Martin Williams near nightmare

[Big Beat Steve]

Yes, great story. But still that particular AFN FM mix really was wearing you out. Learning standards that way (or hearing age-old hits you at that time mainly remembered having seen in PRE-r'n'r pop chart hit listings) may be fine but if the standards are drowned in saccharine, string-overloaded arrangements by the likes of Hugo "Funny how the Yanks pronounce this un-yankish name" Winterhalter or "Where did your first name go" Mantovani etc etc. then all this is just a bit too much - at least to this listener who at that time, though not yet 20, on the one hand had already been very much aware of and fascinated by both pre- and post-war swing and jazz big bands and therefore had enough MEATIER (yet still perfectly accessible) stuff to cut your teeth into, and on the other hand abhorred the pre-r'n'r or "adult" pop chart fare. And Jamal, though pleasant to listen to really fit too easily into the stream of sounds and therefore, to me anyway, his jazz interest was drowned out in that program (which did indeed hold the occasional jazz surprise, which is why I sometimes listened to it). And I still wonder what the target AFN listener audience was for that program at that time. Those who'd have embraced those sounds wholeheartedly must have retired from active duty by that time and gone back home. And the young GIs had either endless streams of country/rock programs (often rather interesting to us, BTW), the R&B (aka soul/funk) charts as well as "Gozar" for the Latinos on AFN AM. So ...?

Anyway .. that Jamal debate reminds me of a lot of other piano trio LPs from the 50s/60s that tended to get short shrift in Down Beat reviews. And possiblx even today. Seems like the court is still out on how approachable or even nightclub-ish or lounge-ish you can get without seeing your jazz credentials tarnished, and a consensus probably will never come to pass (maybe for the better because tastes differ ..).

[JSngry]

Dude, I was a teenager, I didn't think about it that much. Just thinking about knowing and learning these tunes was rebellion enough!

They were tunes, and I could shut the radio off any time I wanted. We didn't have AFRN, we had commercial stations, which meant pop, soul, country, or easy listening, period. Music to sell ads by. (and which also meant that you could go back and forth between idioms at will, without having to wait for it to be programmed). Classical, if your antenna could pick up Shreveport (and our radio in the bathroom could not, and I can't tell you how many standards I began to learn while either on the toilet or in the tub). So it was easy to turn it on and turn it off pretty much at will and go someplace else.

Jamal, I still think about, because when he's not making the obvious For Airplay Only records, there's a lot to think about. I get that not everybody likes what that "thing" is, and oh well, right?

Also - Nelson Riddle, bring him on almost any time, the chords he uses are often enough non-standard, and a delight to this person's imagination. Except, of course, when they're not, but...I take my chances with Nelson Riddle, I like the odds.

[Big Beat Steve]

Dude, I was not yet 20 either! And apart from the fact that I could turn off those stations at will too, I did not dissect the music that much either, I just saw and heard that that those shlocky 50s-60s background music orchestras were terrible company for anybody resembling a jazz artist. The only thing I DID think about was what on earth they pulled all those orchestras from the mothballs for - and who'd listen to that all day in those years in the mid-to late 70s on THAT station. And all this because I used to go to great lengths to search for stations and programs that did NOT just doodle off the chart fare off the days but specialist programs for those into jazz, blues,  pre-1960 r'n'r etc. Not a matter of rebellion but of musical tastes off the beaten tracks of the day's charts. And then you come across a station where they doodle "Theme From A Summer Place" or "Song From Moulin Rouge" and all that stuff and you wonder WTF???

And JAMAL's piano sounds sure got drowned there in the mix. That's all but has left a lasting impression. Maybe what they played by him really were those "For Airplay Only" records ...

 

 

[JSngry]

Summer Place? YES! Crappy music but great RECORD, the way the reverb plays into the triplets and then sets up a cloud of sound which then gives the strings and flutes a perfectly cushioned etheriality into which further float...damn, today's "sound sculpterers" could take a lesson from that technique, and probably have. Don't who it was that did that, odds of it not Being Percy Faith, odds 50/50 at best, but those details matter to some people, not others, I being one of the latter. But reverb as compositional tool, yes, many great lessons in many odd places, this being one of them.

As for Jamal, the next time they play Poinciana, just back the furniture, grab your close-bys and just dance. Fuck it, just dance. Vernell & Israel gotcha covered, trust me.

[fasstrack]

Getting back to Ahmad, very few pianists (or any instrumentalists) have the touch, spacing, or sense of building he does. If he's accessible on top of that it's no crime IMO. It's hard to believe they put him next to Montavani and such though, but if y'all say so....

Edited October 30, 2015 by fasstrack

[AllenLowe]

ahhhhhh mmmmmaaaaaaad  jamal.

[Simon Weil]

On ‎27‎/‎10‎/‎2015‎ ‎20‎:‎28‎:‎27, Larry Kart said:

 The Ornette connection is important not only because Martin put all his chips down there when very few "established" guys did, but also because it placed him squarely in the flux of jazz's rapidly evolving present from the '60s on, which is not a place where he was temperamentally comfortable by and large, avant-garde/revolutionary trappings of most any sort being anathema to him. Thus the range of things that appealed to his taste became increasingly narrow, and barring Ornette's intermittent reappearances, there was little he could be genuinely enthusiastic about. When he did blow his horn about something newish in later days -- the World Saxophone Quartet? -- I usually went "oh?"

 

This is going to piss people off (probably), but I think there's a kind of scale and depth to William's writing (some of it), that I don't hear elsewhere in Jazz writing. There's a kind of greatness to it. Maybe that's just because he wasn't temperamentally comfortable but ended up in that spot out of a kind of critical compulsion.