Nate Dorward

"Someone"? Get out of your armchair & go to the library--there's plenty of litcrit, some of it very fine, some of it just academic business-as-usual. There's no shortage of intelligent commentary on these writers, if you bother to look.

Glad to hear that many of these players ring some bells! I note that the bionote on Nat Su posted above contradicts my info that he's from Cameroon.... I wonder where I got that latter information. Probably Andy Hamilton's review of the disc in The Wire. I should hunt down his other projects & also the Ellington duets with Luescher. The Carla Bley album is really tremendous stuff--it's all about the same almost-suspended-in-midair pace as the track I included, but they really discover worlds within each tune & the tempos are very finely judged (never a slog!). Yes I keep meaning to pick up that new Alan Broadbent disc--he records as leader so infrequently...! The other disc of his I've heard & liked (though don't own) is the marvellous duet with Gary Foster, which pursues more obviously Tristanoite paths. -- Personal Standards is a set of Broadbent originals (except for one tune contributed by the bassist). He writes a good tune, but the real winner is the track I included, an off-the-cuff themeless improvisation on "Body & Soul".

The alt.take of the title track of Hub-Tones--they probably excluded it because though Hubbard's solo is I think better, the time gets turned around at the very end of the track. Them's the breaks.

Tossed the answers into another thread...figured that with BFT15 in the mail it was time to wrap this one up. But of course anyone who wants to post here before glancing at the answers is welcome to do so.

