Well, it's a day without Duke Ellington, so that must mean it's another day for a Blue Note Rudy van Gelder recording. That and a CD I know nothing about and don't have any liner notes for...away we go...
Avishai Cohen Devotion
There's got to be a term for this. Someone has to have identified this as a distinct style and I just don't know about it yet. It's a certain kind of progressive sound that was really popular in the 90s (I don't know if people are still doing it now). It's really distinctive of that 'young gun' crowd I had talked about earlier, the new wave of academic jazz performers.
Wiki isn't really any help here (I suppose I rely too much on Wiki, and I certainly understand its weaknesses, but I decided that there was no point in pretending to be an expert on these performers, rather be honest about the fact that quite often I have to look them up since this should be about my impressions of them in regards to having carried it around for so long instead of presenting myself as any kind of authority.) Anyway, Wiki sites a blend of Middle Eastern and Eastern European influences in his jazz, which might be the case in his current recordings more than it is here. There are certainly some different harmonies and rhythms here, but this sounds very much in that class of Jacky Terrasson or other progressive jazz artists of the 90s. This is not to say that they sound exactly alike or that there is no individuality to their performance. One of the great things about jazz is that even the same artist would have a hard time sounding the same twice in a row.
But I'm starting to feel like I could listen to the first few bars of a recording and go, "That guy was young and new in the 90s." The music is both sparse and complex, segmented in a way that older forms of jazz wouldn't be. There is a lot of layering, which seems contrary to that 'sparse' comment, but it's not thick layering, if that makes any sense. Tempo changes, time changes, even style changes within a single piece are not uncommon. Unison lines trade up with counter melody and repeated figures. And the playing is always very aggressive, even during ballads.
He apparently came up through Chick Corea so that makes a certain degree of sense, because in a lot of was Corea might be considered the father of this kind of sound. Maybe not, since I'm just now piecing this together, but I put it at good odds.
Also not uncommon is the sort of newish third (fourth stream?) style that will make use of larger string arrangements and even, apparently, electronica like in Ti Da Doo Di Da. But this is a bass player's album, so it might just be an excuse to use a different bass, which has a pretty odd tone on it. My brother might be able to identify it, I'm not that good with electric instruments.
Well, there's that Middle Eastern/Eastern European influence, it's pretty present in Linda De Mi Corazon. And the Eastern European again (complete with voice at the beginning calling out in an accent, "Igor come! We play Slow Tune!) is heard on, of course, Slow Tune. And apparently the next two tracks. So basically he backloaded and grouped up all of that so that I would look silly declaring it not present after only the first two tracks...
Lee Morgan The Rumproller
Seriously, how can you go wrong with an album called The Rumproller? So it's another Rudy Van Gelder edition hard bop Blue Note album. For a moment they felt left out, what with all the Duke Ellington going on the last few days. Hard bop is creeping up on blues and big band for most represented in the Albtross so far. And blues is kind of cheating, since I don't divide that up into 'Chicago blues' and 'country blues' etc. Without that it would be big bands followed closely by hard bop.
Seriously, though, that opening track rocked.
The problem with having so many of these RVG editions is that I'm running out of things to say.
At one point I was given a large collection of mock up album covers for all of these editions, well, not me--the store. So everyone got to pick through them and I got what was left. The problem was that the best ones were also the coolest looking ones, so I didn't really end up with that great of a collection. I haven't seen that in a few moves, so I'm guessing it didn't survive, so it's probably for the best that I didn't score the cool ones. Though I may have had this one.
There's a kind of cool 'hard bop meets calypso' recording called Eclipso on here.
Another contender for awesome track name, this CD closes out with Venus Di Mildew.
Yesterday I noted that there was a surprising concentration of Latin music, most of it Cuban. Well, actually now that I think about it it's either been Cuban or Brazilian. I've already talked about why there was an explosion of Cuban music in record stores, so having them makes sense. I just didn't expect them to all be in one place. There is another one today and tomorrow I can see another bossa nova CD waiting to be listened to.
Today brings the Albatross up to 20 gigs. It's going to be a bit until we get to the point where it won't fit on an iPod Touch. I think at this rate it will fit its entirety on an iPod Classic. If only this blog had actual readers, I could get one...ah well...
Bobby Hucherson
The Kicker
Fun fact (alright, not all that fun), Joe Henderson appears on this album called "The Kicker" and has his own album called "The Kicker" which is what I, in my sax-centric ways, almost put in the player instead.
There are three vibes players now on the hard drive with no repeats. Not an easy feat.
I have some sort of Joe Henderson connection (not the six degree kind, rather that he was someone of some importance at some point, like I had an album of his I liked or he appeared a lot on things I liked or an instructor really liked him so I listened to him a lot...I don't think any of those are it though...dammit) that I can't remember now. I wish I could remember it because it would give me something to build on here.
