For the sake of contrast:

Sonny Rollins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLFlJIqiMLc

Pharoah Sanders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuaLidIjAw0

Phil Woods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9-jK_kSOo

Booker Ervin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkjNOS0igXY

Contrasts indeed! Well, let’s contrast 😊

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:

https://youtu.be/YHAKe26KqG4?si=R3DSVNrAprv_G6h0

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

Speaking of contrast, same song, soprano sax, Curtis Amy

https://youtu.be/NbcDLg1gdv4?feature=shared

@frogman

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).

https://youtu.be/dYoRS4rEqCQ?si=rrS4QNT3Fj6oURyr

https://youtu.be/Xm-9qQu8yKA?si=jYhcs1NXcBa0SgTQ

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"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp50jQ_mPAg&list=PLvxWibFr0wiLXaegSULNzwUcrz5c4K5Pm

And see what reviewers had to say about these pure silver interconnects:
https://silversolids.com/revbuysB.html

Contrasts indeed. From gut bucket straight ahead blues jazz to Kenny Burrell’s and Gene Evans produced ethereal stringings.

Al Dimeola's new album TwentyFour. 

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.

Chief Adjuah aka Christian Scott - West of the West

Chief Adjuah (Christian Scott) | Max Mucha | Elé Howell |Cecil Alexander| Morgan Guerin | Richard Howell

Another young jazz lion...Robert Glasper - So Beautiful (Live At Capitol Studios) (Official Video)

@tyray

There’’s a tune Glasper did with Norah Jones, Let It Ride, that’s pretty good. Pretty sure it is not on an album yet, but I could be wrong.

@frogman

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.

There has been quite a bit of M Brecker posted by me and others.  This is the last Brecker I posted.  Perhaps this is it:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l85qqhvqGAA36q_ctKF3ZoE3cqpktgknc

Check this out as well.  His last.  Both are great:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBWjcVWYw1waf3zkCkkNGNAWVR4109BLh&si=7ExrySWN3xPhBleX

@frogman,

It was Michael Brecker - Tales From The Hudson - Man, thank you so much kind sir!

Michael Brecker - The Mean Time - Is just icing on the cake.