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Teasing the Korean
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Posts posted by Teasing the Korean
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The title track on Sunflower is one of my favorite things in the CTI catalog.
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23 minutes ago, BillF said:
I seem to think we've talked about this before,
But the other thread did not include my thoughtful, insightful, detailed, and highly entertaining original post, which has rendered the other threads obsolete.
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Over the decades, when I was in my 30s, 40s, or 50s and lugging home all these jazz LPs, I would sometimes be so knocked out by a particular record, that I would ask myself, "What if this would have been my first jazz album instead of Dave Brubeck's Greatest Hits?"
This got me to thinking about my first jazz albums that I bought in high school, and how they affected my taste in jazz and overall aesthetics. In browsing through my accumulation, I can report the following:
I was in junior high when I bought my first two jazz albums. The were:
- Dave Brubeck's Greatest Hits
- Benny Goodman's Greatest Hits
I bought the following albums when I was in high school. These are listed alphabetically, and not by purchase date, though I can say that the Brubeck purchases were earlier rather than later. The list is fairly complete, based on memory and looking through my LPs.
- Anthony Braxton - Duets 1976
- Dave Brubeck - Time Out
- Dave Brubeck & Gerry Mulligan - Blues Roots - Columbia that I unloaded
- Dave Brubeck - College Concert (Columbia twofer)
- Dave Brubeck - Gone with the Wind
- Ornette Coleman - Ornette on Tenor
- John Coltrane - Giant Steps
- Chick Corea - Piano Improvisations 1
- Miles Davis - Round About Midnight
- Eric Dolphy - The Berlin Concerts
- Bill Evans - Village Vanguard twofer
- Bill Evans - Columbia album with hideous cover art that I unloaded
- Herbie Hancock - Empyrean Isles
- Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage
- Freddie Hubbard - Hub-Tones
- Milt Jackson/Coleman Hawkins - Bean Bags
- Ahmad Jamal - Live at Oil Can Harry's
- Lambert Hendricks & Ross - Flyin' High
- Mingus - Blues & Roots
- MJQ - Last Concert
- Monk - Underground
- Monk - Always Know (Columbia twofer comp)
- Wes Montgomery - Movin' (Riverside twofer reissue)
- Oliver Nelson - Blues and the Abstract Truth
- Herbie Nichols - Love, Gloom, Cash, Love 70s reissue
- Charlie Parker - Savoy box set
- Oscar Peterson - Verve Best of twofer
- Bud Powell - Amazing Vols. 1 & 2
- Bud Powell - Genius of (twofer of Jazz Giant and Genius of)
- Bud Powell - some later albums which I unloaded
- Wayne Shorter - The All-Seeing Eye
- Jimmy Smith - Sounds of
- Jimmy Smith - A New Star, a New Sound
- Jimmy Smith - Live at Club Baby Grand Vol. 1
- Art Tatum - Masterpieces (MCA/Decca twofer)
- Art Tatum - Capitol solo sessions
- Art Tatum - two volumes of the Pablo solo albums
- Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures
- McCoy Tyner - Expansions
- Randy Weston - Zulu (comp of his early Riverside LPs)
- Weather Report - Best of, which I unloaded
- Various - The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (Massey Hall twofer)
- Various - The Bebop Boys (Savoy twofer)
- Various - A Jazz Piano Anthology (Columbia)
- Various - Herbie/Chick/Keith/McCoy album that I unloaded
Unless otherwise indicated, I still have all of these albums, but in a few cases, I traded up for mono copies.
At the same time I was buying these LPs, I was also buying 1960s pop/rock, 1960s-70s soul/R&B, and punk/new wave. I vividly remember returning from a Saturday morning piano lesson one day and spinning Art Tatum Masterpieces followed by the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday.
Many of these albums were recommended in Jerry Coker's Patterns for Jazz, which may have been the first jazz instruction book that I bought. Some I heard on jazz shows on our local community radio station. Others were recommended by friends. Some were blind buys from the cutout bin. My list is piano-heavy, because that was my instrument.
Looking back, I think I did OK for a high school student, and I managed to avoid fusion and smooth jazz when it was everywhere. Still, I wonder what would have happened if I had heard at that age, for example, 1950s-60s Latin jazz or West Coast chamber jazz, two sub-genres that were not played on our local jazz station, at least that I can remember.
I still spin most of these on occasion, the Brubecks not so much. The older I get, the more I treasure these albums, because I heard them at a particular time.
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1 minute ago, Ken Dryden said:
I used to own the LP set, but the later CD set has the performances in the original order. They flow better in my view in that order.
Good to know.
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8 minutes ago, felser said:
I'm one of the exceptions.
So am I.
