Rosco

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) the Copehangen set (previously on Royal Jazz) has this week been issued as Live in Copenhagen on the Gambit label (bulked out with a stray 'bonus' track from the 1963 Antibes festival). I have no details on this label but it looks to be another shady Lonehillesque outfit. They've also put out the Zurich concert. No reason to go for that while the Jazz Unlimited version is out there (another from me for the Zurich set). The Royal Jazz set has been impossible to find for ages though.

Slightly more on topic... The Scheveningen set has already been out in the States on the Unique Jazz label under the somewhat vague title Miles Davis Quintet Live! with John Coltrane, RKO 1037. The bonus cuts on the Lonehill have all been around on various issues before.

Ooops.... just followed this link and realised this had already been discussed. My bad.

No argument there. At least the blantently pirated stuff is easily ignorable. I'd rather Lonehill didn't get any of my hard earned but the Manchester gig is one I've been searching for for some time now. I try to be fairly principled on these things but I can resist anything except temptation. Bastards. The Paris and Stockholm concerts are the ones to have of course- magnificent playing from everyone, especially Trane who is just astounding. The best edition I found of the Paris date was the 4CD set on the French Trema label, En Concert Avec Europe 1, 2 discs from March with Trane and 2 from October with Stitt. I believe these may have been issued separately by Laserlight, can't vouch for the sound on those (or its 'greyness').

Best wishes for the day!

I believe Lonehill have also released the Manchester, UK gig from October 1960 with Sonny Stitt. I have avoided anything to do with Lonehill so far but I'm afraid I may have to make an exception on these. All the stuff from the March- April tour with Trane is worth having.

UK date on this is now December 5th!!!!! This is starting to piss me off now! This time I'm serious: I don't think it'll be out this year!

Arggh! Like I need to get any more worked up!

I was underwhelmed by it... as I have been by pretty much every Stevie album for the last 20-odd years. It's being hailed by some as a return to form by some but I just ain't hearing it.

My copy of Zoot Sims & Jimmy Rowles If I'm Lucky (OJC) reproduces the original LP liner notes... upside down and back-to-front If you want to read them, you have to hold the booklet up to a mirror!

Funnily enough, I nearly revised this thread myself to mention American Splendor, which I saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Harvey Pekar, in addition to being a cartoon writer, also wrote about jazz. At one point in the movie he is searching his chaotic apartment for an Ornette Coleman LP. There's some other fine music in the movie; Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Jay McShann and original music by a band that includes Dave Doulgas. But, yes, the Maneri piece is a wonderful way to start the movie; in the audio commentary Pekar himself sings Maneri's praises. I must track that piece down. Good movie too, with a fine performance by Paul Giamatti as Pekar. Makes me want to see the Crumb documentary again.

If you think Stewart Copeland is a cool name, don't forget he played drums in the band Curved Air, where he replaced Florian Pilkington Miksa. Speaking of drummers, anyone mentioned Grassella Oliphant yet? And, while not exactly jazz, I've always enjoyed Steely Dan/ Doobies saxman, Cornelius Bumpus.

Picked up a stack of these myself (eleven in fact ) and probably going back for at least half a dozen more. Great value at 3.99. FYI, the second volume of Django Reinhardt's Peche a la Mouche has 'Blue for Ike', the superb track that wrong-footed us all on Marty Jazz's BFT.

For the last year I've been trying to practice for 3 to 4 hours a day five days a week. If I'm enjoying myself I'll play for longer; if I'm not (and there are occasional bad days) I won't force it and quit after an hour. I feel it's better to find something else to do than labour over it when your heart isn't in it (fortunately, this doesn't happen often). It is important to enjoy practicing regardless of how much time you put in. I also try and do some kind of theory work for an hour or so every day. Free for All's post is right on the money. Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying my hand at arranging some tunes for a jazz workshop I'm involved in. I've never done any arranging before but I'm enjoying the challenge. Whenever I get stuck- which is about every other bar - I find it more helpful to 'hear' what I want in my head and work it out after. FYI, Barry Green and Timothy Galway have adapted the earlier 'Inner Game' books specifically to cover music and their 'Inner Game of Music' is one of my most well-thumbed sources of inspiration along with Paul F. Berliner's 'Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation'. Both highly recommended.

I'm in two minds on this one... If it's a reissue of an album I like the original running order uniterrupted, with the alternates at the end. (Not jazz but I recall some reissues of Elvis Costello's albums that had the original album and its extra material seperated by a 10 second pause track which I thought was a nice idea) If it's a 'scholarly' release, especially a boxed set, I like recording order. If a session is particularly successful I see nothing wrong with releasing alternate takes. The reasons for a particular take being chosen are not always necessarily musical (especially in the LP era when time constraints were a consideration) and with music of consistently high quality often arbitrary.

