sgcim

I had never heard of this pianist/songwriter until a few days ago, when someone mentioned that he wrote the song 'Along Comes Mary' for The Association in the 60s. Wiki and some other online articles said that he was born in 1942 in Minnesota, was able to play classical pieces by ear when he was four, went to a conservatory as a kid, but then started listening to Trane, Miles and Ahmad Jamal, and dropped out of high school to move to Chicago and become a jazz pianist. He then moved to LA, where he roomed with fellow jazz pianist/upright bass player Bob Bruno, and they gigged as a duo in clubs, until Almer got involved with the pop recording scene in LA of the 60s. After doing some things with Brian Wilson, he went to Washington DC for a film score, which fell through, and wound up staying in DC for the rest of his life. Anyone familiar with his music?

Yea, I meant I didn't hear Marsh in Turner's playing.

I agree with that, but I don't hear Turner's claim that Marsh is his greatest influence.

Well said! That kind of sums up Chekhov's famous quote, "There is nothing new in the arts except talent".

And yet, Warne ignored all the fads jazz went through, and stayed with the tradition of spinning off masterful improvisations on tunes with a solid musical architecture, like Pops, Bird, Brownie,Prez, Bud, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Lee Konitz, Jimmy Raney and others. The fact that players like Ted Brown and Mark Turner lack his creativity and imagination says more about them than the tradition. Even Warne needed to work on some things that he was deficient in (sound being the main thing).

That's what I was saying. Rather than hiring a funk rhythm section and playing things in straight 8ths in 17/4 on three or four sus chords, Warne was still creating beautiful, original lines on the same chord sequences he and Konitz had been playing for 50 years. He was being original, within the jazz tradition, rather than going outside the jazz tradition to be 'original'.

Maybe to you...

I'm talking about the compositions and changes he played on. Warne didn't have to write things in 17/4 and play things in straight 8ths and play free/modal tunes. He could (and you could extend that to other players) get as complex or as simple as he wanted to, and still play off the changes to tin pan alley tunes like It's You or No One, and sound original without adding non-jazz elements. In short, Warne was one of the greatest jazz improvisers that ever lived!!!!!!!

I was saying that the fact that Warne was still playing the same tunes that he was back in the 50s (Konitz, too) that he DIDN"T fetishize 'originality.

Warne went down swingin' and playing the same standards he played back in the 50s. So much for the fetish with 'originality'. Some great Larry Koonse as well. When I heard him first with the LA Jazz Quartet, I knew I had to get a Borys B-120, his guitar.

He sings a lot on the It Amazes Me album, but he plays his ass off as usual.

All very good points Daniel, but I have my engineers working on this matter at this very moment. We all have heard the perhaps apocryphal story that when BE was playing with Miles, they told him that he was rushing. BE asked them, "What should I do?" Philly Joe told BE, "I know how to take care of that", and he led Bill into a backroom where he shot him up with heroin. It shouldn't be hard to find our young prodigy a junkie drummer who can perform the same service in the event of a similar probably also non-existent time problem. When I played a concert at a jazz festival with DF, I made sure I didn't bring up the 12-tone tracks on Dreams and Explorations, as one would avoid mentioning some other embarrassing life experience, but I'm sure we can give Joey an edited version of D&E that omits those unfortunate experiments, and only has Darn That Dream, etc... I haven't heard the 'early Steve Kuhn' you refer to, but I'll have my staff look into it...

There are many versions of Quiet Dawn on you tube. One weird version is by some Italian guy named Niclola Conte, who is a DJ at swanky affairs and a record producer. He took the original version and re-mixed it so that it had a fast bossa nova beat for the entire song, omitting the swing bridge. Conte has another version with a good, live band (I don't know if he plays an instrument) playing it in concert. I like to cut the time in half and keep the swing B section. There was another song that came out around the same time that WRVR was playing QD that sounded like something that Massey might have written called, Good-Bye, New York. All I remember is that it had a few vocalists singing in complex, altered harmony. Does anyone know who did it? The lyrics had to do with going to Europe where things were better. I've searched for this, but all I get is some corny old show tune.

I can see there's a lot of support here for my brilliant idea! I've worked quite some time on the construction of the bubble. I consulted with some of the technicians from the old Prisoner TV series and they've agreed to donate some of the protoplasmic gook that they used to chase Patrick McGoohan when he dared to proclaim that he was a man and not a number. Then we'll get the kid's old man to keep programming the kid's listening choices, and add a few of our own: McCoy Tommy Flanagan Hank Jones Cedar Walton Bill Evans Barry harris Ahmad Jamal Steve Kuhn Eddie Higgins Eddie Costa Michael Weiss Jon Weiss Kenny Barron Thelonious Martial Solal Don Friedman Etc... We will also have to protect him with armed bodyguards to keep corrosive influences from the outside (Wynton, Russell Simmons, etc...) from trying to veer our young prodigy off his guided path.

