king ubu

The Jacquet is great! But as so often with these most/least favourite threads, it's just a question of time before each set has been mentioned MG, I think you'd like the Jacquet a lot! It's full of hot jump music, great blues and marvellous ballads playing. You also get a few nice sideman, towards the end (on the RCA sessions on disc 4) even some boppers such as JJ Johnson. The long dates with Emmett Berry are lovely as well (one half was originally released under Berry's name and the other one under Jacquet's).

Good points - but again: from what I've read (little) and heard (a bit more), Contemporary should be a worthy candidate for similarly high praise? Their product had some kind of concept/planning, was mostly executed very well, and the sound and cover art was - in a different way - very attractive, too! And with Hampton Hawes, Harold Land, Curtis Counce and some of Shelly Manne's bands, they weren't even that far stylistically from Blue Note.

Interesting! That and the Tubby Hayes Proper I should get some day... So far I think all I've heard of Scott's is recordings with the Clarke-Boland Big Band, and there, to be honest, he always strikes me as the least interesting of the three tenors - thought not in a way that he's lacking compared to the others. Griffin is one of my big heros, and Coe when he does his Websterish thing gets so smooth and nice, yet often quite adventurous in his lines and harmonics... next to them, Scott seems a bit rough on the edges (and based on that impression I'm a bit surprised by his love for Mobley and Henderson, but then I wouldn't have any idea whom to compare him to, and maybe later/60s Mobley is indeed not that far away).

Yeah, reading of BN having some worthwhile contemporaries in Prestige and Riverside, I thought about Contemporary, too... why do folks forget about Contemporary even when they stress that Prestige and Riverside are as great as Blue Note? Also Pacific Jazz has been hijacked more or less by Blue Note...

Interesting point! On the other hand whenever I immerge into Parker's music (about once a year or so, and usually quite intensely), I am astonished to find how much beauty there is in his music. His sound, his lines... I'd challenge this notion of the "end of lyricism" - to compare with literature, expressionist (German) poetry (think of Trakl*, Benn, Georg Heym) was able to conceive imagery of stark beauty (also consider painters, E.L. Kirchner for instance, though much of his Swiss mountain paintings in lilac and pink is crap in my opinion)... my point being: it's about different kinds of beauty. I do see the point about the dull copycats - to some point I guess as far as the tenor sax is concerned, there are still too many of those around. But then again I guess the whole academic jazz school system keeps perpetuating itself to a large degree, with in the end not much of a goal except for feeding themselves and saving their own asses... but again I derail *) here's a fantastic page, all in english translations as well: http://www.literaturnische.de/Trakl/englis...dex-trakl-e.htm hey, that was intended as a compliment!

glad for your confirmation - otherwise my post above might have been proof of madness sometime in the future

Still need to get "Manhattan Fever" - the OJCs are pretty nice, but rather slight... "Kofi" is fine, I find! But we're derailing the thread... I see though Tom Storer is posting, I'm sure he'll bring us back on track with his concise upcoming comment!

Yes, still with some of these musicians it didn't lead to very... positive results. I still prefer old Harold Land ("Study in Brown") over anything of his work with Hutcherson. Foster and Land are obviously better examples than the musicians I listed - didn't think of either of them (though I recently got hold of the two OJCCDs by Foster which are roughly from the period in question).

And what about those earlier stages? I realise the topic title deals with swing > bop, but how about earlier similar stylistic developments? Jazz musicians from New Orleans, Chicago or NYC had different approaches, how did the transitions work? Was it similarly hard to adapt, or were those merely different dialects, while bop - to remain in the metaphor of languages - was a different language alltogether (though of the same family of languages, of course)? Take Earl Hines - he went from the early days into swing, and touched bop with his big band as well - quite a trip! Bechet for instance never embraced swing, but there must be a bunch of swing era guys who were active before. Was this change of style/set of rules an issue back then as well? Or was bop the big revolutionary break, the one, the first one? (up to what was referred to as the october revolution of jazz, at least...)

Yes, I thought of that when putting Jimmy Heath's name in that list... but those tenor sax players were already rooted in modern jazz. What did they look for in Coltrane? His vision, his spirituality? Or just technical stuff? More advanced playing techniques, harmonies? Or was Coltrane actually already in another stage that went beyond modern jazz/bop as bop went beyond swing? Probably in the end he was, roughly 65-67, but when did his influence become so overbearing that even seasoned guys like Thompson, Golson, Heath, Mobley etc. felt a need to take healthy or exagerrated doses of his playing and add that to their own styles?

I've heard little of his music, but those Blue Note Jazzmen dates are glorious! Also I think he turns up to good effect on a Condon date (included in the Classics - or is there only that Fats Waller guest appearance? - I have five or so Condon volumes, none of JPJ's alas)

Yes, MG - but in the end guys like Lucky Thompson or Benny Golson were able to bring another "voice" into bop. Budd Johnson as well (now that's one of the true individualists who continued to work in a most varied range of settings for several decades... for instance on Randy Weston's great Verve album "Tanjah"!) was able to adapt to many kinds of settings. And someone like Bennie Wallace then was able to bring a sound likened after Webster's into harmonically through and through modern jazz. Not to derail your point at all, just making some remarks that might even more strongly proof your point.

Interesting thread here! I'm not sure about all these topics myself, but my experience of late (or rather: of about the past 2-3 years) has been that more and more my listening went backwards in history. I figure I must have about as many pre-bop discs (is "swing" really a good label? Or rather "Swing" it should be... but if you take into account stuff like Luis Russell's band, "Swing" is certainly not a large-enough label) as I have 50s/60s discs. When I started listening to jazz, it was stuff like "Back at the Chicken Shack", "Money Jungle", "Mingus Ah Um", "Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet", then also "Ascension" and soon after more Miles, Mingus, Coltrane, then Adderley and Monk. From there I went on to the other end of the 60s - Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Jackie McLean, those artists stretching the boundaries of the genre. I became more and more interested in improvised music, free jazz (two more difficult labels), various kinds of European jazz (i.e. the output of the Hat label, Cecil Taylor, Ayler, also some FMP stuff, Irene Schweizer, etc etc). But over the time, as I got into this quite a bit (see the "funny rat" thread), I got somehow not tired of it, but I stopped listening to much music of that kind. I didn't go back to Blue Note and hardbop though, but rather started exploring earlier jazz - the point of entrance was Lester Young, I guess, and Lunceford, then Billie Holiday, Ellington... (before I'd heard some of those 50s Verve mainstream albums, Hawkins encounters Webster etc) - and there's so much glorious and individual music to discover there that it could turn out into a loooooooong journey! One point that goes beyond labels/styles/eras, that I have been thinking of quite often in those recent times: there was much wider a variety of styles within the general style referred to as "Swing" in this discussion. Many more individual voices, some even I dare say idiosyncratic. Think of Ellington's band, for instance - each of the guys had his own voice. If you play those 1927 OKeh sides long enough, you'll be able to tell the trumpet players apart... but in the larger picture: think of, for instance, Dicky Wells, Bennie Morton, Vic Dickenson, Tricky Sam Nanton, Lawrence Brown, Miff Mole, Jack Teagarden... just for tromboninsts. Then there were Jay and Kai and somehow everything got smooth and similar. Sure some guys turned that kind of playing into perfection and were extremely fascinating individualists (Rosolino comes to mind), but there was bad need for guys like Roswell Rudd and Julian Priester and Jimmy Knepper to break up the style of trombone playing again. Same on tenor... even today, most of the younger guys are so influenced by Coltrane, it's just boring (albeit on a high technical level, of course - but what's that then, high gloss boredom?). Before that you had musicians like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Chu Berry, Don Byas, Hershel Evans, Lucky Thompson, Illinois Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Bud Freeman... I'm not sure I really have a point - but in general to me it seems like the individualism in hardbop got more boiled down to nuances (of course there's still Mobley, Griffin, Lateef, Golson, Jimmy Heath and a few others who largely were able to escape the Coltrane/Rollins dominance, at least for large periods). But the general variation diminished... possibly? And as a post-script concerning free improv: I still attend concerts in that genre more often than any kind of mainstream concert, but in a week or so I could catch Evan Parker and Schlippenbach again... and o vey, this already bores me before being there... (it's a great festival that used to present more local and younger musicians, there's still someone like Peter Evans on the programme, but they seem to rely more and more on the well-known "safe values", which is a rather ironic/sarcastic term to describe that crowd, but in the end guys like Brozziman, Schlippenbach and Parker are just that by now, and quite formulaic as well...)

So from reading the Jane Fielding thread, I learn that the tenor sax on the Fielding album isn't really Teddy Edwards (as the booklet says), but rather one Ted Efantis!? Fegh them spanish crooks! Can't they even do their homework and do at least a bit of research, before putting out their free-of-charge (for them, that is) releases!?

I like the ballad as well, MG! And Dan, I considered singling out "Moment's Notice"... but then "Lazy Bird" is great, too, and so is "Locomotion"...

I strongly disagree. Of course the title track is terrific, but for me, all four originals are classics!

Hm, definitely not a one-trick pony, but Johnny Griffin's "The Congregation" longtime had such an effect on me... his solo on the opening track has such drive, such momentum, so much joyful exuberance, in short, it may be the only Griffin solo I could almost sing along from beginning to end... after that, all that came on the album seemed rather lame and tame by comparison. As I said, not at all a one-trick pony in my current assessment, but back when I got it (on Conn vinyl originally, in the 90s) and had much less jazz experience, it seemed to be...

They're great with Martial Solal as well!

"to whomever" You're slipping, chewy. MG don't be so harsh, he attented a grammer school all summer for this!

Interesting observations by ms fong and mr thornton - my exposure to Mariano has so far largely been jazz-based discs (plus said duo with Sinesi - what's that, some kind of flameco-jazz?). In that area, he did quite a few marvellous albums, in my opinion. And I enjoy his early work - in the early/mid fifties he must have been one of the most individual alto voices around (next to Konitz I guess).

just finished playing a recent recording with Richie Beirach (p), Gregor Hübner (viol) and Veit Hübner (b), aptly titled "Beauty" (Intuition, rec. 2004):

About the redhead?

I only have the Fresh Sound live of those... should get the others I guess. But I'm debating a real buying stop so don't push me please

Yes, but I'm still not sure I won't pick it up on impulse some day... first I'd still be interested in hearing something about the... uhm extra-musical extras, mainly the book - anyone got this box by now, or is there indeed not one single board member who owns it?

Time to dig up those Mariano/Geller live shows I have on some dust-gathering pile... 185 years of great sax playing! Wow!