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.
First, one should look at the song’s lyrics. For me: melancholy, tenderness, feeling of the blues (obviously, “You don’t know what love is/Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues”). Should be played as if spoken. Is the player telling the story of the song?
Sonny: Love Sonny. Love that sultry, velvety tone and it mostly works for me, but gets a bit notee (notey?).
Pharoah: Great! Incredibly expressive owing a lot to Trane’s approach to that melody and Trane’s tone. He doesn’t improvise and sticks to playing the melody. Said it all with just the melody. Love that.
Phil: I normally love Phil Woods, but this is not my cup of tea. Way too many notes (notey?) and no tenderness at all. Yuck! In fairness, the tune is one of those tunes with a chord progression that is really satisfying for players to improvise over. Sometimes leads to over playing.
Booker: I like it, but not nearly as much as Sonny’s version while having similar tone concepts.
My favorite and the classic. Beginning to end, like someone speaking about a lost lover. Pretty amazing. Trane really was a genius:
You don’t know what love is
Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues
Until you’ve loved a love you had to loose
You don’t know what love is
You don’t know how lips hurt
Until you’ve kissed and had to pay the cost
Until you’ve flipped you’re heart and you have lost
You don’t know what love is
Do you know how a lost heart fears
The thought of reminiscing
And how lips have taste of tears
Loose the taste for kissing
You don’t know how hearts burn
For love that cannot live, yet never dies
Until you’ve faced each dawn with sleepless eyes
You don’t know what love is
You don’t know how hearts burn
For love that cannot live, yet never dies
Until you’ve faced each dawn with sleepless eyes
How could you know what love is, what love is
What love is
For me, Pharoah’s version is the most immediately appealing but is it too rapturously beautiful? Does he skate around the anguish ?
Is Coltrane more courageous ?
More obsessively driven to wring out every nuance?
As always, I find Rollins rather inscrutable. That’s not the right word, exactly. I always get the sense his intellect is more involved than his emotions but of course, I can’t know this for a fact. I don’t know how else to describe what sounds to me like detachment/aloofness. Maybe it’s me who lacks the sensitivity to pick up on what he’s expressing.
Interesting. Detached or aloof are probably the last two characteristics I would think of. I find his playing to be very direct and committed. The beauty of music in that it can cause different reactions. (Btw, one of the few players who can improvise without piano or guitar and the harmony of the tune remains always clear).
I’ve loved the guitar since I was a kid listening to Duane Eddy playing "40 Miles of Bad Road" and "Pepe". Then one day I saw an LP with a bright red Gretsch on the cover and I thought I might see what someone else played on the guitar Eddy used.
I was amazed at the sounds coming from Chet Atkins’s fingers, completely unlike the single note twang of Duane Eddy. My dad even liked it and let me play it on his Fisher stereo. I started trying to learn finger style playing after that and left old Duane behind.
In my freshman year in college a friend turned me on to jazz and I started to listen to Joe Pass, Django Reinhardt, Johnny Smith and my favorite, Kenny Burrell.
Which takes me to my pick for "Aficionados".
Burrell recorded a brilliant album called "Guitar Forms" with arrangements by Gil Evans. The tunes range from a Gershwin prelude transcribed for a classical guitar, to a version of Greensleeves which begins as a classical guitar solo, then Burrell switches to electric as Evans and the orchestra come in with a powerful swinging arrangement. There are also small group tracks and two beautiful Gill Evans arranged big band tracks.
Still my favorite record of all, Kenny Burrell, "Guitar Forms"...
It’s good to see young folks not only playing jazz but coming to the shows and supporting the new artists. These are 2 videos of the same song with a whole lot of improvisation with at time, different band members.
Interesting. Detached or aloof are probably the last two characteristics I would think of. I find his playing to be very direct and committed.
This points to the challenge of dissecting esthetic experience and attempting to describe it verbally. I didn’t mean indirect or uncommitted. He’s clearly neither.
It’s probably best to avoid interpreting my experience in terms of what I think he’s doing or where he’s coming from, as I can’t know those things. My mistake!
What I do know: I find his playing unengaging on an emotional level. I have the same experience with Jim Hall and Weather Report, to name two other examples.
Someone posted a youtube Michael Brecker music audio a while back and I tried to find it but couldn’t. If anyone can find that link for me it would be much appreciated. As I mentioned in another thread I get a lot of ’new’ music here that I have never heard and that muscc audio is exactly what I was talking about and I like to bookmark them.
I just listened to Michel Petrucciani, Live-Montreux Jazz Festival (1993) (HD) again and it was like hearing it for the first time. I closed my eyes and just smiled. What a wonderful album!
Petrucciani said: "I play with a lot of balls" and he was certainly a very powerful player. But what I experience listening to him, more than anything, is an overflowing, exuberantjoy.
My personal favorite remains "The Complete Concert in Germany" I bought in Paris.
I pretty much like all of his recordings. There’s something about the way he pounds those keys and you can tell that his bass player and drummer seem to enjoy playing with him as well.
There’s something about the way he pounds those keys and you can tell that his bass player and drummer seem to enjoy playing with him as well.
