Niko

sorry, should have made clearer that I was replying to Peter Friedman... I meant the Eddy Louiss Trio and the Bobby Jaspar / Rene Thomas album on Mole Jazz ... (without actually counting the beans) I'd argue that it's hard to justify a top 5 of albums featuring Rene Thomas without including those two (or a top5 of albums featuring Bobby Jaspar without including the latter)

Gijs Hendriks - Stan Tracey Quartet ‎– Live Recordings to close the circle of "before lunch listening"... for this 1981 album on Loek Dikker's Waterland label, Hendriks, van Erk and their then regular drummer Michael Baird got Stan Tracey from the UK on piano, quite different from Loos but also excellent, obviously... Tracey played on no less than four Hendriks albums around that time (two of them with a larger band though)

Ellington is missing... for me that's Game Over right there... I mean, I see that the rule he made is "my definition of a genius is an artist whose playing was so innovate and influential that it created a new jazz style and spawned many imitators" and I guess he would argue that Ellington was not influential in this sense... but I disagree plus the definition doesn't convince me either

yes... those three albums on that label all look quite tempting... for me, the first looks most promising, Soulbrass Inc at the Bohemia Jazz Club... every cover seems to look different here (check discogs) and it's a progressive organ group with a good organ player (Herbert Noord) and Hans Dulfer on tenor... luckily, the later stuff on the Waterland label is easier to find... Gijs Hendriks-Beaver Harris Quartet ‎– Sound Compound almost bought a second copy of this one but then rightly suspected that I already own it... so playing it now to let that sink in... Hendriks (reeds) and Bert van Erk (b) had a long standing group with varying guests on piano and drums, the number one jazz group in the city of Utrecht... for this 1986 album, it's Beaver Harris on drums and the excellent Belgian pianist Charles Loos

the cover is indeed one of the album's biggest selling points... (I also like Gerd Dudek a lot, and I like how the bio for one of the violin players says that he usually plays "schmalzy semi-classical music") guess I'll have to order the companion album now, if only for the cover (this one)

went through the big city (Amsterdam) in something of a rush on Saturday but ended up buying some pretty cool things like the Schönfeld album, a bottle of that British trappist ale you mentioned recently (excellent, definitely near the top of the more recently established trappist beers - haven't tried the Italian one though), and also this album which is up next Loek Dikker Waterland Ensemble - Tan Tango Dutch free jazz meets third stream, I guess this is comparable to what someone like Willem Breuker did at the same time (mid 70s), played by a medium-sized band with three reeds, four brass and two violins

Friedhelm Schönfeld got this last weekend, inspired by that Euro modernism thread even though it's from a bit later (1978), I just felt like I needed more of those Amigas in my life. It's a nice free album with the leader on reeds + flute, the virtuoso Aladar Pege on bass, a drummer and on one track an additional cello...

what I especially like about that compilation is that it's not limited to incredibly rare stuff (even though there is some on there) but also some tracks from albums that are super easy to find once you know that they are actually decent jazz records (with somewhat short tracks though)

The two albums with Rene Thomas (#1&3), the latter existing with various covers, would be in my top extremely few list of Euro jazz albums that fit the bill...

Yes, I mentioned it above, it's great!

the book's promotional website is still up btw https://sites.google.com/site/sqjazzband/ (for some reason it's in English even though there is no English edition afaik)

Let's say it like this: I don't regret getting it at all even though my French is so poor that I wouldn't want to really judge the book... the author went into the records of the california prison system (and similar sources) to dig up what they had about a group of musicians who were active in a prison band in San Quentin in the early 60s - and they had a lot. Trumpeters Nat Meeks and Dupree Bolton, altoists Frank Morgan, Art Pepper and Earl Anderza, pianist Jimmy Bunn all get a chapter and there are also some general chapters... at 350 pages it's a sizeable document and the type of information (endless cycles of arrests, releases, probabation violations...) I haven't seen in this (or a comparable) level of detail in other books about the era - even though they evidently were an important part of the jazz life at the time... Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz book is certainly the more essential book about this period (because it's broader and says more about the music) and there are, of course, also quite a few autobiographies which touch upon similar topics, addiction and the jazz life in California ca 1960 (Art Pepper and Hampton Hawes come to mind, two of the big autobiographies in jazz, also Roy Porter...)... but I would still say that this book has a lot of unique information and gives you a perspective that the other books don't have, looking with information from both sides at the interactions between the jazz musicians and the legal system edit: reading a bit in it, maybe the image I give above slighlty one-sided... it's not just legal records but also concert reviews from the prison newspaper that went into the book - and various other sources for the times these people spent out of prison....

