Jazz for aficionados


Jazz for aficionados

I'm going to review records in my collection, and you'll be able to decide if they're worthy of your collection. These records are what I consider "must haves" for any jazz aficionado, and would be found in their collections. I wont review any record that's not on CD, nor will I review any record if the CD is markedly inferior. Fortunately, I only found 1 case where the CD was markedly inferior to the record.

Our first album is "Moanin" by Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. We have Lee Morgan , trumpet; Benney Golson, tenor sax; Bobby Timmons, piano; Jymie merrit, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

The title tune "Moanin" is by Bobby Timmons, it conveys the emotion of the title like no other tune I've ever heard, even better than any words could ever convey. This music pictures a person whose down to his last nickel, and all he can do is "moan".

"Along Came Betty" is a tune by Benny Golson, it reminds me of a Betty I once knew. She was gorgeous with a jazzy personality, and she moved smooth and easy, just like this tune. Somebody find me a time machine! Maybe you knew a Betty.

While the rest of the music is just fine, those are my favorite tunes. Why don't you share your, "must have" jazz albums with us.

Enjoy the music.
orpheus10

Many ordinary musicians can play classical and enjoy playing jazz.

But playing in a band of many versus with two or three or four with a "timing" born from the unwritten  play versus a "timing" imposed by the written play ask for a different time feeling...

Music is classical or jazz, rythms of time and timing...

There is no time in mathematics...

But there is not so much  numbers in music as thought Pythagoras and Leibnitz after him  but more timbre explorations and timing time investigations...

We hear a vibrating sound source  which "inform" us and we vibrate ourselves in response in a timing way, transforming our body and the instrument or the vibrating phenomena into one event. It is Speech creation  already with music.

Here in speech, as in music, time is not external to the event but on the opposite created by it  and born from it.( poetry unlike prose can gave us this birth of creative memory again)

Jazz is the root by which we can remember the birth of music and speech again by recreating musical time and timing in a new way compared to classical western music.

The black African root of jazz was a gift.

"its rolling" as said to Randy Weston his African master friend. Time is born with music again.

@maghister,

I agree with your distinction between jazz and classical. One appeals more to the head and the other to the heart and soul. Jazz is primal. I would like to make a few distinctions, however. I think Stravinsky, for example, was searching for the primal in his ballet "Rite of Spring." Its rhythms are primal. When it was first played in Paris in 1918, people booed, threw things, and walked out. I love it.

i  think that jazz is more primal than classical...But some classical music are more primal than some jazz...

I was speaking in my post above  about the way musical time is understood in Jazz and classical...

Scriabin is primal as jazz is for example for me  ...

Stravinsky was searching the "primal" you are right but he reach it in an external way...His concept of time seems imposed on the music ...

By contrast Scriabin musical time is born from the  chords and not imposed on them ...

Scriabin , in his piano music impossible to play anyway by most pianist save very few unknown pianist in the West,  has an internal experience of musical time more intrinsical  so to speak than Stravinsky...

The difference is the difference between the real Orient in Art and the Western evocation of the East in Western Art (orientalism)...

 

An anecdote :

 The mother of Stravinsky comparing Stravinsky music to Scriabin preferred Scriabin who was considered a god in Russia.

 

The reason for me is evident so genius was  Stravinsky and he is one of the greatest Russian composer, Scriabin is more revolutionary, transforming piano playing into a "primal" musical time machine which goal was putting us in a trance. He succeeded. By the way in jazz Sun Ra is our Scriabin so to speak....

 

The mastery of Stravinsky was the witchcraft by which he could use all musical stylistic languages of all musical history in some patchwork way...

The mastery  of Scriabin was creating a unique writing style  whose goal was recreating music itself...The greatest piano composer after Liszt in my opinion ...

 

«Medtner HATED Stravinsky’s music and the course of 20th century music in general, he loved early and mid Scriabin, but considered him a mad butterfly in his later works. Rachmaninoff thought Medtner perhaps the greatest of ’contemporary’ composers. The two were close friends.»

is it necessary to say that this is not musical knowledge but only my listenings impression ?

cool