Big Beat Steve

In a similar vein: One that stuck in my mind for quite a while in my younger days (I was 16 or 17 at the time) after having heard it on the radio (at a time when there still were substantial and regular jazz shows on radio) and that still brings back similar vibes today: ST. THOMAS Made me grab a copy of the Saxophone Colossus LP soon afterwards.

If you include straight-ahead SWING tunes then there are plenty. Of course some of these are standards but anyway ... (they have become jazz chestnuts long ago) Off the top of my head, a scant few personal all-time jazz earworm favorites: Four Brothers Stompy Jones Perdido Jumpin' At The Woodside Caldonia (in fact, a lot of Louis Jordan tunes) - do I hear someone say "too pop-ish"? Well, YOUR loss! ) Turkey Hop Blue 'n' Boogie Zoot (not the Hans Koller composition, the other one ...) Sax No End Ha, another one for the list - but not your "So What" (Miles Davis, right?) but the Gerry Mulligan tune also known as "Apple Core"

I KNOW this is what it means and what I meant (typo or not). I just don't quite know what it would TAKE for this album to elicit this "bowling-over" reaction (from you or anyone else). All this to say that I am quite happy with that album and the way it has been done. Maybe for me it left enough of an impression that he basically "swung" the tunes in his idiom instead of pumping them out on a (church) organ, for example (no doubt there would have been others who may have found it more approriate to reflect more closely on the religious origins of the "source material").

Having bought his trio recordings as well as his All Night Sessions (yes I LIKE these! ) and his FOUR LP plus the early Xanadu live dates all within a fairly short timeframe before, this one was a natural to pick up when I came across an early reissue not long afterwards. I like it a lot and pull it out every now and then for late-night listening. Not sure what the album would have to do to "boil someone over" but I found it quite refreshing how he transferred these tunes into an all-out jazz context and brought out their jazz essence without (apparently) becoming totally overwhelmed by the religious background of the tunes. It would have been a pity if he had handled them as a sort of instrumental Mahalia Jackson. Some might say he "jazzed up" these tunes but I feel he did it very fittingly.

Did Arnett Cobb make you go on a honkin' sax binge? Decided to join in some too:

As for the list of female vocalists Walker lists with the Messner band and just for an aural comparison, here is Gladys Tell singing:

Mine too. Yes, disguised as a Swedish release, but very thinly so. Not lasting longer than until the first one who reads Swedish comes along. At the top right it translates as "From the States, from Swedish Blue Station" (WTF?) The insert at "Tribute from Sweden" says "These are lots of fourteen from the United States" (WTF??? 14 tracks??) And below the pic it says "I am too tired to see anything where can we get something to drink?" (Any more questions? ) To the amusement (?) of those who have the LP, the Swedish babble below each tune sez thus: Left column: My foot is bleeding and is swollen It's bad here With more light You said this was going to cost Adjust the brake linings A soft drink Within an hour later Right column: I've got nothing to declare (at customs) Are we going to stop overnight en route Please change the oil How much will the extra weight cost Put this on the shelf Can you repair this by any chance A pillow linen bathroom mat (WTF again???? Did they pillage a tourist's phrase book??) As for what's not available elsewhere, I have not listened to the Christian side right now, but this discography ... http://www.djangoreinhardt.info/charlie-christian-discography/ ... provides some info on the titles (even rarer ones such as Song of the Islands, but others exist in multiple versions, of course) but does not give release information either. If the "hits" found there are anything to go by, most of the tracks on this LP come from Old Gold shows.

Thans, no. Like I indicated in my post, I bought it some years ago - I have it on a 80s CBS LP and I am fine with that pressing. But somebody else, maybe ...

Well, she does look a bit like Raquel Rastenni (Danish band vocalist from the swing era who also worked and recorded in Sweden and later had a pop career in Denmark) but I doubt it was her you were thinking of. FWIW, Johnny Messner looks familiar too: Like an ofay Cab Calloway. Quite a character. And looking at him and the girl singer in that soundie you posted (and others by the band), it really is extremely difficult to define what must have been the "color line" in those times. These two could easily have passed as very lightly-skinned "colored" persons.