It's another Blue Note CD and another Rudy Van Gelder recording. I wonder if this dude ever just got sick of awesome jazz. "How was work, honey?" "Ah, you know...just another set of legendary performers laying down another set of landmark tracks that players will be wearing their record players out on...same ol' shit...gah. Whats for dinner, anything good?"
This CD barely survived, and whats worse is I think the damage is recent because the card doesn't look too worn out. That's the back of the CD, obviously. I just have that card and barely enough ring left to hold the CD. I really need to get a handle on the CDs or this is going to become really difficult.
Huh, according to Wiki (which may not be true, obviously) this album wasn't released until 1999 even though it was recorded in 1963. No reason is given.
The whole album has a kind of laid back feel to it, as you would usually expect with a group headed by a vibe player, but still enough groove to it that it doesn't become too mellow.
I feel like I should have been including the line ups for all these CDs to track how much cross polination there is between them. Not too long ago a Grant Green CD went on the hard drive and now here he appears as a side man on Hucherson's CD.
Various Artists Cuba Caribe
Aaaaand more Cuban dance music. This is from Hemisphere.
All of this scrambling to capitalize on Buena Vista Culture Club didn't really work. Unless it was actually someone from the film most people weren't interested. The movie had opened them to a new style of music, but the exploration stopped right there and no further.
Even a sampler like this was just too much for a lot of the people to venture into. It was a safe philosophy to have, I guess. They had been presented with a relatively successful film that assured them that these guys were cool, anything else they'd have to start making their own selections, which actually might mean buying some stuff they didn't end up liking. The cynic in me wants to say that was the greatest fear right there. They might 'not like' the wrong thing, and then their new found connoisseurship would collapse. Better be predictable and within the lines then venture out and have to pretend to like stuff you don't.
Though really it was probably an economic issue. They already knew they liked the people in the movie, they don't know who any of these people are, they're not going to spend $100 just to explore Cuban music when they're going to be listening to their Peter Gabriel and U2 and Paul Simon and Sting CDs most of the time anyway, just buy what you already like. Can't really fault them for that, I guess.
This music kind of sneaks up on you. I don't really know that much about Cuban music (despite my recent volume of listening...) so I don't readily make the distinctions between the different groups. Instead I allow myself to be distracted while the music plays and then all of a sudden I find myself halfway through a song going, "Wait, this is pretty cool."
I've been going Godzilla on my CDs as of late. More than a few have found themselves under foot as I let the Albatross get the best of me and haven't really made any effort to organize the CDs as I go through them one by one. This is of course stupid as hell. I have managed to fish out some of the more scattered CDs and at least start making recognizable stacks. Which means that there is more left for the bag I was working on than I initially thought, almost two more weeks to go.
I haven't come any closer to figuring out a way to classify classical CDs in a system designed for pop music.
I was actually kind of dreading putting this CD in because while I like classical music, I haven't had to write about classical music since college, and even in college I wasn't really that great at it.
But I hadn't realized it was a 20th Century composer, which was what I took upon myself as a my mission as classical buyer to promote 20th Century composers. I even made special cards to indicate 20th Century composers, as if that was an incentive instead of a disincentive for the average person browsing the classical section of a suburban record store.
I've talked before about how, let's say 'out of hand' 20th Century music can be. That's not so much the case with this. So far it's pretty accessible.
According to the liner notes the first piece, Drowning Out, is inspired by a William Golding novel, Pincher Martin, about a drowning man. I haven't read or even heard of that book, but apparently that doesn't really matter. Turnage doesn't really commit to that whole 'impressionistic' composition style where the music is supposed to evoke certain imagery or the like.
I really like the cello. Like, in a kind of disturbing way. I bring this up because the second piece is a cello piece written as a tribute to a friend of the composer and cellist for Ensemble Modern who had died.
Turnage manages to dodge one of my main frustrations with iTunes by having his compositions play all the way though instead of in separate movements. iTunes doesn't let you imbed play lists so that when you put things on shuffle you don't get composition movements out of sequence or separated. Pretty frustrating when you have tracks that are supposed to go together in your library.
As much as I'm digging the cello piece (which really is pretty good, has a bit of darkness to it, almost a kind of updated film noir soundtrack feel), I'm looking forward to Three Screaming Popes...because, well, how can you not?
Pretty cool, and fairly tame for 20th Century music, but that's not really a bad thing.
Freddie Hubbard & Jimmy Heath Jam Gems: Live at the Left Bank
Freddie Hubbard is one of the people I've seen live, but it wasn't as an amazing a musical experience as say, Pharoah Sanders or Sonny Rollins. Instead it was a kind of old school spectacle. Hubbard was, the best of my estimation, completely plastered. What was even better was that he was fascinated with some lady in the back of Kimball's East. So really we got a front row seat to that most of the night. The performance was good, too, but really what I remember was the disjointed back and forth with a lady I couldn't make out (and I was closer to her than he was, so who knows what he was responding to...). It was kind of awesome. I mean, I'm way too young to have had the opportunity to be in a club where Parker might wander out of a bathroom just in time to take his solo after shooting up or Mingus slamming his bass and shattering it (I don't remember who that story goes to, to be honest). Jazz men to me are old men, dignified or mellowed with their age, or the ones that were professional enough to have survived long enough for me to see them. But Freddie Hubbard took one for the team to give me that old school jazz club experience.
