Guy Berger

episodes 7-9 of Season 2 😵

This band was Japanese but might be of interest to folks in this thread

Great thread.

Anybody else watching season 2 of Andor? I ended up staying up too late watching episodes 4-6 when they dropped on Tuesday 🤣

MrJazzman, you should check out his classic work with Miles Davis during 1970-71.

Sunnyside is releasing a 2nd album by Ehrlich’s Trio Exaltation (John Hebert and Nasheet Waits). The first album by the trio was on Clean Feed and I thought it was excellent.

Same here

But I think there’s something fundamentally different between the music Paul Bley was recording in 1967, and (some of) the music that ECM is releasing in 2025, despite their stylistic similarities. Trout mask vs trout mask replica Back to the original topic. I’ve been working my way backwards through the Louis Sclavis‘s ECMs and quite a few of them are top notch - my favorite is Silk and Salt Melodies. Mellow but not motionless.

Worth mentioning that album was not recorded for ECM - it was recorded in 1967, ECM just released it a few years later. There’s a great quote I have trouble sourcing but definitely remember reading, from Branford Marsalis - Led Zeppelin sounded they way they did because they were really into classic American blues (and British folk music). If you try to imitate them without that same background, you’ll end up sounding like Whitesnake. Seems applicable here when talking about younger musicians replicating the “ECM sound”.

Good for him.

I assume a lot of it is just that a career as a professional musician is not a great way to support a family or a comfortable lifestyle. Economic opportunities outside of music are generally better than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. So a lot of creators withdraw from the scene.

Counterpoint: Joe Lovano is good

I think Ghost is talking about the 1972 band that is represented on In Concert (and a few bootlegs including the Paul Mall one), not the fall 1971 iteration of the Cellar Door band. Imho the 1972 recordings are fascinating but IIRC the sound quality isn’t great. if sound quality is a constraint then the top pick would have to be the 1975 Japan tour. I think you could get a fair amount of mileage out of the 1973 Japan and Europe concerts too. It’s been a while since I listened to the North American shows from this period - do any of them have good sound quality?

This one is great, as is Another Place on Label Bleu.

Thanks for sharing!

Gave this a few listens. Enjoyable if you liked the prior two. No strong opinion beyond that.

Bingo. I don’t mind the stylings, I do mind the lack of substance

arrived!

It’s funny I wrote this way back when… a few years after, Rudresh Mahanthappa recorded Kinsmen which has a relevant vibe and is a top notch album.

Wait how did you find this out?

RIP. I love his “ugly beauty” Coltrane-influenced approach to the organ

Yeah. I think this is a general feature of takes on Davis’s music from 1965 onward - a lot of the innovation was happening in concert, and official documentation of that is not necessarily representative

Thanks guys. Familiar with a little but not all of this stuff!

The group’s 4th album overall, and 3rd one overall. Hart, Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, Ben Street, I liked their prior two ECM outings a lot, especially One Is the Other. (Separately: I wish someone would reissue Enchance, even digital only!)

I’ve been starting to explore this group of musicians. A lot of them pop up on Spotify, some I’ve encountered on my Clean Feed Records binge, some are active in collaboration with American musicians. any recommendations? I have a wide range of tastes from straight ahead to avant-garde to fusion. My sweet spot is music that sits somewhere between those poles.