clifford_thornton

I'm wondering if the problem is recording process, rather than the actual music played - not being an expert at the 'how' myself, I still can say I prefer a lot of top-heavy grit to the crisp, clear and almost stereo-test levels that a lot of fusion-y records after about 1975 seem to hit. Does this make sense? It's just a thought... I'm surprised about the dismissal of Elton Dean, but to each one's own!

Wait, now we're back to sqare one!

No shit. That was my first thought as well.

I won't lay claim to dropping knowledge on the jazz vocal canon other than a few less-canonized artists, but BC has piqued my curiosity without being enough so as to pull the trigger on picking up any of her records. Some across-the-board recommendations might be useful for those neophytes like myself. She sang at LeRoi's BARTS extravaganza (The New Wave in Jazz, Impulse), am I right? Think it would've been interesting to have somehow stuck in the Carter and Ra tracks on that LP. "New Wave" might have been interpreted a little differently as a result... or not.

I did like some of their more Germs-y efforts on Incesticide, actually. Haven't heard either of those bands in YEARS.

Continuing with Bob Thompson covers: Steve Lacy Quartet - Forest and the Zoo - (ESP-Disk') with Rava, Dyani and Moholo, recorded at a Fluxus event in Buenos Aires!

Rob Brown Trio - Breath Rhyme - (Silkheart) a great trio with William Parker and Denis Charles, extremely colorful music! Appropriately, with a painting by Bob Thompson as its cover...

Strange... wonder who was in the band? I can't really imagine him playing with electric musicians, but who knows...

From James?

Which is funny, because Pearl Jam are still pretty huge if I remember it right. And to a degree, they are in a position to do whatever they want because they're living quite comfortably, I assume. Yeah, I can't think of too many people who tear up the cheques.

For me, that's the strongest cut on the album. It's interesting to hear him in the context of Grachan Moncur III's Evolution from a few years earlier - Lee adds a lot of balls that the record might not have had without him, and yet the entirely different weight of Grachan's music (and the rest of the ensemble) add a strange degree of 'otherworldly' poise to Lee's playing as well. Pretty cool record for those reasons alone (and a few others, too, fwiw).

Ted Curson - Urge - (Fontana UK stereo, blue label, photograph cover) Booker Ervin, Jimmy Woode, Edgar Bateman

Jim, of course - agreed on all counts. My more pithy response is in no way taken as philosophical minimization of conviction in self - how could one, indeed, produce work of staggering conviction without that very fact of selfness? Assuming your last question was rhetorical - think that would be obvious to anyone here. But, there are many with far less than "icon" status who nevertheless had steadfast will to both art and action (action = self).

This is one of those dates that I cannot even recall what it sounds like - though the King LP has been in my shelves for quite a while. Still, I would like to hear the "augmented" ten-incher, as "Everything Happens to Me" is one of my favorite standards.

Derailment #xxx - a MAJOR difference between Miles and Bill Evans: Evans' tropes were copied in a way as to promote a certain 'style' of playing, rather than a notch in the music's continual refinement. Miles was about as far from a given 'style' as one could get. Granted, what Bill Evans did could probably not have been done without the references to Miles' work of a certain period. It's funny - if anyone here had said even five years ago that I would be remarking extensively on anything Miles-related, no matter how oblique the connection, I would've scoffed. Certainly not the biggest Miles nut around, but the discussion is interesting.

Totally agree. Nor do board members speak for one another, though we often try to, it seems!

I agree that we're way beyond the scope of the origninal thread, which was how he was so popular. Not sure if that's to be conflated with why, or why he was who he was. I got it as more related to marketing (both his own and his record companies), than the caliber of his playing, or group assembly, or ideas w/r/t music. Like it's been stated previously, conviction in the 'rightness' of one's art and the idea that it should be presented in a maximal way, combined with record company pockets, don't seem to quite get at how this phenomenon occurs. Hence my attempts to augment the topic with more left-field artists, but it seems that that isn't going to work here.

They can't go too far down the tubes, or else they won't be able to fund those reissues...

I hadn't read that comment before posting my little two cents, but I would suppose that is the main thing for his work in the 50s-60s. Funny, it does sorta sound business-like, when you put it in those terms (not a slag). Sometimes it's hard to separate astuteness from creative genius. But then, Miles is quite irreplicable, as Cecil, Mingus, the AEC in their prime, etc.

I was just playing the Ware card for reaction - I actually have little interest in his playing. Frank Lowe, yes. Kalaparusha, yes. Noah Howard, sometimes. I think what I was trying to get at was whether major label support and artistic conviction were, in theory, enough to drive somebody's work into public consciousness and interest. Obviously, neither are "enough." Edit: Clem: Not sure if we were on the same page on Ware in the first place - I'm well aware of his lengthy and well-distributed discography, though it seems the Columbia thing could've played out a bit differently than it actually did. Part of Miles' astuteness comes from being able to put together a band greater than the sum of its parts, and not relying wholly on his own approach as a soloist - even Lee Morgan or Woody Shaw couldn't, in my estimation, follow through in a similar trajectory. Like my comment in another thread, I really don't dig Noah Howard's playing all that much - solely on the whims of personal taste - but the guy could put together some great bands and wrote a number of wonderful compositions. Ditto on the bands operated by my namesake, though Thornton isn't always my first-choice soloist. Nevertheless, he put together some mean groups. So it seems on some level with Miles. Edit: Not to be confused with comparing Thornton and Howard to Miles on a grander scale.

My cat was named Silva, after the bass player-violinist-cellist-composer Alan Silva.

I have heard that Frank Wright died onstage of a heart attack while performing onstage in Wuppertal, 17 May 1990.

Prince Lasha on AAJ Enjoy! I think there is more Woody-related info there, but it would take some sifting.

Another two cents: I used to work at a liquor store as a college undergraduate, and strangely enough, we had a turntable in the store. I'd bring in records from time to time and listen while sitting behind the counter. One evening, I was listening to trumpeter Jacques Coursil's Black Suite, a very spare recording of somber, Bill Dixon-inspired music. This rather cute girl was shopping, and asked "hey, is this Miles Davis?" I told her no, and that it was Jacques Coursil, handed her the cover or whatever, and of course that blew her mind - probably because she had assumed "jazz trumpet = Miles" without knowing what else was out there. Needless to say, she did keep coming back to the store... I'll certainly say that having the idea of Miles as a reference point is a good one if someone can go beyond it - but then we're talking sociology rather than something inherent in his work.