king ubu

Thanks for reporting that, Justin!

Wow, I'd love to find these! Never even heard/read of this series!

And I thought this was about Chuck

Hm, guess it will take a few decades until I've heard Malaby dozens of times, alas... Just returned from a highly energetic set by Tarbaby with guest Oliver Lake. Lake has played in Zurich regularly over the past years... this was the fourth time I caught him, and I know of at least two concerts I've missed. Tarbaby is Orrin Evans (p), Eric Revis (b) and Nasheet Waits (d) and they're very powerful, very NYC tough - and very loud, too. The tunes they did were pretty wild (I thought of Dolphy now and then), often rhythmically very tricky (I once thought of Monk very much, too), and left lots of space for free flights by Lake and Evans. The biggest surprise to me was Revis, whom I've heard so far in mostly Wyntonite context... big sound, plenty of technique, lots of ideas, very good time and groove... he mixes with Waits and Evans very well. Evans was mostly in what seemed a McCoy bag... incorporating perfectly the tough, muscular, yet lyrical post-Coltrane/Tyner black music continuum. Lake was all over the place, the first set could mostly be heard as in that Trane/McCoy tradition, I guess... but after the break they returned and shifted gears quite some, both in levels of energy and in style. They did some mean funk, with Lake overblowing his alto (no flute tonight, just alto) and going for broke each time he started to blow. The most amazing thing though, all through the two sets, was watching and listening to Nasheet Waits... what a powerful, great drummer! Rather small set (bass drum, snare, hi-hat, one tom, the big tom standing on the floor, a ride, and one more big cymbal next to the ride, maybe a second ride, really?), sounding very good, and putting layer and layer of rhythm on top of each other... truly amazing, and all as good as I'd been expecting! Very intense night, to say the least!

And not all of the Hip-O's are that great... but yeah, times are rough and the cheapotists have more or less taken over.

Well, maybe we ought to start and play our own music... on Sunday nights, do a private re-enactment of "Kind of Blue" (or "Coltrane in Japan", if you dare) with friends and neighbours

One more once! All the best, Rodney! :party:

Von & Chico

Cool! Missed the first edition, too - this looks even better!

brownie, after reading various obits in the German and Swiss press, I must say I'm duly impressed! Faas seems to have been a truly great man!

Sounds interesting! And you might be interested in "Things Have Got to Change" by the same band (except for Erik Friedlander on cello and the great Pheeroan akLaff on drums) on the same label. I mean, who else covers "Dogon A.D."!?

move on to... what? bribe bootleggers? buy crappy mp3? stop listening to historical recordings?

Also, it took them *ages* to finally bring on the third Trane box... but I won't complain as I love the three boxes! Chuck, what abandoned sets are you aware of? The only one I thought having heard of as being planned was a Dolphy Five Spot set, but then the Dolphy box is quite okay with me

Art Tatum - God Is in the House (Onyx) playing the two tracks with Frankie Newton

Chico Freeman - The Pied Piper (Black-Hawk) Elvin and McBee make a wonderful team... Kenny Kirkland has a few great spots, and Chico is in fine form. Not too big a fan of his (I prefer his dad), but this one's worth listening, for sure! His tenor on "The Rose Tattoo" is marvellous!

r.i.p. Duck Dunn

Forgot to mention: spotted in the audience: Irene Schweizer and Gerry Hemingway - the later came to chat with Ben Monder and seemed to have a good time.

