Nate Dorward

It deserves the rosette even just for Clifford Jordan's feature at the end. The rest is nice, but that's really nice. Though I do seem to recall there's an ugly edit on the first or second track..... a minor quibble.

Yeah, I think Peacock is completely uninterested in fire music nowadays. A pity (ditto Dave Holland's mainstreaming).

Haven't got this one in the "official" version--what I have is a CDR sampler of it that Luke sent while he was still in the early stages of working with the tapes. From what I recall (can't check right now as I'm at work) it's well up to the calibre of the other two trio sessions he's released.

Wow, that's great to hear. This was one of the great bands. Any word on recording quality? I guess it doesn't matter, but it'd be doubly nice if it were well-recorded.... I take it the "error" is in the instrumentation listing.

I did a post on teh board some time ago on these two--I'm sure a search would bring it up. -- They're certainly the weakest of LY's Blue Note discs & the Althea tracks are awful, but they both have their moments, esp. Contrasts. "A Major Affair" is the track I remember as the best (duo with Eddie Gladden), plus a good Tyrone Washington tune.

Sorry but I don't see any connection - artistic or esthetic not to speak of political -between OP and the Nuremberg gatherings that Riefenstahl filmed! None whatsoever! Nate, you may not be a fan of OP but he deserves better than this! Sorry: perhaps my point wasn't clear. It's not really about OP at all (a pianist whom I don't like & I don't dislike: though in Canada saying you don't like OP would be punishable by death if we still had the death penalty). It's about this weird use of the word "will", which has connotations that I find really inappropriate for jazz & swinging, & yet the word keeps turning up in supposedly positive descriptions of Peterson's playing. My allusion to The Triumph of the Will was just to make this point about those dodgy connotations of "will", not to suggest any analogy between OP's music & that film!

What is it with the constant application of the term "will" (as in "the will to swing") to OP? It makes me think of Leni Riefenstahl.

He's got two discs on his own Pine Ear label which are both worth getting. Plus the new Billy Stein disc is great with Radding & Rashid Bakr. (Reuben tells me he was incredibly sick during that session & feared he'd wrecked it; when he received the CD he didn't listen to it for ages, then got up the nerve & was pleasantly surprised how well it worked out. It's actually a terrific date, one of the best & most overlooked releases of 2006.)

Generally not, though I've been roped into the occasional review of modern classical or rock or whatnot, often because of Cadence's "Hodgepodge & Shorties" section. & of course I review lots of free improv shading into electroacoustic improv shading into electronic composition or improvised Cagean/Feldmanian stuff. -- In general, though there are lots of genres I like (just bought a stack of Berio, Ives, E. Carter, &c, actually), I don't feel I have expertise in areas outside jazz & its close relatives. I really admire folks like Dan Warburton who have a good handle on a pretty wide range of musics, good enough to write well on them all.

Hadn't known of that one. From the lineup, looks like it'll be in the zone of Stefano Battaglia's (excellent) work for Splasc(h)--i.e. free but ECM-handsome.

Nothing Ever Was...--yeah that's a dull, dull album. Of the discs on ECM Amaryllis is the best, the only one I actually enjoyed a lot. -- I also find the trio with Barry Guy & Paul Lytton rather chilly & dull (they've done 2 albums for Intakt), but if you like the ECMs then they're worth checking out as something in roughly the same line. The best single disc is probably Santuerio--a superb disc that touches all the bases. I wish she'd done more in that vein. Some people are huge fans of Gaia, though I've never really gotten into it. Virtually any solo Crispell album is excellent. I'm also fond of the 1992 tour album with Reggie Workman & Gerry Hemingway--sound is variable depending on the location but there are some terrific performances, & it's the first disc of hers to start working back towards swing from abstraction. Band on the Wall with Eddie Prevost is superb & one of my favourites, though the recording has a minor flaw (crackling at the peaks).

I had a problem with it when I rented it out the other day: the sound is slightly out of sync on one part of the film (basically, the section where Eve pretends to be an English aristocrat). Anyone else have this problem? Has it been fixed on a later print run? The commentary is quite good; I didn't get a chance to try the radio version before I had to return it.

Summit Conference is indeed excellent. -- Did anyone mention Greg Osby's Invisible Hand? Can't say it's a great place to hear Hill (Osby hogs the limelight to the point that his pal Gary Thomas gets, like, one solo) but one to add to the list of Hill sideman appearances. Despite the hype I don't think Dusk or Passing Ships are among Hill's best work. Time Lines is superb, though. (Haven't heard A Beautiful Day.) -- But of Hill's recordings I think the initial bunch of records for Blue Note are the essential starting-place: Black Fire, Point of Departure, Andrew!!!, Judgment!, Smokestack. & Shades is excellent, among the later albums.