This is the Cadence reviewer's special. When you review for Bob Rusch you're asked to review everything sent to you & not to send anything back. & they are sent virtually everything. So you often get a lot of very obscure stuff, & while some of it's a chore to deal with there's a surprising amount of gems in there too -- in fact, a lot of discs better than the stuff from familiar artists or familiar recordlabels. A lot of this BFT is highlights from the pile of CDs I've received lately as a Cadence reviewer. But I also tossed in other discs too, in part because I thought larding this with utter obscurities would kill people's interest eventually, & in part because artists like Rodney Kendrick, Yosuke Yamashita, Chris Anderson & Bennie Wallace similarly seem to get only a fraction of the recognition or popularity they deserve. There are some common threads to the selection, or "tendencies" anyway since I didn't stick to them systematically. 1) I tend to gravitate towards the piano, having played it most of my life, sometimes seriously, sometimes (as now) just for pleasure. So there's a certain emphasis here on piano. Also a lot of sax here, I note. 2) All the tracks are sourced from CD & fairly recent CDs at that. (This can lead to a monotonously "clean" sound, I'm afraid, though fortunately there were a few rougher sounding things like #4. Maybe I should have tossed in a good recent CIMP like Trio-X's Journey or Adam Lane's Fo(u)r Being(s) to vary the sound further......) This is I'm pretty sure the first BFT in this forum where, as far as I know, all the musicians (leaders and sidemen) are still alive as of this writing. One track (#7) is from the 1980s, three from the 1990s, & the other ten are new releases from 2002-4. Several were on, or are destined for, the various top-ten lists I submit yearly to various magazines. 3) Though I'm strongly interested in avantgarde jazz & improv I get annoyed at the insufferable belief of (ahem) certain musicians and critics that more conventional jazz idioms are played-out. I picked these tracks with an eye to demonstrating how much vitality, idiosyncracy & surprise can be found within more centrist (though not exactly "mainstream") jazz. (Track 10 is the big exception: every blindfold test needs to have one track to pin back people's ears.) Another related point is that many of these tracks are covers: seven are readings of other composers' tunes & several others are based on the changes to familiar standards. 4) I broke a cardinal rule of Blindfold Tests, which is: include some gimmes. (Indeed, the Downbeat BFT is invariably ALL gimmes.) There's one very famous player here -- Charlie Haden -- and several like Wallace, Kendrick & Broadbent who are reasonably familiar, but mostly these are unheralded musicians. It's a continual source of amazement to me how much good music there is out there, & how little relation its merits have to the amount of press a musician receives. Though it's always nice as a reviewer to get the latest discs from major artists you already know & love, the truth is that even major artists don't produce a continual stream of masterpieces, & it's the discs by people you've never heard of before that often knock your socks off. The tracks: 1) Bite the Gnatze, "Wilde dans in een afgelegen Berghut" (Pallesen), from Wilde dans in een afgelegen Berghut (TryTone TT 559-020). Paul Pallesen, g; Michel Duijves, b cl; Jorrit Dijkstra, ss; Joost Buis, lapsteel; Jasper Le Clercq, vln; Maurice Horsthuis, vla; Meinrad Kneer, b; Alan Purves, d. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 31 Jan-1 Feb 2003. This track is fun & a bit wayward. It's kind of "Sweet Georgia Brown"ish, & has a country vibe I like a lot. (Its placement at the start of this BFT is almost symbolic: there was a period a few years ago where I felt that I'd had about enough of jazz & was mostly listening to country music.) The fiddling is totally off-the-wall too! Can anyone tell me what the title means? Anyway, this is an album for people who find Bill Frisell's efforts in a country vein too anodyne. It's got that Dutch vibe, which is to say it's often a hoot, but it avoids the increasingly self-parodic lunacy of Breuker & Bennink. Alan Purves, by the way, is a Scotsman now part of the Dutch scene; you often find him using the nickname "Gunga" on recordings. 2) Tom Lawton, "Donna Lee" (Charlie Parker, or Miles Davis, depending whom you believe), from Retrospective/Debut (DreamBox Media DMJ-1070/2). Lawton, p. Maggie's Farm, PA, 3-5 Nov 2003. A late inclusion -- this one's so new my review of it for Cadence hasn't even appeared yet. It's an untypical track as mostly this is a quintet album focussed on Lawton's originals (Ben Schachter, ts & ss; John Swana, tpt; Lee Smith, b; Jim Miller, d; plus a guest spot by clarinettist Norman David). The album is more mainstream in idiom than you might expect from this track, though it does have some "free" pieces on it too. Lawton's compositions often use a neo-hardbop language but he has a distinctive compositional sensibility: the heads are very very long (sometimes three minutes or so), & while a few feel a bit shapeless as a result mostly they're very intriguing, ambitious pieces that push the soloists out of their