Joel Dorn (who also wrote the description of Buddy Rich I quoted) also describes the old school jazz club experience in his liner notes, but that's of the more performance oriented variety. That legendary players would arrive at these clubs and play to enthusiastic audiences and the artists would feed off that.
I can't 'agree' as such because I haven't been to the old jazz clubs at that time, but I do know that the crowds now are more subdued. Fancy men taking fancy women on fancy dates to appear classy, upper middle class folk with the money to go to these things, and a smattering of music students, studying the playing. And I think that we were all judging each other for being there. No one was there 'legitimately' except the person making the observation. I imagine the same thing happens at punk rock shows.
This is from Label M, which packaged their CDs in the same cases used by 32Jazz. They also gave me a t-shirt. There's no insight there, I'd just been sitting here listening to blazing tenor solos and hadn't typed anything in a bit. This is pre-Professor days for Jimmy Heath and yet still awesome.
This isn't the cleanest live recording, but not the worst that's even gone onto the hard drive, and it does give a good feel of the crowd and their reaction to the pretty energetic performance.
I kind of hate Autumn Leaves. For some reason when I played in academic combos the instructor would often give the group Autumn Leaves. Maybe it's the easy changes or easy head, don't know. But it wasn't a particularly interesting piece to play and I played it way too often.
I've managed to hit a vein of CD cases where I'm familiar with the CDs as homeless CDs. Despite knowing that I've seen the homeless CD on numerous occasions, I managed to let myself get excited a few times, like with Duke Ellington's Money Jungle featuring Max Roach and Charles Mingus. Each time I see the case I get a little thrill that is popped as I remind myself that the CD is out there, homeless in one of the bags of homeless CDs that I'll eventually have to go through.
So after sifting through some likewise disappointments (a disc of Marcel Deauchamp, for one. I don't remember what that was about, but I'm sure it was interesting...) two cases with actual CDs have emerged for today's entry.
Grant Green Alive!
If there's one thing I don't know that much about (and frankly there are many things, but this is the internet and I have a blogspot account, so I get to talk about them to my audience of zero anyway...) it's jazz guitarists. I can list the handful of top names by rote if someone asks for suggestions.
But these aren't really suggestions because I can't really give you a good quantifiable difference between them for the most part. I know there is a Wes Montgomery and a Grant Green. And I know that I often confuse Grant Green with Basie guitarist Freddie Green.
I've seen Joe Pass in concert. And I think one other guitarist, but I can't really remember who that would be.
And of course there is Django, but even if you don't know jazz you know Django.
Thing is, there is no good reason I should be this ignorant. Sure, I'm not a guitarist and there was a little bit of disdain early on for guitarists when I was young because everyone played guitar. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting one. And thanks to my long hair and beard if someone found out I was a musician they assumed that meant 'guitarist.'
That all aside, I also played with an absolutely remarkable guitarist. If you have ever watched Home Movies, he was as close as you could get to Dwayne without actually being animated. Well, he didn't have his own rock band, though he could have if anyone could keep up with him. But they couldn't. Frustrated at being teased about guitarists not being able to read music he played the Charlie Parker Omnibook cover to cover. That's a book of Charlie Parker transcriptions that saxophonists spend their lives trying to go through. I never made it. I'm convinced that the only reason I can't find information on where he's playing right now is that I can't spell his last name.
I used to hang out and talk jazz with this guy and the piano player and talk jazz more than just about anyone. That means that guitarists had to have come up. At least enough to go to that Joe Pass concert. I just don't.
So I wasn't really expecting hard bop to come up. Again, I feel like it seems like I just label everything hard bop but really--hard bop is just over represented in the collection so far. There is some Latin like in Time To Remember, but then we're back into soulful hard bop with Sookie Sookie, which so far I have to say is awesome.
And now I have two versions of Maiden Voyage on the hard drive. I should start checking the accumulation of standards that's starting to happen on the drive.
Gil Scott-Heron The Mind of Gil Scott Heron: A Collection of Poetry and Music
This is another inexplicable blind spot. I like beat poetry, I like jazz, it almost seems like a no brainer that I'd be all over Gil Scott-Heron, perennial jazz poet. But alas, I think that this is the first time that I've even sat down to listen to Scott-Heron.
I've certainly meant to listen to him before. In theory I've been all about what he does. But up until this moment, when I sit down to listen to any CD that comes up do I finally actually take a moment to listen to him. I don't really have an excuse as to why I never stopped and listened to him before. I've always known what he was about, though I don't really know that much about him.
Honestly, I didn't even know I had this. I don't remember ever getting a CD by him.