I'll try and write some... not yet 100% sure I'll make it to Lake. There was a rather big fire at the venue were Taktlos (the festival w/Malaby and Shipp/Mateen) is starting right now... but seems they'll do all the concerts, possibly in other parts of the building... hope it wasn't too bad! Okay, so how was it... Taktlos is held the 29th time these days, it's long grown to be an institution, presenting the avantgarde of jazz and other related musics. Fire police have allowed them - on very short notice, it seems, since they did minimal five-minute sound checks ahead of each set - to use my favorite stage there, at the Rote Fabrik, the Clubraum, which is smaller than the regular venue for jazz concerts (the Aktionshalle) and hence looks half full, rather than three quarters empty. Anyway, I got there early, met a friend who showed me pictures from last week's Le Mans festival, where he heard plenty of amazing music (wish I'd been there!). Tony Malaby, then... his quartet is named Paloma Recio and consists of Ben Monder on guitar, Drew Gress on bass and Flin Van Hemmen on drums. Never heard of Van Hemmen before, but he was great, with a lose yet controlled, swinging and fun style that could push the band quite some, if called for! Gress was way too low in the mix, alas, while Monder was often over-bearing, even more so when he started using distortion and other sound pedal effects. I'm afraid I didn't quite get how this group's music worked, though... they all had music stands in front of them but never changed pages (only once did Gress change something towards the end)... the dramaturgy of it lay in the dark to me, anyhow. They started playing rather quietly, until Monder for the first time fell out of his "jazz" style and started getting real loud. He and Malaby played complex lines in unison, while the rhythms kept changing underneath, solos would emerge - some great playing by Malaby, for sure! Wonderful sound, big at the bottom, but still rather slim... thin but beautiful in the high range - and he got pretty intense and wild doing plenty of falsetto stuff as the set unrolled. Monder fit in well mostly, but kept being somewhat overbearing throughout the concert. They reached a climax after some forty minutes of continuous playing, then took a break, but after Malaby announced the band he asked if there was time for one more, and off they went onto an amazingly powerful, exhilarating flight. At the end I was pretty pleased by it all, but it took a while for the band to catch flight and for me to get into this rather complex and coolish sound. Then break, changing the setup, dragging the baby grand to the center, setting up new mics... and a short sound check (Mateen in orange t-shirt). On it went with Matthew Shipp and Sabir Mateen - first on clarinet, then on tenor, and back to clarinet for the encore. A most powerful set, digging right into the music from the very first tones. All music, so to speak. Mateen has a wonderful tone on clarinet and even more so on tenor, very big, deep, rough. Both of them had a few unacccompanied passages, and Mateen's tenor one was the highlight of the night for me. Shipp was both quick and sparse, both dense and pointed - never heard him live and have been kind of an on and off fan of his... but this concert easily convinced me! At the end, all was said and done, no need for any more music, really! Amazing set! Third band was a Swiss one called Phall Fatale, featuring two singers (Joy Frempong and Joana Aderi), both also using samplers and electronics, John Edwards and Daniel Sailer on double basses, and drummer Fredy Studer (of OM-fame). Good beats and grooves from the basses (Edwards is wonderful, needless to say), but I found the whole thing pretty boring and the singers not too convincing (and the lyrics pretty... uhm, uninspired and flat). Anyway, I should have left after Shipp/Mateen anyway, so maybe I'm being somewhat unfair.

Yep, took me a while, but I stocked up many, many OJCCDs after that... As for the three new ones, the bonus tracks on the Bill Evans disc seem to be previously unissued, while the Monk adds one more from the July session (previously on "Blues Five Spot", Milestone 9124, as well as on the 15 CD set), while the other two bonus tracks were part of the old OJCCD. Not sure why yet another edition of the Massey Hall concert is needed...

uhm yes, six... weird!

Hm, why has my CD by Charles Gayle "Consider the Lillies..." just four tracks, when the cover lists eight? Did I get a faulty disc, or was there some mistake when the covers were printed?

Just noticed I've had the "new" "Ugetsu" for some months, so it's not that new... anyway, "Kyoto" is now the only of the three Blakeys I've only bought once.

Indeed, hilarious! Would love to hear Kuhn live some day... he's one of my favorite pianists in that modern/mainstream/whatever style.

I'll try and write some... not yet 100% sure I'll make it to Lake. There was a rather big fire at the venue were Taktlos (the festival w/Malaby and Shipp/Mateen) is starting right now... but seems they'll do all the concerts, possibly in other parts of the building... hope it wasn't too bad!

Sorry to hear this, Guy. My condolences.