garthsj

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the recently deceased Hank Garland as a great jazz guitar player when he chose to be. His albums on Columbia are classic straight ahead excursions, and have recently been reissued. This is well worth listening to .... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=music

If you want to know more about jazz guitar players .. just click here .... http://www.classicjazzguitar.com/artists/a...e.jsp?artist=28

Actually very few of us are "smooth jazz" fans .... you have the wrong list of people .. frankly you could not pay me enough to push smooth jazz ... especially on this list ...

Is French guitarist Christian Escoude still active?? His album with John Lewis, "Mirjana" is a memorable one ...

Thanks "7" ... That is a really interesting and informative site .. and what a real labor of love... Garth.

Right you are, Jim!!! Not totally unrelated is my guilty pleasure in watching all the dedicated BN fans on this board who are "suddenly" discovering the equal, if not superior, joys to be discovered on the "weaker" labels, such as Riverside and Prestige represented by the OJC umbrella .... And for someone who went through the hell of fighting the "east coast vs. west coast" battles in the fifties and sixties, it is a major thrill to see people on this board talk so glowingly about albums on Pacific Jazz, Contemporary, and Fantasy .... WOW! I never thought that I would ever live to see the day when a die-hard BN fan, could also find something memorable in Lennie Niehaus, Curtis Counce, or Shelley Manne! No doubt that jazz fans today have much "bigger ears."

I like Bob Mover and I love Boots Musulli, what little I have heard of them both. (Musulli's two great albums, the Charlie Ventura "Bop For The People" Concert, and the "Kenton Present's ..." are still favorites of mine). One name that seems to have been overlook so far is George Robert ... and considering that he is Swiss, I wonder why Ubu has not championed him? What Bob Mover albums can you recommend Allen?

Great, essential music .... very nerve-wracking packaging .... open at your peril!

O.K.! O.K! Now I know that I am going to get flamed here, but I would like to confess that I never really "understood" GG's great popularity. I have most of his BN albums, because I am a Blue Note completist of sorts up to the late 60s, but these are not my favorite guitar albums. I guess I grew up with Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis, Kenny Burrell, Howard Roberts (very underrated), Tal Farlow, Jimmy Raney, Billy Bauer, Johnny Smith, and Jim Hall as my list of favorites in the late 50s and 60s. GG seemed rather tame to me, and not being a devotee of funk or soul, his music, while pleasant rhythmically, was not the kind of thing I would put on the turntable to actually "listen" to for improvisational inspiration. Now he has become a jazz icon ... and I am still forced to wonder why? .... and if you think that this makes me a Philistine, don't ask me to reveal what I really feel about Wayne Shorter .... Garth. P.S. BTW, does anyone enjoy the Charlie Christian Columbia box as much as I do? Now there is music to snap you out of a sour mood!

In checking this out online, I think I saw a price of $1,550 .... it is hard to judge if this is a fair price or not depending on the quality of the timepiece itself... Quite frankly I would rather have the music ....

My brains cells diminish every day, so I am not sure of my original source, but I think that it was on the much maligned Ken Burns JAZZ series ... but I remember Jackie McLean telling the story how he and Phil Woods were essentially standing in the wings, vying for Bird's throne, and then BAM!! out of nowhere emerged Cannonball, and they were both rather deflated .... I do agree with most of what has been said about Woods so far. Most of his music after "Sugan" (which i just recently re-acquired on CD; I had not listened to it in a long time), was routine. But every now and then something would inspire him, and those are worth seeking out. He is on so many damned albums, big bands, accompaniment to pop stars etc. that it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff ... but the gems are there. I have previously mentioned the essential and brilliant "Musique Du Bois" on Muse, and then there is the "Live at the Showboat" album on RCA with Jack Wilkens, and the occasional slashing solo on big band albums by Gary McFarland, Bob Brookmeyer, Benny Carter, and especially Monk's Band. But that damned boring Quintet stuff was what I call "one-listen" material, and God! I spent enough money buying them hoping for a gem. At one time I must have owned nearly 50 albums featuring Phil Woods, and half of them were dross. The ERM material was more dynamic, but I always felt that he was "forcing it" ... much like the discussion Larry and I had about Bill Perkins a little while ago. It wasn't really Phil. As I also mentioned in a previous post.. I like the duo he did with Gordon Beck .... But, nostalgic softie that I am, I still want him to be the Phil from "Warm Woods" (Epic) or with Gene Quill. I have not heard his recent pairing with Bud Shank, but friends who have tell me it is very dynamic .... and they have just recorded at Yoshi's .. I look forward to hearing this collective aged 150 ....

