Porgy and Bess

[Chuck Nessa]

Bill Potts.

[Don Brown]

The Miles Davis/Gil Evans and the Bill Potts are both essential and they both belong in any respectable jazz collection, but the Mundell Lowe mentioned by JohnS is in the same league. How could you go wrong with Art Farmer and Ben Webster? And Tony Scott's great here on baritone as well. This was an RCA Camden budget LP which, unfortunately, seems to have been completely forgotten.

(Well, almost.)

[ghost of miles]

The Miles Davis/Gil Evans and the Bill Potts are both essential and they both belong in any respectable jazz collection, but the Mundell Lowe mentioned by JohnS is in the same league. How could you go wrong with Art Farmer and Ben Webster? And Tony Scott's great here on baritone as well. This was an RCA Camden budget LP which, unfortunately, seems to have been completely forgotten.

(Well, almost.)

←

I had to borrow the LP from a historian/professor here at IU, who hipped me to the album. Hopefully it will emerge on CD some day.

[Dan Gould]

The Miles Davis/Gil Evans and the Bill Potts are both essential and they both belong in any respectable jazz collection, but the Mundell Lowe mentioned by JohnS is in the same league. How could you go wrong with Art Farmer and Ben Webster? And Tony Scott's great here on baritone as well. This was an RCA Camden budget LP which, unfortunately, seems to have been completely forgotten.

(Well, almost.)

←

I had to borrow the LP from a historian/professor here at IU, who hipped me to the album. Hopefully it will emerge on CD some day.

←

I picked up that RCA Camden version at Stereo Jack's back in June.

[ghost of miles]

The Miles Davis/Gil Evans and the Bill Potts are both essential and they both belong in any respectable jazz collection, but the Mundell Lowe mentioned by JohnS is in the same league. How could you go wrong with Art Farmer and Ben Webster? And Tony Scott's great here on baritone as well. This was an RCA Camden budget LP which, unfortunately, seems to have been completely forgotten.

(Well, almost.)

←

I had to borrow the LP from a historian/professor here at IU, who hipped me to the album. Hopefully it will emerge on CD some day.

←

I picked up that RCA Camden version at Stereo Jack's back in June.

←

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

As for favorite version, after listening to a bunch of them, Miles/Gil still just barely noses out the Bill Potts for me.

[jazzbo]

The Bethlehem two lp/two cd set is interesting. 

Here is my favorite:

This Sony Classical recording from 195 is da bomb.

←

I still like this Columbia one best. Then the Gil Evans/Miles Davis collaboration.

Edited September 26, 2005 by jazzbo

[brownie]

Didn't know about the Buddy Collette... that sounds good indeed.  I'll keep an eye out for it.

←

David, the original might be very hard to get but the album has been reissued on the unmentionable Lonehill label as part of the Jim Hall 'The Unreleased Sessions'.

[Christiern]

As Stewart-Williams & Co., Rex Stewart and Cootie Williams co-led an interesting cast on a 1959 Warner Bros. album called "Porgy and Bess Revisited."

It is an instrumental album on which roles are assigned to different players. The cast: Cootie Williams (Porgy); Rex Stewart (Sportin' Life); Hilton Jefferson (Bess); Pinky Williams (Jake); Lawrence Brown (Serena and Clara); and a splendid supporting cast that included Barry Galbraith, Ernie Royal, Buddy Weed, Urbie Green, and Sonny Russo.

The album was arranged and conducted by Jim Timmens, who gave a similar treatment to "Show Boat" and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Please excuse me if this album has already been mentioned.

Edited September 26, 2005 by Christiern

[king ubu]

Certainly not the greatest, but this one deserves mention, too, I think:

Arrangements are by Ivan Jullien, main soloist is Eddy Louiss.

[jazzbo]

Yes Flurin, it's a good one indeed!

Didn't know about the Stewart and Williams one Chris. Looks like a great session.

Edited September 26, 2005 by jazzbo

[Stereojack]

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

←

Another one I like a lot is by Jim Cullum's Jazz Band (Columbia) - they give the score a dixieland interpretation, and it works quite well.

Of course, the Ella/Louis and the Miles/Gil are tops in my book.

Who is that professor/historian?

[jazztrain]

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

←

Another one I like a lot is by Jim Cullum's Jazz Band (Columbia) - they give the score a dixieland interpretation, and it works quite well.

Of course, the Ella/Louis and the Miles/Gil are tops in my book.

Who is that professor/historian?

←

Ghost: Although too late for your period of focus, there's a very nice version by the duo of Roland Hanna and George Mraz.

[king ubu]

Yes Flurin, it's a good one indeed!

Didn't know about the Stewart and Williams one Chris.  Looks like a great session.

←

Glad I'm not alone there! It's definitely a weird one, but I like it!

[ghost of miles]

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

←

Another one I like a lot is by Jim Cullum's Jazz Band (Columbia) - they give the score a dixieland interpretation, and it works quite well.

Of course, the Ella/Louis and the Miles/Gil are tops in my book.

Who is that professor/historian?

←

Michael McGerr.

[Brownian Motion]

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

←

Another one I like a lot is by Jim Cullum's Jazz Band (Columbia) - they give the score a dixieland interpretation, and it works quite well.

