JSngry

I was under the impression that this WAS the original/only recording of the suite; that Ellington only had one copy PRESSED, but that this was the recording from whence that pressing sprung. Stanley Dance's LP liner notes certainly imply that, althought they don't say so specifically. No matter, it's a marvelous work, and the band, early 1959, is superb. A "must have" in my book.

Now available as

Pablo.

Great stuff, and a somewhat overlooked document in Trane's evolution. Well worth getting into, and at length. Some much music there.

Yeah, kids need to see that their parents are human too....

In many ways, my singlemost favorite Bari solo is the one that Fathead plays on Ray Charles' "Greenbacks". Not particularly "heavy" or anything like that in terms of chops or vocabulary, but a beautifully structured, organically balanced 12 bars that has a Zen-like perfection to it. If it were THAT simple, everybody could do it.

I know quite well what 'depth' and 'substance' mean to me, and offer no apologies for doing so. But I'd not be so presumptuous as to assume that that's what they should mean for anybody/everybody else. The cliche "you gotta stand for something or else you'll fall for anything" rings totally true to me, but so does "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Balancing those two premises is an ongoing, often frustrating, contentious, and perplexing struggle, but that's half the fun of it all, I suppose. "From the oyster comes the pearl", doncha know. Cliches - if they didn't already exist, we'd have to invent them!

It's all good to me, and I don't mean that as "cute" or anything like that. I listen to the spirit, not the style, and I find it all over the place, and not really concentrated in one particular era. Besides, I go through so many "phases" that it's almost schizo. Go on a Lester Young binge for a few weeks then straight to an Electric Miles obsession to a Sinatra-fest to a Bud Powell party to a Brian Wilson marathon whatever strikes my fancy next. Some people call it "eclectic", but I simply call it being a musical slut.

I'm glad that I still have new old players to discover (as well as YOUNG new players, of course), and Wilen seems like he's gonna be a fun one to get into slowly but surely.

Early Ronnie Cuber was a BLAST! The stuff w/Benson & Lonnie Smith, sure, but going back earlier, he had a feature on "The Lady's In Love" off of Maynard's COLOR HIM WILD album on Mainstream that is just a balls-out burnfest. WHOOO! I also got a video of him w/Lionel Hampton's band sometime in the mid-60s, on some TV big band dance show, and he stretches out on "Flying Home". Lemme tell you, that puppy ROCKS! The guy looks to be about 12 feet tall, weighing in at about 25 pounds, with fingers the length of well-fed tapeworms, and he is BLOWING, rocking the house in a totally hip fashion that finds (or maybe even INVENTS) the common ground between Illinois Jacquet & Pepper Adams. Lionel, never one to miss an opportunity to let a good groove go on and get mo'better, just lets him go, and go he does. Easily one of the best examples of bebop-inspired pure party music I've ever come across. But I guess the guy mellowed out, went into the studios, etc, you know the rest. What little I've heard of him over the last 25 years or so has still been good, but DAMN, when he was a kid, relatively speaking, he was a DANGEROUS motherfucker!

You're probably right about the Davis thing. I was really into a revolt against the hyper-brash recording quality of a lot of late-70s jazz records, being in full thrall of Blue Note/Van Gelder-mania, at least when it came to straight-ahead type stuff. But Charles Davis and "loose" are kind of synonymous if you know what I mean so I'll no dobt appreciate it a LOT more now than I did then. I think Iwas expecting a '50s/'60s type date, and that was just plain ignorant of me. I got the JAZZ IN PARIS thing w/Bags on piano, based on what I heard in Dr. J's Blindfold Test. Sounds like a REALLY good session.

If Free For All (or any other trombonist) reads this, I like to know what he thinks about what I view as Prieter's seemingly remarkable technical advances when he started playing "freer" music, from his time in Herbie's sextet onward. Seems to me that as a "hardbop" type player that he has some issues with the music, not always navigating the changes real fluently, but that when he started playing less "confining" music that he really blossomed into a really virtuoso player. It's almost like his "problems", technically speaking, were not so much a matter of his not having the greatest chops, but instead were a matter of not feely fully comfortable in that context, consciously or not. But I don't know. My buddy Greg Waits played that duet thing w/Sam Rivers for me this past weekend, and I gotta tell you - that's some SERIOUS playing by all concerned!

I have to think that "Early Morning Stroll" as heard on BREAKTHROUGH is properly titled. Seems like there was no opportunity for confusion there - Hank had the tune in for the session, and there was nothing else of his to confuse it with except the title tune, and that would have been almost unthinkable. Seems like the opportunity for mistitling would have been much higher on THE FLIP, where all the tunes were Hank's. Besides, I get the vibe from the music that THE FLIP might not have been the most tightly organized date in the history of Blue Note, if you get my drift so a transpostiotion of tune titles could certainly be understandable.

Lou vs Cannonball? That's apples and oranges. No, it's more like oranges and tangerines. Very similar but fundamentally different when push comes to shove. I like them both equally, more or less, but would never substitute one for the other, in either direction.