10 minutes ago, Ken Dryden said:Frankly, I enjoyed the Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces even more when the songs were restored to the original order of performance, Tatum wasn’t randomly playing songs but seemed like he was playing for an audience.
Tatum critics like Andre Hodeir are mere footnotes in jazz, if anything, destined to be forgotten.
Which edition has them in the correct order? I have the Pablo box from the 1970s (after writing above that I avoided Pablo records).
I can forgive Andre Hodeir's criticisms because I love his music, especially Jazz et Jazz.
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13 minutes ago, JSngry said:
There have been very few true improvisors in this or any other music. That's some Romantic bullshit.
There have been a lot more great interpreters of their various personal and collective vocabularies (and vocabularies they are, music at its highest level is both math and language, head and heart) and those interpretations do involve spontaneous inspirations.
I wish people would stop confusing those two things, we could get rid of a lot of noise.
I can listen to Johnny Hodges never play the same thing twice the same way every time and NEVER get tired of it.
Yup.
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16 minutes ago, JSngry said:
I think it was Leonard Feather who in one of his 1950s books posited the idea that technology would soon make it possible to create the perfect jazz record by just rolling tape forever and the picking the best choruses and editing them together to make a perfect take. He got somebody, Zoot Sims maybe? to endorse the idea.
Of course, hello Teo Macero, but Teo was a deeply serious and expert composer, not some asshole opportunistic jazz critic. Teo was not playing games and doing a gimmick. And Teo was not splicing choruses, Teo was waaaay beyond that.
The more On The Corner I hear...hey. Teo, genius at doing that thing that way.
I guess it comes down to whether you are more into the process or the final results. I am into the latter, though I can respect the former. I remember ages ago reading a review of Art Tatum's albums and the reviewer complaining that tunes from the solo Norman Granz sessions sounded too much like their counterparts on the earlier Decca and Capitol sessions, the implication being that Tatum was playing arrangements and not living up to the reviewer's standards of improvisation. Considering the magnitude of those solo Granz sessions, it struck me as a very petty complaint, then and now.
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2 minutes ago, jazzbo said:
Good for you. Just seems a superficial detail for me, a part of merchandizing. Nothing to do with the music itself, but may be a way to get you to purchase the music, feel a part of a certain hip crowd, etc.
Some of us care about packaging. Some don't. C'est la vie.
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14 minutes ago, JSngry said:
Maybe that's what the focus should be - did you get it right or not.
Agreed, but I think a some jazz listeners cling to this idea that jazz needs to be "spontaneous" and "in the moment," and that production somehow compromises that high standard.
Maybe those listeners should listen only to live jazz albums. And because even live jazz albums can be edited, maybe they should just hear live jazz and listen to other music on record.
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5 hours ago, JSngry said:
I need somebody to define "slickness" for me, please. And why it's by definition a bad thing. When I grew up, "slick" was usually a compliment.
I need somebody to define "over-produced." What is over-produced for one person is simply produced for another.
I get the feeling that certain jazz listeners resent the idea that one iota of advance thought or planning went into a jazz album, as opposed to the musicians showing up, calling tunes, and blowing for 8 choruses apiece. Records such as this peacefully coexist on my modular LP shelving unit alongside CTI albums. There's room for both extremes, and everything between.
6 hours ago, jazzbo said:And covers are a minor consideration for me.
A very prominent classical music critic once told a professional musician friend of mine that he could review an album based on the cover art alone. And I get it.
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21 minutes ago, mjzee said:
A really instructive comparison is Milt Jackson on CTI vs. Pablo. Shows the need for a good producer (vs. one that's AWOL). Also shows the need for attractive packaging and good merchandising.
I've often wondered if I may have bought more Pablo albums if they didn't look so amateurish.
30 minutes ago, Daniel A said:I think you'll get misleading results if you compare albums by the same artist CTI vs non-CTI. The CTI catalog is a body of work on its own and quite an achievement.
Precisely.
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11 hours ago, sgcim said:
He wrote back and said it's coming in the future. I hope we're not going to get another Al Haig drama...
Let him know that there are at least two Kenyon Hopkins fans who are waiting!
11 hours ago, sgcim said:The pairing of Stanley and Astrud worked a lot better than the ridiculous pairing of Astrud and Gil Evans.
The Astrud/Gil Evans pairing did not work for me at all.
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This is fantastic, and the audio is really top notch. I watched and listened through our Bose docking station, and it was practically studio quality.
How strange - or maybe not - that there is no other footage of him.
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3 minutes ago, HutchFan said:
Give it a spin, if you're so inclined. We're all looking for stuff that scratches our own particular itches, not somebody else's.
But it is fun to compare notes.