usual ambit. Stuck in among the originals are two solo pieces: this one (a whirlwind cover of "Donna Lee", usually credited to Charlie Parker though Miles claimed credit for it in his autobiography); & a very long & mysterious reading of Shorter's "Juju" which I wish I could have included because it's even better. It took me a little while to quite sort out my reaction to this album but I think it's actually pretty remarkable in its way. I hope the guy does a whole album of solo piano or duets because (as you can hear) he often sounds at his best when he's got a lot of room to work in. 3) Fredi Luescher, Cécile Olshausen, Nathanael Su, "Sing Me Softly of the Blues" (Carla Bley), from Dear C.: The Music of Carla Bley (Altrisuoni AS 134). Luescher, p; Olshausen, clo; Su, as. Zürich, Switzerland, 2002. This is an album of sublimely spare covers of Carla Bley tunes. It was a narrow choice between this track & "Fleur Carnivore" (but the latter was too long). Olshausen is here just to underline the music in the right places -- she doesn't solo on the album at all. There was some confusion over the instrumentation: it's alto sax, but Su has a high, pure, plus-Konitz-que-Konitz tone which is indeed rather ambiguous....! Luescher's solo pays homage both to Carla & to Monk. Su just has a brief solo, but every note counts. He's from Cameroon, by the way, & has one album out on Fresh Sound New Talent, though I don't have it. (It gets a scathing review on AMG by, of all people, the usually compulsively hats-off Thom Jurek.) 4) Dead Cat Bounce, "Hiram Hinckler's Shrunken Heads" (Steckler), from Home Speaks to the Wandering (Innova 593). Charlie Kohlhase, as; Jared Sims, Matt Steckler, ts; Drew Sayers, bari s; Arie Werbrouck, b; Bill Carbone, d. Somerville, MA, 30-31 July 2003. A rude shock after that last one! I'd describe this album in a nutshell as rockabilly Mingus (plus there's Sun Ra, Kirk, Ornette in there too of course...). I'd imagine it'd appeal strongly to Vandermark 5 fans but frankly I think this is far better than most KVDM I've heard. All of the tracks on the album are similarly caffeinated! The gutbucket recording quality & odd balance between the speakers makes a nice change from the plush studio sound of the preceding & following tracks. After the aggressive snapping-turtle opening the improbably balmy interlude at 1:41 that launches Kohlhase's solo is a nice surprise: a little sugar to go with all the tartness. The other horns disappear as Sayers steps up, but then they return for small little outbursts, like the bit at 4:34 where they stick out their tongues. Incidentally, those appalled by the ABBA cover later on this BFT should be warned that one tune elsewhere on Home Speaks... sneaks in a quote from J.Lo's "Jenny From the Block" 5) André Nendza Quartet, "Odyssée" (Nendza), from Wild Open Rooms (Crecycle Music CYM 08). Nendza, b; Claudius Valk, ss; Thomas Heberer, tpt; Hendrik Soll, p; Christoph Hillmann, d. (Date?) Some comments from Nendza's liner notes: "Sort of Tango nuevo for a tragic hero. Che Guevara's 'Odyssée' began with a bicycle trip through Latinamerica. It led him into the forests of the Sierra Maestra, to the Cuban revolution and ended with cut off hands buried near a landing strip somewhere in Bolivia." You could easily mistake this for a Dave Douglas track, both in terms of the music & the thoughtful leftist political sentiment behind the music, though Heberer's sound isn't much like Douglas's (Heberer's more buzzy). The twinkling perpetuum mobile piano on the head reminds me a bit of one of the tunes on Jon Lloyd's Head too. Yeah, this is pretty stuff but it's got heart to it too. So I think, anyway: it was one of the least popular items on the BFT .... Perhaps this track ran foul of people's expectations slightly: the avant types liked the freeish opening & hated the main piece, & the mainstream-inclined hated the opening & liked the tune.... 6) Emanuele Cisi & Paolo Birro, "Do You Remember Me?" (Cisi), from Hidden Songs (Splasc(h) CDH 756.2). Cisi, ts; Birro, p; Bergamo, Italy, 11-12 June 2001. I got this CD for review along with Birro's Live at Siena Jazz, and it was hard to pick between them for this BFT: I nearly went with "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" or "Alcool" off the other album, both of them real tours de force. But I picked this because of my affection for the Tristano school & for the standard this tune is based on, "I Remember You". It's also fascinating to hear two Italians transplanting Italian-American jazz -- Joe Lovano & Lennie Tristano -- back to home soil. There's of course Marsh in Cisi's sound too along with Lovano, & his high-register work understandably got him mistaken for Konitz by a few BFT participants. 