Nate Dorward

Just been watching Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire--has a substantial appearance by Gene Krupa's band including the famous matchbox drumming routine. Who's the one black guy in the band (the trumpeter who takes a brief solo) by the way?

Sorry to hear of this. Hooked on him ever since I heard "Grits ain't groceries, eggs ain't poultry, & Mona Lisa was a man" in my dad's record collection when I was small.

That disc with Breau & Tal Farlow had slipped under my radar--hm, I'll have to get that one. The few snippets on the website sounded pretty intriguing. How're the other ARt of Life Breau releases, do you know? I know I've heard one of the collaborations with Buddy Emmons though neither album cover there resembles the one I'm familiar with. Or maybe it was a 3rd LP?

To judge by the entry for it on the IMDB it doesn't look like the kind of thing I'd want on my c.v., which may explain the mystery of who did the music......

Mwanji Ezana discusses jazz blogging here: http://be-jazz.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_be-...253650625117984

& incidentally re: free jazz on film: I remember that in The Fabulous Baker Boys at the end after the group splits up, the pianist follows his muse & becomes an avantgarde jazz pianist--there's a short clip.

Tell me about it--I remember Mo Better Blues as one of the clunkier "jazz movies" I've ever seen. The things I remember about it are the awful montage with "A Love Supreme", the sequence where a blank-faced Bleek is chewed out by both women in his life, & the headbobbing, cartoony Jewish twins in charge of the club. I remember Malcolm X & Clockers as OK though I haven't seen them since first release.

Thanks for the comments Jim. Have you heard the ones I mentioned at the start, by the way? Definitely not "produced"! (Five O'Clock Bells & Mo Breau are charming stream of consciousness things from the studio, complete with a few bits of talking to the engineer, some dodgy half-sung vocals, some blues lines invented on the spot, &c. Despite all that, they have some remarkable stuff on them--"Toronto" for instance & "Visions".)

The four Lenny Breau albums I've heard are some of my favourite records--Mo' Breau, Five o'Clock Bells, Quietude & Legacy (the first two are now available doubled-up on a signle CD, the latter two are now available as Live at Bourbon Street, though I still just have the original LPs). I was wondering what else of his people had heard, & how it was. Randy Bachman has recently been digging up a lot of previously unreleased material, & I know some of his other recordings have been issued on CD. My impression was that the available documentation was rather haphazard, given Breau's short & messy life, but I was curious what else was worth getting. The good news is that there's a forthcoming bio of Breau--Daryl Angier at Coda tells me they'll be running an excerpt from it later this year.

All this reminds me that one film I really wanna see is Hellzapoppin.....

....but, alas, Blue Note ain't going to go for Byron playing "free".

Most recent example I can think of is the appearance of a few musicians pretending to be the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker quartet in LA Confidential. Nice touch, I forget which tune it was (& I think it was right off the original hit single, not modern musicians recreating it).

Yeah, I thought it weird he dissed those tracks--I like them a lot! Ah well. At least it got a prominent & largely positive review.

At the risk of inviting a torrent of polemic from, er, certain parties, here's a link to Francis Davis's review of the Evening Star releases: http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0528,davis1,65756,22.html

It's usually called a "break" (cf "The Famous Alto Break"). I'll listen again.

Yeah, feeling guilty about those--they're all fascinating discs, & the writeup is coming.....! The one I feel most "comfortable" with is the Erstlive 005; still thinking about the other two...

Yes it's an extremely resonant acoustic for Conic Sections.

The augmented edition of a previous CD published on ACTA (addition of 2 tunes recorded in studio). Essential music, essential JOHN STEVENS The live part has been recorded few months (Weeks?) before the too early Death of STEVENS. What's so extraordinary, here, it's that it shows the incredible evolution of the drummer who goes enter, in this record, the world of "microtonal" impro. Stunning. To clarify: (1) the additional material is a combination of excerpts from an interview plus two short tracks with a quartet (Neil Metcalfe on flute)--lots of insight into Stevens' methods here. (2) the live concert is actually from half a year before Stevens' death. (3) it's indeed a great album, & the sound on "Stig" is noticeably better than on the Acta CD (Martin Davidson professed surprise at this to me, saying he didn't remember doing much more than bumping up the volume, but after auditioning both versions I still think there's more to it than that). Not 1972, 1992. Great music, again. "Another"? He's done some great albums (including with his Iskra groups). But this certainly isn't one of them--though I found it more palatable if you skipped the opening track. For dedicated fans of horn+electronics albums only. Yes this is a great one. It's a bit tougher to get into than their debut Wing Vane but is equally fine.

I remember Mars Song as a really tough go--got rid of it some time ago. Lines Burnt on Light is pretty impressive if you've never heard Parker solo before but I found it disappointing--very little advance to show on Conic Sections from over a decade before. I still like the solo piece on Atlanta best of all the solo E.P. I've heard. The new duo album with Stan Tracey is terrific by the way (the 2nd one--I haven't heard the 1st). It's fairly jazz-oriented too--downright groovy on the title track "Crevulation".

One of my "little knowledge is a dangerous thing" moments, obviously.... Will have to relisten though the BFT is buried here among the chaos at the moment. I seem to recall that earlier editions of The Penguin Guide had an entry for the Oliver Nelson album, but it's dropped out of more recent editions. So what tracks from the album did you leave off this BFT, Jim ? It certainly sounds like a winner.

Aha, Clarence "C" Sharpe. I gather that Luke Kaven's got some tapes of some of his performances from his last years & plans to issue them in some form on Smalls Records--I look forward to hearing the results.....

FWIW-- http://www.onefinalnote.com/reviews/g/grea...tumn-leaves.asp I have one of the Inner City releases of the "original" GJ3 & I like it a lot.

The Duck Baker disc is really nice by the way. Baker's best known as a critic--he has a regular column for Coda for instance.

I have the 2nd Herbie Nichols Project disc--I thought it was pretty nice, though I've never got much out of Frank Kimbrough alas (I say this because he's such a nice guy in the shark-infested waters of the Jazz Corner board that I wish I was more excited about his music). -- I remember that Change of Season with Mengelberg, Lacy &c was another good Nichols tribute album with a few previously unheard tunes. I've never heard vol. 2 of the Rudd Nichols set but vol. 1 was so disappointing I dumped it rapidly (despite its having Rudd signature on the cover!).

Ugh, you really like Slightly Latin? With the Quincy Jones material at the end of the set it's the only dud stuff on the Mercury box, I think. It's worth pointing out that the recent reissues of Domino has stuff not on the boxed set; but I gather the reissue of the Copenhagen set omits some of the material added to the Mercury set. If you dig around you can find a weird 1960s TV program with John Cage & Roland Kirk (live at Ronnie Scott's & in London zoo) juxtaposed. They don't actually meet, but it's kind of nice to have them in the same show. Kirk is playing with Stan Tracey there.