Nate Dorward

AMG's reliability depends on the reviewers. If it's an entry by Scott Yanow, Brian Olewnick, Dan Warburton, &c then it's fine....but if it's Thom Jurek, for instance, run for the hills. The Penguin Guide is the best single reference book, yes, despite a few off-the-wall notions (e.g. that Sign of 4 is worth 4 stars).

Just got a new one from David Berkman on Palmetto, Start Here, Finish There; the personnel are Berkman on piano, Dick Oatts on alto & soprano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass, Nasheet Waits on drums. Haven't really decided what I make of it yet--so far it sounds nice enough, but not grab-you-by-the-lapels. Nine originals plus a cover of--believe it or not--Woody Guthrie's "Mean Things Happening in This World". -- I hadn't heard Berkman before, though he has a couple earlier discs out on the same label. Anyone heard those ones & might venture a comment?

Sure, sign me up.

You can also hear Schoof play free jazz (rather than free improv) on Mal Waldron's discs of the 1970s--I like Hard Talk a lot.

Oh jeez, I was trying to forget about that one I think. I've heard it once (a friend with the LP lent it to me). Speaking of arrangements of Monk, who exactly was Hall Overton & what else did he do?

I tend to be a bit cautious about IAI discs because they're from a period when Bley was often using rather dated-sounding synthesizers. But there is a much more recent disc with Konitz & Bley on Steeplechase, called Out of Nowhere. I haven't heard it, though. There is also one track by Konitz, Giuffre, Bley & Peacock on Konitz's Rhapsody (a 20-minute themeless improvisation on "All the Things You Are").

Been a little while since I listened to this one. I wonder how often the title-tune has really been covered all that successfully since the original recording was made--I've heard various stabs at doing it "straight" which haven't worked for me all that much (don't know the Spaulding): in many ways the best version I know is the remarkable two-take presentation on Georg Graewe's Monk album on Nuscope, which totally reconceives the tune as delicate solo piano. -- Am I right to think the piece was never rerecorded by Monk? I've always thought it a great tragedy that Monk seemed disinclined to play more than a handful of his own compositions with any regularity. Incidentally re: the fineness of Pettiford: notice that when Monk drops half a bar in the middle of his solo on "Brilliant Corners" Pettiford almost instantly corrects for it. (This isn't the result of splicing: you can hear Pettiford play one bar out of sync before he gets back in sync.) -- It's surprising how compelling & logical the track is as a continuous performance despite its being pieced together via splices.

Got two of the Westbrook releases, On Duke's Birthday & the live Rossini 2-disc set. Hm, both are OK--I'm keenest on the Duke tribute--but neither have become favourites with me. I like the opening track on ODB a lot, but some of the later ones less so, & the lyrics Kate W. sings are atrocious, though fortunately it's mostly an instrumental disc. The o/p Hats I hope most they'll reissue are (1) Blake's Gershwin disc & (2) Cecil Taylor's Garden. I have the former but not the latter.

I've always loathed Mehldau's solos on Alone Together--I recall there were entire choruses in which he simply shunts the same four-note phrase around the keyboard, e.g. No taste: just listen to the contrast between Konitz's brilliant melodic perversion & improvisation on "Round Midnight", & then Mehldau's completely disruptive solo that follows...... Konitz is in really good form on that date, so I still listen to it anyway. Truthfully, though I've heard many Blue Note releases from the past 5 years, few of them have moved me strongly. I do like Patricia Barber's Verse & Modern Cool, neither of which has yet been mentioned--perhaps a minority taste (she does seem to acquire fans & detractors in equal measure).

What's with it with Joel Dorn, anyway? I've lost track of the number of record labels he's helmed.....

Here's some info on VicissEtudes: http://www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/labe...ndom/ra002.html I don't know if it's still in print, though. Highly worth obtaining, though.

Sun Ship & Interstellar Space are the most "accessible" of that batch of material. But basically, just give it a close & persistent listen. Still not sure after all these years what I think of Ascension, really.

Geoff--those are all fine albums: rather than creating a thread specifically devoted to your tastes, simply post individual threads for each album. I think much of the skepticism was prompted by the word "neglected" in the thread title, also--though none of the albums you name is as famous as, say, Kind of Blue, Mingus at Antibes or Live at the Village Vanguard, they're virtually all albums much cherished among serious jazz fans. I'm sure that many of the members here would be delighted to talk about them, but maybe on an album-by-album basis. I really don't understand the problem with multiple posting in a variety of forums, though it might be a good idea to include a mention that you've posted it elsewhere too (just something like "Here's a review I've been working on lately; I've posted it on another board too but I thought people here would enjoy reading it also."). It's always worth mooting an album like Komeda's Astigmatic--despite its legendary reputation (& a crown in the Cook/Morton Penguin Guide) I wonder how many jazz fans have heard it still. (For that matter, how many people have heard Jan Allan's remarkable 70, another Penguin Guide enthusiasm?) Though if you feel it's genuinely embarrassing to have the thread kicking around, I'm sure you can try asking one of the moderators to remove it, I'd strongly suggest leaving it to stay, especially since there are many posts by others on the thread, including some quite useful ones (e.g. Jim Sangrey's comments on Moncur).

As long as you replace one of those with one of the sessions with Larry Young (my vote: Street of Dreams) that'd be my list too.