Amazon.com would be an option

well, there are those two albums, Katanga and The Fox. Then there's the stuff in the Onzy Matthews Select, some tracks with Matthews (one or two solos) and that abandoned Pacific Jazz Session (two tracks). The latter session is also on the Bolton Uptown CD... That cd also contains a session of an Oklahoma prison band and a live session of the Katanga band that's also on youtube, e.g. this track then there's the album of that Oklahoma prison band (this one) which is distinct from the material on the Uptown cd... I don't have this but I dimly remember I once found samples that sounded like bits of Bolton on there... and finally there's the question of possible 1940s recordings which is analyzed in a really nice document here, arguing that quite a bit of what used to be attributed to Bolton comes from an even more obscure early bop trumpeter (Willis Nelson)... it's not much but it's not nothing either...

when I was searching for samples from that album a few weeks ago, I ended up here

living as a foreigner in the same country, I must say that I am really happy with how vaccinations went here... yes, the start was a bit slow, but I kept telling my friends that we will catch up because our healthcare system (with all its well-known faults) is designed to do a great job at something like this - and I'd argue that this is what we saw over the past few months... got my certificate of being two weeks past the second shot today, it's all in the same official app for everyone and if you need a pdf to print that's two minutes of extra work... and this idea of letting youngsters go clubbing or on holidays right after their first vaccine shot (of Johnson&Johnson, so only one shot needed "dansen met Jansen")... had its drawbacks (as seen in the current infection numbers) but I am guardedly optimistic that it did motivate quite a few 19 year olds to get that shot as quickly as possible ... so when I will be back to teaching in September it will hopefully be to a class of vaccinated kids or even young adults... [my friend tells this story of how his kid who'd been mildly skeptic of all the policies got the shot just so he could walk around the house saying "you can't tell me anything, I am vaccinated"... in the end, it's not the reasons that count][home in Germany, I am slightly worried that they lost the chance to get the 19 year olds on track for unrestricted, vaccinated summer holidays - which still seems to be the best motivation for this demographic]

what I found a bit puzzling when I read this yesterday (great read!) was that there was no reference to the San Quentin Jazz Band book by Pierre Briancon... I know it's in French... but it does have a 50 page chapter on Dupree Bolton with many additional details (arrest records being a major additional source)

in my case, youtube went right into Togashi's Face of Percussion album after that track which was right on target for me right now...

Like I wrote, I didn't buy Rings because normally solo albums by drummer don't work for me at all (so, in particular, I only know it from the little that's on youtube)... but with Togashi, stuff that otherwise wouldn't work seems to work for me... you get into this Zen mode [or, your best imitation of a Zen mode] and the music is just so good...

this is such a good album, kicking myself for not getting Rings which was available at the same time... but at least I got this one and it's great... and I do agree it's the kind of album one tends to forget (as a matter of fact, a significant fraction of the Kikuchi and Togashi cds is permanently stored on top of the cd player, partly due to space restrictions, but partly because it's always good to have the reminder )

Rene Costy - Expectancy even though it's somewhat outside the scope of that Euro modernism thread, this is the record that the thread really brought back into my mind (bought it a year ago or so) ... and on some level, this is all about Euro modernism... and it's nice to finally see the face of someone whose claims to fame are a (large) handful of those anonymous library albums... and compared to that vast KPM catalogue TTK posted today, it's also kind of nice to have a curated 2CD compilation of the tracks that might still be of interest (the leader himself on violin I suppose)

They're 75% of the international series: https://www.emipm.com/en/browse/labels/KPMINT

I've spent the past minutes trying to figure out that discography and it seems it's an alternative version of Indo-Jazz Suite (see here)

Wow, thanks for the heads up! went straight to the KPM international series which has John Mayer Indo-Jazz Interpolation and then those Clarke Boland albums...

I learned a lot about the US recently when I tracked how pianist Jane Getz birth year had shifted over the years in official records (she looks great for the age she claims and even better for the age she actually has, and she did keep her birthday)... once you're inside the US there seems to be zero accountability - and the societal benefits of that feel dubious at best... I know this is super political for US people [so: sorry]... over here,,, I just gave the same ID at vaccination that I give for paying my taxes etc [even though I am not even a citizen of this country] and my doctor at home knows I am vaccinated and this "everyone claims they are vaccinated" thing is a mostly a non-issue