Well Coltrane was such a genius that he didn´t let it bug him, but for a lesser musician it would have narrowed him down, and the drummer is supposed to push you to the highest inspirations......

Stolen Moments, well easy. I hadn´t known it until 1980 when I also played bass fiddle for some years as a second instrument and was invited for a gig with guys who were even younger than me (I was 21 at that time), and they had some sheet music of what they wanted to play and one of it was "Stolen Moments". Well, some medium hard bop in minor, if I remember. They had a lot of such tunes of safe medium hard bop, like "Moanin´" "Blues March", "In a Mellow Tone" and stuff like that. Easy to play and to solo, but it didn´t exite me really......

I don´t have very much big band stuff on records. But I saw Woody Herman 2 times live. The first occasion was in 1979 with the Herd, I think they had Nick Brignola on bs..., and exactly during that time the Concord-LP with star guests like Dizzy, Woody Shaw and Stan Getz was for sale. And this was the LP era. At least during the time I heard him. I later re-bought the album on CD. The only other Woody Herman on LP I have is "Bird and the Herd". The last time I saw Woody live was in 1985, but strangely it was not the Herd, it was a kind of all star thing in the "Concord-Style", I think Buddy Tate and Al Cohn were featured.