7) Bennie Wallace & Yosuke Yamashita, "Blues Yamashita" (Wallace), from Brilliant Corners (Denon CY-30003). Wallace, ts; Yamashita, p; Jay Anderson, b; Jeff Hirshfield, d. Japan, 7-8 Sep 1986. I'd originally planned to include a track from Yamashita's Canvas in Quiet, one of my favourite contemporary solo piano albums. But by including this track I worked in another of my favourite musicians, Bennie Wallace. These are both players I got hooked on early on as a listener to jazz. I dug the One Night with Blue Note series out of a sales bin full of cassettes & was knocked out by Wallace's trio piece "Broadside"; I then bought Twilight Time & this disc, the latter introducing me to Yamashita. Two players you could identify from a single phrase: Wallace from his mindbending runs launched from a low-register belch into way-up-there false notes that stick out like cowlicks; Yamashita from his jittery approach & his tendency to play things that always sound like they're about to escape into a different key! This track has that feeling of mounting excitement I value in uptempo pieces: you get it in track 12 (Kendrick) too. Also a sly sense of humour, another quality I value. 8) Charlie Haden & Chris Anderson, "Alone Together" (Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz), from None But the Lonely Heart (Naim NaimCD022). Haden, b; Anderson, p. New York, 5-7 July 1997. The album lists Haden first for marketing purposes but it's really Anderson's album. He's a blind, elderly black pianist who like Michel Petrucciani suffers from glass-bone disease; he has a few recent recordings out on Mapleshade, DIW & Alsut, but I can't seem to find any of them so this is all I've got. Stuart Broomer first alerted me to this guy after hearing Solo Ballads. Anderson is on a live Charlie Parker session from the 1950s, was Herbie Hancock's teacher at one point, recorded a few times as a leader or sideman, but basically is one of those pianists' pianists who tend to rarely get recorded much.... There's a thread I started on him on the board a while back. Anyway, I wanted to have this kind of wonky, deeeeeep piano playing on here among the glossier stuff. Fans of Frank Hewitt's disc on Smalls should check this out (Anderson & Hewitt were friends); for that matter, people who liked this should check out Hewitt's disc. I'm surprised that people had such trouble i.d.ing Haden here: the sparseness of his playing & the low-key setting are typical of his 1990s work (cf Alone Together with Konitz & Mehldau or You & The Night & the Music with Kenny Barron or Steal Away with Hank Jones). 9) Geof Bradfield, Noel Kupersmith, Ted Sirota, "Reconciliation" (Andrew Hill), from Rule of Three (Liberated Zone Records ROT4512). Bradfield, ts; Kupersmith, b; Sirota, d. Hinsdale, IL, 8-9 July 2001. Bradfield's a fine composer but I had to go with the cover of Hill's "Reconciliation", one of the most memorable tunes from Judgment. I've been carrying a torch for this album ever since it popped out of the mail in a review packet from Cadence: for me this was one of the best jazz albums of 2003. I would have liked to include a longer track from this disc to give more of a taste of Bradfield's playing & composing, but I like pithiness too--this is a solo which seems perfectly edited-on-the-spot, breaking into two parts (the increasing intensity up to the two-minute mark, & then a straighter swing feel at that point as it glides back to the head). 10) Hiroaki Katayama Quartet, "Sous le ciel de Paris [under Paris Skies]" (Hubert Giraud), from Quatre. Katayama, ts; Fumio Itabashi, p; Nobuyoshi Ino, b; Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, d. Yokohama, Japan, 26-27 Feb 2002. Katayama is basically unknown to me, though he has appeared as a sideman with Aki Takase & Satoko Fujii. This is easily the obscurest item on the BFT: except for my baffled but admiring review in Cadence I don't think any English-language reviews have appeared. (When my review appeared, by the way, I screwed up & listed all the Japanese names backwards -- a perpetual danger with Japanese albums -- & I note that Cadence still has Katayama's name the wrong way round in their catalogue.) This album is.....well, "unique" is such an overused word, but this really IS unique. It's got the same demented impact as a Naked City release, but none of Zorn's cutesiness -- despite Katayama's very warped sense of humour, he basically just blows his heart out. The results are often oddly moving & inspiring just as much as they are fearsome or hilarious. The tune sounds a lot like Dorham's "Blue Bossa" but it's the Edith Piaf-associated tune "Under Paris Skies." This is far from the most over-the-top track on the CD: the opening "For You" starts with sickly-sweet piano & then becomes as intense as Albert Ayler, & if I'd had a little more room on the BFT I might have gone with the wildly melodramatic 10-minute reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." There are even odder things on the album, like a track that sounds like Peter Brötzmann playing disco, and an improvised sock-hop blues. Anyway, if this track appeals to you I really do recommend hunting this album down--it's one of those albums I pull out to make friends' jaws drop. 11) Alan Broadbent Trio, "Ballad Impromptu" (Broadbent), from Personal Standards (Concord CCD-4757-2). Broadbent, p; Putter Smith, b; Joe LaBarbera, d. Los Angeles, 7-8 Oct 1996 Based on "Body & Soul" of course. Stuart Broomer included this among his list of all-time great jazz solos in the MusicHound Guide to Jazz, incidentally. Broadbent likes to improvise in counterpoint, & I'm not surprised that several people thought at points this might be a piano duet: love that moment at 2:34 where you get an "Over the Rainbow"ish counterpoint