I was doing some research on Charlie Parker, and came across this item ... I wonder if the Parker estate gets anything from this? By the way, there is a PDF file of the brochure that is very interesting... http://www.oris.ch/english/watches/jazz/parker.htm

I cannot let it rest without noting that ANY of the Zoot Sims albums on Pablo with Jimmy Rowles, as well as the one on soprano with Ray Bryant, is just about as good as it gets in the world of jazz. And I do agree that many Sims, and Phils Woods albums do seem to be on auto-pilot at times. As I indicated in a previous post, I believe that Woods seems to be rejuvenated for some reason, although he does suffer from respiratory problems, and is playing better right now than he has done at any time in the last 20 years.

Thank you for finding that outline ... Geez .. some academics cannot resist exposing themselves on the internet! But it is a very useful document ... I wonder if he ever thought it would find its way to a forum like this for intense discussion ... he may live to regret it! Garth.

Would reverse on the way-back machine go forward in time? Well ... I assumed, knowing the world of academic publishing, that the book had been sent out for peer review many times before Yale U.P. would consider publishing it ... and knowing that we have many esteemed jazz scholars/historians/aficionados on this list, I wondered if anyone had read the page proofs, or been sent the manuscipt for review. (I say this as I have two such manuscripts, one on "Fifties Television," and one "Film Audiences" sitting on the corner of my desk at this very moment while publishers await my "thumbs up or thumbs down" ... Such Power!)

I found this recent reference to a new book in the Yale U.P. catalog ... has anyone read this yet? NORTHERN SUN, SOUTHERN MOON EUROPE’S REINVENTION OF JAZZ Mike Heffley May 2005 384 p. , 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 Cloth 0-300-10693-9 $45.00 Until the 1960s American jazz, for all its improvisational and rhythmic brilliance, remained rooted in formal Western conventions originating in ancient Greece and early Christian plainchant. At the same time European jazz continued to follow the American model. When the creators of so-called free jazz--Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, and others--liberated American jazz from its Western ties, European musicians found their own distinctive voices and created a vital, innovative, and independent jazz culture. Northern Sun, Southern Moon examines this pan-Eurasian musical revolution. Author and musician Mike Heffley charts its development in Scandinavia, Holland, England, France, Italy, and especially (former East and West) Germany. He then follows its spread to former Eastern-bloc countries. Heffley brings to life an evolving musical phenomenon, situating European jazz in its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts and adding valuable material to the still-scant scholarship on improvisation. He reveals a Eurasian genealogy worthy of jazz’s well-established African and American pedigrees and proposes startling new implications for the histories of both Western music and jazz. Mike Heffley is a writer, composer, and jazz scholar. He has a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and is the author of The Making of Anthony Braxton.

Thanks for the information Mike. I knew that he was on several significant sessions in my collection, and I did not have access to my index volume of our Belgian friend, whose name I can never remember how to spell .. I usually just call him Asterix ... Off to play Phil and Quill .... Garth.

This was posted on the west coast board this morning: Pianist George Syrianoudis died 12/29/04. George played piano with Dick Meldonian and Sonny Igoe's band.He lived in Cresskill,NJ and was known in his musical career as George Syran.A memorial and visitation service will be held on Monday January 3 2-4pm at the Barrett Funeral home 148 Dean Dr. Tenafly,NJ. Information at www.barrettfuneralhome.net Of course, I first encountered George Syran on the early Phil Woods album "Pot Pie" with Jon Eardley, and also on the Phil Sunkel Band album on ABC. He appears to be a fine musician. I am sure that he was featured on other bop related albums in the mid fifties. Anyone else out there know of them? Garth.