Of course, the Ella/Louis and the Miles/Gil are tops in my book.

Who is that professor/historian?

←

I'll second the Jim Cullum interpretation. I wouldn't call it dixieland; it's more planned than that, but it's clearly an interpretation based on pre-30s jazz styles. Too bad it's out of print and damned difficult to find: it deserves better.

[ghost of miles]

The Miles Davis/Gil Evans and the Bill Potts are both essential and they both belong in any respectable jazz collection, but the Mundell Lowe mentioned by JohnS is in the same league. How could you go wrong with Art Farmer and Ben Webster? And Tony Scott's great here on baritone as well. This was an RCA Camden budget LP which, unfortunately, seems to have been completely forgotten.

(Well, almost.)

←

I had to borrow the LP from a historian/professor here at IU, who hipped me to the album. Hopefully it will emerge on CD some day.

←

I picked up that RCA Camden version at Stereo Jack's back in June.

←

That's pretty ironic--Stereojack is buds w/the professor/historian I borrowed the LP from.

As for favorite version, after listening to a bunch of them, Miles/Gil still just barely noses out the Bill Potts for me.

←

After three listens, I, too, would put the Mundell Lowe right up there in the same league as Miles/Gil and Bill Potts.

[ghost of miles]

Working on the Night Lights show and came across this passage in Miles' autobiography:

Around this time, Columbia wanted Gil and me to do a jazz version of the music from the film Doctor Doolittle.  See, Porgy and Bess had been my best-selling album, and so some real dumb motherfucker over there thought that this Doctor Doolittle would be a great seller.  After listening to that shit I said, "No way, Jose."

[ghost of miles]

BTW, wasn't Ellington pretty critical of the original Gershwin score? I'm sifting through books and my old Jump for Joy notes, because I'm pretty sure he said some scathing things about it in the mid-1930s. (Ironically enough, he had some small involvement with the 1956 Bethlehem recording.)

[ghost of miles]

Found it--Michael Denning references a 1935 New Theatre interview with Ellington in THE CULTURAL FRONT (a fantastic book, btw):

In 1935, Ellington criticized Gershwin's Porgy & Bess in an interview with the left-wing New Theatre; after arguing that Porgy & Bess did "not use the Negro musical idiom," Ellington pointed to his own short musical film, Symphony in Black, as an example of a socially critical musical play:  "I put into the dirge all the misery, sorrow and undertones of the conditions that went with the baby's death.  It was true to and of the life of the people it depicted.  The same thing cannot be said for Porgy and Bess."

Denning also quotes Ellington in the same interview as saying, "Grand music and a swell play, but the two don't go together... the music did not hitch with the mood and spirit of the story." Denning posits that Jump for Joy was in some ways a response to Porgy & Bess.

[jazzbo]

More seditious comments from Duke. . . .

Hard to tell if he REALLY felt that way, or if it behooved him to say so. And he's probably right, from his viewpoint as a composer and a chronicler of "my people." And P and B may have been far less a success if it were more as Duke would have had it.

I personally feel that the opera is a masterwork, I like it in its original form very much. But then again, I have a TOTALLY different background and viewpoint from Duke! And. . . my dad instilled a reverence for Gershwin in me by osmosis that I didn't even really realize I had for a long time.

Edited October 5, 2005 by jazzbo

[ghost of miles]

I think some of Duke's criticism may have stemmed from how under and ill-represented the African-American experience still was on stage in the mid-1930s (and even black musical theater, which had had a run of sorts in the 1920s, was very much on the wane when P & B came out). Even though P & B met with very mixed reviews when it debuted in 1935, it still got a lot of attention, owing to Gershwin's authorship of the music... I wonder if Duke was somewhat resentful that Symphony in Black went so little noticed by comparison.

Gershwin did go down to the Charleston/South Sea Islands area to spend some time in 1934 as he worked on the opera, and from most, if not all, accounts, he was welcomed into the musical church community, first as an observer, and then as a participant.

[jazzbo]

OH I think you are dead on. . . I think it did stem from those things.

[Larry Kart]

I go back and forth on this -- in part because I'm not normally a fan of this conductor and also because I've heard that cast members were unhappy with his rather know-it-all manner both in the recording session and the Glyndebourne production that preceded it -- but for the opera itself I'm very impressed by Simon Rattle's recording, which essentially turns "P&B" into a somewhat different work by emphasizing the harsher, more modernist aspects of the score (i.e. in the orchestra's contribution). Rather than being there more or less to accompany the singers, the orchestra is transformed in this recording into a semi-independent force -- a kind of Fate Machine is how it hits me. My guess is that, consciously or not, Rattle had in mind as a model here the role that Kurt Weill's music plays in the Brecht-Weill works. Whatever, it makes for a different "P&B" in dramatic terms and one that arguably fits the conclusion of the story quite well.

[l p]

for non-vocal versions of summertime, i like the one on "My Name Is Albert Ayler"

[jazzbo]

That's interesting Larry. I tried and tried to like the Rattle version. . . a large part of my problem may be the recording. . .but it never connected with me at all! Sold it when I got the Sony fifties version which seemed da bomb to me.