Rabshakeh

I got these in a twofer a few years back for effectively no money. One of my favourite LPs.

Count Basie At Newport (Verve, 1957) There's no better record to show why so many musicians were so confused at being labeled as "jazz artists". You could call this, jazz, swing, R&B, big band or blues and you'd be 20% correct each time. It makes no sense for a record like this to be marketed to a jazz audience and not a rowdy blues crowd. It could easily satisfy either, because it is all of those things. Yeah!! I just finished with that one.

Impressive original to own.

I've been very impressed so far.

It is a symphony, isn't it? It's called a symphony. Or isn't it? I forget which was round jr went. If I can't pick The Song, I'll go with 7. What led to the question?

Can I pick Das Lied von der Erde?

Great cover art concept too.

Max Roach Quintet in Europe with Sam Rivers (Condition West) Not a great deal of info on this one available out there. If anyone knows when it was recorded or who was in the group, let me know. Some of them get called out, but not all. It doesn't seem to be on Discogs even.

Johnathan Blake - Gone, But Not Forgotten (Criss Cross, 2014)

The whole Ezz-Thetics series has suddenly popped onto Bandcamp.

He never seemed to get the recognition that his peers and sidemen got, which is strange, because everything about Mr. Moondoc was great. I'd sooner listen to his albums than many of those who did make it.

Same here. Exeter University had an excellent AV section in its library, with lots of LPs. I remember my first encounters with Heliocentric Worlds and Agharta there. I often wonder who bought the LP collection when they were sold off.

John Zorn's overtures to the metal world were quite important to me in increasing the amount of jazz that I listened to. I don't listen to that stuff at all anymore, but it was important then. I have met a lot of other people who crossed over that same bridge. On The Corner always struck me as the much more intimidating and 'advanced' album of the two, but I have also never understood why BB was so well received - it has none of the catchy hooks you get in other fusion hits of the time. Looking back on it, and as I have mentioned in other threads, I remain cross at the extent to which predatory major label marketing and unchallenged jazz education assumptions held me back as a teenager in the 1990s from getting into jazz - leading my tottering first steps down paths that were never going to appeal to a 15 year old listener. There's a reason why my younger family members who grew up in the internet age are jazz fans whereas my own peer group who came of age pre-MySpace were not.

Rene Thomas et son Orchestre - Meeting Mr Thomas (Barclay, 1963)

You can hear them moaning about USPS in Orkish from here.

Currently listening to Paul Brusger's Go To Plan B, which someone mentioned here a week or two ago. A really nice high definition modern bop record with John Hicks and Ronnie Cuber both in great form.

I did actually make my wife sit through this. She was really entranced by Cecil Taylor, but formed a visceral dislike of Paul Bley. Everyone in this film looked like they were going through a tough patch at the time. Bley pontificating with rotten teeth, Shepp welling up constantly, and Dixon, still largely unknown, talking about himself, drunk. I'm not sure how Taylor compared to himself at his height. I really felt for them all: I got the sense that they felt left out in the cold at the turn of a rough decade, during which they must have been made to feel like irrelevancies. Regardless, i second the recommendation.

That’s an interesting order. How did that occur?

Oh no.

Interesting. I need to revisit those.

I had bad first experiences. It took a while to unlearn stupid habits. I spent a year or two as a teen buying jazz, just because I thought it was something I should do. I got shipwrecked on records like Kind of Blue and Blue Train, which I wasn't sure whether I liked (I do now, but they weren't great starting choices in retrospect). I was also overly led by "name" horn players: I bought a bunch of cheap reissues that had what I thought were A listers double billed, etc., which looking back on it were basically just cynically marketed outtake records that had the leads on only maximum one track each: landfill reissues from the height of the CD era. Nowadays I would know that a record named something like "Trane 'n' Diz!" is likely to be nonsense, but back then I didn't. Then it just clicked for me when I bought My Favorite Things and A Love Supreme. These were records that sounded deep and discordant and resonated with me, at a point in time when I was around 75% hormone. I fell in love with Coltrane, at the same time as Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner, and then began to understand that it wasn't just about who was the horn player, and I began to expand outwards from that point. About a year after that I chanced upon a throwaway reference to an album called "Sound" by an artist I'd never heard even mentioned called Roscoe Mitchell. It had a cool looking cover. I managed to find the CD reissue in a shop later that day by chance and I bought it on a whim. That was really it for me.

I think people will disagree with me, but Solal. A really unique concept when he's at his best. Organ combo served à la Blue Note or Organ combo au Prestige?

Thanks. I'll keep an eye out.

What's the third? Or is "Dizzy & Miles" two separate schools? If so, who's a trumpeter who was influenced Davis as opposed to Gillespie pre-53? This is a thing. Some people like LPs, me included. It generally ruins the experience for me if I am listening to a comp of 78s.

In case anyone hasn't seen the press, there's a doc coming out about the early years of Free Jazz, that is directed by Tom Surgal. It comes out on Friday, which is my wife's birthday. I've been joking with her that I will take her to see it as a "treat". (Although I'm not sure it is getting a theatrical release over here, so sadly she may have to miss it.) The Guardian gave it a long write up today. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/07/fire-music-history-free-jazz-documentary The write up makes it sound solid, but a little generic. Still, I am interested. I'd like to hear what any New Yorkers or Los Angeleans think of it. In the meantime, I'm reminded of this classic meme: