couw

A magnificient player, definitely also on piano. Some of his stuff knocks me off my chair every time I play it. RIP Mr Kurylewicz.

yes, and the Netherlands is the capital of Amsterdam (I'm pretty sure).

it's somewhere on an FZ album I only have on vinyl, but there Ertegun is pronounced starting off like "Earth", but then forms into Eardigin' with stress on the first syllable; almost rhymes with "cardigan".

attached a German announcement, first of "das Joachim Kühn Trio", then twice just "Joachim Kühn". Note how the stress in Joachim is on the A, so that's yo-Akhim. The announcer actually almost swallows the "yo" part; typically, guys named Joachim are called Achim for that matter.

ey, I've been listening to the thing since before it was even born. It's good, but I know all the answers and don't want to spoil the fun. Plus I am too busy to think up one-liners to combine clues and fun of the kind that makes all the others shrug and make guestures of appointed craziness. I'll bet next month will be deader still (sorry MG) and the month after death we'll have a regular ghost town in this here BFT forum... BTW and as the drummer would say: thebonustrackkicksasshellyeah!

Ramwong was originally released on Columbia/CBS, the GDR label Amiga had planned to release it contemporaneously, just like they did the (One) Tension album -- BTW, that's where the title mix-up comes from as Amiga released the LP as "One Tension", whereas CBS had just "Tension" -- but for some reason the GDR release of Ramwong was pushed back a few years. The 12 tune tracklist is from a US release titled "Now Jazz Ramwong" (World Pacific, if memory serves), which is actually a compilation of Tension and Ramwong, leaving off some tracks. To add some, the Wewerka release "Abstractions" is actually Ramwong with an extra long alternate of Blue Fanfare (hellyeah!).

previous thread, and yeah!

Another interesting tidbit that this album was released in the GDR as well at the time, just like Ramwong and (One) Tension. Mangelsdorff held various tours through the GDR.

interestingly, the "free" jazz scene in the former GDR was well represented in main stream, i.e. state controlled media like radio and recordings. From the mid 60s on, several small and big groups developed their ideas in relative isolation from the outside. There were occasional visits and guest appearances by the likes of Willem Breuker and various players from West Germany. Joachim Kühn has stated somewhere I can't find now that Cecil was among his main influences. Kühn certainly was among the main proponents of the early GDR free jazz scene until his move to the west already in 1966. Ernst Ludwig (Lute) Petrowsky is another early bird on the scene who then continued to appear on many of the free jazz albums issued. His influences I would say are more to be found in Poland with guys like Ptaszyn Wroblewski and Zbigniew Namyslowski. I can't recall all the details, but I believe that for a period of time Hannes Zerbe was in artistic charge of the Jazz section of the state controlled Amiga label and he certainly was not opposed to freeer outings as his own Blech Band and piano/tuba recordings testify. It may have all been a bit clicquish, with the same names popping up over and again, but then the scene was small and freedom was still state controlled freedom and not equal across the nation.

Jack Schitt drank much at the Schitt-Happens nuptials and ended up loudly brawling sailor songs. The morning after, he was one hoarse Schitt.