I may have been expecting it to sound like a CTI album rather than a "jazz" album. Keep in mind that I was well into jazz by several decades already by this point. I think it was the production/engineering/close miking, but yes, I will revisit and report back.
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23 minutes ago, HutchFan said:
I'd put Red Clay right up there with Straight Life as some of the best music Hubbard ever made -- and some of the best music released on CTI. So I can't imagine getting rid of it.
Then again, we all hear differently.
I hear you. The production values didn't work for me. And I just climbed up my library ladder to find that I did indeed hang onto Red Clay. I will give it a spin this weekend.
4 minutes ago, sgcim said:No, that quote was from a post he made to me.I asked him where I could read about it, but he never got back to me.Maybe he's saving it for a future installment on his site.
He could even be planning a bio on KH.
That would be great. There is very little info on Kenyon Hopkins out there, that I've been able to find at least. He has always been a very mysterious figure. If what you're saying is true, maybe it's better that we keep him mysterious!
24 minutes ago, mjzee said:I don't think CTI was really meant to appeal to standard jazz audiences. They were building a whole new thing, which was very successful.
Completely agree.
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15 hours ago, mjzee said:
On a different note, I've noticed a few CTIs that don't seem coherent as albums. For example, Hubert Laws's In The Beginning. It's really hard to figure out what they were striving for; stylistically, it's all over the place.
Completely agree. As someone who owns most of the CTI albums circa 1970-1974, In The Beginning is one of the few that I unloaded.
This may be sacrilege, but I also unloaded Red Clay. I did not think that dry, thuddy, 70s CTI production values worked well with more straight-ahead jazz, or at least what I remember as more straight-ahead jazz at the time that I owned it.
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16 hours ago, AllenLowe said:
if you like Kenyon Hopkins, I recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Rooms-New-York-Kenyon-Hopkins/dp/B002XMGJGC
Got it. I have I believe all of the good Kenyon Hopkins albums. I unloaded some of his sleepy albums on Capitol.
16 hours ago, CJ Shearn said:For me the CTI sweet spot is 1970-1974
+2
14 hours ago, sgcim said:Here's a thing on CT's Jet Set/specialty phase:
https://www.ctproduced.com/the-abc-of-specialty-recording/
The writer claims that "There is a whole fascinating story about Hopkins and especially around his divorce which includes using binoculars to peep on neighbors, hitting his wife and more. One day."
Thanks. I could not find the quote that you included. Is there an additional link?
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Thank you for mentioning the great Kenyon Hopkins, whose score for The Hustler is one of the greatest jazz motion picture scores of all time!
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Today included some very rare - rare for these days, at least - record and CD shopping for Mr. and Ms. TTK. I picked up several $2.99 jazz CDs. Of these, I'm most excited about Curtis Fuller and Hampton Hawes with French Horns. Would you consider this chamber jazz? I love the color that French horns provide in chamber jazz, and I was especially happy that David Amram is one of the players.
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6 minutes ago, JSngry said:
That's a good record!
I figured it almost had to be, given the lineup. It is in queue to get a scrub on the ol' Nitty Gritty machine, and then will be enjoyed this weekend!
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I almost never buy LPs anymore, but today at an antique mall for a dollar I found a very clean mono copy of Tell It the Way It Is on impulse!. Never heard it before; looking forward to spinning it this weekend!
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1 hour ago, felser said:
You're probably right. I'm in Philly, but haven't listened to commercial radio much in decades, and based my observation on the music I hear piped into stores and restaurants when I am shopping and eating, and on what I hear on Sirius/XM.
Looks like you are right after all. My brother, who has listened to oldies radio much, much more than I have over the years, (and who has lived in Philly since the late-1970s,) tells me that the only instrumentals that get played with any regularity on terrestrial oldies radio are "Green Onions" and "Soulful Strut." He says that you likely may hear both versions of "Grazin'" on satellite.
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On 8/28/2022 at 9:09 AM, felser said:
May be that your local A.M. station chose not to play it, and the Friends of Distinction version made the Masakela version instantly obsolete for golden oldies formats.
That has not been my experience at all. I have heard both over the decades more or less equally, with possibly a slight edge to Masakela. I lived in Philly and used to listen to their soul/R&B oldies stations, and Masakela was played one those. His version was also on a TV commercial recently.
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24 minutes ago, T.D. said:
For sure!
For a long time, this was in every thrift store, right beside Whipped Cream & Other Delights and Merry Christmas from Firestone Tires!
The First Jazz Albums We Owned
in Miscellaneous Music
Posted
As I've written elsewhere, my Dad had The Double Six of Paris and Mundell Lowe's TV Action Jazz, one of the greatest albums ever made and easily one one of the greatest LP titles of all time. Those were both gateway albums for me.