Today represents two musicians I kind of backed into knowing, so to speak. They were either tangential to something I was into or they did one thing that I found curoious and as a result (and since whenever they released something I got it for free from the label) I started following. Also, today represents the first time something is verifiably from the actual rotation section of the Albatross because it comes from a sleeve to a broken CD carrier. On with the show...
Don Byron Music for Six Musicians
I have to keep checking because I become convinced that this album is already on the hard drive, but it's not. I listened to it enough that much of it is pretty familiar, even though that had to be a fairly long time ago because I don't remember this being available during that brief window in which I had a CD player in the short lived Vanagon.
Not that I associated any of this familiar music with this album. There is the slam poetry opener that I knew as soon as it started, but if I had remembered those lines separately I would not have thought immediately, "Oh, that Don Byron CD I used to listen to..." In fact, I was surprised to hear slam poetry when what I was expecting was just some progressive jazz played on a clarinet.
This, I believe, never really had a case, so it's little torn sleeve is as much home as its ever known.
Outside of the poetic opening it's pretty straight forward progressive jazz stuff, complex rhythms, some collective improve, dissonance, lots of counter-everything. I don't know that what makes up the six musicians stays the same from track to track, since I don't remember the electric guitar that's making a showing in "I'll chill on the Marley tapes..." on (The press made) Rodney King (responsible for the LA riots). The track names, by the way, are awesome. A little dated in their politics (a reference to both Rodney King and Ross Perot...), but that's fine. In ten or twelve years some rabid downloader is going to realize he has all this unlistened to music and start whatever indulgent method is available to him like blogs now about going through all his music and commenting on the outdated politics of half-term Alaskan governors and modern day tea partiers. And maybe people who do stunts to become reality TV stars. Or maybe by then we'll have given up and everyone will be reality TV stars.
The cool thing about being political in jazz is you really only have to come up with the snappy title and you're done. Well, unless you're Moss Allison, then you have to use dry wit in lyrics, apparently.
The music is as eclectic as I come to expect from Byron. Not so much as A Fine Line, more than Bug Music. Right down the center of variation. The relatively short The Allure of Enlightenment is a calm and melodic contrast to the previous Crown Heights. I'm more familiar with the beginning of this album than I am its end. I don't know if it's because by this time I was well into playing a video game and not paying attention, or if it stands out less, or if I simply just stopped playing it early on each time and moved on to another CD.
Wayne Shorter Juju
The internet has effected me. I feel the urge to create some sort of graph or something starting with Sidney Bechett and placing saxophonists along it in relation to which direction they took the horn and where they sit. Because in my mind at least, I start to do that in some form or another. There are groupings, like Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond all sit grouped up in one part of the graph, the 'mellow side.' Then there's Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Hamiet Bluiett on the crazy side, and just a little in from those guys would be Pharoah Sanders and Rashaan Roland Kirk, and a little further in Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter. But here's where the graph would get confusing for me, anyway, is finding the distance on a different axis between Shorter and Rollins. Rollins is more bombastic, more Kirk, and Shorter is more manic, more Dolphy. Of course for any of this to make any sense you have to know who all these players are, and if you do then you don't need the stupid chart.
Wayne Shorter is on or near everything cool at one point or another, which I guess would come from being part of not only Miles Davis' amazing group ("The Quintet" as some have called it) but also part of a whole lot of other people's amazing groups. Whenever I want to find an example of jazz albums I should have to demonstrate my collection's lacking, about half the time the example I bring up is a Wayne Shorter album. Half because he's a remarkable player with some landmark albums, but the other half I think is because he's one of those guys that people know is awesome but don't buy the records that he heads. I might be projecting here, but most of the time when I was able to look at a serious collector's stash, Shorter wouldn't really come up as often. Shorter albums don't appear on lists as much unless the list goes past twenty or so, but when it does the person making the list lavishes it with praise. I don't know what the distinction is or really even if it's just in my head. I was relieved that the CD had been pulled out, that at least I listened to this one when I got home, but not as often, apparently, as Don Byron's CD.
