Late

Reissued again. Along with: • Fire Music • On This Night • Live In San Francisco • Mama Too Tight • The Way Ahead • Kwanza • Things Have Got To Change • Three For Shepp (Marion Brown)

20 new reissues. The SHM-CD titles I've heard from this series sound really good. I missed Kwanza the first time around, so it'll be nice to pick this one up. [Note: I'm conflating the UHQCD and SHM-CD series. Oh well!]

Pharoah Sanders Impulse! titles, on compact disc, are available again — on January 20, 2021. This will be only the second time that Live At The East has been available on compact disc. Tauhid and Karma aren't in this batch, but the rest are. Too bad Alice Coltrane titles weren't added. Still! [Oh, it looks like Love In Us All, also isn't in the list.]

Operetta for Barbara Donald

Rumasuma contains some of the best Barbara Donald on record. Simmons seems inhibited by the piano, but Donald just burns — every solo she has. You can really hear the Booker Little influence.

A legit reissue (Enterplanetary Koncepts) of this:

This 2003 Japanese compilation is excellent, especially when you just want to play a single disc of Red's: 1. C Jam Blues (Groovy) 2. I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (Red Garland’s Piano) 3. But Not For Me (Red Garland’s Piano) 4. St. James Infirmary (When There Are Grey Skies) 5. My Blue Heaven (When There Are Grey Skies) 6. Soon (Can’t See For Lookin’) 7. Summertime (All Kinds of Weather) 8. Rain (All Kinds of Weather) 9. A Foggy Day (A Garland of Red) 10. What Is This Thing Called Love? (A Garland of Red) 11. This Can’t Be Love (It’s A Blue World) 12. And The Angels Sing (Red Garland Trio/Moodsville) 13. Billy Boy (Revisited!)

Good album for 2020. Red is tight.

That comp looks great.

Saw Golia live in 1997 at LACMA. He played almost the entire gig on Eb contra-alto clarinet. Unfortunately, I can't remember the rest of the band. A piano-less quartet if I recall correctly.

The Ayler appears to be a two-disc reissue of: I never got around to picking up the Stockholm/Berlin set, so it's nice that it'll be available once again. I also have Yasmina, but not Blasé, so the Shepp too is a welcome reissue. I hope that Werner keeps digging through the hat archive as well as other labels. If ezz-thetics essentially becomes a reissue label, I'm for it.

Any thoughts, twelve years later, as to what compact disc edition of Pithecanthropus Erectus sounds best? ("Best" being a relative term, of course.) I have a Japanese K2 20-bit edition, and Mingus's bass is artificially boosted. Anyone here happen to have heard the (ridiculous term ahead) MQA-UHQCD edition? The music, it goes without saying, is irreproachable.

Maybe Cecil united all his Units at one point and we just didn't know about it.

"United"?

You're gonna love it. It's always seemed a little more heartfelt to me than his Prestige dates. The young Bobby Few on piano adds a slight twist.

I don't find the album horrible, but I do think it's curious that perhaps the most interesting track ("My Heart Stood Still") was left off the album. My guess is that Creed Taylor didn't like Gary Peacock's solo (which seems to be giving the middle finger to the proceedings). I like Olga Albizu's paintings:

The Day Elvin Jones Fired Up Milwaukee's Lakefront Festival of Art in 1972 I love this quartet. Wouldn't be the same without Grossman.

During a blindfold test, Bill Evans listened to Cecil Taylor. He had positive things to say. ================== What about Lennie Tristano's influence on Herbie? Anyone hear that? It can readily be heard in Evans.

Maybe the closest we can get to that setting (Davis, Evans, LaFaro, Motian) are the ballads from Seven Steps To Heaven. Feldman sounds (to me) like he'd been listening to Evans a fair amount. Had that quartet actually recorded, I'm sure the ballads would've been amazing. ================= Connecting back to the discussion in 2009 (about Hancock's influences, Evans being one of them), I've often wondered to what extent Herbie listened to Tristano. If Herbie is influenced by Bill Evans (which I think he is), then he'd have picked up some Tristano influence via Evans. Another question — is this statement valid? --> No George Russell = no Kind of Blue. In other words, would that recording exist as we know it without Russell's thinking on harmony?

The stories about seeing/meeting Simmons in San Francisco in the 80's are intriguing to me. In 1985, I was in downtown San Francisco as part of a YMCA trip (I was 15) when I stopped to listen to an alto saxophonist playing on the street. I had just started seriously listening to jazz music, the alto in particular, and my entry points were Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. (Bird came a little later.) I ended up chatting with the street musician, and he told me that he'd played with Dolphy. I had a hard time believing that — Dolphy had been dead for over twenty years! Only decades later did I realize that the street musician may have been Sonny Simmons, and he was just sharing his history with me.

Intrigued ...

Recent podcast interview with Mahanthappa. I didn't know he was at Princeton now.

Sonny Simmons is one of America's most under-valued musicians. It's amazing he's still with us. Recommended recordings: • The Cry (Contemporary) 1962 • Staying On The Watch (ESP) 1966 • Music From The Spheres (ESP) 1966 • Firebirds (Contemporary) 1967 • Rumasuma (Contemporary) 1969 • Burning Spirits (Contemporary) 1970 And, yes, all the recordings thereafter (especially from the 90's).