Here is the quote from Barry Ulanov that Larry mentioned in the previous quote. Since this book was mentioned last week I decided to revisit it for the first time in probably thirty years, and found it to be much more historically complex, intellectually rigorous (if also wrong in lots of places), and idiosyncratic than I remembered it from my teenage years. I guess that I just know a lot more about the history of jazz than I did back then. Nonetheless, I think that this book has been unjustly neglected in any assessment of the history of jazz literature, and deserves to be evaulated in much more positive terms. Simply put, it has a lot of very interesting perspectives and basic information than most of the blander jazz histories used in universities today. Ulanov said: Superficially, this might appear to be consonant with descriptions of jazz and the experience of listening to it. But there is never anything in jazz, not even at its most primitive, that suggests a tune yelled by a hundred persons; whatever delicacies of pitch and liberties of intonation, there is never a chaotic cacophony such as Gide describes, in which not one of the hundred or so persons sings an exact note. In the same way, the description of beaded piano-wires suggests jazz honky-tonk piano; but the honky-tonk piano was the result of the poor equipment of brothels and barrelhouses, not of a need to confuse and drown . . . contours." A comparative analysis of African and American music does not yield clear parallels. For one thing, jazz is a measured music, the structure of which depends upon fixed beats, occurring in rhythmic patterns as unmistakable and immediately identifiable as the pulse of a metronome. African drumming, submitted to the most painstaking of auditions, simply does not break down into a structured rhythmic music; there are shifts of time and points and counterpoints of rhythm that make accurate notation impossible. As for the melodic qualities and quantities of African music, these too are shaped by a tonal and rhythmic conception entirely outside the Western diatonic tradition. To speak of the blue notes -- the flattened third and seventh -- as they are inflected against their natural position within a fixed key, or the alterations of pitch of jazz singers or instrumentalists, or their swooping glissandos, as American developments of African music is to talk unlettered nonsense. The basic chordal and melodic and rhythmic structure of the blues and of the jazz that has developed out of the blues is firmly within the orbit of Western folk music. There is far more of the sound of jazz in Middle-European gypsy fiddling than there is in a corps of African drummers. Barry Ulanov, HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AMERICA , New York: The Viking Press, 1955, p. 12. P.S. I have always loved this cover, and wish that I owned the figurine depicted....

OOOPS! I am sorry .. I just noticed that someone had posted on this concert a few days ago .. still worth catching....

If you log onto this site, you can listen to the now legendary Anthony Braxton Concert at the recent London Jazz Festival, together with some interesting interview material ... the sound is excellent ... There is lots of other good jazz to be found on the BBC3 site ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazzfest2004/index.shtml Garth.

I believe that you are correct Jim. Stan himself has discussed his long, and finally succesful battle with narcotics. For many musicians at that time, taking narcotics was "going along to get along.." He is a rather formidable man in person; definitely a physical presence ...

His 78s were among the very first I purchased when I started my interest in music .... a true giant in the swing-jazz world, and real iconoclast in a rather mundane world. He will be missed. Garth.

Tony Agostonelli posted this note on the jazz west coast list this morning. I thought that many of you would be interested ... I certainly am going to get this .... I have just seen "Stan Levey: The Original Original." This is a one hour & fifty-three minute documentary masterpiece....a true documentary....the makers of the music reflect upon Stan Levey's career, and the music in which Stan played a great part...I have never seen such an exposition and discussion of the music, and the place a great player like Stan Levey played within it! There are special appearances from Stan's musical friends -- Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Hank Jones, Lalo Schifrin, Terry Gibbs, Bill Holman, Charlie Parker, Charlie Watts, Lee Konitz, Howard Rumsey, Bill Henderson....and so many others. As for big bands, Stan has worked with Benny Goodman, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Lalo Schifrin, and others. The times, the music, the personal recollections -- they are all there! I was captured, mesmerized, and swept into the music and lives that I grew up with -- personally and musically.....Stan Levey himself plays a central role in telling about his careers -- jazz with the be-boppers, with Kenton, with various others for whom he played, his photography, his work on films, and his stint with pro boxing....you'll love it, as I did. If you need to know any more about it, here's the details -- The film was produced by Arthur S. Pritz and Stan Levey. StanArt Productions, 1626 North Wilcox Avenue, #487, Hollywood, CA 90028......Phone: 818-981-1178; FAX: 818-783-0484. ($24.95, plus $7.35 UPS Ground -- Total $32.50). http://www.stanlevey.com info@stanlevey.com All the best, stay well and in touch, ...and may the Joy of the Season be yours, Tony

This was just listed in Jazzmatazz .... King Ubu Orchestra - The Concert: Live at Total Music Meeting 2003 (ALL 009) Dec — Wolfgang Fuchs, contrabass & bass clarinet, sopranino sax; Peter van Bergen, tenor sax; Radu Malfatti, trombone; Melvyn Poore, tuba; Phil Wachsmann, violin, live electronics; Anne LeBaron, harp; Bertram Turetzky, double bass; Fernando Grillo, double bass; Paul Lytton, percussion, live electronics; guests: Boris Aljinovic, actor/speaker; Phil Minton, voice; Irena Bart-Greiner, soprano; Berlin Is there something we should know?