Niko

Interesting to read the time Manfred Krug in there... when I was a child in early 80s Western Germany, he was the fatherly figure in the (West) German version of Sesame Street (we all loved him, really did), but 20 years earlier, he'd not only been a popular jazz singer but also the difficult guy in his then country's most difficult movie (like Michael Moore in a Michael Moore movie) (the guy with the hat and the earrings e.g. at 29:00 and at 1:22... the lone anarchist in a socialist environment)

was about to post this, too, since my copy of the book was in the mail today (thanks for the tip!), it's mostly a photo book about guys with long hair and beards playing trombones and the like... quite an amazing window into it's time and place... what I also remembered btw was that we once had a great bft here, introducing this time and place, bft 47 by former member couw (I still miss him a lot) I would confidently buy any album that's mentioned there

same here... I once walked into this record store in Rennes, France, and it was so amazing I asked the guy how he did it... he said he'd bought the contents of a bankrupt record store in Chicago and shipped all of it to France and that was his shop... there are so many 3$ or 5$ records I'd like to have but they're not available in Europe except with a super high margin...

a very Prussian attitude btw, remember my mother telling me "when we just do our job, it has to be at least as good as what others do when they're putting their heart and soul into it" (and this line of thought comes from the Prussian roots of the family she explained)... she recently retired and felt so misunderstood when people said that she'd been passionate about what they'd been doing there

this is such a good album! bought it almost accidentally some time last summer and would place it within the top3 or so of (way too many) albums I bought last year

in for the journey

I guess there's also the simple mathematics of more generations of musicians living simultaneously as jazz got older... a productive jazz musician can produce new music for about 60 years... and, indeed, in the past year, we saw e.g. two great new albums by Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders who appeared in the 60s... in the 40s, most people had entered the scene in the 20s, 30s or 40s so there was more homogeneity... in the 70s you had for the first time the full six decade range of people who appeared in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s... (and of course that's not the whole story... I do agree that with the 70s jazz started to be a bit like it is today... but for the 70s and 80s you definitely have great albums that couldn't have been made any time else, afterwards I am not so sure... but I do start to get a bit of a feeling for the 90s...)

These perceptions of where territory starts to become uncharted are interesting... I got into jazz in the mid 90s, reading (many times) the 1989 edition JE Behrendt's jazz book... and while stuff did become a bit messier from the late 60s onwards, I thought he and his coauthor still did a fairly good job covering the 70s and 80s... after that territory is largely uncharted .... I wouldn't know how to explain how the jazz of 2000-2010 differs from the jazz of 2010-2020...

No Herbie Hancock, no John Abercrombie, just a single mention of the Brecker brothers... somehow many of the lists don't fit very well with my image of the 80s... I mean, there is a lot of Marsalis, and Ming by David Murray and other usual suspects... but that type of album that would have Peter Erskine on drums and John Patitucci on bass (there must have been hundreds) does not seem well represented

quite a few surprises there... Album Album as the most popular ECM album (and not a single mention of Special Edition)... almost nothing on Criss Cross or Steeplechase... e.g. what about some of those glorious late Chet Baker albums (some are mentioned but not the best ones)...

still remember competely how my friend and me discovered this one back in school ... it was the model for our band but we didn't make it far another of those great SDBAN compilations, this one dedicated to a genius of library music

now playing another Belgian favorite, Miles Inspirations by the Janot Morales Quartet, the rare case of a library music album that was reissued under the musicians' names because it was just so good... again, it was recorded a bit too late, in 1974, but Janot Morales (tp, flh), Gus DeCock (p) and Paul Dubois (b) have discographies that reach back to the early forties, e.g. those Belgian recordings of Django Reinhardt from 1942... the liner notes start with a memory of Dubois and Morales meeting each other in Brussels in 1944 on Place Flagey when Morales' son Garcia had just been born... Garcia, an important studio drummer in the Germany of my childhood, is on drums... It seems that the task they had for this record was something like "Can you do an album in the style of Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud or Miles early quartets? The fuck we can!" If you see this for decent money, you don't want to leave it in the store... (the youtube clip has the alternative cover from the original library music release)

Belgian Big Band now playing it but I thought I might as well post here... this is another crazy modernist record, millionaire race car driver Jean Blaton, "the quintessential gentleman driver" (link), bought himself a fine big band led by Fats Sadi to show off his considerable guitar skills in a program of mostly standards... recorded in 1972 so outside the strict scope of the thread but featuring quite a few musicians whose careers go back to the 40s and 50s like Freddy Rottier on drums, Frans van Dijk on trombone, "Johnny Hot" on piano, Herman Sandy on trumpet and, of course, Sadi himself... what seems really European to me is that at the same time the band has quite a bit of overlap with Placebo, the country's leading fusion band (Richard Rousselet, Nicolas Fissette and "Johnny Dover" were 75% of Placebo's horn section plus Rottier on drums) - the music was foreign anyway so there was not much of a contradiction in playing dixieland, swing, bop, free jazz and fusion with different groups at the same time - these guys were true professionals... (Han Bennink for instance was still recording with Dixieland bands by the time the ICP thing had started)

Sunday afternoon is a great time for playing 45s... This here was one of my luckier recent finds, an Austrian quintet on a Swiss label, featuring a young Joe Zawinul on piano and the sax team of Hans Salomon and Karl Drewo playing cool jazz in 1954... to be followed by this Dutch guitar / bass / drums trio from the early sixties

https://www.jazzarchief.nl/winkel/ you can buy it here, it's certainly worth it,... winkelmand is Warenkorb.... but if you just write a nice email in German they'll be able to handle it...

