kenny weir

Hey it may not be among his more jazzy stuff, but Brown Eyed Girl is a pop classic - with one of the best (and simplest) bass solos ever. Shame on youse! I really dug Van's most overtly jazzy outing How long Has This Been Going On when it came out (1996), but it wore out rather quickly. This time out, for the likes of us, I'd say a lot will depend on who is playing on the album. A buddy of mine saw him at Umbria a few weeks back, and said he was fine if as surly as ever. Here's part of the festival review he wrote: "July 15 I was surprised to hear later that some of the Italian critics had canned Van Morrison for this concert, as I thoroughly enjoyed it. Van, of course, gave the impression that he'd rather be somewhere else, but he was in good voice, and sang with plenty of feeling. The program included favourites like 'Moondance', 'Here Comes The Night', 'Days Like This', 'Precious Time' and 'Brown Eyed Girl'. He sang some jazzy numbers ('Sack O'Woe', 'Centrepiece'), and several blues, borrowed from the likes of Mose Allison, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Witherspoon. The 6-piece band was strong, and sounded especially good on the shuffles that predominated. The encore began incongruously, with 'When You're Smiling' (!), before 'Gloria' sent the fans home happy."

In my e-mail this morning ... FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 1, 2003 ACCLAIMED SINGER VAN MORRISON SIGNS DEAL WITH LEGENDARY JAZZ LABEL BLUE NOTE RECORDS; MORRISON’S LABEL DEBUT, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?, DUE TO BE RELEASED OCTOBER 21st Van Morrison has signed a worldwide deal with EMI Music’s legendary Blue Note label, which will give one of music’s most creative figures a home at the prestigious jazz label. Morrison’s Blue Note debut, What’s Wrong With This Picture?, will be released on October 21st. The album draws upon the jazz & blues influences that Morrison has explored consistently throughout his storied career. Born in Ireland in 1945, Morrison has always relentlessly followed his own muse, incorporating jazz, blues, R&B and traditional Celtic music, creating his own distinctive voice and becoming one of the most important songwriters of the past century. This distinction was officially recognized on June 12th as Morrison was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at their 34th annual induction and awards ceremony in New York City.

Hmmmm - a pity it's not on Impulse!

I own quite a few Grant Green albums and albums on which he plays, but far from all. Until quite recently I would have named Idle Moments as his greatest recording. Fine as it is, though, it is more of ensemble thing, with Green sharing the limelight with others, particularly Joe Henderson. Green Street has been on very high rotation at our joint for a few weeks now. I just love it to pieces. The sound is just so big and warm and open. The interplay with Ben Dixon and Dave Bailey is subtle yet swigning and ON. Is the Standards album as good? I'm looking forward to Grandstand.

I've had this for a week now, and I'm disappointed. *The sound is muffled and muddy, although not mortally so. *The Dameron/Birth Of The Cool-inspired stuff seems to sit uncomfotably with the Trane-esque title track. *The track length - mostly around the 10-minute mark with a couple at 15 minutes - really leaves a jarring feeling between the ensemble bits and the solos. Disappointing, for me at least, as I believe 52nd Street Themes is a cracker and the new one doesn't build on it or complement it at all.

I LOVE my three-day weekends - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday - as I get to cook!!!! Last night for din dins we had fish, mussels and pippis (I think they're called clams everywhere else) done in white, lots of garlic, parsley, white wine, onion, olive oil and tomatoes, with Turkish bread on the side (along with more wine). Hmmmm-mmmm! What really surprised us was that Bennie, 2 years 3 months, was slurping up that shellfish like a pro - picking up the shalls, scooping the meat out and chomping it righteously while putting the spent shells in the appropriate bowl. After we had baked apples, cored and stuffed with a buttery mixture of honey and sultanas with creamy Greek-style yogurt. There has been a big change around our joint, though, a bit sad really. Somewhat reluctantly I've had to curb my lust for baking. Waistlines were expanding, and all thje baking brought a few allergy issues to the surface. I miss it, but have to admit I feel better for not scoffing cookies/slices/cake/whatever after dinner every night!

Ka-ching! Have just ordered the Chico Hamilton. I'll confess the OOP factor was decisive. Not because I expect to embark on a crusade to get every set (who knows? ), but because after all the reading and asking I've done, I feel I would be saddened if I didn't have this one. Plus the clips on the Mosaic site sound very cool to me. The Tristano and Parlan are next. And what about the The Complete HRS Sessions? I'm really intrigued by this one. Anyone care to comment?

I'd sell it.