It's a little weird to listen to a contemporary poem addressing Watergate (The H20 Blues). This is a compilation but it does not include the iconic The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, so it's not really a primer.
Ah, when unemployment being at 7% was bad...we'd celebrate that right now...
I think some of what kept me from listening to Scott-Heron was that Slam Poetry wore thin on my really really quick. I was kind of excited that poetry was making a mainstream comeback, that I was going to be able to listen to new work instead of old recordings of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and Ginsberg.
But I had let history filter out those poems and proved to not be patient enough to filter the new Slam Poetry. So while I did encounter some that I thought was pretty cool, I found a lot of it, to be frank, fucking annoying. I realize now that a lot of it was people doing their best Scott-Heron, so it's a lot like someone watching Citizen Kane and thinking, "What's so special about this? All of this is trite and cliched." Well, sort of, but when everyone does those low shots or deep focus, they're imitating Welles. The movie was so influential, the techniques so imitated, that the conventions seem trite now but that's only because they were so mind blowing when they happened. Watching Citizen Kane is like looking at a Rosetta Stone for the language of film.
There is a track on here called The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash) which has a highbrow version of observational humor on the alphabet and the calender, but it also contains a reference to the practice of adding '-izzle' and 'sh-' to words as part of The Ghetto Code. Did not know that it was that old. He describes the Panama Canal situation as-
"There's a little bit of Panama over here, then there is some canal, then there's a little bit more Panama over here. But the Panamanians don't control the canal. You could think of it as if Amtrack came through your crib. You would at least want to know the man who was punching the tickets, and have a very tight relationship with him."
This is a good cross section/time capsule for the political outrage of the time, but mostly now I want to hear Scott-Heron poems on Tea Parties, oil spills, two wars, and the 'Great Recession.' Of course now I'm going to think "Oatmeal Man" every time someone brings up Gerald Ford...which makes me think of Wilford Brimley (who our manager had managed to convince a few people was his uncle in one of the more awesome moments of ridiculousness at the store) or Quakers. He laid out the rational for calling Ford The Oatmeal Man earlier on, I forgot what it was. But, I have liner notes:
Anytime you find someone in the middle
Anytime you find someone who is tepid
Anytime you find someone who is lukewarm
Anytime you find someone
Who has been in Congress for twenty-five years
And no one ever heard of him, you got Oatmeal Man.
Oatmeal Man, straddling uncomfortably
yards and feet of barbed wire
It's hard to live in the middle all the time.
So that's the story behind that.
There's a lot of those things that I eventually found trite in Slam Poetry, like word plays that were never as clever as the poets thought nor seemed to merit the crowd's reaction. Things like 'Hollyweird,' which was probably a tad more clever at the time but is still kind of 'eh.' I guess it's to counteract the 'normalizing' effect that the media has, but now it just feels like something that would be on an annoying handwritten sign or a Palin tweet.
Rudy van Gelder and another curio show up today. I really have no idea what to expect from the Herbert Herhbein. I'm intrigued to see if my new understanding that I really like Hard Bop will hold up.
Ping, by the way, finally (well, 'finally'...I've had iTunes 10 for less than a month...) does what I thought it did, so you can follow the project through there. I guess, by the way, I'm going to handle the Ping thing (ha!) by just taking any signifigent quote I make about a specific track and posting it to Ping. And of course, since everything on the net is in someway Google's, there is a Picasa page of all the album covers. I'm not really sure who any of that is for, but I am providing as many ways to not be followed as I can, I guess. The album cover collection now also plays from the Picasa on the side bar.
The other CD is a double, so really I should just get to it.
Horace Silver Song For My Father
It really is appearing as if the Blue Note rep, whoever he was, was very generous. And really, without much need. This is another one of the Rudy van Gelder re-issues. Thing is that it's Blue Note, really the jazz label. I was going to carry these CDs or it wasn't really going to be a jazz section. In fact, I don't know that I really even had a say in the matter. Most of these might have been ordered as part of the overall order from the distributor and thus handled by the store's main buyer.
But I still got a boat load of Blue Note CDs. It didn't occur to me to keep track, but a clear majority of the jazz CDs that have gone in so far have been Blue Note CDs. I mean, obviously that's going to at least in part be a product of how dominant a label Blue Note is for jazz, but also that whoever handled their distribution for the store was incredible generous with the CDs anyway.
I'm not complaining, I have a lot of those 'must have, essential' jazz recordings because of that. And I'm apparently pretty blase´about it. Most of them aren't even opened, including this one.
Which brings me to the other, non-musical and yet weird part about it.
The credit card application. The CD came with a credit card application. Fell out when I opened the CD. This actually happened a lot, little offers of some sort or another would be included in the CD. I never really took much notice of them before. Usually they were offers to join some sort of mailing list or whatnot regarding the label, but I was a buyer, I was already in the loop. So I never really paid attention to them. This was late nineties.