March 4, 2007, 9:20 pm Laudatio: Steve Lacy By Alvin Curran Steve Lacy, center, with Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome, 1977. (Photo: Roberto Masotti) ROME — For anyone who has not played the Dixieland standards — say, Muskrat Ramble, Fidgety Feet, Sister Kate, Black and Blue, Rampart Street and Moldy Fig Stomp (that one I made up) — there’s no postmodern theory that can beat it. Derrida, a great jazz buff, as George Lewis assures me, knows where Les Orleans Nouveaux are, but Baudrillard, a sometime Americanophile, probably doesn’t know the changes. This much I got out of just reading a heart-rending, ear- and eye-opening book, “Steve Lacy, Conversations” (Duke Univ. Press, ed. Jason Weiss, 2006). It is a knock-out, an omelette aux fines herbes, an impeccable Lacy line of weird angles and implied major seconds. A bag full of Dixie, borscht-belt air, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Gil Evans, Musica Elettronica Viva, the road, Rome, Paris, New York, Asia, Boston, backstage philosophy, painters, poets and corduroy. A life of roaming music lessons on stage and in the streets, in museums and at home — compositions all, that most professors have long excluded from their curriculae. No sour grapes nor sentimental journey in this book, just the pure straight dope. Steve’s erudite and smart words, thousands of which I exchanged with him over nearly four decades — like his crystalline notes, loony melodic contours, say-what repetitions, clusters containing the whole Ellington book, durations of long disappeared tribes, texts of every major poet, and dedications galore — sent me scrambling into my own scrapbook of similarly shared experiences … When Steve entered the “studio” and music of the mythical group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in Rome in 1968 it was as if the entire Mississippi Delta had washed in on us. As an ex-jazzer I could appreciate the pristine sound, the noble dignified inflection of his music, speaking in time, out of time, in repeatable syntax, in tongues, in Babe Ruth swats and almost inaudible overtone seductions. Here he was passing through a natural way-station, a grimy old metal factory in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, which MEV in the form of Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Carol Plantamura, Allan Bryant, Jon Phetteplace, Ivan Vandor and myself had nearly brought down on our own heads by amateurishly widening a structural arch to connect two main rooms. Rich with projects but low on cash, Steve, along with Irene Aebi, moved in and seldom paid the rent. Threatened with losing the place Teitelbaum and I went one day like two tough landlords to collect from them. Steve listened to all the arguments – how much we had sweated, invested and put into this place and looking down boyishly at his left foot, as he often did when offering major replies, said, “… Man, but you have no idea how many notes I put into these walls … millions!” Steve came up with these life-saving retorts time and time again – poetic truths so simple and evident that even the sewer-rats applauded when he pronounced one. There was no comeback to the million notes in the walls, and as far as I know that locale, now the studio of a group of painters I know, is still alive with the remarkable sounds that Steve was producing daily in the millions – practicing on end to master the devilish soprano saxophone and to amalgamate his solid jazz self with the most open forms of musical liberation and creative anarchy that were the central themes of the day. Playing with MEV, in exchange for our riffs on sheets of grating glass, amplified springs, and various found-objects, mixed with unearthly oscillators, Steve would simply drop a honked low A-flat or hang a heavenly mid-range long tone like he was causally hanging the wash on a line, then heave air-brakes like a Mack truck about to hit a goose caught by a hyena, or send out an anomalous phrase that sounded like all God’s chillun’ were singing in unison. Against the MEV “casino” of sound it all made perfect sense, perfect “Arte Povera.” But, the MEV theology which vaunted no leaders, no scores, no authority, no beginning or end, now had “melody” — certainly a bourgeois artifact to be avoided, but coming out of Steve’s horn, a blessing and a remarkable alternative to the group’s penchant to construct walls of earsplitting noise in crescendo. This time it was Steve Lacy who brought the whole history of music up the Tiber and dropped it in Via Peretti right in the laps of a bunch of Ivy League runaways. There, Steve began his life as a composer in earnest. A born melodist crafting lines of incomparable invention, the beginnings of his endless songbooks – band-books of life. We all learned from him as he from us, and while Rzewski could speak ancient Greek and nouveau-Marx, Lacy was talking Cecil and Monk, Akhmatova and Gyson. The dialogue was convulsive as it was serene. MEV, the quintessential experimental composers’ performing group was becoming via Lacy, and then with Garrett List (trombone), a meta-Dixieland band with roots in the mud of all the rivers, the Tiber to the Mississippi, the Rhine to the Ganges, the Jordan to the Yangtze. Pure flowing postmodern theory in practice. Maybe what Mozart would have invented – between fart jokes – had he been in our so-called utopian shoes. Though Steve’s music and life had other places to go, when called, he always made time to return to the unkempt MEV project between 1970 and 2002, often using it as a musical launching pad for his compositions to uncharted destinations. But in typical fashion as Rzewski wrote to me: “I remember phoning S. once, maybe sometime in the 80’s, to tell him “There’s another MEV gig!” From the other end of the line, after a moment’s pause, came an agonized groan: “Ooh, Nooo…” Never, other than in the coherence and clarity of the composer Cornelius Cardew, have I encountered a musical poet of such unruffled purpose as Steve. He lived on the same ill-famed streets where all music lives, the obscure and even dangerous ones, where you only emerge by disappearing into your own sounds late at night letting in their precious air and light. Outside the MEV experiences I had the pleasure to work with Steve in some unusual ventures of my own, in which he recognized his immediate affinity and utility. The first was an LP of songs which I had written and arranged for the politically engaged music-theater singer Maria Monti, “Il Bestiario” (The Bestiary, 1974-5), with texts by the renowned poet Aldo Braibanti – a set of pithy and airy songs over which Steve added unforgettable commentaries. He was also a natural choice for my 1985 National Public Radio “Maritime Rites” series, now on New World Records, as one of the illustrious colleagues (Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, George Lewis among them) to solo against my recorded soundscapes of the eastern United States seaboard. I recorded him playing his “Coastline” (based incidentally on the contour of the sea view he had from his get-away house in Sperlonga ) in a closet somewhere in Bologna 20 minutes before he was to appear in a solo concert. And then in a radio work, “For Julian,” (1987) — commissioned by Klaus Schoening of the WDR Studio Akustische Kunst, Cologne — where with a mixed chorus, Steve answered my plaintive shofar calls with his biblical soprano sax. This work, in memory of our mutual friend Julian Beck — co-founder of the Living Theater — received the first Ars Acustica prize for Radio Art in 1988. So here was this chubby Upper-West-Side kid, who in the 1950s I heard play at Brown University with the Max Kaminsky’s Dixieland Band and the next thing I know he is a MacArthur genius — patiently and intently bringing the entire treasure of Western modernism into the exploding crucible of Afro-American music, and vice-versa. Who could ever have imagined that the elegant quasi one-note “Basin St. Blues” contained such potent changes? Thanks, Steve. [The New York Times obituary of Steve Lacy.]

