Guy Berger

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.

I had a very different impression of this band on record, and live. Different strokes etc

Has anyone listened to this album? I know Relyles wasn't crazy about it which leads me to think I should skip it. Guy

The Evidence reissues are great, but I would note that Heliocentric Worlds Vols. 1 & 2 are on ESP and I'd put them, especially the first one, up there against anything else I've heard from him.

Absolutely agreed with Jim. We live in a world where Yo La Tengo is covering "Nuclear War". It's hard to judge what the best starter is for Sun Ra without knowing where the listener is coming from and what they think they're looking for. When I started listening to him, I was instantly gripped by Atlantis (which strongly resonated with the Floyd fan in me, and which I still enjoy) but was not terribly interested in the wonderful Chicago-era stuff. Holy shit, I just realized I've been listening to SR for 17 years. I'm old.

538 had a fascinating article on how Curry doesn't shoot enough. Pretty interesting contrast to the decent Warriors team of 2006-2008 which was chock-full-of-chuckers (Baron Davis!).

The corollary of this is that KW could still have good or even great marketing support behind him that's not being wasted on record stores. Also, related but unlikely (but someone more familiar with the production side of physical media can chime in) - it may be that the CD is selling so well through other distribution channels that there simply isn't enough stock available to supply a random record store.

Maybe the audiences for the two are different. Easy to imagine that some older shoppers (like ECM fans) still like to frequent record stores whereas youngsters (Kamasi fans) do not. It might simply be that ECM's distribution network is suffering from inefficient inertia.

I haven't heard it - but to be fair, it's not like the lyrics on the original trilogy of Santana albums were un-trite.

He's hit and miss as a live performer. Sometimes I've felt the way you describe; but I thought his playing during the WILD MAN DANCE performance at the Temple of Dendur in the spring of 2015 was outstanding.