Easy - the Evans set. I recently played Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess and Skteches Of Spain in their entirety on successive weeks on my show, and have also played the fabulous second version of Miles Ahead that follows the first in this amazing box.

Freddie Hubbard - Hub Cap Fats Domino - Live at New Orleans JazzFest 2001 (DVD). Hey - I was there! Joe Lovano Nonet - On This Day Pee Wee Russell - Ask Me Now! Mulligan/Hodges - Meets The Wiggles - Yummy Yummy Paul Williamson Quartet - Mutations Paul Williamson Quintet - Talk It Up! Mark Simmonds' Freeboppers - Fire TheakTet - Gamla-Stan Roger Miller - King Of The Road (Bear Family anthology) Duke Ellington - Such Sweet Thunder Lester Young - Aladdin and Verve complete Charlie Christian - Columbia box Jimmy Smith - Cool Blues Larry Young - Unity Grant Green - Green Street. Fast becoming my fave by him. Grant Green - with Sonny Clark Grant Green - Grant's First Stand Sonny Criss - Complete Imperial. Fats Domino's label!

I've only seen one (encouraging) review, but I'm very tempted to check this out. They just don't make good old-fashioned horror movies these days!

Hey, come on down! Actually, having yerselves and Quartet Out play at one of our festivals is a little fantasy I've had tucked away in the back of my brain for a month or so now. I guess it's one of those lottery dreams, but you never know. And of course, you get to enjoy our summer coming from your winter. One thing you should know, though: Along with driving on the left-hand side we have a related, legislative dictate - our state law requires that Hammond players play bass with their right hands and that they have their instruments modified so they can play their pedals with their noses. I stand by what I wrote about our scene here in Melbourne, but I guess it could be misconstrued as being about a land of milk and honey. Like everywhere else, gigs pay badly. And there are plenty of days - and even weeks - when there vis nothing at all happening. But still, there does seem to be a really high level of creativity and insteraction between a really diverse community of players. One thing that has only been touched on here so far is what effects the weight of history might have. Players here are very hip to the great figures of jazz and the music's history. Ellington, for instance, seems to imbue the work of our plethora of mid-sized combos working in the post-bop vein. But when it comes to creating their own sound, Ellington (or Basie or Coltrane or Parker or ...) is just another thing draw on. I wonder if the "weight of history" has inhibiting effect on young musicians living/working in, say, NY or KC. And in Melbourne, there is also much genuine interplay with the traditions represented by a robust multicultural population.

Wow, I finally got 'round to reading this thread - and it's made me realise (not for the first time, mind you) just how lucky I am to be living right here in Melbourne. We're a city of 3 million people, but going by the posts here and elsewhere, it seems we have a robust, fertile scene that is equal of any US city outside NY or Chicago. Melbourne has a couple of full-time jazz clubs, but many many other venues that carry jazz on a casual basis - well as community arts centres, bars, restaurants etc. Outside of Bennetts Lane (ranges from very good mainstream to very good AND very adventurous mainstream to avant garde) and Dizzy's (mainstream with a lot of vocalists), there are faces and places with which I am only slightly familiar - the Planet Cafe, the Make It Up Club, the weekly offshoot of last year's innaugural Half Bent Festival - that present really innovative and challenging and original sounds. In bands such as Ishish and the Adam Simmon's Toy Band and many more, we have a milieu in which the Quartet Out heard on Live At The Meat House, just for instance, could feel right at home. You do hear the odd standard or bop chestnut - largely due, I suspect, to the revolving player situation mentioned earlier in the thread - but overwhelmingly the accent is on original material, or at least really original treatment of familiar stuff. Sydney has it's own thing going, although perhaps not as strongly as Melbourne, and both cities benefit from the regular influx of young players from other parts of the country. And both Melbourne and Sydney boast their share of elder statesmen - Mike Nock, Bob Sedergreen, Bernie McGann, Allan Browne, Joe Chindamo and many more - who invariably both benefit from the youth factor and inspire it. The likes of Dale Barlow and Nock used to have to move to the US or Europe to try to make it big. They both live in Sydney now. And these days young and aspiring players tend to visit overseas cities such as NY for study periods of 6 months or a year, and then return home. At the same time, international tours have become more regular - although I expect precious few of the denizens of this board (or AAJ/JC) have seen'heard an Aussie play! Between them, Melbourne and Sydney have a handful of labels that document all this, and the results can be breathtaking. It is one of the greatest frustrations of my life that this music is so little heard outside Australia - or even outside the southern hemisphere. Those who have heard some of this stuff, I'm pleased to report, are very happy campers indeed. (Check out the ongoing AAJ BB thread in which a couple of regulars, God bless 'em, are actually laying down some serious bread for Oz releases I have suggested - and really digging them). In some ways, coming from such a heavy R&B background and these days being a very serious hard bop head, I wish there were more hard bop/soul jazz things going on around here. For instance, a band called Milestones has just started a Saturday afternoon residency in an inner-city Melbourne venue/bar. They're doing the whole hard bop repertoire - Hubbard, Davis, Golson etc etc. When I first heard about this, I got real excited. But you know what? I'll probably be a little disappointed when/if I get round to checking it out. 'Coz the truth is, that through regular gig-going - and excellent bashes such as the Wangaratta and Melbourne Jazz Festivals (where experience has taught me the Oz artists almost invariably produce far greater firworks than whatever international artists are brought in) - have taught me and the rest of the Australian jazz audience to really respect and eagerly anticipate the adventurous and the unknown and the wild. No matter what your record collection looks like. (And that's probably another good thing about Melbourne audience and the Melbourne scene - there is, I suspect, relatively little presure exerted by jazz nerds such as myself. I'd guess 99.99 per cent of the paying public wouldn't give a rat's arse about the latest Blue Note reissues) If I had been living in, say, NY and could've gone and seen hard bop or something like it whenever I felt like some live music, I hate to think how much ridiculously fine magic I may have missed out on. Living in Melbourne/Sydney/Australia and digging jazz means, by definition, having big ears. I guess part of our strength, too, is that in having a relatively small talent pool means musicians are forced to pursue what must sometimes seem like incredibly unlikely relationships and unions, and also that most players can and do play in a variety of genres. The aforementioned Adam Simmons, for instance, plays EVERY kind of saxophone for a variety of raucous (sorry Adam!) avant garde/new music outfits, performs regularly in a Hammond combo setting and plays on a weekly basis with a popular for-dancers swing outfit. I guess there would be Melbourne players who would disagree with much what I have just written, and certainly being a full-time jazz musician here is far, far, far from an easy gig. But the tyranny of distance that has often been seen as such a handicap in terms of the arts in Australia has in jazz at least - delicious irony - had profound and happy consequences.