as the hands switch roles, and also the risky left-hand line at 1:14-1:22 (even though it ends with what sounds like a wrong note!). Check out those quietly ecstatic falling/rising runs that remind me of Mingus's "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love" at 3:23. That's the point where the track starts to really levitate: I love that slow-motion build as he goes into the bridge, at 3:49-4:03, & then there's another quietly triumphant build at 4:20-4:31. Some x-refs on this BFT: Broadbent is a former Tristano student (cf. tracks 3 & 6) & he's the pianist in Haden's Quartet West (cf. track 8). He doesn't record often, though he's on a couple recent Lee Konitz discs (though frankly, I think Live-Lee is one of Konitz's more mannered latterday performances), contributes a lot of string arrangements to singers' albums, & has been (probably still for all I know) Diana Krall's musical director... 12) Rodney Kendrick, "The Nac" (Kendrick), from Last Chance for Common Sense (Verve/Gitanes 531 536-2). Kendrick, p; Graham Haynes, cornet; Justin Robinson, as; Eric Wyatt, ts; Tarus Mateen, b; Taru Alexander, d. New York, 15-16 Nov 1995. Four albums for Verve (or for Verve's more interesting partner, France's Gitanes Jazz), & then Kendrick was cut adrift, his albums deleted. (There is a fifth album for Columbia, only available in Europe, but I gather it's a jazz-rap experiment very different from the Gitanes albums.) Dance, World, Dance is an even better album than this one, & had some good cameos by Arthur Blythe, but I stuck with this track because I really like this kind of tune, where the chords are a relentless treadmill you can't get off & the intensity just builds & builds. Who's Justin Robinson, I'd like to know? The guy smokes. (I haven't come across him anywhere else, but I note he's on that Harper Bros. disc marcoliv picked for AOW on this board, which I haven't heard yet...) I love Kendrick's distinctive "cracked" notes (minor seconds that make the note sound like it's fraying at the edges), which he borrows from Monk but which he's made his own. 13) Joe Hunt Trio, "Solar" (Miles Davis, supposedly), from The Joe Hunt Trio (DreamBox Media DMJ-1067). Hunt, d; Steve Rudolph, p; Steve Meashey, b. Saylorsburg, PA, 15-16 Dec 2002. Another disc from DreamBox Media (cf track 2), this time a bulletin from the drummer Joe Hunt, whom I'd heard nothing of since his work with Stan Getz & George Russell back in the 1960s. He also apparently spent some time in the Bill Evans trio, the obvious influence on this track & indeed this album, but that version of the trio was never recorded. Great to hear Hunt back in the studio. And who's this pianist Steve Rudolph? I found his website & wrote him, & had a brief but pleasant correspondence. Among other things he was the pianist on Johnny Coles' last, unreleased leadership date. (Coles was very ill at these sessions and Rudolph tells me only a few tracks are releasable.) This seems to have been one of the least popular items on the BFT, along with #5, but to me this one is a good instance of a disc that tends to slip under the radar because it's in a genre -- the Bill-Evans-style piano trio -- where about 99% of the entries are thoroughly boring. But there's a high-wire logic to Rudolph's playing and fertility of invention (not to mention a very un-Evansish sharpness) which sets this several cuts above the usual piano trio disc. 14) Staffan William-Olsson Trio, "The Winner Takes It All" (Björn Ulvaeus-Benny Andersson), from Pop! (Real Records RT 114-2). William-Olsson, g; Terje Gewelt, b; Espen Rud, d. Oslo, Norway, Nov-Dec 2001. >evil chortle....< I could have picked something off this album that was closer to kosher jazz repertoire, but I was genuinely curious what side of the fence people would fall on concerning this (I think) excellent, moving arrangement of an ABBA tune. Glad to see a surprising number of people liked this one. When I got this CD for review I groaned: the CD cover is faux-1950s pastiche, there's "Giant Steps" & "Body & Soul" in the setlist also the Beatles, Ricky Martin, Bacharach, some European & Scandinavian tunes I didn't know ("In a Secret Garden"?). But actually it's a very convincing album, & I found it hard to pick between tracks for this BFT. I almost went with the gorgeous reading of the Lennon-McCartney "She's Leaving Home" instead, or the (Scandinavian?) kid's-show theme song "Karius Og Baktus" (which ends up rather like "Dear Old Stockholm"). It's amazing that they even get good music out of "Livin' La Vida Loca"! In general what I like about this track & more generally this album is that (somewhat like Katayama) it treats the source material with obvious affection & respect rather than dousing it in irony, while nonetheless doing something with it entirely different from the original. ------ Anyway, that's it folks--hope you found a few gems here. If you need any more details on the albums I can dig out the original reviews I did (writeups exist of all of them except the Anderson/Haden, Kendrick & Yamashita) or give a little more info. AMG is useless for most of them, I'm afraid. But most of the small-label discs are easily obtained through Cadence/North Country & probably through other distributors.

