Cannonball Adderley

[mrjazzman]

If you haven't heard it, get it right away. "Cannonball In Europe" Cannonball is ripping up the place, he's on fire. When I heard it, I wanted to call the Fire Dept. and tell them smoke is coming from my cd player and to please send an engine to the International Jazz Festival in Complain-La-Tour, Belgium on August 5, 1962. I have all of Cannonball's titles on cd and this one has shot straight to the top of the list. IMO the audience at this set gives the best responses of any audience on his other live performances. Although there have been several good ones, IMO, Cannonball is the best extension of Bird. To all my fellow Cannonball lovers, this is a must listen, I guarntee you will like this one..............mrjazzman

Edited December 17, 2010 by J.A.W.
Error in topic title

[Guy Berger]

If you haven't heard it, get it right away. "Cannonball In Europe" Cannonball is ripping up the place, he's on fire. When I heard it, I wanted to call the Fire Dept. and tell them smoke is coming from my cd player and to please send an engine to the International Jazz Festival in Complain-La-Tour, Belgium on August 5, 1962. I have all of Cannonball's titles on cd and this one has shot straight to the top of the list. IMO the audience at this set gives the best responses of any audience on his other live performances. Although there have been several good ones, IMO, Cannonball is the best extension of Bird. To all my fellow Cannonball lovers, this is a must listen, I guarntee you will like this one..............mrjazzman

In anticipation of Blue Note's impending demise (at least in terms of CD issuance) I snapped up a bunch of Cannonball stuff. Man, this is a great recording and much better (IMHO) than the near-contemporaneous Jazz Workshop Revisited. There's a real edge to Cannonball's playing here (he's clearly been listening to Coltrane); I like his earlier playing, but maybe it was lacking a certain gravitas or depth that appears more regularly from this point onward. And Yusef Lateef is just awesome -- a guy who I'm embarrassed to say I have generally overlooked in the past.

Next up: Fiddler on the Roof, Money in the Pocket, and Cannonball Plays Zawinul.

Guy

[JSngry]

I wanted to call the Fire Dept. and tell them smoke is coming from my cd player and to please send an engine to the International Jazz Festival in Complain-La-Tour, Belgium on August 5, 1962.

Let me get this straight - smoke is coming out of your CD player & you wanted to send the Fire Dept. across the globe & 45+ years back in time?

FAR PHUKKIN OUT, MAN! :tup :tup

[Christiern]

Adderley

[JSngry]

There's a real edge to Cannonball's playing here (he's clearly been listening to Coltrane)

I hear this a lot, and understand the point, but please, let us remember this - more than just "listening" to Coltrane, he traveled with him & played beside him night after night for more than a handful of gigs. He got it about as up close & personal & intensely & viscerally as you can get it. This cannot be emphasized enough!

There's a real edge to Cannonball's playing here (he's clearly been listening to Coltrane); I like his earlier playing, but maybe it was lacking a certain gravitas or depth that appears more regularly from this point onward.

Couldn't agree more, the real irony being that as his own playing increased in depth/seriousness/gravitas/whatever, the focus of the recordings on which this could be heard went decidedly in the other direction. I've said it before more than once, but those Capitol & later sides are some deceptive little suckers. You can hear them all kinds of ways, but if you focus strictly on Cannonball, there's a lot of stuff going on that his earlier playing never even hinted at, all of it about growth & progression.

[Guy Berger]

There's a real edge to Cannonball's playing here (he's clearly been listening to Coltrane)

I hear this a lot, and understand the point, but please, let us remember this - more than just "listening" to Coltrane, he traveled with him & played beside him night after night for more than a handful of gigs. He got it about as up close & personal & intensely & viscerally as you can get it. This cannot be emphasized enough!

I know what you are getting at BUT -- the two hadn't played together (aside from maybe a sit-in or two) for almost three years when this recording was made, and the Cannonball recordings in the intervening time don't show the stylistic link nearly as much as this one or its successors do.

Guy

[Joe Christmas]

In his 100 Influential jazz albums (or whatever it's called), Ben Ratliff best explained Coltrane's influence on Cannonball, and particularly the limitations of that influence. I won't attempt to paraphrase because I can't even remember the title of the book, but his take on that relationship made perfect sense, given the direction Cannonball was heading at the time and those areas Coltrane had already covered.

[JSngry]

There's a real edge to Cannonball's playing here (he's clearly been listening to Coltrane)

I hear this a lot, and understand the point, but please, let us remember this - more than just "listening" to Coltrane, he traveled with him & played beside him night after night for more than a handful of gigs. He got it about as up close & personal & intensely & viscerally as you can get it. This cannot be emphasized enough!

I know what you are getting at BUT -- the two hadn't played together (aside from maybe a sit-in or two) for almost three years when this recording was made, and the Cannonball recordings in the intervening time don't show the stylistic link nearly as much as this one or its successors do.

Guy

Sure, but I think that that's because Cannonball already had his own thing and needed time to....digest what he had been getting in his face for that time, let it settle in, roll around, and finally get put to use in service of his own voice. I mean, you can hear the immediate Trane influence as Milestones & KOB, and it ain't pretty. It's pretty ugly in spots, actually. I gotta think that 'Ball knew it too, that what Trane was up to was not something that he could easily assimilate & toss right back out. And I think that he figured out pretty quickly that although there was much in Trane's musical explorations that he could deal with, the..."tone" of it all would not be something he could adapt, not without changing who & what he was as a person and performer. Cannonball was above all a bandleader who had to keep a working band together. The Miles gig was a "career move" in that regard. So he didn't necessarily have the luxury (or probably temperament) to shut down & retool, if you know what I mean. Life was ok, ya' know? But he definitely heard it, and it definitely took, just in its and his own sweet time.

[papsrus]

What with the fire truck being sent back in time, and all ... and the high praise otherwise, I figured I'd better dial up Newbury and snatch me a copy of this fandango Europe disc. ... I'll have a bucket of ice at the ready when it arrives ...

[ValerieB]

Adderley

haha! i've been wanting to post that! very common spelling error that drives me nuts. that and sarah vaughn instead of vaughan, to cite another common one. trivial but important to some of us.

[Christiern]

Thank you, Valerie, the common Sarah misspelling also bothers me. Now we just have to show Jim how he can edit a header.

[king ubu]

Interesting - I've loved "Cannonball In Europe" for a long time, he being one of the first musicians I had multiple CDs of. And "In Europe" was always a favourite, also "Nippon Soul". I only came around checking out "Jazz Workshop Revisited" in the latest Capitol/Blue Note edition, and what a letdown it was! Similar to "In New York" - both just don't ever live up to the expectations built up on the base of "In Europe" and "Nippon Soul"! There's some wild stuff on those, not just by Cannonball, but also by Lateef (his two oboe features are terrific!) and Zawinul. And the bass/drum team was of course really together by that time!