Ruud Brink - Teach me tonight the Dutch Stan Getz on his debut album, recorded way to late around 1970... I love how that cover says "I don't have long hair, I just didn't see the hair dresser in a while", it's a ballad album... you can see him here propery dressed doing the Getz in the Getz Gilberto thing Ruud Jacobs (of that recent Sonny Rollins tape) is on bass, Wim Overgaauw on guitar, Pim Jacobs on piano (and moderating the show, sorry it's bossa nova, not jazz), Brink on tenor and the Brazilian guests Astrud Gilberto singing and Dom Um Romao on drums... (interesting that they sent her around the world with just a drummer) ... it's the former Wessel Ilcken band, except that after his death there was no regular drummer anymore

The Louis van Dyke Trio/Quartet from 1964... read an interview with pianist Louis van Dyke somewhere where he told the story of how he could get the best b/dr team in the Netherlands (Jacques Schols/John Engels), the former rhythm section of the legendary Diamond Five because the Diamond Five had run their own jazz club for a while and that ended with everyone being heavily in debt - so a somewhat more commercial job was appreciated... An album of waltzes, in 3/4 time, with half the tracks played with a trio and the other half played with a quartet (adding Carl Schulze on vibes), 3 and 4... on some level, that says it all...

congrats on that find! There was just so little recording of modern jazz in Belgium and the Netherlands... the Belgians are documented a bit better because they spent more time in Paris... if you look at a discography like that of Frans Elsen, it's really quite depressing - there are the two compilation projects, Jazz behind the Dikes and before that Jazz at the Kurhaus, there's a 45 single and then some recordings with clarinetist Peter Schilperoort who briefly abandoned his Dixieland career to [work as an aircraft engineer at Fokker, most modernist job ever, and] record music in the style of Benny Goodman... and then there's stuff from the 70s onwards... similarly for Belgium, in terms of recordings that were issued in Belgium at the time in the 50s, you have this and these three... and that's more or less it...

For the Netherlands, there are some players I like a lot, e.g. tenorists Ruud Brink and Toon van Vliet and Wim Overgaauw on guitar, but the production of nice modern jazz records was limited - most of their recordings are in somewhat more commercial settings... I agree the Jazz behind the Dikes series is essential... Boy's Big Band made some nice recordings, so did the Diamond Five... But music like the stuff on this posthumous Toon van Vliet collection, the Dutch hard bop that did exist was not documented well... Another recommended cd is this one, Ruud Brink with the rhythm section of the Diamond Five live 1961... I wish there was more stuff like this... what does exist are the slightly more commercial recordings by the Jacobs Brothers and Louis van Dyke, both more, say, in a Vince Guaraldi or Horst Jankowski bag... this split LP is slighlty later but it might be a good introduction... from the same time around 1970 are those famous Ann Burton albums

For France, all the favorites have been named (for me especially Urtreger, Solal and Wilen). For Belgium, we had Rene Thomas already and Bobby Jaspar, big fan of both... There have been some nice reissues of Belgian jazz that fits the bill recently... This 3CD set from Fremeaux has half a CD each of some the key players (Jaspar, Thomas, Jacques Pelzer, Jack Sels, Toots Thielemans, Fats Sadi) Then there are several nice compilations from SDBAN covering different parts of 1950-1980 or so.... Let's get Swinging has a focus on 1950-1970, it's also on spotify, highly recommended. One of my favorite archive releases of recent years is their 2CD set dedicated to Jack Sels, Minor Works, here is a write-up that duplicates quite a bit of the contents of the booklet...

discogs has become quite weird, especially with the shipping costs making so many things prohibitive... I had a very nice afternoon today, buying vinyl in real shops in Rotterdam... (and few weeks ago I was at Swingmaster in Groningen which is completely amazing despite its somewhat remote location) but, of course, my tastes and wishes are probably not quite as refined/expensive as yours

Agreed, but the English fans in the stadium made it crystal clear that they're not much into playing the host, pretty much any country's home audience would have been more welcoming than them... I know it doesn't say everything about the country at large, it just makes a bad impression and spoils the game

my quick search turned up this compilation and this link. Guess this is the original issue, the entire album is here and the music in question are somewhere in the middle, starting around 18:00 ... interesting stuff!

wow, hadn't heard of this,... you've really made it in life, if you can record an album like that, playing your favorite Monk and Coltrane tunes on your trumpet, for a major label - just because your famous for something else...

Charles McPherson hasn't died