John L

...or could "months earlier" actually be "years earllier?" I have 2 volumes on Magnetic Records of what are supposed to be recordings from the Half Note from 1965. The versions of "One Up, One Down" and "I Want to Talk About You" on these discs are listed as being from 3/19 and 4/2 '65. Yet I have another CD on Cool and Blue with these exact same performances and a claim that they are from Birdland 2/23/63. They are also listed as Birdland 2/23/63 in David Wild's discography: http://home.att.net/~dawild/john_coltrane_discography.htm. Now David Wild's discography does have a 3/28/65 entry for "One Down, One Up" at the Village Gate. This was evidently recorded professionally by Rudy Van Gelder at the same concert as the live version of Nature Boy that is now a bonus track on the "John Coltrane Plays..." CD. Wild lists the track as "unissued" and doesn't even have a time entry for it. To make things even more mysterious, the piece "One Down, One Up" that Coltrane recorded in the studio on 5/26/65 is not the same composition as "One Up, One Down" as recorded (evidently) at Birdland in 1963. There is also a High Note listing in Wild's discography for a performance of "I Want to Talk About You" (private tape) that clocks in at 15:26, which is longer than my 10:00 (evidently Birdland 63) version. For those of you who have more recent releases of this material, which versions are you guys listening to and what is currently available? I know that there was a new disc of material supposedly from the High Note released not long ago. It had "One Up, One Down" and "I Want to Talk About You." listed and I didn't buy it under the impression that it must be a repetition of the same error.

Mine arrived last week. With Ray Charles on keyboards, Teddy Edwards, Fathead Newman, Hank Crawford, Gerald Wilson... kind of hard to go wrong. Percy Mayfield was a fantastic and unique artist.

This one is on my list too. I was hoping that it would show up in a local store. But it looks like I am going to have to type my credit card number over Internet one more time...

Be sure and get "Fire Music," a genuine classic (IMO). The CD version also includes an incredible live recording of Hambone from Newport, an absolute killer! I also highly recommend Live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival Day Dream is a personal favorite of mine with an entire Ellington program and Shepp at his most lyrical.

Yea, but do you file yourselves under A or H?

Jazz musicians used to play a lot of blues, not just in jazz contexts but more straight blues as well. Take a look at the session musicians who played in the R&B bands in the 1940s and early 1950s. It would seem that fewer blues musicians played jazz primarily for technical reasons. You can learn to play good and original blues without learning to play jazz, but (at least in the past) not visa-versa. Now that a lot of directions in jazz are moving away from blues, and blues is no longer the music of the street, it seems to me that the number of accomplished jazz musicans who can play good original blues is declining very fast. I cry a big tear for it, but time has to march on somehow.

oops. I somehow missed that. Thanks.

Are there any theories as to the motive behind the murder of Eddie Jefferson? I had just heard Jefferson live in at the Keystone Korner in SF about a week before the shooting. It was really upsetting.

ditto

Carefull, Patricia. You might get a warning for that one, maybe even two warnings for "In the Nutcraker Mood" alone.

I'd say that you were a little overqualified for that job, Chris.

I haven't heard this one, but my son played me the Madlib Blue Note disk not long ago. I was quite surprised. It was not at all what I expected. The disk is pure DJ Hip Hop with little to no fusion with jazz or (ironically) the Blue Note sound. He just used some Blue Note tapes for sound patches here and there. The grooves are really all his. In sum, this certainly didn't strike me as any sort of rip-off of Blue Note at all. It is often even hard to recognize where the samples come from. There is no "jazz" involved. Madlib is doing his thing, not a Blue Note thing. If I couldn't really get with the music, it had to do with my own personal difficulty in enjoying much of this sort of hypnotic laid back DJ Hip Hop groove music, not with any sort of musical piracy. I bring that up because this Bird thing might be similar. Don't jump to conclusions on the degree to which these professional Hip Hop DJs need to fall back on the structures behind the various pieces that they throw on their canvases.