It's quite amazing how things are perceived differently. I have always had mixed feelings about the MJQ. My mother had several MJQ records and when I became interested in jazz (at 15 in the mid-70s) at about the same time I became interested in buying records at all (jazz wasn't my only interest) she touted the MJQ as well as others in a similar vein (e.g. George Gruntz) as the begining and end of jazz and what jazz was supposed to be all about. Easy to understand - to that generation deeply conditioned by classical music and the listening habits that went with it, here at last was some jazz outfit that had the aura of respectability and seriousness that was compatible with listeners' ears brought up on classical music. As I of course leaned towards much more meaty, straight-ahead, outright blowing jazz (from classic jazz of the 20s via swing - both big and small bands - to my early bop discoveries), in the beginning I found the MJQ utterly odd and it took me a long time to figure out what "Fontessa" (her preferred MJQ record) was all about. In fact I bought my own copy eventually (figuring that there must be something to it) as well as "No Sun In Venice" but to this day the MJQ I prefer is the one where things focus on Milt Jackson and his soloing. Those where John Lewis takes control of things I cannot always warm up to in full, and in general (and particularly from a historical point of view of the European scene) I still find that all that "Third Stream" fetish and "jazz must attain the respectability of classical music by being married with it" attitude was a dead end and a huge disservice to the evolution of jazz over here and therefore something that I find needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. IMO this overly zealous attitude (particularly widespread among Germans, alas, including certain jazz scribes) to use classical music and their "respectability" as the yardstick by which jazz is supposed to be judged (which was one major reason why the MJQ concerts always were huge and much-lauded events here) has often stifled the development of real, down-to-earth no-frills jazz here that is allowed to develop fully and be appreciated on its OWN terms. In between more pop-oriented bands where jazz came to the fore very occasionally and high-art, high-brow Third Stream there was not that much room for other, IMO healthier and more straightforward forms of jazz. Between being not commercial enough (to make a living) and not "respectable" enough, jazz led a hard life. And the MJQ and its success had a huge role in setting that scene, alas. Did you check out the "MJQ at Music Inn" LP (feat.Jimmy Giuffre)? That's a start, at least. Bought it on a whim at a clearout sale years ago, not something I can take in often, but maybe I should again one of these days...

Leo Walker's "Big Band Almanac" lists these girl singers with the Messner band: Gladys Tell Jeanne D'Arcy Mindy Carson Take your pick. She doesn't look linke Mindy Carson, though. And she's also on here: Compare the voice of Jeanne D'Arcy here: Does not sound like her IMO.

That's strange. Try the following: Access your message using the "Edit" option, mark the text you would like to edit/change (set the cursor to the beginning of the text segment you would like to mark, press Upshift and keep it pressed and set the cursor to the end of the text you would like to make - which should mark the entire text), open the "Size" field, click on "14". If this does not change the size of your marked part of the post then click on "12" which should make it appear rather small. THEN click on 14 and it should be the same size as the "correctly sized" parts of your post. This is how I edited the message I quoted from your initial post using exactly the "Size" option so 3 of your 4 sentences appear in the correct font (14) in my quotation. And afterwards I edited my own message to try and access those fields too and it did work again. Same now: Here is my message again selecting an extra large size (18) from that "Size" option to repeat my post That's strange. I edited the message I quoted from your initial post using exactly the "Size" option so two of your three sentences appear in the correct font in my quotation. And afterwards I edited my own message to try and access those fields too and it did work again. And to try again, here I copy-pasted a paragraph from your post and edited it back to normal size (14) using the "Size" option again. : 11. “Abide with Me/Blue Monk” : Richard Stoltzman . 1985. Stolzman clarinet, Bill Douglas piano, Jeremy Wall synthesizers, Eddie Gomez bass. Stolzman is regarded as a great classical clarinet player. I have several of his non-classical records and have seen him perform a Steve Reich piece he commissioned. I used to run into Bill Douglas in Toronto at the John Norris/Bill Smith Jazz and Blues record store. Bill was a huge fan of Bill Evans so it's fitting he got to play with Eddie Gomez. Hope this helps a little.

Why not edit your message and try the "Font" and "Size" option fields on the upper right above the message? What (oddball?) word processing software would YOU prefer instead of Word?

Another case of one man's meat being another man's (or, here, two men's ) poison. I like them a lot, even though I found the praise heaped on them in the WCJ books a wee bit too much. If these sets don't do enough for others out there then I have a feeling this might be because they are just "too straightforward" for those who elsewhere might above all enthuse in the "angry young men" of the times, avantgarde or other more "advanced" styles of jazz. OTOH I'll freely admit my jazz preferences lean towards the swing side and go on from there towards more modern forms in an evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) manner. And I'll also admit I prefer to let the music as a whole act on me and not so much dissect every single note. I'd rather enjoy the flow. To each his own ... I may be able to see where you are heading from an expert writer's/reviewer's impressions (but again, a listener who takes in the "whole" is bound to see things a bit differently), but if you apply these criteria, wouldn't you have to tear to shreds about half the discography of Bud Powell? (After all, if these criteria were to apply then to me "being out of it but trying anyway" is not something that excuses each and every fumble)

Yes, by now I know.