ARIC: I THINK I'LL TRUST LLOYD'S JUDGMENT OVER YOURS. AND STUFF.

Nope, not "Flea Flop" but nearly there.... Anyway, once you've got the tune it's not too hard to figure out the album via AMG (at least, it wasn't before they installed the new interface...).

.....well, if you want to save yourself a little pain just look under marcoliv's name. There's a fair number of discs out there that haven't got responses but I suspect that mostly discussion's winding up here.... I'll put up the answers in a day or two.

Funny--just got up from reading the Leonard review in the NYTimes to find this thread. I'd come across Peck's reviews in the LRB some years ago (the Infinite Jest pan & the untypically positive piece on Vonnegut come from its pages)--can't say I'm encouraged to go check out his new book, which sounds like more of the same.

Now, c'mon marcoliv, you HAVE to know what tune it is on track 9.........

Glad to hear you got the BFT at last...! Good to hear there are plenty of other Wallace fans out there (plus a few Yamashita fans I hope....). Incidentally, continuing my generally unenthusiastic take on the AMG, note that aside from the perfunctory review by Wynn, the sequence of the album is completely wrong on that page. It's the opening track (unless it was resequenced on a later issue??).

& forgot to say, no not Kellaway/Mitchell! Hm, interesting the bassist should prove hard to spot, & that the (much less well-known) pianist, with his beautiful broken-china piano technique & sense of timing, should be compared to technical wizards like Bill Evans & Roger Kellaway. Maybe it's the focus on harmony rather than playing changes that prompts the association? Anyway, I'd actually thought this would be one of the few identifiable tracks on the BFT!

A further hint: it's not a sax tune, though you've got the right period. He had a Europe-only Columbia release, I gather, which was more of a jazz-hiphop thing. But that was in 2000 if memory serves. A year or two ago there was a review of a NY concert of his by Ratliff in the NY Times. & he's on a 1996 Frank Morgan disc. Other than that, I dunno--it's a major frustration that he's been so little recorded since the mid-1990s Ah well, this seems, with #5, to be the track least liked by BFTesters. If it gives any different spin on it let me say that this drummer actually worked with Bill Evans briefly, though I don't think that that version of the Evans trio ever recorded. You'll have the drummer in your collection on a few notable albums from the 1960s, I'm willing to bet, though he's not exactly a household name(!). I'd be interested to know where you thought the pianist on #6 was a bit irresolute--I'll have to go back to that one. It's interesting to notice how much I sometimes miss on these tracks--for instance, hadn't noticed the delicate wrong note in the left-hand on #11 (the end of countermelody running from 1:14-1:22) until I recently replayed it while drafting some comments on it (eventually to be included in the "answers" thread). * I've more or less got the answers drafted & am now back in town after the Cincinnati sojourn--I'll wait a bit more though to post them as it looks like people are still digesting the discs or in a few cases only got them a few days ago.

Just dropping in while I'm away (borrowing laptop time from a friend)--interesting reading, folks! Yeah I figured #10 would either pin back the ears or be an instant winner. It ain't Gato Barbieri, though! Unless you get a bit creative with Google you won't nail this one (AMG certainly doesn't list this album). I'll drop a broad hint by saying that if someone nails the bassist on "Alone Together" (1) it won't be too hard to figure out the album & the i.d. of the pianist there; and (2) a big hint by way of x-reference: the pianist on the "Body & Soul" track is well known for his work with the bassist on the other track. C'mon: nice old standard, slow pace, unhurried (even sparse) approach to the bass, low volume-level & indeed no drums--that should be enough to finger the bassist on "Alone Together", & a good referencebook (but NOT AMG, again) will do the rest. RDK--I'll toss you a replacement if you like once I'm back. At least one other faulty disc turned up in the mail...

Thanks for the reports--I've updated the list at the top. I'll follow the discussion thread with much interest--I'll be away starting tomorrow morning (back on Monday) but I'll have occasional access to the internet during the trip. Anyway, dig in, folks....!

Yes, Zappa, but it's "funny" not "bad". Nice rockstar sneer to the quip, isn't there?