But post-credit crisis, this suddenly stands out to me. A credit card offer in my CD? It is a Blue Note credit card, at least. I guess...apparently you get 'jazz insider' benefits that allow you to collect points to get Blue Note stuff and to select your own compilation that will list you as 'producer.' This act, apparently, makes you a 'jazz insider.'
I actually have no idea what the terms for credit cards are these days. This one is 3.9% for the first six months and then 9.99%, unless you miss two payments, then it's 19.99%...unless they're consecutive in which case it's 22.99%.
Really attached to that .99% thing.
There's a weird note to Wisconsin residents-
No provision of any marital property agreement, unilateral statement or court decree adversely affects the rights of First USA, unless a copy of each agreement, statement or court order is furnished to First USA, prior to the time credit is granted, or First USA has actual knowledge of the adverse obligation. All obligations on this account will be incurred in the interest of my marriage or family. I understand that First USA may be required to give notice of this account to my spouse.
I don't understand any of that. Well, except that apparently First USA might have to tell your spouse that you have the card.
Oh yeah, and there's a CD in here as well. Which is pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure I played the title track in jazz camp.
That's right. I went to jazz camp. As far as I know nothing untoward happened with anyone's instruments, flute or otherwise. Mostly it's where I discovered my laziness towards the new need to shave. I came home both years fuzzy. And one year a much better sounding saxophonist thanks to an instructor who hated my guts.
Horace Silver's Lonely Woman is a little more solemn and less...wailing? than Ornette Coleman's, which is a song I futiley try and hum now and then. Not that this piano trio Lonely Woman is easy to hum. But it is, obviously, more conventional.
This album has two contenders for awesome song name. The first is this groovin' number playing right now, Sanctimonious Sam and the other is the one that closes the album out, Silver Treads Among My Soul.
This is going to be a little rough. Listening to 'easy listening' music intently during normal circumstances is a bit of a sleep aide, but to do it while you're tired is something else. I'm up early to watch the Petite Le Mans from Road Atlanta and I was up late trying unsuccessfully trying to customize the theme of the blog (short story, their advice on how big the photo has to be to complete the background is a filthy lie...)
My initial strategy to find something to say about this CD was to try and link it to the Bert Kaempfret CD, but apparently I don't have to work all that hard on it. The rather anemic liner notes tell me that aside from Rehbein's apparent 'signature' string sound, he was a long time composing partner to Bert. So it's not just that I somehow tapped a vein of German based easy listening orchestras, it's entirely possible that these albums were released together and I got the promos at the same time.
While Kaempfret's CD was surprisingly jazzy, this one is not at all. This shouldn't be a surprise after a glance at the original liner notes to all three albums. Here are the first lines of each:
"It has been aptly said that "Music has charms that soothe the savage..." It has even been stated that this phenomenon actually works." -Music To Soothe That Tiger
"The mood is romantic...the songs are haunting, nostalgic, the language of love...the artist, a musical sorcerer named Herbert Rehbein." -Love After Midnight
"The days, we spend in doing...the nights, in dreaming.
The mood may be serene, or bittersweet with memory...a love a reality, or an unfulfilled longing...a moment shared, or spent in solitude. But whatever the time or the setting, the songs dedicated to love hear in this album fully express the thoughts and emotions of lovers everywhere." -...And So To Bed
In the same way that blues liner notes have to sell the artist as a hardboiled voodoo priest of pain and heartache the easy listening notes have to, it seems, sell the artist as a romantic enchanter wielding his soothing tones to take you to a magic world of sensuality.
It is not, by any stretch, dynamic music. But I have to say, it's kind of growing on me. Not that I would listen to this music in...well, most situations. And certainly not as prescribed. I don't want to speak for the 'ladies' but this might knock them out instead of get them in the mood, so to speak. Who knows. The covers are pretty racy, from the apparently topless woman in a leotard hugging the tiger skin rug on Music To Soothe That Tiger to the nude back of the woman taking off her lingerie on ...And So To Bed, leaving not much mystery as to what is about to happen once we get there.
One CD down, one to go. So far I've only nodded off once during a full course caution in the race. (I know I nodded off because I went to sleep under yellow and woke up to them racing...of course just in time for someone else to crash...). There is no way to pair endurance sports car racing to easy listening music, it's not even surreal, it just doesn't go.
I can't listen to any version of It Was a Very Good Year without thinking about Homer Simpson. We must have hit the Frank Sinatra vein, as the very next song is Strangers In the Night.
These tracks are remarkably short, but you'd never know that listening to them.
What easy listening collection is complete without a version of Spanish Eyes. I talked before about this being the thinking behind getting a CD like this, that there was going to be this one clutch moment in theater or film or something where someone was going to go, "Man, if we only had a version of (say) Spanish Eyes..." and then, like Spiderman I would arrive just in time with my copy of Spanish Eyes. And then the lead actress would swoon. Or something like that. More likely she'd regard that along with everything else as "not her lines." I was literally dumbfounded when I first encountered an actor who counted her lines. I think I muttered something like "well, make the most of them."
