ghost of miles

This week on Night Lights it's the early music of Charles Mingus, taken from an Uptown Records CD entitled "Charles 'Baron' Mingus: West Coast Recordings, 1945-49." Musicologist Stefano Zenni has an interesting website devoted to this little-heard period of Mingus' music, which includes jump blues, Ellingtonian ballads, bop, and quasi-third stream pieces. There is also a very informative interview with legendary producer (and Organissimo board member) Chuck Nessa, who did a great deal of work on this CD (it was a five-year project, and comes with a 96-page booklet replete with biographies of all the musicians and many photos as well). The program airs Saturday night at 11:10 and can be heard on the web at WFIU.

I think I did mention Jackie's problems and made a more general comment about some of the musicians in the cast having addiction issues themselves. I think I've read or heard somewhere that Freddie Redd may have had a problem too, but I was extremely reluctant to say anything without actual documentation... I'm going to listen to the program again, as we'll probably re-record it for national distribution, and will definitely add the Jackie/general comments if I inadvertently omitted them the first time around.

Is there an estimated release date for this beauty?

Yeah, there was a small ring of chemistry students here at IU a few years ago who made a killing in the stolen-bike industry with judicious applications of liquid nitrogen. The things you learn in college these days!

Dmitry, sorry about that--I thought we'd already put the audio up. I sent a message to the engineers, and it should be posted pretty soon. I'll up the thread when it is.

First I've heard of this set. Sounds like a "must-have" set! Excellent news! This one's actually been on the drawing board for a long time, sort of like the Capitol Big Band box... I first saw mention of it about 5-6 years ago & wondered if it was still in the works. Hah chah!

The Kenton tracks (3 of them in all, I believe) show up on one of the Bird's Eyes CDs, which may be the Philogy that Bill lists above. I have it at home & will check when I get off work.

Dan, thanks for posting the liner note remarks. Peter Keepnews is obviously still around--I'd be curious to contact him & find out what his source was for this info. I'm still thinking that the "Hammond abandoned album" and "Godfrey audition" are probably one & the same. But does the rest of the session survive? I'd like to think that it does--where & how on earth did Columbia dig up "Love for Sale" in 1983? Again mostly an artifact for Montgomery & Indiana jazz fanatics, but I find the whole business fascinating. I don't think that Monk & Wes ever recorded together in the Hampton band--they both show up on certain Hampton sides, but I haven't found any together yet (and if I did, I highly doubt either would be featured). This Columbia session, whatever it was, certainly seems to be the first time that all three of the brothers recorded together.

Jim, The Godfrey session is almost surely the one attributed to Hammond on the liners for the Columbia LP ALMOST FORGOTTEN--in fact, if Godfrey was associated with Columbia at the time, I just can't imagine that it isn't the same one. I'm really intrigued by David Baker's reference to a separate session done with Quncy Jones--where would that have been done? Wasn't Quincy doing a lot of work at EmArcy around 1955?

I think Chris is right, based on a passage in Ingram's 1985 bio. Ingram doesn't list the session in his discography, and is apparently unaware of the then-recent (the book would have been going to press in 1984, I'm assuming) release of ALMOST FORGOTTEN. Here's the relevant passage from his book: Ingram then goes on to describe a two-year residency at an Indianapolis club until the Montgomery Brothers, minus Wes, headed out to the West Coast and became the Mastersounds. So, apparently, there were two Montgomery Brothers recording sessions with Wes that preceded what I always thought of as their first studio appearance together. Pete C (if you're reading this) did Seth at Sony ever get back to you on anything that might be in the vaults? And under what label's auspices would the Quincy Jones session have fallen? Undoubtedly these sessions would primarily be of interest to Montgomery buffs--I doubt there's anything earthshattering about them--but it is an interesting chapter that I had no knowledge of until yesterday. I'll also take another look at the liners for ALMOST FORGOTTEN, to see exactly what that writer had to say.

Lon, thanks much--this is good to know!

Here's Yanow's review of the album in AMG:

I'll also ask Pookie Johnson about it the next time that I see him. I know that Buddy is still alive, and I'm hoping to line up an interview with him in the next several months--he could probably shed some light on the backstory as well.

Chris, It was on the back of a Columbia rarities LP called ALMOST FORGOTTEN that we have at the station. Don't have it with me, but the author of the notes may have been mistaken--the phrasing he used seemed to indicate that a number of tracks had been recorded for an album project that was then abandoned. I haven't heard the "Love for Sale" track yet, as our afternoon jazz DJ just showed me the LP a couple of hours ago--hoping to listen to it tomorrow. The author of the liner notes says that Wes takes a one-chorus solo and that his style is still a far cry from where it evolved to by '59. Until tonight I had never heard of such a session. I have a Wes bio at home & am going to peruse it tonight to see if there's any mention of this session.