This is, of course, another Rudy van Gelder edition from Blue Note. If I had been tagging RVG CDs in the posts I'm pretty sure that would be the top tag. Everyone of the RVG Edition CDs has the exact same graphic on the back. There's that pose, the universal gesture, apparently, of someone wearing headphones indicating, "Shut up, I'm trying to hear something..." You see that all the time in movies...hell, I do it when I'm recording audio on a shoot. You're trying to pinpoint something in the audio and you tilt your head even though you're wearing headphones...like if I crook my head just right the proper audio will fall into my ear and I'll get what I'm looking for. Like for no reason we all become Nipper the RCA dog twisting it's head in front of the gramophone. I'm not sure why in the hell we do this. Alright, in movies it is really the only way to visually indicate that the person on the headphones hears something important and is trying to figure out what it is. And maybe it's just reflex because in every other situation if we move our ears we can hear certain things better and it's not like that reflex is going to go, "Oh, hey, the speakers are attached to your head...moving it won't matter." But it's still kind of silly.
I wonder if I could rate artists on how easy it is to do something else while listening to them. I don't really know how to do it without it sounding like a bad thing. I get distracted on a lot of the CDs, they're usually around an hour long and if I sat here with my fingers on the keyboard for the whole hour the posts would be crazy long nonsense, and already they're too long for one of my only readers. But for some of them I enjoy having them play and then merrily go about my business stumbling around the internet until "Shit! The CD is over and I haven't said much of anything!" Then I don't know what to do. It's hardly ever that I just didn't like the music, but rather I just didn't only listen to the music, I guess. And they don't have any tracks where I go, "What the hell is that?" which isn't a bad thing, necessarily.
This may not be as much a function of the Albatross as it is the way I actually function. Sometimes I do want to put away the CDs that have been playing around in my rotation, but I don't always have the time or the inclination to find the case. So I just put them in any one I can find.
I've talked about this before, the Fake Out. But there was an aspect of the Fake Out that I hadn't mentioned, the Double Down. More than one CD in a case at a time.
Well, today there is a Fake Out AND a Double Down at the same time. What I thought was going to be my second comedy CD, a Berkeley concert by Lenny Bruce is instead two CDs that I'm kind of hoping make it (as I type this I haven't tried to injest them.) But it's two cases so I'm just going to go with the rule that they both have to go in.
I really have to find out what's making these CDs so expensive. I mean, I'm limiting myself to Amazon because...well, to be honest I want a new music player and if for some reason people start reading this blog and want the music I'm listening to I'll get a few pennies towards that goal, but at $30-some dollars for a used CD I might be better off opening a used store.
If only these CDs were in anyway good condition. Well, this one is, I just opened it and there isn't any damage, but for the most part.
So yeah, more big band. What to say? I rather like Woody Herman more than I realized. Which I now realize is something I discover every time I listen to Woody Herman. There's a lot of energy to his arrangements and his bands playing, even when doing ballads like I Remember Clifford. And then, of course, there's Four Brothers, which you always wanted to be in a sax section so bad ass that the leader decided to do Four Brothers. I'm not as fond of the James Bond love theme sounding Free Again, however.
The Preacher is on here, the first combo jazz number I performed in public. I really like this piece, nostalgia aside. It made me think that Hard Bop was where I was at, but it didn't work out that way as much.
Interestingly, the liner notes is written by someone who has almost the same trajectory, talking about knowing Herman is important etc etc (he goes a little further, but it's the liner notes), but not realizing he actually likes Herman until he listens to the album. Of course, being liner notes, it's a little over the top in its exuberance:
...But if there were to be a subtitle to this fine album, after listening to it joyously several times, I'd have to call it Woody Live East and West or, The passion According to Now, because in its fervor there's sure and steady voice that speaks of the immediacy of the Age in wich it is sounded--an immediacy formed the best of the Past, the Zap of the Present, and the nervy, uncertain excitement of the Future.
These are apparently the original liner notes from the 1967 release, so all that "Now" and the "Future" talk is keeping with the times. I mean, we were two years away from landing on the moon.
Listening to this live recording on headphones you get to hear snippets of people saying things to each other on the bandstand. No good dirt, but it's still kind of cool for some reason to hear someone try to get Woody's attention or Herman comment on solo.
This is another short album, too, at just under 40 minutes (almost a dollar a minute if you buy it new...seriously, what's up with that? Is it that they'll print one just for you if you really want one?)
This last track has an awesome title, Waltz for a Hung Up Ballet Mistress.