Probably because he so clearly enjoyed what he did. It’s as though he was immersed in a constant process of discovering new delights. With no evident (to me) technical limitations, he was free to instantly play whatever came into his head. Playing music was, for him, just that -- "play".
I was very impressed with the musicianship. The young folks would consider it as Jazz as I think that is who it is targeted to. This album has a lot of ’meat on the bones’ and takes awhile to listen to with a fresh, up to date take on jazz. It’s definitely a keeper to be put in rotation. Robert Glasper Experiment · Black Radio 2
Since I am not the target audience for this album, I gave Black Radio 2 a wide berth. Although there are some okay bits, I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy a copy. 😎
Saw Bill Frisell last night. I was reminded how far my system is from live music!
A college age guy next to me told his Dad " Its like their all playing a different song except together". Their communication and joy of playing together was awesome.
I used to be a baker. Mornings when it was my turn to mix, I’d have a couple hours to enjoy working alone, before the other guys showed up. One such morning, I was playing Jack DeJohnette’s "Tin Can Alley" when my boss and his girlfriend (not Jazz fans) walked in. First thing she said : "It sounds like they’re all playing different songs". Never made sense to me but then, I wasn’t hearing it through her ears.
I used to own a bar once. During winter weekdays when there was less people and if I wanted to go home earlier, I would play some jazz music, usually the people would just left their drinks unfinished and just leave. On other occasions, I would put some Chet Baker concert, both on screen and on speakers, just to see the reaction. Even the regulars, more girls than boys, would come and ask for the change of music. Often, they would say that they simply cant endure so much sorrow, which is interesting. No matter how ’sad’ the music was, I would first think of it as ’beautiful’. No need to say that soon I changed my music menu, for the sake of better profit. But, even in the major cities, jazz bars are rare, or there is a lot other music there, with jazz sometimes included...just crossed my mind, back in a day, there was a jukebox in one popular bar that I went often, because the owner wanted for customers to pay for the music...to my surprise, I found out that jukebox had a Led Zeppelin concert and on it was a ’dazed and confused’ song that lasts some 25min...I would play it and went for a walk, 20 minuts later, the bar would be empty...first they removed the cd and not long after the jukebox was gone too...when I think of it, some jazz would cause the same effect, but with less noise
Love Frisell, acman3. And I get what you mean. He is the kind of player that plays with so much nuance of tone and personal sense of time that make audio systems sound inadequate.
I was watching a "reaction video" yesterday by a guy who looked to be in his early thirties. He was reacting to a video from the Fillmore of the Allmans (original line-up) playing "Whipping Post". Not Jazz, but what did he say, among other things?
"It sounds like they’re each playing a different song".
@stuartk, perhaps I should have correct myself. There is one 'type' of music which often I find too emotional and overwhelming to listen. I guess there are numerous reasons for it, but that is not something that I plan to discusses here, right now.
Anyway, it is very archaic form of music and I believe its not singed anywhere else except for the some part of Balkans. I will post the same song, but couple interpretations, you may listen it out of curiosity if nothing else, and tell me what are your thoughts about it
They are certainly emotionally intense, but as I don’t speak the language, I’ve no clue regarding what they’re singing about, so I could be missing what it is that you find difficult to tolerate. And just to be clear, this isn’t an oblique way of asking you to disclose this-- I’m merely acknowledging what could be a significantly limiting factor in my experience of the music.
If these albums have been mentioned, I’ll delete the post, but a search didn’t turn them up. I was digging through my hard drive last night and came upon two incredible Tal Farlow albums I hadn’t listened to in years. I bought the LPs decades ago, then acquired the CDs when they were briefly issued in the late 90’s. I’ve never been without a copy of these. ;-) Lots of Tal Farlow fans have probably heard them but if you haven’t, they’re just wonderful. Xanadu issued the original LPs and the CDs came out on a spinoff label (CoolNote? I have the CDs somewhere). The original LPs, titled "Fuerst Set" and "Second Set" consisted of eight extended tracks recorded at jazz-fan Ed Fuerst’s apartment in 1956, and they caused a bit of a sensation when they first appeared. The trio is Tal Farlow (g), Eddie Costa (p) and Vinnie Burke (b). Farlow, Costa and Burke made some commercial recordings, but nothing like these utterly swinging jams in which they all stretch out and challenge each other. Tal Farlow needs little introduction, one of the greatest jazz guitarists. Costa was a brilliant pianist and vibraphonist who sadly died in a car accident in 1962. He had a very distinctive sound, recognizable on any recording he made. Burke was an excellent bassist who had a long career as a leader and sideman. The sound is very decent mono for the era. Even Vinnie Burke’s bass is well captured.
Fresh Sound issued a 2-CD set of these sessions called "Tal Farlow - Complete 1956 Private Recordings." Unfortunately, all the CD versions are OOP and I can’t find them on any streaming service. But the LPs can easily be found on eBay, and the Fresh Sound set is available on Discogs:
Also well worth obtaining, those these are available on some streaming platforms. The "House of Blue Lights" album is a pretty spectacular. The piano is close-miked and Costa’s growly lower-register octave excursions are quite thrilling!
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