Maybe we misunderstood each other. I had understood your reference to Dolphy as referring to his CONCERT appearances with Coltrane ("the band") - and therefore I'd have seen a parallel there. This may have been the source of the misunderstanding. Actually the "proactive" thing actually is beside the point by now. I had made this point (and stand by it) only because - as you no doubt know - what I said about todays' worshippers of past hereos falling all over themselves in defending their idol against critics who voiced their criticism THEN and therefore operated from a totally different (but IMO no less valid) "period" point of reference is something that did and does happen. And I find these hindsight-based approaches inappropriate in many cases. So - as far as I am concerned - "don't even try."

"But" ...?

Let's put it this way ... it's happened before that when reviewers' (or - generally speakling - scribes') comments were brought up that might sound like heresy about someone held up high on a pedestal among today's fans it wouldn't take long for replies of the sort of "he didn't know shit" to come up. So I thought it only fair to point out BEFOREHAND that things have to be seen in the context of THEIR times. As for your other comment about "Dolphy being in another place than was the band", by coincidence while checking the above reviews I also came across a reference in the press review section of one of the issues relating to a feature on Coltrane and Dolphy that seems to have been run in an April, 1962 issue of Down Beat. The contents were paraphrased like this: "Coltrane partially confirmed what the critics had to say about the two of them apparently never being able to finish a tune. .... The cooperation with Dolphy still remains on a theoretical level, as they haven't really found each other yet on stage. One never knows when the other will stop, what he'll be going to play and how, but John was optimistic about the future." Sounds a bit like your impressions, doesn't it?

Yes, him. Exactly. He wrote regularly for OJ in those years. BTW, just to put Werner's comments about Dolphy a bit into context, ESTRAD - the "other" Swedish jazz mag of those years - had this to say about Dolphy in the review of that concert: "Next to him [Coltrane] stands Eric Dolphy and he makes even the bandleader himself sound conventional . Well, almost, at any rate. ..."

FWIW, here is a quote from the review of the late-November 1961 Gillespie/Coltrane "double feature" concert in Stockholm during the above tour as written by Lars Werner for the December, 1961 issue of ORKESTER JOURNALEN: "Gillespie's music certainly is mature and complete, which is about the least you can say about what John Coltrane's group plays. Here it is all about jazz in an overwhelming expansion and searching without limits. The program was largely the same for both concerts but the musical contents were quite different. A singular experience and really stimulating to hear. The biggest impression was made by the rhythmic freedom and richness - Elvin Jones' enormlously driving and pushing drum work. I think this he the best drummer i have ever heard. MyCoy Tyner made a much better impression than on record and played long, beautiful melody lines and romantic sounds - the sounds that Coltrane is said to be so fascinated by, and one can understand that behind his experiments dissolving all chords he insists on having a rich harmonic background. Coltrane was in fine form on all tunes, and I liked him best soprano sax in his two versions of "My Favorite Things" of which he played one at each concert. This was his top feature anyway - totally hypnotizing with his repeated figures and Jones' phantastic drumming. On the other hand, I found Dolphy's participation to be quite superfluous. He just gives me a feeling of bluffing and masquerading whenever I find myself near him. I think it is just wrong to play "wrong" the way he does. All in all a top-notch concert of the kind you would like all concerts to be. " So clearly Lars Werner had not got to grips with Dolphy by late 1961 - and Werner was no slouch on the Swedish and European jazz scene and not averse to exploring advanced jazz ideas. So IMHO there is no point denigrating Werner (with the doubtful benefit of hindsight and therefore missing the point) for how he felt about Dolphy at THAT time. It just reflects the impact a musician may have had (or not) in his time.

Do we know why the site went down (or had to go down)?

Yes, quote from the Variety link above: "Since being acquired by Wood Creek Capital Management Group in March, 2013, from Village Roadshow Entertainment Group (and Norman Lear, who remains on as chairman emeritus) for $120 million, Concord Music has been on a spending spree .." So that Billboard item is old hat indeed. You just explained why there are P.D. labels reissuing that stuff in places where this is perfectly legal. Because there ARE people who care about hearing this.

Thanks for the reminder. Have done what's necessary to preserve this for me. "Distinguished female jazz scholar Charlotte Bronte" .... hee hee!

Yes, I would like to hear about the outcome too. We will all be up against this one day. And the fact that I am seriously thinking about NOT going to the twice-a-year record clearout sale this fall at our #1 local record store that still carries a substantial range of vinyl is giving me the creeps (the reason being that I now have definitely run out of filing space if I want to maintain a halfway orderly system).

Yes, the one who drew that "likeness" (?) did not know his craft. And very unfavorable and unflattering for Stan Getz it is too.