Tony Williams Young at Heart
Tony Williams is one of the concerts I went to blind. I knew he was supposed to be good, so I went. From my senior year in high school up until about the time I moved to the Bay Area, I would make regular trips down to Kimball's East, Yoshi's, Kimball's and various other places to see jazz artists on their way to japan (at least that's what a few of them told me.)
That was the other strange and cool thing, quite often they would talk to me. Not all of them, and not always the band leaders, but with a strange frequency they would pick me out and talk to me. The most shocking instance was the Tony Williams concert because I hadn't really even expected to see anyone, but Bill Pierce was sitting on a bench in the lobby and, being a saxophonist, I was trying to inconspicuous but totally noticed him. That's when he said, in his characteristic gruff jazzman's voice, "What do you play?" Not "Do you play," what. I don't know if he figured that the only reason someone so young would be at that show was because they were a young jazz musician or what, but he pegged me. He instructed me to sit down and we talked through the intermission. I honestly don't remember about what, I was absolutely floored that the dude I just saw completely nailing it on stage a few minutes ago was having a conversation with me...one that he solicited.
This became a bit of a norm for me. I started more or less going to shows with the reasonable assumption that I might meet the performer and have a casual conversation. I don't know if it was mojo, or just the novelty of youth showing up, or what, but I was getting to meet some incredible people. When I became a buyer it actually became expected. The first time I met Branford Marsalis said he remembered me, Terrance Blanchard told me a great story about Art Blakey, Tony Bennett shook my hands like a movie mobster. But it was that first contact at the Tony Williams show that sort of stuck for me.
Hands down, drummers form the best bands. For all the jokes about drummers and musicians, at the very least in jazz, they really know how to pick 'em. A good drummer makes all the difference in the world, and of course, Williams is very, very good. Because of that first show I was always excited to get a Tony Williams promo when it came out, though I may have actually bought this one, I seem to remember having it a pretty long time, and the CD certainly shows that. I wasn't able to rescue the title track.
This particular album is just a trio, so no horns. Just straight piano trio stuff with a lot more drum features that would normally happen. It's got standards like On Green Dolphin Street and Body and Soul, some out-of-cannon selections like The Beatles Fool on the Hill. I want to characterize this but it just sounds like my first few years out of high school when I listened to stuff just like this all the time.
Oh yes! This Here, I fucking love this chart. I always forget its name, so I glazed over it when the track listings came up, but this is one of the coolest hard-bop pieces around. Sweet, thank you Albatross for eventually putting this back up. AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! Cruel fate, it's a damaged track! Sadness now surrounds me...
The anidote to sadness is the Hammond B-3 organ, preferably played by Jimmy Smith. And Blue Note is here to deliver. The rep that handled Blue Note was pretty kind to me even though he didn't have to be. It was a big label distributor and I was going to carry his stuff regardless of how he treated me, but he knew I was a real fan of jazz and he made sure to hook me up with a lot of great stuff. Most of my really great classic jazz stuff is Blue Note, partially a function of Blue Note being THE jazz label, and partially a function of this guy hooking me up. I mean, I was a soft touch. Truth be told I probably wasn't that good of a buyer, I just don't think anyone had the heart to remove me.
On the subject of performers talking to me, Jimmy Smith is an early early instance. So early in fact, that I didn't know who he was. And it wasn't my charms at all that were involved. I had been going to local jazz clubs for a while, to the point where the local jazz musicians had gotten to know me and my friend, the piano player I mentioned in the Henry Mancini entry.
It was a piano player that we had come to see when he started talking to an old man who had come to talk to him. He seemed to get pretty excited and let the old man sit down and start playing. We were bummed, to be honest. We thought the guy we had come to see was letting some cat sit in so he could go flirt with chicks. It wasn't out of the question. But instead he came and sat at our table, beaming.
"Do you know who that is?"
"A friend of yours?"
"That's Jimmy Smith, man. He just moved here!"
Yeah, nothing. We had never heard of him. But he was pretty cool. He later came over and talked to us as well, and we tried our best to hide the fact that we had no idea who he was. Joe, the local piano player, had filled us in enough to fake it. It wasn't until much later that we discovered who we had the privilege of meeting. Of all the encounters, his is the one I most wish I could redo.
Most people 'know' (even if they don't actually know it) Jimmy Smith for the organ figure in the Beastie Boys' Root Down sampled from the track and album of the same name.
