Peter Friedman

My good friend jazz pianist the late George Ziskind and I spoke about this often. He referred to what he called "the composer gene" that only a limited number of musicians have. When I look at a jazz album and see all the tunes are originals by the leader, I quickly loose interest in hearing it. Of course there are a number of exceptions such as ,for example Horace, Cedar, Wayne, Bird, Golson and some others. Some standards, and or some of the fine tunes by the jazz musicians with the "composer gene" provides an incentive for me to want to give that album a listen.

After all the talk about "Return To Forever", a record that I don't really care for, I wanted to play something very different.

Dvorak - String Quartets No.11 and No.13 - Guarneri Quartet

Op.18/1 and Op.95

Blue Mitchell's albums on the Mainstream label were (to my ears) generally terrible. The one I had hoped would be the exception was this one -Vital Blue. With Joe Henderson as a sideman my expectations were quite high. It turned out that the album was a mixed bag. About half the tracks were (to my taste) quite enjoyable. The remaining half were spoiled by a vocal obligato that made me want to quickly move on. All of this is disappointing as I have greatly enjoyed Blue Mitchell's playing as leader and sideman on numerous albums on a variety of labels other than Mainstream.