Mark Stryker

Rara Avis A 50-minute snapshot of casual straight ahead-jazz in New York in 1976 at Boomer's (340 Bleeker in the Village). Kenny Barron, Bob Berg, Al Foster and a bass player I don't immediately recognize. Anyone know who it is? And does anyone have any ideas who filmed this and why? As always, Barron is unruffled and consistent, and Foster in particular is playing his ass off. My best guesses for the bass player are Bob Cunningham or a young Charles Fambrough, but as I said, I don't recognize him.

The one time I was at Herbie's house, I was disappointed to find that he keeps the Cobra offsite in a private garage for protection. However, I did get to see his everyday car in the garage -- a red Ferrari. Also, this is my favorite Herbie/Cobra story. This excerpt is from an LA Weekly story a number of years ago: -- I bought the car, for $6,000. Then I got hired by Miles, maybe a month later, and I’m gonna go on the road. But I had one more gig, at the Village Gate in New York, as a sideman for Clark Terry. … When we were playing the last set, I looked out the corner of my eye, and who do I see? Miles! Miles had come down. We finish the set, we come down and Miles says, [gravelly voice] “I’ll give you a lift home.” He knew I was living nearby. I said, “Aww, man, that would be fantastic, but I just bought a new car.” He said, “It’s not a Maserati.” I said, “No, no it’s not.” We get downstairs and my car is near the exit. He says, “Cute.” We both get to the stoplight at Sixth Avenue. It’s like 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. I knew what was going to happen: As soon as the light turns green, we’d floored it, right! So we drove several blocks before the next red light. I got to the light shortly before Miles, and I smoked Marlboros in those days. I grabbed one, lit it, rolled down the window as Miles drives up. He looked over at me and he says, “What the fuck is that?” I said, “It’s an AC Cobra.” He said, “Get rid of it.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “It’s dangerous.” And then he started driving [off]. And I’m thinking, “I beat Miles!”

That's a concert hall not a club. Those copper tubs with the glare are timpani.

I was just thinking of this point a couple days ago, though not in relation to Braxton. I was listening (again) to Earl Hines' brilliant Quintessential Earl Hines (1970) and realized that he was just 67 when he recorded it. That seemed ancient at the time. By comparison, Chick turns 79 next week, and Herbie turned 80 in April.

I don’t suppose anyone here relates to this.

I don't suppose anyone here has any interest in hearing what apparently is a previously unknown phone interview with Charlie Parker that aired on the radio in 1954. Nah, didn't think so ... but here it is anyway.

Nailed it.

New from the New Yorker culture desk. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/anthony-daviss-revolutionary-opera-x

Thanks. This all makes sense to me.

Anybody have any idea what the hell this is? Not listed in Lord ... https://www.discogs.com/Benny-Golson-Bobby-Troup-Two-Part-Inventions-For-Trumpet/release/10327678

Thanks much. Appreciate it!

Thanks to Peter and DJCavanagh for the kind words, to David for the media exposure, and to all the gang here at Organissimo for the ongoing support.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/opinion/sonny-rollins-art.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR0YAFiswgP9CSvrt6__fq-aVRd-jYl-Rq223mAq7CRyPejM_CbRm6wx0P4

Hidden History Here's Sarah Vaughan in 1970 swinging the hell out of "I'll Remember April" at a racehorse tempo with a 22-year-old Jan Hammer, just out of Berklee, playing his ass off on piano. Gene Perla, who got Hammer on the gig, is on bass, Jimmy Cobb plays drums. Have mercy! Gene tells me that the source of the tape is a Vancouver television appearance. There's a second tune that he sent me from the same show -- the Beatles "And I Love Him" (sic). As near as I can tell, Hammer was with Sassy for the better part of a year. This reminds me of the remarkable bootleg tape of Sarah a couple of years earlier with Chick Corea in the band. What a shame that neither Chick nor Jan recorded with her, but their tenures coincided with a tough time in the recording business for Sarah. After her Mercury contract ran out in 1967, she wouldn't sign another deal with a label until Mainstream in 1971. One more amusing Hammer story: Apparently, about a year after he left Sarah's group, he got called to sub one night for her ailing pianist at the Rainbow Room in NY. By then, Hammer was playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Imagine playing synthesizers in a rock venue with Mahavishnu one night, wearing blue jeans and surrounded by amplifiers 10-stories high, for an audience of stoned teenagers and college students; and then the next night putting on a tux to accompany Sarah Vaughan on a Steinway at the Rainbow Room for a bunch of swells drinking Manhattans and Whisky Sours. It's a living. In a similar vein, Chick left Sarah to join Miles' quintet with Wayne, Ron, and Tony. A few years earlier, at the same time Bob James was touring with Sarah, he also recorded an avant-garde date for ESP and the challenging post-bop material that appears on "Once Upon a Time," the new Resonance Records release of previously unissued 1965 material. (I wrote the liner note for the Resonance release.) The point is that history often comes down to us in reductive form, with the demarcations between eras and genres drawn in bold lines and musicians' careers seemingly laid out in clear, linear fashion. The truth is that things on the ground in real time were generally a lot blurrier, if not downright messy.

