Rabshakeh

Hope that you enjoy it! It's one of my favourites.

I need to dig this one out again. Thanks for the reminder.

Currently listening to Khan Jamal’s Dark Warrior (Steeplechase, 1984), with Johnny Dyani on bass and Charles Tyler on alto.

An underrated quartet. I like City Gates a lot.

It may well be...

I do like that blog. It's a solid mixture of genuine musician's insight with total nonsense that drives me up the wall. But the former is predominant and makes the latter bearable.

Thanks for posting this. I love that album. As you say, he's a huge part of it. After listening to records like Pillars, you can't un-hear how important he is to Bells. It's impressive, given how strong Mitchell's own voice is.

Those Frank Wright and Noah Howard discs are some of my absolute favourites because of Bobby Few's playing. His melodic sensibility was pretty unique in the free jazz world at that time. It made those records sweet as well as salty. R.I.P. Very sad news.

At least it’s better than that 30 run Marzette Watts repressing that ESP did.

This is great! Thanks for sharing. Did you attend the performance too?

Bells for the South Side (ECM, 2017) by Roscoe Mitchell. I hadn’t listened to this one in a year or so, during which time Tyshawn Sorey has really exploded in stature. Listening to this record now, I can hear so much of his sound and input throughout the record. There’s some amazing players and compositions on these two discs, but the combination of Mitchell and Sorey is very special.

The 3 Sounds - Soul Symphony (Blue Note, 1969) You’ve got to love that cover! Now moving on to Solos (Chatham House, 1973) by Dickie Landry, featuring a young Alan Braufman. I’m really getting into the latter day McLean albums recently. I’ll give this one a go.

I hope you enjoy it!

I'm with you on this. It's a very special album.

Any showing for Abdul Wadud!

Happy new year!

I am probably wrong about this, and no doubt someone who was there at the time is better placed to explain what is meant by the term, but I always thought that "neo-bop" was a slightly pejorative term to distinguish (1) the revivalist stream of the early '80s onwards (e.g., the family Marsalis, but also someone later like Joshua Redman) that was self consciously reviving the music, performance style and often dress of '50s Art Blakey or Miles Davis' second quintet, as opposed to (2) the earlier streams of "straight ahead" music in the later '60s through to early '80s, that were an actual linear continuation of that earlier music, but which lacked the later revivalists' strictures (e.g., Woody Shaw / Keith Jarrett). I confess that I associate this type of music as a whole with the musicians marketed as the "Young Lions" in the mid-80s, rather than the later 90s musicians who people seem to enjoy more (judging by the comments here). Hence the probably inaccurate title of this thread. I think that I need to revisit that recent "90s straight ahead" thread from a few months ago.

Middle aged lions, now getting on in years.

I was wondering about this too. Do people differentiate?

Feels like a very different type of music.

You got the last one, apparently.

ErstLive 005 by Keith Rowe/Sachiko M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide (ErstWhile, 2005). I loved this one when it came out, but I guess that nothing ages worse than yesterday's electronic improvisation. I can't see what I liked about it now. Now on to Ethan Iverson's Costumes Are Mandatory (HighNote, 2013). Lee Konitz' chemistry with Larry Grenadier is the main appeal of this one for me. I pulled it out mainly because the day it was released, I was in sunny Avignon at the theatre festival, and that's an appealing place to be, right now, from the point of view of icy 31 December 2020 London.

That's a good record.

I didn't know this one. I like it.

I find it interesting that a fair few of the responses above highlight the late 80s and early/mid 90s generation as having explored and improved upon the sound and style of the early/mid 80s set (with which this thread is concerned, call them what you will), and that it is the chronologically later musicians to which people find themselves returning, 20-30 years on, rather than the actual "Young Lions". I suppose it's somewhat ironic, given that the "Young Lions" have assumed a form of canonicity which the following generation did not - perhaps that's because they never had a snappy marketing line and major label interest. Perhaps if they had been billed as "The Younger Tigers" and released on EMI they would have a similar standing. Who knows. Personally, aside from Terence Blanchard, I had never felt much of an urge to explore the earlier neo-boppers, but I'm going to revisit the records that have been mentioned in this thread. I'm probably more intrigued, though, by the idea of exploring the following generation of neo-bop / straight ahead musicians that are spoken of more highly, as I really know very little about them.