Maybe, but we don't have recording contracts ..... But I wouldn't call the disc boring--I haven't got it at the moment (a bassist friend borrowed it) but I remember it as being quite good, even "Send in the Clowns" (awful tune that it is). -- Talking about Motian, I found him a lot better on here than on the Rava Tati album, which was such tedious Miles Davis pastiche I couldn't get to the end of it. Very disappointing, given my esteem for Rava (his earlier ECM discs like the one with Rudd are great).

Or Joe Venuti? There's a version on the late album with Dave McKenna.... though I'll have to re-spin it to see how well it works.

Actually I thought it was pretty good, though I can imagine it disconcerted some fans because much of it is very "outside" (& the outside stuff is often quite lengthy!) Re: Scofield--some of his earlier (1980s to mid-1990s discs) are good--I used to spin Shinola or was it Out Like a Light a lot on my brief-lived radio show. & the album with Joe Henderson, So Near So Far, is terrific. But I dunno about the later Scofield (walked out of one particularly dull Toronto concert, pushing my way through the droves of entranced guitarheads in the audience). Hey, Hub-Tones is a very good album--not FH's best (I like Ready for Freddie & Open Sesame more of those I've heard) but it's still got lots going for it, including the presence of Clifford Jarvis. Of recent discs I think the more disappointing ones I can think of were the Taylor/Dixon/Oxley; Metheny/Bailey's Sign of 4; Fred Anderson/Hamid Drake's Back Together Again; about two-thirds of Bill Frisell's albums after the departure of Joey Baron; David S Ware's ludicrous Threads; Dave Douglas's The Infinite; Robert Glasper's Canvas.

They played all this stuff--the moderns vs traditionalists date & the informal session that got pillaged for the Bird soundtrack (but they played the original versions)--on the WKCR Tristano marathon recently. Wonderful stuff. Incidentally, though my feelings about the book itself are very mixed, I love the cover of Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz which has a great shot of Parker & Tristano.

What have you heard already? A while ago I picked a fairly recent Hank Jones disc, Upon Reflection as Album of the Week. I still think it's one of his best. But he's one of those players who's consistent enough that it's hard to single discs out. As for Mobley there are people here who can give you chapter & verse on him, but I'll just mention the obvious ones: if you've not got Soul Station and Roll Call yet then those are priority purchases. Also the early work with Blakey & Roach. I'm not so crazy about the albums with Miles.

Wow, thanks Jim!

Hey, that's great to hear, even if those aren't quite the Naruse films I most want on DVD (I hope vol 2 might find room for the astonishing Yearning, Ginza Cosmetics, Wife Be Like a Rose or Floating Clouds.....). I know Repast is considered one of his best but somehow it didn't click with me as much as those ones. On the other hand When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is stunning & I look forward to that one a lot. I still can't figure out why Naruse's films have been so hard to get hold of for half a century.

Best wishes for your birthday, Clifford.

The pagecount hasn't changed for years; though I think that there was still much more wordcount per issue in the Norris/Smith days because they concentrated on packing in a lot of material without many visuals or ads (in fact, in the backissues I was consulting a few weeks back at the library, I recall virtually no ads in the early 1990s issues, aside from the classifieds at the back). That said, when I last talked to him, Mark Barnes did say that they were contemplating an increased pagecount in the future. Fingers crossed.

Good question. The mag is actually in better shape than it has been for a long while, with a new publisher (Mark Barnes) who is getting behind it in a way that Warwick Publishing never did. The Sep/Oct delay was caused by a shift of printing facilities, I gather, & this seems to have compounded the lateness of the Nov/Dec issue. I haven't the faintest how they plan to get back on track by this point, which seems to me urgent--it leaves subscribers scratching their heads when issues are consistently 2 months late. -- Not that it was very on-time before--I recall that Stuart Broomer had to play catchup at one point by doing a double Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb issue! Anyway, the new one looks good--the main features are on Satoko Fujii & Gerald Wilson, so a bit of a focus on big bands.

Thanks guys--number 33 & counting..... I'm visiting my parents in Halifax at the moment--no big plans, just a Mexican meal in the evening.

Hey, room for all types--some folks are great musicologists but lousy poets. Just as long as there's some passion in the musicology.....