Roy was deeply into Monk -- it was Roy who originally turned Geri onto Monk in the first place -- so the impetus to play Monk started with him and then it was a matter of finding out what common tunes by Monk the group knew and which ones Woody wanted to play. Not a conscious tribute. Coda: Geri told me it was Roy who pushed her to learn Monk's language and be able to use it when she played Monk's songs on gigs with the drummer. She also told me a story about how he once lit into her when she was still a student at Howard for straying too far from Monk when she began to be influenced by other players and ideas like Herbie Hancock. This was all in a larger context of her coming to terms with various mentors -- and those mentors coming to terms with the fact that each wasn't the only one with an impact on her.

"Bemsha Swing" was never a Blue Note project. It was just a gig at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit pairing Woody with a local trio that Roy Brooks put together. Roy was the cat who made the gig happen and he had it recorded. A decade later he was able to sell the the tapes to Blue Note with MIchael Cuscuna the key figure in producing them for release.

BTW, here’s the jury for this year’s music prize as listed at Pulutzer.org William C. Banfield (Chair) Professor of Liberal Arts & Africana Studies, Music and Society, Berklee College of Music Jon Batiste Bandleader/Musician, New York City David Bloom Conductor; Co-Artistic Director, Contemporaneous Kevin Puts* Professor of Composition, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University William Trafka Former Director of Music, St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City *past Pulitzer winner

I reviewed the premiere of ”Amistad” in Chicago in 1997. I can’t believe that was 23 years ago! It had issues dramatically—the libretto was too long, wordy, unfocused. Musically, it was more successful, especially in terms of the orchestra; vocally it was more inconsistent, and you could feel Davis still getting a handle on setting text and creating a lyric vocal line within his language. But I think you’ll like it, particularly if you know his other work across idioms.

Anthony Davis won the Pulitzer Prize today for his opera “Central Park Five.” https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-05-04/anthony-davis-pulitzer-prize-music-central-park-five-opera-long-beach%3f_amp=true

Co-signing on Jim’s comments, I’ll add this film of Richie and Eddie Jefferson made 41 years ago this week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago in May 1979. Two nights later, the band was in Detroit and Eddie Jefferson was killed by a guy with a gun on the sidewalk outside Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. The then-young rhythm section, all good friends of mine, was a working trio back in the day in Chicago. Pianist John Campbell, bassist Kelly Sill, and drummer Joel Spencer.

Apologies if there is an existing Sonship Theus thread, but I didn't see it. Just today a friend pointed me to this revealing Modern Drummer obituary for Theus, who died in 2011. Thought I'd share it. It's nicely written by drummer Gerry Gibbs and it's both quite humorous and genuinely touching. Theus was a man who certainly knew why he was put on this earth. This paragraph says a lot: "Befitting his unusual approach to sound and technique, Theus was known to carry himself through life in idiosyncratic ways. One bandleader asked him several times to play more softly because he couldn’t hear himself. At the end of the set Sonship told the leader, 'I will go outside and ask God what He thinks.' When he returned to the stage playing as loudly as ever, the drummer explained, 'I asked God whether I should play quieter…and He said no.'" --- This is an approach to daily life I had never quite pondered. "I'm sorry (insert editor's name here), but I asked God whether I should keep it to only 1,000 words and He said, 'no.'" https://www.moderndrummer.com/2011/08/woody-sonship-theus/?fbclid=IwAR0gEsNmcQhF6rYd3sYlqc2JDx1BoJLPmHvmikfvHb9odyuoQyXHtAkmY0E

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/arts/music/electric-recording-co-vinyl.html?referringSource=articleShare

Don’t forget Sonny Clark.

Jim is right on here. I love the term "infrastructure." It's not just that Cedar and Billy so often hit the syncopated eighth notes at the same time; it's the way the accumulation of those accents,-- both those they hit in unison but also the ones that get batted back and forth like a tennis ball -- builds a groove that envelopes the beat and the band. A great example of the dialogue between Cedar and Billy is the way they play behind Dexter and Freddie' on "Milestones" in 1972 on Dexter's "Generations." (The bassist is Buster Williams). Listen especially to the second A section in Dexter's second chorus, starting at the 2:05 mark -- Cedar plays a series of anticipatory off-beats and Higgins' chatter connects them via quarter-note triplets on his snare. Cedar is actually a fairly busy comper. He's building his own strata of melody -- not just rhythm but melody -- that runs concurrently with the soloist-- yet also interacts with the soloist. It's a tricky thing to do because you easily overplay, forcing the soloist to play with you rather than the other way around. Cedar is also reacting as well as leading. Its a two-way conversation. Gotta have GREAT taste to do this. I also think there's something about the way Cedar and Billy both feel their 8th notes in the same way -- they're very even, almost but not quite like straight 8ths, Back in 1994, when I was working for the Dayton Daily News, I interviewed Cedar and asked him about why he and Billy sounded so good together. He described the drummer this way: "I like to describe his approach as immediate in terms of feeling, swing and intensity. It's not gradual. Mr. Higgins' intensity is immediate, which is very soothing to the player. There's no waiting around for the groove to build. It's built in. So it's him that's designing the piece. In a away, it's just flowing through you into the keys and the concept of the group." For the record, I just went through the Tom Lord Discography and counted 135 recordings that have Cedar and Billy together. Tthe first time Cedar and Billy appeared on a record together was in August 1965 on Eddie Harris' "The In Sound" (with Ron Carter). The last was Dale Barlow's "Manhattan After Hours" in late 2000, about six months before Billy died. Only nine of the Walton-Higgins records were on Blue Note (Morgan, Mobley, Byrd), all done within 20 months between Sept. 1966 and May 1968. Another great example, especially the tag. David Williams is the bassist. 1985

I have this one too.