Listen to Pharoah. Listen to Elvin. Yes, but listen to Sharrock too! I can't say I find Tisziji Munoz terribly inspiring, to judge by Divine Radiance (great band, except for the leader & that guy on the keyboards... . Holland's OK but I've never had a stronger feeling about what I've heard than that: OK. Except for Conference of the Birds, which is a classic.

Hey, I think we're nearly there, then: all the "relayed" discs are now in the mail in domestic US mail. (Due to a crossed wire [my fault!] I think two or three people will find a 2nd copy popping out of the mail eventually....oh well.) A few people outside of North America I haven't heard from--Daniel A, tjobbe, deus62, Eloe Omoe--but I hope it won't be too long till their packets turn up. Anyway, hope people have fun with the disc--some interesting responses so far on the discussion thread.

As you can tell Д.Д. is actually my alter ego.... Well, this bassist is well known for playing like this...... Yes it's a cover of a classic tune from the 1960s. Or anyway a tune from a classic album--not sure if anyone else other than this saxophonist has covered this tune since the original composer's version.

Nah, in general I'm not a big fan of the Canadian jazz scene, though Gene DiNovi's great & there are other good players here in Toronto & elsewhere. Though the Toronto jazz scene is a bit frustrating as a whole. -- That track's not DiNovi, though! Aha, glad to see the Bley tune & "Under Paris Skies" got spotted ("U.P.S." does sorta resemble "Blue Bossa" in this version!). That leaves only one non-original unidentified on the BFT. & as I said don't worry much about i.d.s: there are about five or six tracks I suspect will be nailed after everyone's given it a spin (there's already been one confirmed sighting!), but the others are pretty out-of-the-way. (I'm surprised no-one's spotted #11 yet, though... ) In any case I'm more interested in direct responses to the music.

Just an update--most of the foreign-destined discs seem to have arrived but the US ones lag behind, & it's particularly aggravating that the ones sent to a couple people who offered to distribute them in their region haven't turned up. So: I'll be in Ohio next week (getting dragged by Jane to Cincinnati for the SABR convention), leaving sometime on Monday. I'll bring some extra CDRs along, packaged up, & mail them within the States to anyone who by Monday morning hasn't received a copy. While I'm gone I should be able to check in online occasionally but please PM me on Organissimo or failing that write nd_away AT hotmail DOT ca. Don't use my usual email address for the duration of next week as I probably won't be able to consult it while away.

MJ--been having trouble with some of the US discs taking a hell of a long time to get there..... most of the foreign discs seem to have arrived some time ago but for some reason the mail to the States has been sloooow. -- Could folks who have their discs report back to me (either pm or a post in the sign-up thread)? I know that more have definitely arrived than have been reported to me.

Re: Dixon--one of my favourite pans of all time is this one on opprobrium (scroll down to find a review by Marc Masters of two Dixon releases).

Sure, name the tracks! I should say, don't take my intro note seriously--it was just my way of trying to make people who felt they couldn't i.d. the musicians feel more comfortable (because in fact very few of the musicians are big names). Maybe I should edit tha paragraph out of the post. OK, I'll keep my trap shut for now till other BFT recipients have had a chance to digest the disc. (Or receive them, in several cases: I've discovered to my chagrin that the discs sent overseas seem to have arrived faster than those to the US...)

tooter: Hey, guess away! It's fine by me, but I just thought I'd make it clear people shouldn't feel confounded if they draw blanks. -- Neither of your links works but since it's indeed the 5th track of the album I assume you nailed it. It takes a little deviousness sometimes to produce a working link to AMG.... [Edit: I see you've fixed the link.] Gary: Heh-heh-heh...... Actually, seven of the fourteen tracks are covers rather than originals, if you feel like trying to spot them all. (There are also a few others based on the chords of identifiable standards.) Thanks, EKE BBB, for the responses! They're interesting reading indeed, with some comments closer to the mark than you might suppose.... No, I avoided the really avant stuff in the collection simply because I thought it'd make the compilation incoherent. Also because I tend to think that music in the zone I've sketched out here doesn't get its fair share of attention: it's not "avant-garde", not "mainstream", & so it tends not to attract a lot of critical ink.