I loved the way the kid played on that 60 Minute episode. I'd like to open a Kickstarter on him to keep him enclosed inside a big bubble that prevented him from listening to any non-swinging players. We could implant something in his brain that would implode inside his head that causes a life-threatening situation every time he's exposed to a pianist who can't groove/swing. I know it sounds extreme, but we've got to take extreme measures to preserve the music.

While we're talking about the great Don Joseph, I should say that I recently spoke to a friend of mine who was a close friend of his on the island of staten. He now claims that DJ never used heroin, only alcohol. I could have sworn that he said DJ used H back in the 50s or 60s, but now my friend denies it. It could be that we were talking about another great SI musician we both played with who OD'd on H, but my friend has reversed what he's said on a few other things...

A trumpet player friend of mine used to play 'the mountains' with him in a band back in the 60s and 70s, when there were still gigs. RIP.

Yeah, he got sick of the jazz scene and started directing and writing porn flicks. I never saw this one, but I'm sure his work is impeccable: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084449/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_80

Things ain't what they used to be- now they're FIRED! https://www.wnyc.org/story/new-york-public-radio-fires-hosts-lopate-schwartz/

Alright, I'll admit it, I got it from some terrible Wayne Dwyer book I read as a kid...

Nervous Breakdown.

On WKCR this afternoon, Phil Schaap did a really odd show; he played some early things that Andrew Hill recorded before his Blue Note LPs. He made it pretty clear, as only PS can do, that these records were very rare and hard to find, and that you should perhaps genuflect to him for playing them for you. I wish I could say that the recordings showed some of the talent that AH showed in Point of Departure, and everything after that, but even Phil let on that early AH is nothing to get excited by. He started off playing a Dave Shipp date from 1954 which featured mainly lame, square blues tunes, with one Rhythm changes thing at the end. Shipp was, on the basis of these recordings, a lousy bass player who couldn't swing, couldn't write tunes, and rushed like crazy. AH's solos were pretty sad also, just stiff minor pentatonic blues riffs that didn't swing at all. His comping was also very on the beat corn. Then he played another date that PS went out of the way to say that AH said in an interview that he didn't remember doing, BUT then said that he didn't know it had been recorded. PS called that the 'smoking gun'- how could he not remember doing the date if he also said he didn't think the sides had been released? Don't mess with Herr Schaap! Again it was a horrible rhythm section with a young Malachi Favors on bass, and some awful drummer. AH played about the same as he did on the aforementioned date. The only one who sounded like he could play was the leader, tenor player Clifford Scott. I believe that one or both of these dates were on King Records. Then he played a trio date that Hill did with Favors on Ping records, in 1955, which was pretty much the same thing. From here, he went to another trio thing Hill recorded on Warwick in 1959, with Favors again and James Slaughter on drums. Schaap opined that since it was done around the time of Ahmad Jamal's Poniciana, that Hill was trying to cash in on that type of sound. There were a lot of bass pedals, and soft mallets on the floor tom, so he could be right about that, but this showed a much improved Hill, playing with a much more relaxed, swinging feel, although I didn't like his harmonization or rendition of the title tune, 'So In Love'. The rest of the album was much better, with Hill playing standards like Spring is Here, That's All (with lame changes), and Ole Devil Moon (he blew mainly on one chord rather than the I bVII of the tune) and one bluesy original. Schaap read the liner notes of the album that revealed Hill had an NBD in the time between the first albums in the mid 50s and this one, from the stress of trying to make a living as a jazz musician. He also said that Hill had come under the tutelage of Barry Harris, which might have been responsible for the marked improvement in his playing. Schaap then played another Hill original, which was left off of the Warwick LP, but included in the TCB re-issue that featured a string section(!) dubbed in over the trio. It was a kind of lame groove tune featuring Hill's apparent favorite progression back then, IV-iii-ii-I all over the place. The overdubbed strings didn't help. Then Schaap went into an apologetic sermon about how he felt bad playing this material, and talked about Hill studying with Hindemith and going on to much better things, after which he played Hill's Blue Note recordings.

Get well soon, Barry! The enemies of Bop are taking over America's only original art form, and destroying the tradition Bird devoted his life to. We need General Harris to lead us back into the light...

Schwartz used to host a radio show on rock station WNEW in NY back in the 60s and 70s, and then switched to the Great American Songbook on WNYC. Leonard Lopate was also escorted out of WNYC by armed security guards... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/business/media/wnyc-leonard-lopate-jonathan-schwartz.html

Mundell Lowe passed away at 10:45 yesterday morning (12/2). He was 95. One of his important contributions to jazz was 'discovering' Bill Evans in Louisiana, and then putting him in touch with Orrin Keepnews, leading to BE's first LPs on Riverside. My only contact with him was when I did an album with clarinetist Joe Dixon. Joe wanted to record my arr. of a tune of ML's from Satan In High Heels' soundtrack. Mundell's reaction was, "What the hell do you want to do that song for?"