Damn straight they are!

That Davis Tadd thing was on West 54, the same short-lived label that released Slide Hampton's first WORLD OF TROMBONES album, and what else? I bought the Davis album in the 70s, didn't care for it, thought it was too loose, ragged, unfocused, whatever, and ditched it in about a month. But the Bastardinous ones at Dusty Guruve had a sealed copy for sale at a good price when I found that Wilen thing earlier this week, so it's coming back to me. I think I might have acted too hastily back in the day...

They'll get more. They always do. They're pushers, and they're pros.

Youknow, not to be too esoteric or anything, but the question being asked here could also be asked as "Who do you think brought out the best in Andrew Hill?", and I think the answers would be identical. The reason I say this is that I don't think that Hill by nature is the kind of leader who is inclined to push his vision of his music on his players to the point that if they ain't gettin' it that he's going to MAKE them get it. All the unreleased sessions from the late 60s point to this, as does a story I heard about how the roots of DUSK. Seems that Ron Horton (it was either Horton or Frank Kimbrough, but I think it was Horton)went to hear Andrew, one of his idols, perform somewhere, and Andrew had a group that was just not cutting the music particularly well. Ron went up to Andrew afterwards and expressed his frustration at hearing such great material played so inadequately. Anrew's response was along the lines of, "Yeah, I know, but what can I do about it?" Horton then volunteered to get Andrew some players and to help him organize his music in terms of readable, accurately notated charts (supposedly, Andrew doesn't write all the rhythmic quirks in his melodies in a specific manner, he just writes the basic rhythms and leaves it to the players to figure out where the cracks are). Well, Andrew took Horton up on his offer, one thing led to another, and DUSK was the eventual result. This is all secondhand information, but from a source I trust fairly well. Even allowing for some "slant" as to Horton's "importance", the essence of the story rings true to me. Hill has never struck me as a real assertive type leader. It has always seemed to me that if he gets players he can really count on to dig deeply into his music, then he does, but if not, he'll just kinda go with the flow and not really push anybody past what he percieves to be their limitations and/or natural tendencies. This is not an uncommon trait amongst musicians, so I certainly don't consider it a "flaw" or anything like that. It's just the cat's nature, nothing more. But it does accent just how important the "group vibe" is to Hill's music. It's so full of subtlties and implications that only the best players, no, scratch that, the best MUSICIANS (a big difference, imo), the ones who aren't afraid to dig in and tackle it fearlessly, can fully bring it to life. When this happens, I think Andrew responds in turn, and you get magic. When it doesn't, I think he kinda lays back and goes with the flow. You still get good, even great music, just not the "ultimate Andrew Hill experience", if you know what I mean. So it's a two-way street as to who brings out the best in whom, I think. And along those lines, I'd LOVE to hear a duet album, on standards, maybe(!) between Andrew & Von Freeman. Maybe make a trio w/Malachi Favors. Something to stir up old memories of Chicago through today's older and wiser eyes. That could be something really special, and it's not too late for it to happen, at least in theory. But the "business" end of it might prove problematic. Still, a kid can dream, can't he?

Miles w/Hill in the 60s? Don't know about that. Exactly why I can't say, other than I think that there would be a conflict of basic rhythmic sensibilities. But I could be wrong.

I wonder how Jimmy Lyons would have sounded on COMPULSION. Not that that date needed any changing around. No sir! For that matter, I wonder how Jimmy Lyons would have workied in place of JAmes Spaulding on some of the more outre BN dates. I just wish that Jimmy Lyons could have been heard more in his all too brief lifetime. A HELLUVA player, and I think that him and Hill could have made some good music together in the middle '60s, especially the "frustration" dates like COMPULSION & the quartet date with Sam Rivers (remember, Lyons & Rivers tore the joint up w/Cecil!) unless there would have been a clash of chemistry or something like that.

ROY ELDRIDGE oscar peterson That's how I'll listen to this set. Roy was a freakin' force of nature, and I can't think of anything or anybody or any setting (not even his playing "Mame" on a Count Basie album in the '60s!) that can detract from that.

Johnny Griffin or Tyrone Washington on GRASS ROOTS.

On the Jarvis tip, his work w/Elmo Hope on LAST SESSIONS is pretty goshdarn good. I think that maybe my favorite Charles Davis on record, all things considered, is on THE STRAIGHT HORN OF STEVE LACY. But that's really too close to call.

Those Miller airshots show the band to better effect than do the studio records, I think. It's still Miller, and it's still wound pretty tight, but there's a bit of genuine swing there that you don't always find on the studio stuff. The band was just inhumanly tight (a subject of much simultaneous admiration & exasperation for me), and the writing was often quite good (for what it was), sometimes great, so if you even halfway like the music, you might find the airshots even more likable. My suggestion - Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other places to whom old folks and their families give stuff they no longer want and have no clue as to the value of. Eeitjer that or a really big used record store that carries everything all the time.