Mccoy Tyner and Joe Henderson live at Slugs Saloon (Blue Note)

[clifford_thornton]

I didn't really encounter much of the dreaded "boom" when listening to it online.

[kh1958]

1 hour ago, Holy Ghost said:

You're probably right, but I haven't because I do not subscribe to Spotify, and my computer doesn't have the greatest listening phonics, but I do have a pretty good sound system to play CDs, and I can probably tweak the bass if needed. I am pretty excited about this release, so I don't want to spoil the listening experience; and I've avoided hearing snippets, tracks on YouTube, etc. I have a feeling I will not be returning it, when it's delivered to my house. 🙂

You won't be returning it.

[Holy Ghost]

On 12/2/2024 at 7:48 PM, kh1958 said:

You won't be returning it.

Nope! Christmas gift today. Love it!!!

No probs with the bass. So Coltranish, so much like  In 'n' Out type 64'ish. Joe Henderson is pretty out there for Joe Henderson. 

[Holy Ghost]

On 11/26/2024 at 3:17 PM, clifford_thornton said:

FWIW, I'm not hearing much of the "out"-ness that was described to me by an early listener of the material on this set (well before it was announced). It's good, though, and I'm glad it is available.

Agree. To me, this is "aggressive" hard bob. Still dig it. 

2 minutes ago, Holy Ghost said:

Agree. To me, this is "aggressive" hard bob. Still dig it. 

Weirdly, wish Kenny Dorham was there....

[Guy Berger]

On 11/26/2024 at 12:17 PM, clifford_thornton said:

FWIW, I'm not hearing much of the "out"-ness that was described to me by an early listener of the material on this set (well before it was announced). It's good, though, and I'm glad it is available.

I mean, if your benchmark is Page One or Hank Mobley it’s “out”!  If it’s Ayler or post-1964 Coltrane, not so much.

On 11/26/2024 at 1:50 PM, felser said:

Agreed.  To me, McCoy never went overtly "out", even when Trane was pushing him in that direction., but was as intense as anyone.

I agree that he never tread the path set by Cecil T and Paul B (to pick 2 archetypes) - the path that other mainstream giants like Herbie, Chick, Keith explored, but…

The intensity and abstraction of some of those recordings WAS out!  I think it’s telling that a lot of the incorporation of Tynerisms into modern straightahead jazz piano is much more restrained and controlled.

[felser]

35 minutes ago, Guy Berger said:

The intensity and abstraction of some of those recordings WAS out!

Especially here for me:

[ep1str0phy]

I just got to this record, on the recommendation of a trombone player friend who talked it up on a gig. My CD purchasing habits took an absolute nosedive at the onset of the COVID era, so I didn't even realize that this had been released. 

I find the narrative behind this music really fascinating. The Iverson article is simultaneously deeply literate and hermeneutical in kind of a weird way. I wouldn't go as far as to call it revisionist, but it feels like part and parcel of this latter-day obsession with mythmaking that suffuses a lot of modern jazz writing.

The valorization of certain figures that resonate with 21st century pedagogical or critical worldviews just strikes me as unnecessarily ideological. All of us who came of age after the heyday of this music are receiving its knowledge secondhand. I'm very leery of writing that cordons specific artists or styles into rival or contending scenes, in part because these barriers are almost always invented after the fact.

I highly doubt that someone like Jack DeJohnette was thinking, "now I'm free jazz," "now I'm inside-outside," "now I'm fusion" while he was making the music. This just flies in the face of how rapidly and inscrutably this music was developing after 1960 or so. And so there's something weirdly ahistorical and sensationalist about propping this music up while simultaneously underplaying just how complex the music emanating out, for example, the Survival Records label was. 

Forces of Nature is really good, but its obvious stylistic reference point (from a 21st century, recorded-media-as-bible standpoint) is the Coltrane Half Note tapes. And I feel like a release of this kind, if we're talking as writers/listeners and not "the cats," needs to be contextualized inside of '65 Coltrane. Weirdly, I don't think there's much more nuance than that - this is epochal music that just so happens to be invoking the praxis of even more epochal music from literally one year prior. 

Which is largely immaterial to the discussion at hand - except to the extent that we're talking about the Joe Henderson of this vintage as some kind of appendage to the liminal "out" music of the Coltrane lineage. And Henderson is just not an out musician. There's like no recorded evidence that Henderson could use the language of free music in a facile way. His use of multiphonics, bent notes, etc. is just an extension of his riffage. He never really goes out of time, and he almost always resolves his bursts of "chaos" with blues or bebop vernacular. You can hear it all over "Taking Off." In this way, the band uses the ethos of Trane, even though Joe himself has nothing to do with Trane. 

I'm not passing judgement, BTW. I really enjoy this release and freely admit that I could benefit from listening to it more. But I feel like there's this constant push in jazz writing to prop up historical documents - sometimes in disingenuous ways. And doesn't it better suit the music to say that this was just four of the cats playing their shit, rather than some heroic act of radical invention? 

[JSngry]

It was a gig that got recorded.

Possibly not the only one, and possibly not the best one, recorded or otherwise.

Coltrane of the date, yes, but there were already even newer things going on in NYC.

It takes everybody time to catch up to things they didn't think up, because these damn instruments don't play themself and it takes work to get them to do things you yourself didn't find. Nobody bothers to look at that part, how real music takes work and work takes time. Short cuts don't last.

What I love about Joe Henderson is precisely that he is NOT an out player as much as he is not really an in player either. In terms of the instrument, he's a NextGen Lester Young (via Warne Marsh and Larry Teal) guy, the type of player who will find the sounds to play to make his music when the notes alone won't suffice. 

Past that, right on 💗

[Rooster_Ties]

Barcelona!