Rabshakeh

Now that is interesting. Not something that I had picked up on at all.

Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom – Otis Was A Polar Bear There are some nice ideas here, but a problem that I have with this kind of heavily scored modern jazz is that it sounds like the musicians are essentially playing to the sequencer / compositional IT that was used to write it. It just pure execution of ideas with no real interpretation. I realise that this makes me sound like an old man.

A lot of the material is on discogs. I would struggle to tell a computer from a lamp stand in technological terms, but I had a naive hope that it would be comparatively easy to harvest. Even just BN would be quite interesting*. *Interesting = Fun to look at.

That's what i mean. Very hard to disentangle. Are there records (live or comps) with early Coltrane playing with Bostic and with Gillespie? I have heard the comp The Champ but that's all. Was this pre-playing with Monk? George Russell is one I hadn't heard. Was that as a theorist?

It was listening to Golson that triggered me asking. He does and doesn't sound like Trane. Okay, great. That's it then. I do hear Gordon for sure. Getz an interesting one. I know of the famous Coltrane quote where he says something like "we all wish we could sound like Stan Getz", but I had assumed there was a hint of irony there. I certainly don't hear or feel much closeness there. Interesting to know that he said he was a favourite of his. This I have to see. Edit: He's on loads of Johnny Hodges?! I had no idea. I knew Bostic and Gillespie. Had no idea he played with Hodges...

Which are those?

Ezra Collective, the London based jazz group made up of drummer / leader Femi Koleoso, bassist TJ Koleoso, keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones, trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, and tenor saxophonist James Mollison, has just won the Mercury award for Where I'm Meant To Be. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/07/mercury-prize-2023-london-group-ezra-collective-secure-first-ever-jazz-win The prize has become quite a big deal recently (after having been the kiss of death of utter un-hipness for a decade or so), and I've noticed young people getting excited about it, so it is a nice deal for Ezra Collective. It is a category-free award and they are the first jazz act to win. Like a lot of these London scene records, the record is a mix of jazz with danceable diasporic and jazz-adjacent musics, and afrobeat in particular in this case. I think it's a better record than their previous by quite a long way. It is definitely not a rehash, but it should appeal to Fela fans on here.

Walt Dickerson and Richard Davis - Tenderness

Did Coltrane mention Gordon and Stitt? I can certainly hear the former. Parker I find it harder to hear in Coltrane, particularly their very different sense of when to place notes.

Quite aside from music, Epistrophy & Now's the Time is a competitor for my favourite of all Don Schlitten covers. I am sorry, but he just looks so damn cool.

Some recent discussion on eras of Coltrane. Has there been much research on who may have most influenced John Coltrane when he first started, and how his ideas crystallised in those very early stages? For ease of definition, let's take the period playing with Monk as the end point for the early stages. I find it very hard to "unhear" Coltrane, having started out listening to him. He has quite distinctive melodic, harmonic and rhythmic positions even from quite early on.

That's good.

Hank Marr – Greasy Spoon Benny Golson – This Is For You, John (Bay State, 1984)

16-17 – When All Else Fails...

Oh no.

16-17

Thanks!

Thanks for suggesting it!

This is good. Excellent record. One of my few random buys and I've never regretted.

Those records are obviously juvenalia and they are also their own sort of dead end, but they're really interesting dead end juvenalia. Third stream and its colleague: esoteric cool and bop modernism. The link to Black Saint is obvious but also the records are really different. It's more a link in thinking that actual musical language. I'm also a big fan of John LaPorta. He's not the best alto player by any means, but he has a nice smokey quality and, more importantly, he tended to be on oddball interesting records only.

The options really show how starkly short Coltrane's career was.

That's another cool record. I like LaPorta on it, and the composing is good too. Lots of great ideas in that era.

Dwight Trible – Cosmic (2011) Great version of "I've Known Rivers". I enjoyed seeing him recently with Kahil El'Zabar.

The Fletcher Henderson All Stars Under The Direction Of Rex Stewart – The Big Reunion Great record. A good recent recommendation from this forum.

Bob Mintzer – Spectrum First listen to Mintzer outside of the Yellow Jackets, following a semi-disparaging reference to Bob Mintzer's big band work in another thread. It's only really half big band though.