Teo only tends to bitch about these things after his check's been mailed...

UK release date on this is now November 7th! I'm starting to think we'll be lucky to see it this year...

"Not four candles... Fork 'andles!" RIP Ronnie!

Gonna hold off voting yet... I've had a couple of months to live with the Bird/Diz set while the Monk/Trane is still fresh. As far as 'importance' goes... it'll probably be the Bird/Diz. The Monk/Trane album sheds new light on the progress of these two obviously influencial musicians, but the Bird/Diz helps define a whole genre and one that still remains the touchstone for anyone who plays or listens to this music. Besides, what are my chances of being trapped on a desert island anyway?

I can't disagree with any of that. And as much as I adore the recordings with Johnny Griffin, the level of interaction between Monk and Trane here is quite staggering (and perhaps even a little surprising given the difference in their approach to instrumental technique). They seemed to have achieved such profound empathy and in such a short time span. It doesn't just feel like Coltrane sitting in with the Monk trio (which I kind of felt about 'Discovery'), it feels like a fully integrated group. This is one of those releases that is genuinely revelatory.

Listening to this for the fourth time... and I have to say it lives up to expectations for me. Sure you can quibble about the merits of the sound but given the circumstances of the recording and its (re-)discovery it seems pretty insignificant. That these recordings exist at all is cause for celebration. I don't agree that Coltrane sounds like the player of 1964. Yes, he's playing with the steely intensity that we expect particularly from mid-period Trane but that was already present in the 1958 live recordings with Miles (Coltrane seemed to shift up a gear or two when playing live, even over the mercurial playing of his studio recordings). The real delight here for me is Monk. Rarely have I heard Thelonious to be quite so happy, jaunty, witty and inventive. And he's all over that keyboard! For any who doubt Monk's innate musicality this is a lesson in his peculiar brand of angular virtuosity. He just seems to be delighting in the playing; a combination of venue, instrument and musical colleagues I would guess. The thrust and parry between the two principals (and also their rhythm partners) reminds me why jazz is the great music that it is.

I'm another one weighing in with a for this one. It feels very much like a 'transtitional' kind of album; of course, we were denied the outcome of that transition. It certainly suggests, if not jazz-rock, a sort of electric-modal hard bop. Not to everyone's tastes, granted, but Lee still sounds like Lee and Billy Harper is well worth a listen. I recently got the 3CD Live at the Lighthouse set which is also very good. Further proof that Lee was not content to rest on his laurels. Bennie Maupin is smokin' too.

Ok, guilty confessions time... I recently picked up a budget priced two CD set of Bob James first 4 CTI albums. There's a lot of dross on there (some quite laughably lame) but there's some genuine corkers too. James always seemed like a player who could have made some interesting music at the sharper end of things but chose to go a different- and certainly more lucrative- route. I've always been intrigued by the idea that he made an album for ESP Disk'. Never have heard it though.

Well, there's finally a UK release date for this and it's not until the end of October! Don't these boxes get released same day worldwide? Even with the late October date I'm not holding my breath that it will actually come out then. These things always seem to get put back.

Just had a quick listen to the three versions I have: Miles & the quintet (master and alternate) and Weather Report. The slow alternate take of Miles' is pretty straightforward; 18 bars repeated. Weather Report's also seems pretty straightforward although there it's 20 bars. The Miles master take is a little harder to pin down; the melody is played four times; the first three are 18 bars but on the final repeat it feels as though the phrase is extended to 20. Miles solos for 38 bars and- this is the key part- brings the melody back in by playing the opening phrase (Shorter jumps in pretty quick, Hancock is slower on the uptake). The melody plays again (feeling like 20 bars); Shorter solos for 44 bars (I think, I got lost ); Another melody, again feeling like 20 bars; Hancock, sticking closer to the form, takes two 18 bar choruses. Melody with a tag vamp out. So the form seems to be the melody is 18 bars, except when it preceeds a solo when it's extended to 20 bars. Miles and Wayne's solos are not over the form and melody is brought back in after an indeterminate number of bars by cue (something that Miles often did, as early as Flamenco Sketches and which would later become what Enrico Merlin calls the 'coded phrases' which would signal the change from one tune to the next or, in the 80s bands, the bridges to tunes). At least that's how I'm hearing it. Feel free to disagree.