No, but your spam sure is.

Jane Greer. I watched THE BIG STEAL again this weekend and am obsessed once more... she reminds me so much of my wife in that movie! I didn't realize until yesterday that THE BIG STEAL was Mitchum's "comeback" movie after the pot bust. Evidently much of the movie was filmed while he was still in jail.

$3 for a $10 cut, but it's been a long time since I had a $10 cut. I've been hanging out with those fancy-pants "stylists"... barbershop culture is a really interesting phenomenon, and, to a large extent, a dying one, I think. At least it is out here.

The only label box I have is the 2-CD Cobra box - at thetime it was the only way to get the Otis Rush master takes in one place. Other music on it is good, too. That Cobra box is excellent--one of the first blues CDs I ever bought. NASHVILLE JUMPS from Bear Family is excellent as well.

John McCluskey, MR. AMERICA'S LAST SEASON BLUES, and the new Langston Hughes mini-anthology, LET AMERICA BE AMERICA.

Man, I didn't know about this--in 1955 the Montgomery Brothers (Wes, Monk, and Buddy) went to New York to record an album with John Hammond that was never released. Monk was on electric bass, Buddy on piano, Alonzo "Pookie" Johnson on tenor sax (Pookie still lives in Indpls. and leads a group there), and Robert Johnson on drums. There's one track, "Love for Sale," that came out on a Columbia anthology called ALMOST FORGOTTEN. Anybody else have info on this apparently lost session? The recording date is given as June 16, 1955.

One of the songs off the upcoming album--"Twilight," formerly known as "Somebody's Baby"--can now be downloaded from the front page of Sweet Addy.

I'm hoping that some of the recent RVGs (McCoy's TENDER MOMENTS & Jimmy Smith's HOME COOKIN', specifically) show up in the next month or so.

Yep, I was hepped to this when I came across mention of the album by Dmitry in a thread about THE CONNECTION's release on DVD. Dexter Gordon's score for the West Coast production was different as well (some of it survives on DEXTER CALLING). The program was a bit rough in a couple of transitional places, as we're now trying to fit it for a 59-minute format for national distribution. That means you have to "cut away" at certain points where some stations might be taking NPR news, usually by playing a music bed. It's the first time I've tried to do that with the show, and we'll probably go back and reassemble the program (as opposed to recording it live, which makes hitting those marks much more difficult, particularly when you take post-production editing into account--in other words, I stopped talking right at the 29:00 minute mark, say, but when we tightened up some pauses & long track endings, my out-cue ended up being at 28:56. Etc, etc.)

This week on "Night Lights" it's music and dialogue from THE CONNECTION, a groundbreaking 1959 off-Broadway play from New York City's Living Theater group, written by Jack Gelber, that cast jazz musicians as heroin addicts waiting for a score. Artists that passed through the play included pianist Freddie Redd (who composed the original score), alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, and pianist Cecil Taylor. THE CONNECTION was made into a 1962 movie directed by Shirley Clarke, who would go on to the film the adaptation of Warren Miller's controversial Harlem-set novel THE COOL WORLD. A West Coast production was also staged in Los Angeles, with different music written by cast member Dexter Gordon. The show won several Obies and ran for more than 700 performances; eventually it was presented in London, where its raw immediacy and demolition of the normal boundaries between audience and cast provoked a near-riot. We'll hear music from four different versions of THE CONNECTION's soundtrack--the Blue Note album released under Freddie Redd's name, the Felsted record on which Tina Brooks replaced Jackie McLean and trumpeter Howard McGhee was added to the line-up; baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne and pianist Kenny Drew's rarely-heard 1962 score; and Dexter Gordon's Blue Note recordings of two of the pieces he wrote for the Los Angeles production. We'll also hear dialogue from the 1962 movie version, which included original cast members Freddie Redd and Jackie McLean. Though parts of THE CONNECTION may now sound dated, it remains a cultural landmark of both early-1960s jazz and theater--a moment when the jazz world found itself in the service of avant-garde drama. THE CONNECTION is available on DVD from Dusty Groove America. An interview with CONNECTION director Shirley Clarke can be read here. Jazz and fiction writer Joe Milazzo's meditative take on THE CONNECTION: Milazzo This obituary of CONNECTION playwright Jack Gelber talks about the play's initial reception and its impact on other playwrights such as Edward Albee: Both versions of Freddie Redd's THE CONNECTION (on Blue Note with Jackie McLean and on Boplicity with Tina Brooks and Howard McGhee) are currently out of print. I have not been able to find a CD copy of Cecil Payne's version, though it was supposedly re-issued at one point by either Fresh Sounds or Collectables. A friend was able to supply an LP copy for this program.

Yikes!