clifford_thornton

Saw Ravi a couple times but never John or Alice (duh). I agree, Ravi doesn't sound all that much like his dad. But that's a subject for another thread!

Yep, agreed on both counts. Kinski was also excellent in Herzog's other films including Nosferatu and Aguirre.

I have Farmer's Market as a New Jazz LP, very nice one.

I like this one: Also, "Mau Mau" is an incredible tune. Once I heard it I never forgot it! (doesn't hurt that the vamp on which it sits is somehow familiar... 🤔)

Hard to say. Depends on whether it's worth it and what the licensing or non-licensing looked like. It can be a lot of work to put a stop to grey market releases once they're out in the world and in mass quantities. UMG could be paying more in lawyer fees than they'd recoup from Scorpio putting out unlicensed LP copies of Dippin'.

RIP. He seemed like a fascinating character, and wrote some great tunes.

I am still suspect. It's pretty easy to bootleg records -- i.e., release stuff without properly licensing it. That article is interesting, though, and might mean that the issue is more complicated. The Scorpio Sun Ras are definitely unauthorized and sourced from digital masters, many of which were made for the Evidence CD program (different label, which also ran into some licensing issues by releasing more on CD than they were supposed to from the Saturn catalog). Hearing from the pressing plant that something is "licensed" reads weirdly -- the pressing plant taking Scorpio's money doesn't exactly instill confidence that what they're running off is wholly legit. In fact, I've never heard of a pressing plant caring whether or not their product was making royalties for the artist or label.

Scorpio is a bootleg operation.

Donelian still plays here in upstate New York. I should probably find a time to go see him.

I'd imagine, like Elvin, Paul Gonsalves, or Pee-Wee Russell, it was something like that.

I'd like to own the solo Clive Palmer LP. It's gotten quite hard to find.

used to have all those ISB albums on Elektra, and purged them in a move. I thought this was the most fully-formed of the bunch, although Wee Tam had some great songs too.

yep! All of his 60s/early 70s output is excellent. FWIW, trumpeter Lasse Färnlöf wrote nearly all the music on the first two, and Sweet Alva seems to be the first to actually feature some of Abeleen's writing.

worth it for the title track alone, my god!

RIP, too bad. Just watched her in After Hours not too long ago.

Right, I actually talked to Dave about this so it was indeed conceived as a mass of individual lines/phrases superimposed to create a collective whole. If musicians are playing their own thing in parallel, then they're doing right by the music as it was composed. A lot of free music is quite organized and sometimes even precomposed. Good call on the Coursils. I think of them a bit differently but they are rigorous and spacious for sure. the Horos are pretty bound up in all sorts of questionable ownership deals. That said, there's only a handful of Horo LPs to my mind that are really in the "free jazz" realm. Most of what I own or have heard is of the "off-kilter mainstream" variety. There are some more experimental exceptions, though: Lacy, Schiaffini, Mengelberg-Bennink-Schiano-Rutherford, Laboratorio Della Quercia, MEV... IIRC at least one of the Lacys got the vinyl reissue treatment not so long ago. Re: Togashi, those are great records but I don't feel that something like, for example, Guild for Human Music has much in common with the Black Unity Trio on the face of things.

well, simply put, Echo is a dense thicket of clusters and superimposed scales and operates more like a matrix or latticework. Solestrial and Luna Surface are similar in that they are built off of scalar superimpositions, but structured more purely around constant glissandi. Silva also came from action painting and the gestural strokes of flinging liquid paint onto a floor-bound canvas (acting within that environment) influenced these works pretty heavily.

the Silvas are very different animals from what is being discussed here. no, Otis Harris never led a date, but his playing is of a piece with some of the musicians being discussed here. His writing was maybe a bit more boppish, as evidenced by the additional tracks on the Ted Daniel Sextet album.

yeah, for sure, I was not thinking so much in a European perspective but Prayer for Peace is certainly in a related zone. Beautiful album. "Communications Network" is a neat document of areas in progress though to me it's not quite on the level of CT's other albums. However, there are certainly reasons he sought to release it on his own label and spend the money getting it out into the world. I say this with obvious love for the man and his work.

I can't think of very many records yet to be reissued that merit much hype, the exceptions being the Marzette on Savoy and the Colbeck on Fontana. Otherwise, most of the truly great records in free music have seen the light of day at least a few times. re: ESP, I zoomed in on the two Tylers but there are of course many on the label that I love. Not sure they'd fit in whatever bucket we're putting Black Unity Trio into, but if Ayler-influenced rust belt "free jazz" is the criteria, I'd continue to check into Tyler, Jones, Frank Wright, Otis Harris (Cleveland) as well as Charles Gayle (Buffalo). Not sure about Pittsburgh as it's a town I mostly associate with drummers (f.e.: Beaver Harris, J.C. Moses, Joe Harris). Erie, PA and Gary, IN I don't know enough about to hazard a guess. Cisco Bradley is working on a book about rust belt musicians; I'd imagine it will be an interesting volume.

yeah, the later Tyler LPs are excellent but I don't feel like they are in the same bucket as the Black Unity Trio. His compositional voice and playing were a bit more fully formed by the time "Saga of the Outlaws" came around. for what it is worth, the ESP I gravitate to the most is "Eastern Man Alone," which features Tyler and a string trio of University of Indiana players: the professor David Baker on cello and U of I students Brent McKesson and Kent Brinkley (basses). It does fit in with a certain conception of hummable, spiritual tunes and gooey interplay that Ayler certainly put forth in his music.

Arthur Jones' "Scorpio." I like Scorpio better, but honestly if I had heard Al-Fatihah in the late 90s it probably would be in my pantheon of emotionally rich and direct "power trio" records as well. It wasn't until 2007 or so that I actually sat down with the music, via a CD-R from a friend. Not for nothing, Arthur Jones was also from Cleveland. I suppose the case could be made for Charles Tyler's ESPs having a bit of similarity, vibe-wise, but Tyler's writing and solos have a different cast from Yusef Mumin's.

Happy Birthday, Guy! Thanks for all you do!

Lucky you are. I really want one of those John Butcher t-shirts. Hopefully Oto has some left.

Perhaps he was under contract to Impulse at the time of its recording (June 17, 1965) and thus Impulse felt it had the rights to release it? This was mere weeks before he went over to Englewood Cliffs to record On Impulse!.