Guy Berger

Beautiful dog, Dan. Congrats!

Well if it was up to me he'd have gotten the Pulitzer for This Brings Us to vols 1 & 2

What do folks think about this? It's a nice summation of Zooid's work, though not necessarily their best.

Sounds good. It's unfortunate that Wynton & Branford ended up financially sponsored as "young lions" instead of folks like Hemphill, Murray, Blythe, Lake, etc - people who wanted to make music "within the tradition" without simply recreating it.

Am I right to assume these albums are essential? I have Lenox Avenue Breakdown already - are the other 3 equivalent in quality? Also, what is the James Blood Ulmer reissue mentioned?

I really enjoy the new one. Not quite as good as ToMH or MtB (I haven't heard WWD) but absolutely worth listening to if you like the musicians involved. 3 years later: revisiting this. Nice album.

Are you thinking of the ghostly organ sound on the track? I never really thought of that! But I'm pretty sure the answer is no, LY did not play on that track.

this is awesome. hooray!

not specifically picking on Soulstation here, but KB's sendoff is a good reminder of how our society rehabilitates celebrity rapists.

i just had the new one delivered to me - very much looking forward to hearing it though I'm a little sad that Henry doesn't perform on it, I love his playing. PS Any chance we can merge this with the other, longer Threadgill thread?

Interesting thread, Rooster. I, too, love this tune. I should check out the Ampex.

I haven't heard ALL of the Savoy recordings yet, but I have listened to about half of them, and second/third the comments made above - they are all worth hearing.

If it sounds like something that was done in the 80s, then it's unlikely that any "youngster" would be remotely interested in it...

ECM has gotten some fantastic recordings out of Jack DeJohnette over the past 10-12 years, so I'm very much looking forward to this one. From Amazon:

Bennie Maupin's playing is really outstanding here.

I try to judge ELP fairly. As a band making consistently good music, they were a failure relative to their main peers. But a decent chunk of their music is exciting and/or fun. They were clearly less afraid of embarrassing themselves than Yes, King Crimson or Genesis.

I saw Melissa and the Crash Trio in concert last night. Very impressive player, look forward to hearing how her style evolves. Very cerebral and not-showy, reminded me of Mark Turner.

I really like both of these albums, though I'd put them a notch below the two albums with Corea/Holland/DeJohnette. JSngry's assessment is right on.

It's a very good album.

But this is BS, right? Iyer has quite obviously connected with his audience, an audience that enjoys his music and is probably larger than that of musicians currently replicating Webster's sound.

Yeah, not a bad album by any means! But RateYourMusic has it scoring higher than Point of Departure, Black Fire, Andrew!!!, Judgment, and Shades. Vox populi, vox dei! Guy

Anybody else find Dance With Death somewhat overrated?

Afro Bossa is a great album. Afro Eurasian Eclipse has higher highs and lower lows.

Pax is fine, but it feels like a Blue Note pickup date more than most of Andrew's BN dates. There are a lot of AH albums I would pick up before this one. The recommendation of Black Fire is right on. This is one of the very best AH recordings, period. I would put Judgment and Andrew!!! (along with Passing Ships, which you have) pretty close in the next tier. Compulsion is also in that next tier, but it's more firmly in the avant-garde category than the other recordings I'm mentioning - not sure if that is a minus for you as a listener. As far as post-1970 AH, Shades (w/Clifford Jordan) is a fantastic date, albeit much more straight-ahead than the BN stuff. And I love Dusk too.

That was my initial instinct but I read somewhere that McHenry has only a limited role on the album.