Jeez, that's ugly & petty. My apologies, Geoff, for inadvertently touching off one of those by posting the link. I'd not posted it out of malice. That said, I think the threads were probably asking for trouble with their titles, which come across as overweening & as obvious ploys for attention. Enthusiasm is one thing, but setting up shop as a tastemaker & connoisseur with his own soapbox is quite another. But I'd assumed this was simply due to the forgiveable rhetorical tone-deafness of someone still learning to write & who is genuinely enthusiastic about encountering this music for the first time. Oh, did he say something about Monk's attire & onstage dancing? If so, I think I missed that, & can't be bothered to hunt through the three threads in question to find out.

No, look at the dates--the Cunnilingus thread (what a dickhead the guy is for picking that username) is inspired by, not the inspiration of, Geoff's thread on that board. The copious reposting of reviews is probably just naivete--it's a bit over-the-top & a little grey-areaish, but I wasn't aware it was actually against netiquette? Who's it harming since virtually no-one here was reading posts on the other board anyway till I posted the link?

Aha! They've at last updated it. I wonder if it helped that I wrote an email to Steve at Hallwalls bitching about the lack of schedule updates....

There's also this thread here.......

Thanks for the info--as I'm in Toronto, I may head down to see the McPhee concerts, unless there's a chance they'll come up here. Where'd you get the info? Hallwalls hadn't updated their site since November last time I checked--aauugh!

I can doublecheck once I get my turntable going again, but at least on my copy the final ring-modulator track at the end of the Bley album sticks in a loop right at the end, & I'm pretty sure it's intentional.

A few things come to mind-- 1) the abortive solo on the first half of "Alabama", before the other take is spliced in. Been a while since I listened to it, so I forget--why exactly was the performance called off? 2) I suspect that whatever lucky dog has The Heavyweight Champion can consult the alt.takes of tracks like "Giant Steps" to see them wrestling with that tune--not that there's any shame in stumbling on that tune! 3) Coltrane was less impeccable as a soprano player. I don't have his early stabs at it for Atlantic like the date with Cherry so I'd be interested to know how secure he sounded on it--I note that Cook/Morton are pretty unimpressed: "His soprano playing is not yet either idiomatic or nimble, and on 'The Blessing' he makes even Ornette's eccentric pitching sound dead centre." 4) He was constantly reaching for the notes & phrases even further than he could get--there's an instance in the solo on Interstellar Space discussed by Lewis Porter in his book, where Trane keeps reaching for higher & higher false notes until finally there's one he misses.

Incidentally, if you're very keen on Nichols it's worth tracking down the handful of sides for Savoy with Danny Barker (I have them as the A side of a disc with the Monk/Gryce session on the B side)--two inconsequential vocal tracks, but "Who's Blues" & "Swonderful" are first-rate Nichols, & you get two takes of one of them. -- I haven't heard anything else from the Nichols apocrypha, though I gather there are a few recorded glimpses of him as a sideman in dixieland bands.

I have a burn a friend gave me. It's interesting--not revelatory, but certainly distinctive. Anyone have any idea why Hasaan never recorded again? Or did he? This is a good opportunity to plug Giorgio Pacorig's My Mind Is On the Table, a terrific piano trio disc released last year on Splasc(h), which has an excellent tribute, "The Legendary Hasaan".

This is a tad inaccurate. Rutherford was the co-founder of the SME with John Stevens & Trevor Watts, & the SME is more or less identified with Stevens as the leader because it became a decades-long institution under his leadership, with many different shifts of personnel. This sentence strikes me as oddly as it would sound, e.g., to say that Horace Silver was the founder of the Jazz Messengers--not quite wrong, but missing a key name..... I was going to captiously point out that it's a bad mistake to point to the use of unisons on heads as in any way an innovation of Moncur's or Monk's--you'll hear that on just about any bebop side you care to name. But I see Jim Sangrey has posted a much more useful comment specific to this track (I don't know the track, as I haven't got Some Other Stuff). Thanks Jim. I've always liked Evolution a lot--there's also another closely related album you should hear if you've not already, McLean's One Step Beyond, the same band with no Morgan & with Eddie Khan on bass: I'm not so taken with it but it's still interesting. The original Blue Note reissue was badly botched (a crucial track index misplaced, into the middle of a track!), but I imagine it's on the recent Mosaic Select? -- That said, Moncur's never done much for me as a player--it's the composing & the great bands that make those discs. Like Herbie Nichols Moncur seems always to have had very specific images & scenarios in mind for his compositions--witness titles like "Ghost Town" or "Frankenstein", which are pretty accurate descriptions of the moods evoked. I entirely agree with Jim about the painfulness of reviewers who insist on using musical terminology to make a show of knowing-what-I'm-doing, but doing so entirely inaccurately or in an obfuscatory manner. God help us, I've probably committed a few sins over the years (the most aggravating being a review where I misidentified Rhodri Davies as playing "Celtic harp"--which actually a small handheld thing, not confusable for a second with the full-size concert harp he uses), but have found time & time again that my having spent a few years trying to make a serious go of playing jazz piano has given at least the rudiments I need to write reviews. I can't imagine writing them without that basic background, really. & yes: get rid of the darn typos. Very few journals except for the biggies like The Wire & Downbeat are at all carefully copyedited, so if you send in something full of mistakes & typos, expect most of them to make it into print. Plus the editors are usually happy to add a few more (most memorable instance: I gave the location of recording for a disc I reviewed once as "Lisbon". This was helpfully elaborated to "Lisbon, Spain" in the published version.)

Probably it was cheap because Hat has since reissued that set plus the other 2 CDs' worth of material from the sessions (previously issued as Round Midnight) as a 4-CD set, Live at Dreher.