Rabshakeh

Thanks! I'm definitely ordering this one.

Its a good one. Right up there with Hearinga Suite in my view.

Very sad. A really unique musician.

Alan's is fun. It is an old fashioned record shop experience and the man himself is very nice and chatty, which is a change. Not an easy trip if you're based in Hornsey though. Are the Palmer's Green ones RDA and Merlin?

Alan's in East Finchley and then The Little Record Shop in Hornsey. Definitely a different experience to the Hackney Hypsters. The difference in price is pretty remarkable. The Hornsey one, which is where I got the Braxton, I'd recommend at the moment. Alan's has a lot of new jazz in, mostly in the Soul Jazz or smoother end of the market. Lots of Jack McDuff etc. Only about a quarter had made it to the shelves though so perhaps worth checking in. I find Yo Yo a bit of a mix. I think that they overprice what they think they'll sell. The stuff that doesn't make it to the website is sometumes more moderate.

Reading the above with interest. My parents hated music and would look relieved when the “noise” was turned off. It didn’t matter what the “noise” was, they preferred silence. I think the only CDs we had in the house were versions of some classical pieces that had crossed their 60s paths (Jacqueline de Pre etc.), but I don’t remember them ever being played. Despite that, my dad had very happy memories of listening to Sonny Rollins as a younger man, which was a good direction to me when I started feeling my way into jazz. In the 90s, Rollins wasn’t really being marketed in the way that e.g. Miles was, and I might easily have missed him. Getting hooked on Freedom Suite (my Dad’s recommendation) after stumbling missteps with Bitches Brew and some Columbia-era Monk, was part of what got me actually interested in jazz.

I spent yesterday on a final trip round North London record shops before further lockdown restrictions are reintroduced in London. I picked up Live At Mintons by Eddie Lockjaw Davis / Jimmy Griffin and Raw Materials and Residuals by Julius Hemphill at one, and a copy of Creative Music Orchestra by Anthony Braxton at the other.

Double thumbs up on this one.

This puts it beautifully.

Modern Jazz Concert from 1958. A record that's full of little surprises.

It could be, although I think he was possibly also just opposed to the genre (at least whenever he wrote the relevant essays). There is another later essay in Black Music where Baraka runs through the New York nightlife options at the time. He rather snootily dismisses "Harlem" jazz clubs for pandering to their listeners. I don't have my copy to hand, but I recall him being very dismissive of the music that was actually being played in the more African American parts of Manhattan. I remember finding it striking when I read it, because, unlike his criticisms of the more establishment venues, he doesn't even bother to explain himself: he obviously just viewed the music as beneath his notice.

I was going to buy this on vinyl on Saturday, but I had a moment of "sense" which I have been regretting since then.

I'll definitely seek that out, as I enjoyed Tangle.

It doesn't help that a lot of it is a question of style and perception. Deep Purple and early Judas Priest made basically the same kind of music at times, but Deep Purple are placed in the "are they or aren't they?" category with Led Zep, whereas Priest were identifiably leading the speed metal charge in the late 70s / 80s. That's mostly down to how they dressed and their lyrical themes, rather than their music. The other band leading the charge, at least as I had always seen it, was Van Halen, which along with Priest is the metal band that I would say was most responsible for "modernising" the sound of metal as it moved into the 80s and turned into a recognisable genre.

Sure. It’s only really in 1979 that “heavy metal” definitely emerges as a genre rather than an adjective. I guess you could make a case that any metal band from earlier than that Is actually “hard rock” or “heavy prog” or “psychedelic blues” or “shock rock”. Van Halen is right at that border chronologically.

There's a Vinyl Me Please primer on Smooth Jazz that I came across once about a year ago. I started listening to the records that it recommended ironically, but they are almost all pretty damn great. Possibly better than a lot of widely accepted CTI classics. The primer sensibly kept to funkier stuff and avoided Messrs. Tesh and G etc. Bit of a life lesson. I think what was said above about Soul Jazz certainly holds true for Smooth Jazz too: Smooth Jazz is a big and vital genre, and any general history of jazz that fails to at least cover Smooth Jazz is missing something that is important to an understanding of what jazz is, where it went and where it is going. I only half recall it, but I don't think Jones / Baraka uses the term. He just obviously regards Cannonball as some sort of regressive force. The essay in question was from the same period when he was putting forward Wayne Shorter and Sonny Rollins as key Avant Garde players, so I agree, the terminology and the viewpoint was different from what we use and where listeners stand today. That video is incredible by the way.

LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka seems to have taken a fairly anti-Soul Jazz stance too, at least at times. Cannonball Adderley comes in for a lot of criticism in some of the articles gathered in Black Music. That Ethan Iverson / Gerald Early interview is really good, by the way. Many thanks for posting it.

I don't get it. Why was Van Halen not a metal band? I was a teenage metalhead. I still like metal. It has never occurred to me to doubt Van Halen's position as a metal band, any more than I would doubt Sabbath's.

What's this one like? It's quite a line up.

Thanks. I'd actually been sizing that one up, at least partly because of the excellent title. I'll take the plunge.

Poor old jump blues seems to have been written out of the narrative everywhere you turn.Too glossy and jazzy to be blues; too poppy to be supposedly high art jazz. The result is that people aren't aware that blues was urbane and jazzy, and jazz was populist long past the bebop line. These genres were pluralist, as you say. There was no one highway taking everyone in a single direction. On the question of popularity as having an inverse relationship with whether the jazz legates (or whoever is invested with the power to excommunicate under jazz canon law) allow you to be mentioned, I do wonder. The Gioias and Giddenses of the world are quite proud of the popularity of Swing era jazz, and seem to have come to an acceptance of the popularity of jazz rock / fusion. Perhaps it is a question of the particular audience with which the particular style is popular - as I think you suggest.

This is one of my favourite albums ever. I don't think it can be highlighted enough.

I can see that there is never going to be space for everything in a general history. I'm not at all surprised that Ted Gioia, for example, doesn't deal with Evan Parker's music, or with the Blue Notes' time in London, or with the jazz scene in the Eastern Bloc countries in his History of Jazz. There wouldn't be space for such a treatment in a book that was meant to have widespread appeal. Then again, it isn't like jazz is overpacked with genres or specialist niches. Nor is it that these books only cover the basics - Gioia for example has a long chapter on recent big band recordings. The lack of attention to soul jazz always seems to me to be the most blaring omission, because (i) it was commercially popular, (ii) it is solidly within the focus of exactly those generalised jazz history books: it had its high point during what those same histories would probably regard as jazz's golden age (i.e., 1945-69) and it is closely associated with hard bop and the Blue Note label, and (iii) unlike other commercially oriented takes on jazz (presenting Mr. G) it produced lots of great music, which people generally agree on. In my view, if you are going to go into some basic detail on Lennie Tristano's or Kenny Dorham's musics (as Gioia, to use the above example, does), there out also to be space for Eddie Lockjaw Davis' and Gene Ammons'.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/10192-what-vinyl-are-you-spinning-right-now/&do=findComment&comment=170500 "llinois Jacquet - How High the Moon (Prestige) Compiles cuts from Jacquet's Prestige releases, 1968-69 Check out the final sentence from Dan Morgenstern's liner notes: "... don't pay attention to any history of jazz tenor that doesn't have Jacquet's name in bold type." Bob Porter feels the same." An interesting quote, and presumably one that was meant to be hyperbolic, but it is a reminder of how little attention Illinois Jacquet's historic corner of the jazz world gets. Does anyone actually know of a general history of jazz that deals with soul jazz, R&B approximate saxophone or jazz organ in anything like reasonable depth? In my experience, the treatment of the genre in general histories of the sort Morgenstern is referring to (as opposed to specialist works on the subject like Porter's) is mostly confined to a summary reference to Jimmy Smith and Horace Silver before moving swiftly on to Giant Steps and Kind of Blue. I can't think of any that give a halfway reasonable treatment, even to "stars" like Lou Donaldson, Brother Jack McDuff or Stanley Turrentine.

I love this one, and love the artwork too.