sgcim

I'm not the OP, so your recommendations are perfect for the thread. I was just taking it in a different direction. On the Giuffre and Adderly LPs, there is plenty of inspired improvisation; by Cannonball, Giuffre, Hall and Pena/Atlas. The fact that they managed to integrate it with wonderful counterpoint, ensemble passages and use of dynamics not usually encountered in jazz, made records like these rather special,IMHO. Jim Hall seemed to be interested in exploring these types of unusual jazz textures; in the 50s he wrote a wonderful piece for electric guitar and string quartet that also featured some great improvisatory work by Mr. Hall himself, and no drummer. It's available on the LP "Jazz Abstractions", which was I think, under Gunther Schuller's name. It's a shame he ended up aligning himself with musicians like Frisell and Metheny, because they seemed to exert a more placid influence on his music, when you compare it to the raw jazz feeling exhibited in his work in the 50s, IMHO.

I appreciate your willingness to assume the terrible burden of guilt for those two, but no man should be asked to take on such a heavy weight...

I'm sure all these drummerless groups albums are fine, but for the most part, they're pretty much the same type of thing the leaders would put out, except they wouldn't have a drummer. The only exceptions I'm aware of that cross over into what could be called "chamber-jazz" are the Giuffre group the OP mentioned and the john Benson Brooks/Cannonball Adderly, "Alabama Concerto" LP. I can understand why there are very few LPs like the ones I mentioned above; they require: 1) A composer/arr. on the exalted level of a Giuffre or Brooks- they don't exactly grow on trees... 2) Muicians who can read very demanding music, and on top of that, improvise on a very deep level, like Giuffre, Adderly, Hall, Hinton and Pena could. These also don't grow on trees... There were groups that tried to do this on a more superficial level; the Ahmad Jamal Trio, the Red Norvo Trio, but they lacked the type of writing that Giuffre and Brooks were capable of. Can anyonethink of any LPs similar to the Giuffre or Brooks LP (I'm not interested in any free jazz or atonal examples)? Giuffre made another LP that did away with the pulse completely; "Tangents In Jazz", but i forget if he used a drummer on it anyway. Anyone know if there was a drummer on that?

And the Cannonball Adderly record "Alabama Concerto with Milt Hinton and Barry galbraith- wait- this feels like deja vu, all over again...

It was interesting to find out that Giuffre's inspiration for those wonderful trio LPs with Clarinet (and a little tenor sax), guitar and bass, came from the Impressionists work for flute, harp and viola, mainly the piece by Debussy that used that instrumentation. Nothing could match the magical blend of the chalimeau register of JG's clarinet with Hall's mellow guitar and Pena's bass. A shame he had to switch the instrumentation to that noisy, banging instrument, the piano. Joe Puma seemed to prefer drummerless groups on a few of his recordings. On "Joe Puma Jazz" on Jubilee, he has a full side of the trio with Eddie Costa on vibes, himself on guitar and Oscar Pettiford on bass.back in the late 50s. Then he recorded another album on Resevoir, with his working group at Gregory's in 1984, featuring Hod Obrien on piano, and Red Mitchell on Bass. Chet Baker dispensed with drummers on the European trio records with Doug Raney and a bass player.

My brother-in-law went to HS with him when they grew up on LI. We were just talking about it over the holiday weekend. Duke, Satchmo, and all the other biggies used to come out to Long Beach for dinner, and Billy knew them all.

My dentist is always catching live jazz in NYC, and telling me about it, as he drills what's left of my teeth into oblivion. Today, as he was prepping me for my latest root canal, he told me he saw Lenny White in a club in a basement on 14th St. (the VV?)a few months ago, and he said his guitarist, a black guy with long hair and shades, played the entire night with his back to the audience, staring at the wall. When LW told him on the mic to face the audience, he refused to turn around, and just waved at the audience with his back still facing them. My dentist is Russian, so he might have confused the guitar with the bass guitar, but does anyone have any idea who this might be? Every time he talks about jazz, my dentist asks me who this guy "Mr. G" is, who he hears people talking about. I tell him the same thing each time; it's Kenny G. and he don't play jazz!

WKCR noticed; they played 24 hours straight of Mingus' music. They played a JJ Johnson LP I was never aware of that featured some nice playing by Billy Bauer and Kai Winding. The re-issue is "Mad Bebop", recorded in 1954.

The apologist couldn't make our weekly rehearsal/session, so we spent a few minutes renaming the infidel 'Stanley Crotch', and then went back to channeling our deity BE, musically. We then took a break, and started recounting several stories that presented Miles Davis in the worst possible light.

Though I could see I wasn't going to change his mind, he knows Sandke, and agreed to read his book. On the free jazz question, he cited a Cecil Taylor concert at JALC. On using whitey, he mentioned his friend, and a few other white musicians, and said the JALC orchestra is an integrated.one. I think things have gotten better in that regard, but the repertoire is still nothing I'd ever want to check out, including the Brubeck program that's coming up.

I just did a google search on it, and found reams of articles mentioning that SC was the co-founder and artistic consultant of JALC. Not that that will mean anything to person i was arguing with...

We were having a nice Sunday afternoon session, when we started talking about JALC. The drummer has a friend who has done some work with Wynton and JALC, so he was very defensive when I started bringing up some aspects of the scene at JALC, and denied any notion of WM being anti-free jazz, anti-white jazz musicians, anti-semitic, etc... I could see it was pointless to pursue it any further, but he seemed especially irate when I said that WM was influenced by Stanley Crouch in some aspects of JALC. He asked for some proof, and all I could think of was a vague memory of it being mentioned in Randy Sandke's book. Can anyone cite any mentions of Crouch's involement in JALC? TIA

We Have a Winner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nobody knows which movie I was talking about? Hint: I was being extremely sarcastic when I called it a horror movie; it was actually a well-known Hollywood movie

I saw the scariest movie I've ever seen the other day, and it had one scene that literally had me jump out of my seat! It was a movie from 1938, and the basic plot was that a young classical violinist defied the wishes of his mentor, Professor Heinrich, and started a band of his own playing non-classical music. He met a blonde female vocalist of questionable moral background, and they reluctantly were forced to work together in this hideous band in San Francisco. As is quite typical of this genre, even though they were repulsed by each other at first, the violinist and the blonde eventually fell in love, but she was lured away to NYC by a big-time theatrical producer. He somehow followed her to NY, but his band now needed a vocalist, and this brought about what was most surely the most frightening moment (IMHO) in movie history: The new young woman vocalist they found, barged into the hapless violinist's hotel room emitting one piercing, frightening, pitch from her vocal cords that can only be compared to the shrieking violin of the shower scene in "Psycho"! Can anyone identify both the movie, and that terrifying vocalist?

Yeah, but he could sure beat those skins! Although he should've used some more name players as sidemen...

Huge fave of mine. One of the most soulful singers that ever lived, IMHO. I used to play "Sackful of Dreams" and "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know ' from the great "Live" LP for the hip-hop kids in my HS music classes, and they'd just say "Old School", and beg me to put on some Fifty Cent (a former student at my school, before they booted him out).

Thanks for the info, Mr. Ascending.

Wow, that was the last big record store left in NYC. Bloomberg let commercial rents go through the roof, and all we have left is a bland, yuppified NYC. I used to love browsing at all the great record stores they had: Dayton's Colony Records Tower J&R Rockit Science Kim's Now they're all gone. NYC, the cultual capitol of the US, right...

I was in my fave used record store the other day, and they had Phil Miller's "Cuts Both Ways" with the omni-present Dave Stewart on keyboards. They wanted a lot of bread for it. Is it a good record?

Yeah, but I don't think they copied enough notes for Horace to get a big payday from those two funky white boys. Keith really took them to the cleaners.

Well, at least WM got to split the 15K that Becker and Fagen allowed him and PC, out of the 50K budget that Warner Bros. allowed them. That's $7,500, probably the most money WM had ever seen at one time. While I think that Becker and Fagen have written some of the best pop tunes of the last 40 years, their pop perfectionist attitude towards a jazz record made what could have been a great record somewhat less than that. I haven't listened to it in ages after being initially disappointed in it. While we're on the topic of the SD boys and jazz, it may be edifying to some people here that they ripped off Keith Jarrett's intro to "As Long As You're Getting Yours" (OSLT?) for their pop masterpiece "Gaucho". Keith wouldn't let them get way with it, and now his name is included on the songwriting credits.

It's a pretty fascinating story that illustrates William Gaddis' theory of "Capitalism and the Arts- the destructive element". From the book, "An Unsung Cat": Marsh and Christlieb were disappointed with the way the LP turned out. They wanted just two tenors and bass and drums like in their private sessions. together. Becker and Fagen however added Lou Levy on piano, and used arr. by Joe Roccisano. WM and PC maintained that WB and DF not only chose the wrong takes, but destroyed the true sound of the band through their engineering techniques. WM said that WB and DF, "spoiled the master in such a way that you really lose the presence of the band. We have a master that's just spectacular. So we feel that that they just castrated the music. They didn't quite know what to do with us. Originally they wanted just me alone, but I wanted Pete because Pete can really play. There was no trouble with the band, but the producers had something else in mind." In 5 days, the group recorded a total of 33 takes of ten different tunes. Becker and Fagen rejected a half dozen tunes entirely, and even on tunes they accepted, PC said they chose takes that the band didn't like. "Everything we worked for was in jeopardy. They didn't want what we wanted." The group was particularly dismayed that WB and DF rejected a "Body and Soul" that the group loved. "They looked at it with such disdain, that it wore a hole in our soul. That one tune in place of their tune "Rapunzel" would have made an entirely different LP today." PC appealed to Warner Bros. executives in an attempt to rein WB and DF in, but was told that his problem was with the producers, not them (WB). Becker and Fagen made it clear that the LP would be done their way, or it would be Shitcanned(!). After Marsh returned to NY, Christlieb and the rhythm section were called back in to the studio to record five more tunes, but only one, "I'm Old Fashioned" was used. If Marsh was called for this final session- PC said he wasn't- he declined." As a previous poster said, 1991's "Conversations With Warne" on Criss Cross is the same band without the piano that consisted of material recorded before the 1978 "Apogee" sessions.

I was surprised to read in the Warne Marsh bio, "An Unsung Cat" that this was a pretty negative experience for Warne, because of the poor production choices of Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan, the record's producers. It must have been pretty hard to fuck up a session with two of the best tenor players around, but somehow Becker and Fagen managed to really make idiots out of themselves, according to the bio.

That sums it up pretty well. If you look at the the two projects he's been involved in; JALC and the Ken Burns doc, it's not that much of a stretch...