sgcim

I should add that Roy gave that student a free trumpet lesson, backstage at the gig! We're going beyond Ted Curson territory here (one of the nicest guys I ever met), who used to invite young musicians back to his hotel room after his gigs, to hang out and talk about music.

So sad to hear. Roy acted like a big brother to the best trumpet player in my HS band.A very encouraging, giving person- RIP, Roy.

Yeah, dat it!

Thanks for posting the other half of this session! The only ones I was aware of were the four cuts on a weird Lennie Tristano LP re-issue, that featured one side of Tristano's group, and then four cuts of De Franco's group with Raney doing Russell's "A Bird in Igor's Yard", "Extrovert" and two others. I think the title of the album had something to do with 'modernists of the 50s'. Comparing him to Parker is very apt; he spent a lot of time listening to Bird live, and then adapting his lines to the guitar, which is insanely difficult considering the difference between a wind instrument and a plucked instrument. He did it by a combination of accents, slurs and a special type of picking, that enabled him to play Bird's lines at ridiculously fast tempos. And yet, there are still these warped 'shredders' on jazz guitar forums who insist that George Benson is the closest thing to Bird on guitar, even though Barry Harris was quoted as saying Raney "was the closest thing to Yard" that he'd ever heard. Thanks for posting the other half of this session! The only ones I was aware of were the four cuts on a weird Lennie Tristano LP re-issue, that featured one side of Tristano's group, and then four cuts of De Franco's group with Raney doing Russell's "A Bird in Igor's Yard", "Extrovert" and two others. I think the title of the album had something to do with 'modernists of the 50s'. Comparing him to Parker is very apt; he spent a lot of time listening to Bird live, and then adapting his lines to the guitar, which is insanely difficult considering the difference between a wind instrument and a plucked instrument. He did it by a combination of accents, slurs and a special type of picking, that enabled him to play Bird's lines at ridiculously fast tempos. And yet, there are still these warped 'shredders' on jazz guitar forums who insist that George Benson is the closest thing to Bird on guitar, even though Barry Harris was quoted as saying Raney "was the closest thing to Yard" that he'd ever heard.

I think it was his first. I was looking forward to it, but was disappointed. By large ensemble, I just meant bigger than a quartet, and smaller than a big band. Criss Cross has some type of deal where you;ve gotta agree to buy a certain number of CDs, if you want to record for them. Peter bernstein got the in with them, because a photographer friend of mine was doing a shoot for the head of CC, and he needed a sideman guitarist who lived in Manhattan pronto for a leader's recording, and the photographer mentioned PB. i just heard the old Ralph Lalama CC record with PB, and PB seemed to be having some difficulty with the up tempo tunes. Another Buddy Rich story I heard involved two members of a band I used to play with. They were in Buddy's band for a short time, and they got a notice that they had to talk to the band manager. The first one went in, and the band manager said to him, "Buddy says you don't swing, you're fired. Here's your two week pay." The second guy went in, and the same thing happened, verbatim. A well oiled machine...

Oh my God, I didn't think he was that old or sick. I think I recently heard an interview with him on KCR. Another of the great masters is gone. RIP Sonny...

Yeah, Fusco was great with Buddy. I didn't know he was a lineman; maybe the Giants could use him. At this point, they'd probably do better with an alto player in his 60s than what they have now. I was thinking about your comparison of Dillon to WW. I'm sure they have a lot of contact in NY, so there's probably a lot of influence from his theoretical ideas and playing. I enjoyed WW in his stint with Donald Fagen, so I checked out that larger ensemble record he made for Criss Cross, and found it turgid and lifeless, more 'brain' music than 'ear' music. I'm sure he's done other stuff since then, hopefully more ear oriented, but I tend to not be interested in an artist after I've disliked a record they've made as a leader..

Yeah, he's Trane obsessed alright. You might be interested in his friend, an alto player named Andrew Gould. I played a show (Smoky Joe's Cafe) with him a number of years ago, and he's got that same do-or-die attitude. He recently released his first album, also. http://www.andrewgouldmusic.com/audio.html

I can't mention names here, because the parties are still alive, but I was talking with one veteran player about his day hanging out with a guy who is known for having a great attitude on the stand, and even today, is still doing the top gigs, jazz or otherwise. He mentioned the fact that the guy with the great attitude just got a great Broadway gig, because the guy he replaced was fired for playing practical jokes on members of the band. The guy who got fired is a player who was on most big band jazz records recorded on the East Coast from the 50s onward, and had a rep for shoving things in players' horns, untuning instruments on breaks, hiding drumsticks, etc... Apparently, it developed into a type of mania that he couldn't control, and despite warnings to cut it out, the conductor couldn't take it anymore, and fired him.

That's good to hear. He used to jam at a loft in NYC that a friend of mine owned, and he sounded great. It would be a shame for a player like that to stop playing.

I'd heard that Phil Dwyer has become a lawyer, and retired from the music biz. Is he still playing?

Out of the younger guys I've heard. Sam Dillon, has went through the insane discipline, sideman credit accumulation, and whatever else it takes, to earn the admiration of Ray Drummond, Joe Chambers, Jimmy Heath and a lot of other people of that caliber who he works with. He just released his first album, "Out in the Open", and from what I've heard of the previews, every note swings, the notes come popping out of his horn like Trane's did, and he wasn't afraid to include a jazz version of Hendrix's "Third Stone From the Sun" that doesn't pander to, uh, pander bears? I've had the demoralizing experience of having to follow his soloing in a big band we played in, and the only excuse I can give is that I was working an exhausting day gig during that period, and on the one day I had off, I did earn a nod from him after my solo. I think he's in his late 20s, or early 30s.