In an interview near the end of his life, Mel Lewis told Francis Davis that Thad left the band for Denmark "for a chick, a woman over there who had some money and wanted him because she was pregnant with his baby. He left his wife in New Jersey with nothing, to raise a couple of very good kids on her own."

Gary: If you like Joe Henderson, you are in for a treat. This box is loaded full of exceptional music. Some of the later "out" recordings with Alice Coltrane and others might sound a bit dated. But a good majority of the music is solid and timeless, with Joe in top form.

I take back my last post! April 22, 1946: Pres made a JATP recording in a band that included Babe Russin, a white Pres disciple if there ever was one.

This is a good question. Having most of Pres' discography, I am inclined to say no with respect to recordings. It does seem a good bet that he shared the Jazz at the Philharmonic stage with some of them at some time. But I don't know of any recordings. In general, there are very few post-Basie recordings where Pres shares the stage with another tenor. There are several JATP recordings with Pres and Flip Phillips. But Flip hardly qualifies as a "disciple." There are no recordings that I know of with the likes of Getz, Zoot, Perkins, Brew Moore, etc. Does Gerry Mulligan count? He follows Pres on the 1957 "Fine and Mellow." Not an enviable spot to me in!

Tom: Take a good listen to something like Supersonic Jazz, Sound of Joy, Jazz in Sillouette, Sun Song, or The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra. Doesn't suck.

That pretty much sums up the way that I feel about this one too.

David Marsh must have had a hand in this. He thrives on making lists like this. What burns me up the most about these kind of lists made by "rockers" is that they pretend to include jazz, blues, soul, country, world music at all. It is as if they are saying, "yea, we looked at all forms of music and, in the end, the rock classics kicked everybody else's ass. Miles and Trane are OK, but they ain't the Beatles."

I voted for Goerge Cables partly out of personal sentimental attachment. I heard that unit live on a regular basis in the 1970s, and Cables never let me or Dex down. Sonny Clark, Kenny Drew, and Barry Harris also sounded great with Dex, or should I say that Dex always sounded great with them.

Actually, this is what has come out on DVD. Although the title is the same, it is completely different than the Impulse! record.

Thanks for the heads up. I wouldn't have know about this without you guys!

As I undersand, the Broonzy was released in Europe in September. No? You should already be able to get it in Spain. Also recently released from JSP is a 5-CD box of all of Memphis Minnie's early recordings. They are going to follow it up with a another box of her later stuff. The early recordings are superior, especially the collaborations with Kansas City Joe McCoy that take up the majority of this set. Tasty!

No, it is unlikely that Blakey's "fatefull visit" could have happened on the day that Bird died. Or at least that would cast serious doubt that whatever happened that day was responsible for Bird's death. Recall that Bird was in very bad physical shape when he first showed up at Nica's three days before his death. He was in such bad shape that Nica called a doctor, who examined Bird and recommended immediate hospitalization, warning of possible death otherwise. Bird refused to be hospitalized and died a few days later. The only way that Blakey could have really been responsble for Bird's death is if he had been the one who put Bird in that kind of shape, i.e. unless the fight happened earlier.

I bought a CD player in the late 1980s. At that time, I remember that Caravan was the only Art Blakey title that I could find. I believe that the first jazz disk I ever bought was the "Best of Blue Mitchell" on Riverside. Then I bought the Cannonball and Cleanhead Vinson disk that was recently reissued on CD for the second time. After that, I picked up a John Coltrane on Impulse disk that was just entitled "From the Original Master Tapes." It included several rare takes from the Village Vanguard that hadn't been released in the US before, and didn't appear as such until the complete VV set. Kind of Blue and Love Supreme started to go through multiple incarnations from the very beginning. At that time, MCA launched a "Peacock Spiritual Series" that looked poised to release most of the Peacock gospel catalogue. But that series bit the dust right away and has never been revived. One of the real gems was the Gospelaires "Bones in the Valley" and "Can I Get a Witness" on one disk. They also put out some great Dixie Hummingbirds, Sunset Travlers, Swan Silvertones, and Julius Cheeks. If only they had continued...