As much as I chide, Bert Keampfert drives the most search traffic to this blog, at least according to my stat measures. I guess we'll see what Herb does. Though if you're doing a search for either I can't help but think this would be a disappointing result.
Well, I made it--easy listening double CD that I don't remember getting. Day 36 under the belt...
So this is the thirty-first day. I've been actually doing this for a month. The time period is longer because of the hiatus, but thirty one actual days of cds going onto the hard drive. I don't really have anything profound to say about it but that I'm rather enjoying doing it.
It's all jazz day on the 31st day, and all jazz that I tend to prefer, so it's an easy day for listening because I'm likely to enjoy the heck out of it. We'll see if that translates. I was also suckered again by CDs in sleeves, but this time it's only going to result in three hours of music instead of yesterday's marathon five. When I originally decided to do this, five was the first number I came up with until I realized that five CDs a day meant listening to five hours of music straight through every day and write about it while it happens. It doesn't sound horrible, I'm sure critics do it, and just listening to music that long is not bad at all. But having to comment on it, and my decision to wear headphones to give the music it's best (under the circumstances) representation, that clearly would have been too much. And besides, critics get paid to do this, and I don't know that this blog has a reader I haven't met, so two it is.
Except today, where it's three.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers At the Cafe Bohemia V.2
This has always stood out to me as the halmark of post bop jazz. Not this particular album, which I apparently didn't even take out of its case until just now, but The Jazz Messengers in general. I may have mentioned this when I did the Tony Williams Trio, but drummers make the best bands, and the biggest proof of that is Art Blakey and his messengers. The jazz critic written liner notes tell me that this is the original line up (as much as I admire the Jazz Messengers, I don't really know the line up history--I just know that any time I pick up a Messengers CD the line up is going to be awesome.) The Messengers went from this super band line up to be the greatest predictor of remarkable talent until Blakey hung up his sticks.
This is not a volume two in the box set sense, but it is a companion recording to another that I'm hoping comes up because it's got some of my favorite Horace Silver numbers on it, apparently. It's of course another Rudy Van Gelder edition...I wonder if I should have been tagging those all this time?
I have been sitting on my Art Blakey anecdote, and I don't think I've already blown it. I wanted to use it yesterday when it was probably a little more appropriate. I was backstage at a Terrance Blanchard performance at Yoshi's in Oakland--I don't remember if I got back there because of the record store or because a former record store employee had become artist liaison for Yoshi's--anyway, I was sitting backstage while Blanchard held court. He was talking about his days as a Messenger and playing with Art Blakey. He was part of that crowd I talked about yesterday, the musicians that came out of school jazz, the technicians. He even talked about how they (including himself) loved to flex their skill by creating complicated, difficult, technical pieces. They'd all come in, Blanchard explained, with these hard, technical pieces to try out. But they'd get three or four bars in and Blakey would wave them off. "What is this?" Blanchard quoted, doing his best raspy Art Blakey voice, "Look here, anyone can write something no one can play. It takes talent to write something people want to hear." Blanchard explained that it changed his entire approach to music. To be fair, this is in no way an admission that Blanchard rejected his academic, technical past. He had reached a point of training himself, of study, that all of that was completely on demand. He wouldn't have been the player he is without that command. It just signaled a time to develop a different direction built on that philosophy.
That story effected me pretty deeply as well, even if I didn't continue on in music.
The CD opens with a track that threw me off completely, and the internet didn't help at all. The liner notes cleared it up, the track that sounded an awefull lot like Tenor Madness but was labeled Sportin' Crowd was in fact what Tenor Madness...when it was recorded six months later by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. And when a young Walrus played the snot out of it in high school. I had not sufficiently understood how chord changes related to each other for far too long, so I jumped at any chance to play the blues progression.
There's a weird thing that happens at the end of I Waited for You. At the end of the nine minute track the band launches into another tune for 15 to 20 seconds until it fades out. It's a weird choice.
Various Artists 32 Jazz Sampler
This is the kind of thing that I could only get from working at the store. I don't think it's the first of its kind I've done, because that seems familiar. I don't even think that this is the first one from 32 Jazz now that I think about it. Maybe not, my posts aren't as searchable as I'd like them to be...probably my fault.
This is a collection of 32 Jazz's hard bop/post bop artists, for the most part. This was a sampler of upcoming re-issues. Sometimes this meant that I was about to get six new awesome re-issues, sometimes it meant that this was all I was going to get. Since the Albatross is completely unorganized I have no idea which one is the case here. I don't know that I've seen these albums at any point, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
The second track on this album is one of those Real Book charts I never really got the hang of, Freedom Jazz Dance performed here by Eddie Harris. Turns out I wasn't that far off, it's just that kind of melody, I just never listened to it with a rhythm section. Or maybe I did and never made the connection.
