I heard Dara live w/Threadgill's sextet back in 1981, and it was great. The guy was working a plunger like I'd never heard it worked before, making all kinds of micro-timbral shadings that were as obviously intentional as they were obviously effective.
But this is also the guy who said that his stint with Blakey was too simple (or something like that) because you didn't really need to know all the changes to all those tunes (I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it). Well, yes and no... You don't necessarily need to know all that to play those tunes, but you do need to know all that to play that gig. Which is why whenever Blakey talked about having an "avant-garde" trumpeter in his band for a few gigs who "couldn't even play the blues", I think that it was Dara that he was talking about, even if the blues was one thing that was probably no problem for Dara. It just wasn't Blakey's type blues.
So, when I heard that he ws "re-emerging" as a "blues/folk" type guy, I was excited at the potential because what I heard him play with Threadgill (and on some records from that time, admittedly none of which hit with the power of that live gig), reeked of that type of flavor. This, I thoought, was going to be something to hear, a man who had shed the need to play "jazz" and was ready to just settle into some raw rootsy selfness. But the records...didn't get there for me. Not even close.
Then again, those are records (on latter-day Atlantic, no less), so I don't know but that what's on them isn't the total opposite of what goes down live.
If I ever get the chance to contrast and compare, I sure will!