VA - Jazz Via Dresden (Amiga)

VA - Jazz Na Koncertním Pódiu (Supraphon Gramofonový Klub) Czechoslovakian live jazz from the early 60s

ah, frère "Jack"!

and you listened to him? if you drink nothing for a week or so, you will need to see your doctor again. Please let us know whether he has other ideas up his sleeve.

Belgian actually.

you must mean the American Goldfinch (Carduelis trístis), as the Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) has a red face.

listen to streaming audio here: http://www.sonarkollektiv.com/releases/SK132MP3/

The Hank Jones Trio w/ Bobby Jaspar is a favourite as is Frank Wess's Jazz For Playboys and Bill Barron's Tenor Stylings.

The Körössy is interesting as well. It has four tracks from a 12" LP and 4 issued on a 7" EP. Never heard the EP. The LP tracks are really good but in poor sound. I wonder what the CD sounds like.

There is a CD with four tracks by the Ptaszyn Wroblewski Quartet as a bonus. http://www.mp3.com/albums/458724/summary.html this is very nice, the rhythm section is more than solid, Trzaskowski is a great piano player! The cover you posted is one of a series of generic covers of Muza vinyls in those days.

Wolfgang Schmiedt/Jörg Huke - XXX-OOO (Amiga)

young and raw, partly self-digested in its own pancreatic slime. yum! Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and traditionally in the south of the Netherlands this means: stop partaying (carnival) and sober up. Nothing better than raw herring for that job! in spite of all the goriness, this "haring" tastes really good.

but you will still be able to see the big paintings by Rembrandt and the small ones by Vermeer, so I'd say hop in there for an hour or so and have a look.

na, gefliesieteerd dan mar, war!