You know, one of the things I'm discovering about myself through all of this is that I am a way bigger fan of hard bop that I thought I was. I liked it when I was learning jazz because it was funky, not as hard to play as bop and not, in my teenage estimation, as corny as swing. But my impression of it was that it wasn't always as funky as I thought it was, but that really seems false. Or I've grown into it, or something. Because of the 'straight jazz' CDs that have gone in, I've really enjoyed the hard bop ones most consistently. Rather than trying to use my own words to define hard bop, since it only seems appropriate at this point, I'm going to link to a definition.
It might be that any song named Feels So Good is going to be pretty cool. Mose Allison gives a groovy, laid back, very different Feels So Good than Chuck Mangione.
It was only a matter of time before Satin Doll came up. I had invoked it as the 'generic standard' enough times that here it is. It's being done by Raashand Roland Kirk, who sounds like he has a few saxophones in his mouth. I'm being literal here, Kirk would occasionally play multiple saxophones at the same time.
This is also a much different Angel Eyes than I am used to. A little groovier. This one is performed by Hank Crawford, not the high school big band favorite of any band that had a really good lead alto. I should explain that, but that's really it--there is a ballad called Angel Eyes that about three or four jazz bands would do at every competition that's lead by the first alto. I was expecting that song, but it was apparently a different Angel Eyes.
I really hope these albums pop up in the collection. I only managed to find MP3 downloads of two of the albums on Amazon, but they're both good.
Miles Davis Blue Miles
I'm pretty sure I have this twice, but the other one may not have survived. This is a themed compilation of Miles Davis recordings that, at least according to the CD, try to establish him as the "King of the Blue Hours between midnight and dawn." Apparently to refute him being the prince of darkness, which I've never heard him called, though he did record a song called that. Not sure that really counts.
This is the Round Midnight I'm most familiar with, the version from the movie of the same name the second most. This is probably the version of Round Midnight that everyone is most familiar with, even if they don't know they know it.
Miles Davis was really, really good at ballads. I mean, he was really good at trumpet in general, but he really smoked ballads. He's famous for saying, "You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads." I guess there's a couple ways to take that, I don't know what he said after or before that. Certainly Miles wasn't one to wallow in a comfort zone to be sure.
I usually don't like compilations, I prefer to hear the whole album. I want that artist's 'moment', so to speak, their complete thought. I would hear people complaining about having to buy a whole album for one song and I would think, "Man, listen to better music." But I guess there is an argument to be had for, "I just want to sit back and relax to some mellow, smokey Miles Davis music."
Or, I guess, if I was trying to seduce a classy lady in a cliched movie in the roll of pretentious douchebag. I do feel like I should be sipping wine instead of water for this. Though now any water I consume makes me a little nervous if the computer is anywhere near it...
I think that what the Albatross is teaching me is that perhaps really jazz is too big. It really is. This might be true of all kinds of music. I'm sure if I dug enough I'd find that there isn't enough time in this world to absorb all the really good Klezmer music out there. (I seem to remember picking up Klezmer music...)
But jazz is too big. There is simply too much good stuff out there. You have to dedicate your life to absorbing all of the fabulous artists, and ultimately end up with an unmanageable beast of a collection for your troubles.
Today's two CDs are from artists I 'know' but don't really know. They're prolific, very present in the history of jazz, great players, I just don't know enough about them because I know Sonny Rollins, Branford Marsalis, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Paul Desmond instead. I may have only one album each from either of these guys and my collection is full of completely phenomenal and prolific players of whom I have exactly one CD. There may be no hope. It might just be that you can never really know jazz unless you make it your life's work.
Perhaps that's fair enough. You don't have to know every little thing about your entertainment. But every time I find one awesome recording that I should have known about I worry about all the ones I don't. It reaches a point where finding good recordings is actually worrisome.
Here's what is worrying me today:
Jimmy Heath The Professor
I try and not look too many things up lest this turn into some digest of Wikipedia and random jazz reviews I manage to find in a Google search. The idea is to mainly write about what these CDs mean to me after having dragged them around with me all this time without really exploring them.
But from some reason it was important to look this one up, because it was a name that would have made me go "Oh yeah, that guy" - and then hope there were no follow up questions. Not the first time that the Albatross has done that to me in this process.
But also because I have started to try and do all the site building stuff like getting the MP3 player and scanning the cover after I started to listen to the CD so I don't sit and feel compelled to write things while I'm listening even though there isn't much to say. Because of this I have been listening and the recordings don't sound the same. Turns out this is a compilation from sessions in 1974, 1985, and 1987 released a year after he left the Aaron Copeland School for Music as 'The Professor.'
So the liner notes (strangely intact) lean heavily on the notion of learning jazz and the complexities of that. I hadn't realized that I learned jazz in a bit of nexus where more or less it had just been begrudgingly decided that you could in fact teach jazz. If jazz could be taught, it would lose some of its mystique. It was no longer that thing that came magically from the fingers of giants.
