Rabshakeh

Adonis Rose Quintet – Song For Donise I generally find that I enjoy the drummer led Young Lions records more than leader dates by the horns. Something about how foregrounding the rhythm smooths out some of the issues that plague the period. I enjoy this record. One person who always confuses me is Tim Warfield. On this album and others he seems to come up with odd measures that don't fit into the bars properly. I never understood why someone like Payton had him around but then I am not a musician and perhaps there is something admirable there.

I like the chat! That's the best bit.

Xhosa Cole – Ibeji

Ellery Eskelin – Solo Live At Snugs

I read this as Patty Waters for a minute...

That's a great record.

That's a real favourite of mine because of that piano trio. With culls you just have to be brutal. Brush the tears from your eyes. No time for pity or sentiment.

Thanks!

Another for the not the same names but similar to confuse category is trumpeter Joe Gordon and trombonist John Gordon.

Mongo Santamaria Y Su Orquesta – ¡Sabroso! Charanga Y Pachanga

I generally dislike JBL. Luckily he sits out for a lot of it. I find that when he does play (so far, i am only half way through) it is at least nicely tempered to the music. Not Lewis's normal Coltraneisms and narrative difficulty, although that does show up a little (as I type he is fouling up "Only Sometimes" a bit). Maybe it will get worse in the second half. What are the other Guidi records you recommend? I don't know him at all. I picked this one to listen to because you made a passing comment a few days ago about ECM albums with colourful covers.

Giovanni Guidi – A New Day

Marilyn Crispell and David Rothenberg - One Dark Night I Left My Silent House

I seem to be seeing more and more Vince Guaraldi cover albums these days, from the likes to jazz musician like Cyrus Chestnut to funk groups like "Vulfpeck". It's quite surprising because I wouldn't have thought that Peanuts was getting more salient, but maybe it is the book in Christmas albums in the era of streaming combined with the inbuilt access to visually arresting cover art. Any favourites out there? Any stinkers? Any surprises?

Trzaska / Mazurkiewicz – Nightly Forester

Henriksen is actually one of the names I've been enjoying the most on my icy Nordic deep dives.

I'm incredibly jealous of this one.

Is this Americans in Italy or all American jazz? If the latter that's a huge task!

That's a great record. I didn't know they'd changed the name. Why do they do that? As if his discography wasn't already complicated enough.

Nonlocal Forecast – Holographic Universe(s?)! Quite a nice record this one. A reimagining of 1980s new age Californian fusion for the laptop era.

I was in that crowd too. Big teenaged Zappa fan so Eric Dolphy was always a subject of interest.

That's a good comparison that I had never thought of. The idea of labelling Braxton and CT as "European" is absurd. But that was a successful hit in those days.

That was what I was going for with my "anxiety over US influence" comment. But query why it is that whispery rhythm-less expansiveness is the sign of jazz continentalism. There are plenty of other more obvious European signifiers that they could have picked up on for European jazz: waltz time, brass band traditions and the European classical avantgarde might all have been more obvious contenders. The Nordic folk roots of Scandi jazz get talked up a lot but they can be hard to discern in the 1990s/2000s ECM era stuff. I am always a little unsure about Johansson's actual musical influence on "European" jazz. He is talismanic, and he clearly led the way with the idea that jazz could and should have its own Nordic tradition (similar to Under Milk Wood for Brits), but I don't hear that much resemblance between Johansson and e.g. Tord G. I hear a likelier line of musical influence on the ECM stuff from Giuffre's experiments in removal of rhythm (particularly those European tour records), and Miles Davis' turn towards expansiveness. But fundamentally I think that Jan Garbarek was a just a big seller and, having had a hit, ECM started pumping out product in the same vein, like a more extreme version of every post-Sidewinder Blue Note record having to have at least two boogaloo tracks. Query whether it is right to even talk about a monolithic European jazz tradition. The legendary European records from the 60s and 70s draw on In A Silent Way, Gil Evans, Don Cherry, Stockhausen, dada, Motorik and Mothers of Invention. They're many things but they not whispery and rhythm-agnostic.

I'm reasonably interested in the idea of those festivals. I understand that they went on for decades, with an ecosystem of fan favourite amateur bands, each inhabiting fiercely exclusionary sub-genres, that turned up to them every time, selling records that in some cases were greatly influential on other amateur bands in their particular micro-niches, until with the turn of the decades, they gradually died off. There's a 'great' series of articles about the scene by a writer called Tex Wyndham which are republished at the moment in the Syncopated Times: https://syncopatedtimes.com/tex-wyndham-texas-shout/ The articles are that kind of self-critical but still can't even identify the wood for the trees production that only a deep insider could produce.

Have you ever seen Imagine The Sound? There is a long interview with a ropey looking Bley, who goes on at length about the effect of the Taylor / Murrey band on the idea of rhythm in jazz, as a whole. He thinks it rendered piano or guitar into mixed rhythm / melody roles but drummers into a support harmony role. That's an idea that I have heard before in respect of Taylor's own music, but Bley's idea seemed to be that this process was irreversible and applied to jazz generally. It isn't a great interview, because Bley looks like he's about to burst into tears the whole time. Anyway, I can see the influence from that to the whispery Nordic stuff. It is one influence among many but sure it is a strong part of the mix. Giuffre's 1960s records, new age, anxiety over US influence and Davis' Second Quartet are all obviously in the mix there too.