Easily the most interesting thing about the replies so far is that I deliberately differentiated Canadian bacon from the American variety - because, let's face it, they are not even close to being of the same genre of pork smallgoods - and nobody bats an eyelid. Very strange. When did "American bacon" mutate to such a pronounced degree that it became its own species and quite different from what most folkses regard as bacon?

For the first time in weeks, I made Bennie and I pancakes for brekky this morning. As we didn't have any syrup in the house, we had 'em with bannana and yogurt. Trouble with having syrup in the house, though, is they make the enterprise so yummy-scrumptious that I wanna have those suckers EVERY day. And I suspect that's not really all that healthy. I have to confess that I usually have muesli with sliced fruit and a good low-fat yogurt. It definitely keeps me in motion, if you know what I mean. But fundametally, the Italian coffee, pastry 'n' papers thing is my dream breakfast.

Mike, I'd like to think Mike Nock will get a bit of a run in your new book. I think he was pretty active in SF during that time.

Doesn't that query belong on the spider thread?

Actually, I think pasta (noodles anyway) came from China. As did motor scooters. And parmesan.

What about the Peddlers, a Brit organ-guitar-drums trio? I remember seeing them on The David Frost Show shen is a wee little lad but can't recall if they were any good. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll Someone I also recall from those radio days was Brian Auger. That was all down to a hit he had with (I think) the band Trinity and Julie Driscoll with Dylan's This Wheel's On Fire. But I think they went quite a bit deeper than that. I've seen various discs raved about at Dusty groove (so what else is new? )

I liked Pleasant Valley, too, so i was looking forward to it. Why not, with Mark Whitfield, Lonnie Smith and Fred Wesley. Sad to say, I've found it pretty sluggish so far. Drummer Lenny White is part of the problem, but only part. Just doesn't seem to have a groove or much life.

Ahhh, this is great ... and very touching. Eat yer hearts out, AAJ, BNBB and JC!

What do you feed him? More importantly, what kind of jazz does he dig?

Reminds me of a sandwich board potted outside a pub in the midst of Sydney's Chinatown a few years back. It read: "Australian food - lasagne, spag bol."

Well, I've just dusted off Soul Manifesto and having had the walls shaking as I'm cooking dinner for family and friends (Burmese beef curry, Burmese mixed vegetable salad, plain rice; caramel cake, my current fave thing to make). It's sounding pretty damn fine - much better than I remembered. A real solid workout. Turn it up!