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felser

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Posts posted by felser

  2. Are there any box bargains currently available?

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    We're all crazy here, but musically and soundwise, the Columbia totally obsoletes the Mosaic. Packaging and sentimental value are a different matter. BTW, is everyone hip to the 1977 Muse/32jazz album Louis Hayes - The Real Thing? That's a Woody Shaw album in all but name (he and Hayes co-led that group, with Rene McLean, Ronnie Mathews, and Stafford James, the same core group as the Berliner Jazztage concert and even has Slide Hampton guesting), and a gem. Could have easily been fit onto the Mosaic, but wasn't. A shame.

  3. Candid's Why Not Series

    in Re-issues

    Posted

    The 'George Cables' is nice !

    I just picked this up to complete an order from jazzmessengers.com (they're the real dirty bastids, with the free shipping on 60eu orders), and am blown away by it. Expected to like it, but not like this. As enjoyable to me as any trio set I have ever heard, and I never even thought of myself as a huge Cables guy. His writing on this is outstanding. Highly recommended.

  4. Woody Shaw - Complete Muse Recordings on Mosaic

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    A Kenny Barron Muse set might be quite nice. A Cedar Walton set would be really great though ! If there's anyone who deserves the Mosaic treatment it's Cedar.

    But I don't see their Muse recordings as highlights of either of their careers. Something like a Steeplechase Walton would be mighty to behold. I generally have preferred Barron as a sideman, though "Sunset to Dawn" on Muse is pretty great, but "Peruvian Blue" is nothing special, and "Lucifer" is pretty awful.

  5. Woody Shaw - Complete Muse Recordings on Mosaic

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    I'm neither familiar with Muse nor Woody Shaw, although I've preordered the new Columbia box based purely on his rep.

    Here's a list of Muse releases that I found. Anything here that would make a good Mosaic set?

    Charles Earland, though it will never happen. Carlos Garnett would make a nice Select if they still were doing those. The aforementioned Jordan/Walton, though the Jordan sets were frustratingly inconsistent, in some cases because of overreach - Muse albums often sounded underrehearsed when they wer trying to accomplish something big. OTOH, Muse put out a lot of stuff in the 70's and early 80's that maybe never would have seen the light of day otherwise.

  6. Woody Shaw - Complete Muse Recordings on Mosaic

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted · Edited by felser

    Important point (although perhaps not an important consideration) - this material covers Woody on the ascent as an "important" (in high visibility/market terms) composer/bandleader/trumpet influence and then Woody after he had peaked in market terms. Still a great, great player, but his post-Columbia Muse sides are more or less blowing sessions on familiar tunes with a hired-for-the-session group of "the usual suspects" of the time. In effect, it's one set that serves as a two-part bookend for the Columbia set. All of it very good, but pretty dramatic in "how quickly things changed"..

    Yes, was gonna comment on the same. The pre-Columbia stuff is invigorating, but I find the post-Columbia Muse stuff to be pretty "by-the-numbers" and the most disappointing of Shaw's career. Not that it's bad, but it's not compelling. I own it all, but never pull it out to listen to any more (the only Shaw that is true of for me). The Elektra-Musician dates do a lot more for me, as does the posthumous live stuff on High Note. I also agree with Rooster Ties on how magnificent the Berliner Jazztage material is, my favorite of his.

  8. How we've changed re. Mosaic

    in Mosaic and other box sets...

    Posted

    It was one thing in the early days when the sets were until then unavailable on CD Blue Notes, such as the Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill, etc. It's another thing when the sets are things I would not have considered essential to my listening joy. They can still pump up the excitement in me when the material is right, like with the Mingus set, but most of what they come out with these days isn't anything I was dreaming of.

  16. Buzz Gardner

    in Artists

    Posted

    Workig my way through the big "Jazz on Vogue" box, and ran into Buzz Gardner's bop trumpet playing on the Rene Thomas set (and other places in the box, I believe). Wondered if it was the same Buzz Gardner who played (along with his brother Bunk) with Frank Zappa in the late 60's and on Tim Buckley's unhinged "Starsailor" album (talk about your artistic suicide) . Sure enough. That's quite a well-rounded discography for a trumpeter.

  17. Clifford Jordan: Any Love?

    in Artists

    Posted

    Clifford Jordan was one of the first musicians I heard when I fell in love with jazz.

    Why? Because one of the first records that impressed me was the Mingus ´64 band in Paris. I was almost a kid then and didn´t know about many musicians, so each member of that band became somewhat like a hero for me.

    Me too. My college library had the 3 LP set "the Great Jazz Concert of Charles Mingus", and I had never heard anything like that, and I became enamored of Dolphy and Jordan right then. I was 18, a freshman in college. That is still a magical recording for me, and I was thrilled when it finally came out on CD a few years ago.

  19. Clifford Jordan: Any Love?

    in Artists

    Posted

    I have a more limited window of love on Jordan. To my ears, he really found his voice playing with Mingus in 64-65. And perfected it in the Magic Triangle group with Walton/Jones/Higgins. I really like both of the Strata-East albums, especially 'Glass Bead Games", and the Steeplechase albums, whether under his name or Walton's. The Muse albums (except for the live one) sound very underrehearsed to me, as so many on that label do. And I found his playing to be very inconsistent after the mid-70's. But I will always have room for and greatly appreciate his peak mid-60's to mid-70's work, and do own the albums he did before that, though I have not kept the ones he did after that.

  24. Black Jazz reissues on Snow Dog label (Japan)

    in Re-issues

    Posted

    The Doug and Jean Carn is classic. That is the only "must have" title. I like the Awakening titles and the Rudolph Johnson, but those are for particular tastes only. Johnson is one of those guys like Von Freeman who you either like or he makes you crazy. The Awakening is very 70's spiritual content, not necessarily technically excellent. The Kellie Patterson is pretty weak, the Bishop pretty late in the game, the Russell pretty conservative.

    curious as to what that means. he was still in his 40s and playing his butt off!

    I haven't heard his Black Jazz recordings in a number of years, did revisit the Muse recordings recently, and they were underwhelming. I remember the Black Jazz sides being much better, but I don't remember them giving me any additional insights into Bishop - that's what I mean by late in the game - he was already pretty well-defined by his earlier recordings. By all means, if you really like Bishop's playing, go for the Black Jazz sides (indeed, every record ever released by that label has merit, and I owned every one of them at one point thanks to Third Street Jazz selling many of them as 99 cent cutouts). But they weren't landmarks the way those three Doug & Jean Carn albums were. I go under the assumption that people have a limited amount of $ to spend, and can't own every worthy album, especially at Japanese import prices. I know I can't.

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