When I heard one of those versions of Nardis it scared the hell out of me. I had no desire to hear it again. The same with his coked up version of "In Your Own Sweet Way". Unfortunately, the Evans fanatic I play with insists on playing at that coked-up tempo. It should be pointed out that regardless of the experience with the "Explorations" session, there are a lot of CDs that have been put out after Evans' death that Evans insisted not be released. Add to that the numerous bootleg live CDs that have been released, and the only sure way of assessing Evans' legacy is to go by recordings released prior to his death.

Yum, Mike make a good fillet!

When you google 'marches to a different drummer', and come up with a lot of images of Doomberg, the apocalypse truly is nigh, and the anti-Christ is circling your house... Buckley and Nyro were similar in that they both rejected the music of their earlier successes, and just did whatever the heck they wanted to do, but Buckley took it way further out improvisation-wise than Nyro. Bass, Marimba, jazz guitar and percussion, no song structure, one chord, improvisational vocalise...

I don't know about filleting PS; I usually throw the little ones away. AG and EC are another story, though...

Houston qualifies for living legend status. It was like a breath of fresh air hearing him play after everyone else seemed to be competing with each other over who could play the most notes at the Phil Woods Memorial concert. Houston swung more, got a better sound out of his horn, played perfectly in tune, played better ideas and played with more soul than guys and gals half his age. In Grace Kelley's case, 1/4 his age!

No direction ho-me I don't know what the croaker things are about. Must be a Texas thang...

Yeah, I always wondered how those two snot noses would feel when they hit 70. We should wheel them over to a park bench sometime and shoot a video of them, and ask them ,How Does it Fe-el?

Yeah, he plays a lot of that type of stuff. Gives him a very West Coast sound, where he used to live. He used to play in Papa John Creach's band, in another life.

Garfunkel completely lost his voice a while ago, but claims in his book that he's almost got it all back. I don't know, I haven't heard him in years.

We were just talking about Vince Guraldi's influence on us as kids on a gig this week. One guy just picked up a two month road gig playing the Charlie Brown Christmas Show, and thought of it as a great gig playing "sweet jazz" every night, rather than the typical Broadway stuff he had to play to make a living. The pianist said Guraldi's music had a strong influence on him as a kid, and I can hear it in his use of those chordal fills Guraldi played in some of this pianist's solos. I fell in love with "Christmas Time is Here" as a kid, and loved the mood that it created with chord progressions I'd never heard before (bVII+11, the #ivm7b5 descending thing), and starting the melody on the maj7 really knocked me out back then.

Garfunkel once called him a little shrimp (or something like that) and said he would always be taller than him. I don't think Paul ever got over that... In the recent bio he's always complaining that he should be happy, because he's rich, talented, has written hit songs, etc..., but he keeps complaining that he's not happy, and has to keep seeing a shrink about it. Then he thought marrying Edie Brickell finally made him happy. Next thing you know, they're in court with EB telling the judge that she can't live with him anymore because he's such a dick...

To get a good understanding of who exactly Smith was, I'd recommend reading his biography "Moonlight In Vermont", written by a British guitarist a few years ago. The difference in Smith's approach to jazz was his very different approach to rhythm in his single line solos.You don;t really notice it until you hear his recordings with his old buddy from the NBC Studio Orchestra, Hank Jones. Smith invariably takes the first solo on most songs, and everything seems fine, until Jones comes in for his solo. All of a sudden, it sounds like you're listening to a completely different style of music. The eighth notes become the tied triplets that all boppers used, instead of the almost classically even eighth notes that Smith was playing. and the syncopation boppers achieved by accenting the offbeats of said eighth notes appears, instead of Smith's accenting eighth notes on the beat. \ The 'troublemaker' Jones finishes his solo, and we're returned to Smith's world of even, unaccented eighth note lines that sound as if they were written out beforehand. On most of Smith's Roost recordings of the 50s, he uses the pianist Bob Pancoast, who sounds like a pianistic version of Smith, so we don't notice the difference in Smith's rhythmic conception as much as we did when Jones was playing with him on some of the Verve recordings of the 60s. When a writer informed Smith that he wanted to put out a book of transcriptions of Smith's single line solos, Smith's reaction was reportedly, "Why the heck would you want to do a book of my solos? Why don't you do a book of Jimmy Raney's solos? His lines were much hipper than mine." One of Raney's students claimed that Smith used to sit incognito in the back of clubs when Raney was playing in NY to figure out how Raney 'did it'. That would have to be verified by Jon Raney. The other side of Smith was his literally perfect technique, incredible beauty of sound, and astonishing solo guitar performances, all of which pretty much establish him as probably the greatest plectrum guitarist that ever lived. Van Eps switched to finger style playing from his early days of plectrum playing, and developed what he called his 'lap style' of playing the guitar, taking advantage of the contrapuntal aspects of the guitar, in addition to a very advanced sense of harmony. He added a seventh string to his guitar to give a fuller, almost pianistic range to his guitar playing. Smith accomplished this on a smaller level by tuning his lowest string down a whole step, from E to D. In addition to playing his great solo arrangements of standards, Van Eps was also an accomplished composer of solo guitar pieces.

Smith's amazing accomplishment on those recordings was being able to perform those classical guitar staples entirely with a plectrum, rather than the standard finger style practice. They came out too late for me to loan the CD to my classical guitar teacher in graduate school, to get his opinion of Smith's heretical use of a pick on those pieces. The last time he had anything to say about a jazz guitarist was when a hapless student loaned him some of Joe Pass' 'Virtuoso' albums. He let loose a string of epithets, which had me shaking in my shoes, Ironically, I chose a Van Eps piece for my final jury, and the guy loved it, and made me xerox a copy of it for his own use.