But that has always been ridiculous, as the liner notes concede. Charlie Parker studied the hell out of Stravinsky scores, and players studied other players to see what the were doing, what they had come up with. Formalizing that didn't take away the mystique because there is still an 'it' between the players that study the book and the truly great players. But there is no harm in giving those players with 'it' the structure they need to not have to re-invent the wheel just to get where they're going.
So Jimmy Heath, after playing with Miles, Milt Jackson, Cal Tjader, and more became a professor of jazz formerly in the way he would have been for any young player secretly taping his shows so he could take them home and transcribe them to find out what he did.
I hate finding out that awesome people were teachers only after they're done teaching. Not that I would have the nerve to actually try and be a student of awesome teachers because I would feel that "I'm not ready." Ultimately that constant feeling of not being 'ready' is what eventually undermined my foray into music.
I just realized I have been bobbing my head to this track without really thinking about it, turns out to be a tribute to Sonny Rollins. There are other tributes here, one to Ben Webster, one to the saxophone itself.
There is a lot of jazz guitar on this CD, which is always a little tricky. I either like it or I hate it. When I like it, though, I tend to really like it. In defiance of that, I'm okay with this guitar. It's pretty good, not that annoying tone that too many guitarists adopted I think in the 80s, transitions smoothly between a rhythm instrument and melody instrument.
Okay, CD, you have me. It has found my already documented weakness for goofy chanting on track with the droning "There's no end..." on the track naturally titled No End. Usually I find soprano sax taxing because it's harder to play than the people who pick it up like to admit, but Heath doesn't have the buzziness I usually associate with soprano sax. And, as I said, there's a chant. Tell me that Salt Peanuts isn't one of your favorite bop tunes and that it isn't because of the "Salt peanuts! Salt Peanuts!" yelled in the middle of the head. Unless of course you don't know 'bop' or the tune Salt Peanuts. In that case, check it out and tell me it isn't awesome for the above reason.
They avoided irony and did not end the CD with that track. Instead, it ends with one of the tunes I liked to play the most, Sophisticated Lady. Basically, I didn't know my scales and chord changes that well, so I learned a lot of ballads which I felt were easy to fake it on. There's a tuba on here, sounds like. The tuba got shafted in Jazz... it was there at the beginning and people use it from time to time but, as far as I know, there hasn't been a 'legendary' tuba band leader. Every other instrument got their moment in the sun, but the poor tuba toils in obscurity.
Albert Ayler Witches & Devils
It's hard to believe but CDs really had a short run on center stage as the music medium of choice. When I started at the record store we still called it a record store, for one, and CDs were really only about a decade old. There were still hold outs coming into the store complaining about our diminishing audio cassette section and arguing that they didn't want to have to 'replace all of their tapes' (as if after you buy your CD player it would sneak around in the middle of the night and smash all players of outdated media.)
So one of the ways that CDs were sold was the increasingly 'detailed' digital remasterings. No movement of Moore's Law was too trivial to trigger the re-release of some marginally remastered catalog of a label's material. Jazz and Classic Rock got it the worst. Since the mine was richer over in guitar land the whole thing got much more comical with rock re-releases. Audiophile store regulars would call in like clockwork looking for that Boston or Kansas re-issue with the new-process-of-the-moment and bonus tracks of the five minutes the engineer left the mic on accidentally.
For jazz, though, it meant that some titles collecting dust on the shelves of a label's catalog got to see the light of day. And so this '24-bit remastered' Albert Ayler CD ended up in my collection.
This gap in my knowledge hurts the most because I love free jazz. After years of making fun of it, one day sitting down and letting John Coltrane's Om! play all the way through, I just got it. It helped that the music program I was enrolled in at college had been very focused on New Music, but it finally clicked with me and I've been a fan ever since. But if progressive jazz is hard to come by, free jazz is nearly impossible. Free jazz is what I played at closing time to empty the store.
And again, the covers don't help me. Free jazz artists don't meet me halfway by having an album cover with them pouring honey on their head while banging a trash can lid on an ice sculpture of the Mona Lisa to let me know the music inside is going to be the disjointed frantic collective improvisation that I've come to love from free jazz. Okay, I don't know that I would have guessed from that album cover either, but you have to admit, it would be hard to ignore.
This CD resisted the draw of others for 'bonus tracks' and remains only four tracks at a relatively brief 36 minutes. Frantic, wild, atonal minutes. The titles are consistent, there is a theme that Ayler was approaching. There is the title track, followed by the much shorter Sprites, then the longer Holy, Holy, followed by another short track, Saints.
This is something you see every once in a while from free jazz performers, where they suddenly pop into melodic mode as if to say, "See, I can do that too, I just choose not to." There is always pressure on a free jazz performer to prove they don't have to play free jazz.
This is pretty early in Ayers' career and in free jazz in general. It's really frantic. According to the liner notes he used a plastic reed usually reserved for members of marching bands or parents who are tired of replacing reeds. It's a unique and recognizable sound. I wish I had dug this up earlier.
