Rabshakeh

That's a great way to describe them. Teenage hormone jazz.

Does anyone have particular favourite JATP or NGJS LPs? The box set is a little hot for my blood but I’m interested in picking up some of the LPs.

Now on another new vinyl / old friend: the 1955 DFD / Moore version. Not fashionable any more, but still a version I love and which wasn’t going to turn down when I saw it in good condition.

Jim Hall - Concierto (CTI, 1975) First listen to a new acquisition. I’m actually very disappointed with this on vinyl. It sounds like the tracks are playing out of time. This is not something I ever encountered with the digital versions. Is that a known issue with CTI? Even aside from that, it lacks the close mystery of the CD master, and Ron Carter’s horribly recorded bass is much more prominent.

I really do struggle to tell them apart!

Miles Davis - Live at the Fillmore East March 7, 1970: It's About that Time

Oh no. He really felt like he was doing well. Very sad news.

Randy Brecker - Score (Solid State, 1969)

Ralph Peterson I actually really like. The Fo'ter records are really good.

Well done to Pony Poindexter for not showing favouritism.

Universally acknowledged fact: Between the release of Red Clay by Freddie Hubbard in May 1970 and Wynton Marsalis' debut in January 1982, the only jazz music recorded was the sound of Grover Washington Jr and Chuck Mangione arguing over who gets to use the cash register and a single field recording of wolves howling in a barren wasteland. Other than that... Nothing. Thinking it through though, I see a hole in the argument. Can you really call Red Clay a jazz record when it was recorded using electricity (lightbulbs etc.)? Probably best to adjust the thesis and move the starting date backwards.

In my opinion, there's nothing wrong, in itself, with the sort of conservatively minded hard bop and post bop these guys played. What's the problem is that these guys just didn't make that many good records. It's just hard to understand why these guys weren't better. Flowers picked too soon and wilting fast; too much money and studio interference impeding actual development; stupid ideology that shuts down interesting concepts.

Thank you.

Wynton Marsalis - Blood on the Fields (Columbia, 1997) I hadn't listened to this before. I'd be impressed if this had been composed by a precocious high school student.

Are there any that stand out to you? I don't know the material at all. Thank you.

Which ones in particular?

They all regularly play on each others' records: no surprise to see Lockjaw, Jacquet and Ben Webster getting co billing.

Jan Garbarek - Dis (ECM, 1977)

I think my favourites are these: Illinois Jacquet - Bottoms Up and Arnett Cobb - Blow, Arnett Blow I guess the Jacques/Cobbs and the Lockjaws/Griffins are close cousins of the musicians in this thread to the extent that it might make more sense to see them as the same thing, perhaps targeted at different age groups. Thank you everyone for the Byas and Eldridge recommendations too.

I started listening to jazz long after the controversies that this bunch brought up had already ceased to be live debates, and after the critical consensus was formed that bop disappeared in 1970 (the widely accepted Red Clay End Point thesis). I think that before I started to investigate for myself, I had assumed that the reason why Marsalis was famous was because he had been in some way responsible for bringing back the sort of high quality bop that the punters supposedly craved. Once you become aware of the very active and impressive bop ecosystems of the 1970s before the bop revival and then the very successful and popular work from the revival's early stages (e.g. VSOP, Dexter Gordon, etc.), all of which preceded Marsalis, the continuing critical focus on the controversy over the Young Lions, even once the marketing budgets had stopped flowing, starts looking weirder. I had been wondering whether I had missed some gems, but it really doesn't appear so. Bottom line: to me, this really does not appear in retrospect to have been a particularly strong period in the history of post-1970 bop music, even if one narrowly focuses on the most conservative side of post-1970 bop.

Over the last year or so I've listened to most of the albums in this thread a couple of times. I have to say that it's surprising how comparatively low the hit rate is for the core "Young Lion" movement. Perhaps other than two obvious Marsalises, and Harrison / Blanchard, there's very little I'll be revisiting. Once you get to the slightly later cohorts like Hargrove, Payton or Carter, or even later with pure genre players like Eric Alexander, the records really improve in quality. I shouldn't be surprised, given the very lukewarm feeling in the (very helpful) responses to the thread. But it is still weird how poorly these records compare to even chronologically adjacent traditionalist bop records by other younger musicians from the late 70s (e.g. Ricky Ford or the musicians in Steps) or mid to late 90s (e.g. the 3 mentioned above), let alone the slightly older cohort of bop players like Woody Shaw or Billy Harper. Presumably dry production and inexperienced players aren't a great combo, and that's most of what's to blame, but even then...

What are these Definitive Black & Blue Sessions? Is there a connection to the Black & Blue label? I've had a quick good and it's not clear.

These are great.

This is a comment from a long time ago, but does anyone know to what it refers? I have the record and found the liner notes odd in their emphasis on the opposition between the approaches of the two players.