Smith is the end all for organ for me know. To the point where I don't really know any other organ players. I have a few of these compilations, mostly gained for the exact purpose of finding other organ players. I don't want to be left flat footed if I find myself in a small jazz club and some other legendary organ player walks in.
Though most of these tracks are led by saxophonists or guitarists, two instruments that go well with the Hammond. I don't have the case anymore (apparently) so I don't have the list of band members to go by.
This kind of music almost demands that everything be in sepia tone and wearing tank tops and suspenders.
Disc One opens and closes with the lengthy tracks, Jimmy Smith's twenty minute The Sermon and then Grant Green's fifteen minute Blues in Maude's Flat (which is a clever name...) Every thing else hovers around six minutes long.
Organ music is awesome. I must have been playing this one a bit, and that's how it wound up in the Lenny Bruce case. I hope I find Disc Two.
Once upon a time I had a record collection. You know, like real records, LPs, vinyl. I had it because that was what was available.
It wasn't a collection of rarities or anything. I think it started with Disco Duck and Pac-Man Fever and by the time of its demise contained what I thought was the core of an essential jazz collection. Or at least jazz music I had heard in jazz history classes or from instructors that I really liked.
Sadly, the stack of records was thrown out with my stack of comics after I moved out of my Dad's house and forgot them. That has always stung. Not because Pac-Man Fever is such a valuable record (I think I saw it at a thrift store for $.50 once) or my billionth printing of Giant Steps was worth anything, but because that was music I wanted and I didn't have it anymore. (I also had the complete run of the original Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2, which might actually have been worth something...well, the internet says $20...but that's for another story...)
Part of working at the record store was to fix this, to re-establish my collection. And this time not let go of it. Little did I know what I was getting into.
Herbie Hancock Maiden Voyage
This is one of the first albums I bought when I first started to explore 'real' jazz. As I stated before, I had an early connection with Herbie Hancock and when I found out that he recorded this kind of stuff, I went right for it. Plus, after my dad had mentioned that Hancock didn't know how to play in response to Rock It, I looked forward to the moment he would ask who this incredible piano player was so I could beam, "Why, Herbie Hancock of course. Don't you recognize his playing?"
I don't know that it ever actually happened, but I sure know I wanted it to.
I've always had a cheese streak in me, so when I formed a jazz combo in High School I wanted them to play Maiden Voyage at our first show. That first show never happened, and no one was as into Maiden Voyage as I was, so I don't think it would have happened anyway.
This might be the first recording of people I've seen live to go into the hard drive. With the exception of saxophonist George Coleman, I have seen each member of this line up live, heading their own bands. Hancock I saw in 're-union' groups, first with Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter and last with The Headhunters.
With all the importance of this album to me, with all my clear love for these performers, this CD was unopened. I was undoubtedly excited to get such a crucial album back into my collection, but I never so much as took it out of its wrapper. It was a CD I knew, I was glad to have it back, I probably intended to listen to it at some point, but I probably got it along with a bunch of other things, or stuff I hadn't heard yet, and into the Albatross it went, lost. I remember it surfacing now and then and being happy that it still survived, but I never even picked it up.
I've painted myself into a corner, I realize, by classifying the jazz in the tags. I knew there would come a time when I wouldn't really be able to do that without messing up and here it is. I tend to think of this as just 'post-bop' jazz, not really cool or hard-bop (as wiki seems to think it is...or 'modal jazz' which is true of the title track). I think I'm just going to go with post-bop with the caveat that I am by no means a final authority on the subject. I just thought that there was so much jazz that was going to come up that just saying 'jazz' wasn't going to be enough.
This is as close as jazz gets to a 'concept album,' with all the pieces meant to evoke the ocean. This is done through the use of a lot of modality and openness in the arrangements and solos. It's a pretty easy album to listen to, which means you can end up missing some of the wilder moments in the solos. It's a little deceptive that way. This is what formed the basis of what I considered jazz at the time. To me, jazz was small combos and lengthy solos, not really blistering but rather developing over time. I had heard other pieces out of context before, Take Five etc., but this was 'on-purpose jazz.'
It's also pretty short at 42 minutes, with only five tracks.
This is another one of those Rudy Van Gelder reissues. I replaced a lot of my old Blue Note recordings when the promos for this series came out. It was a boon, since up to that point, my promos didn't feature a lot of 'classic' acts except in collections, not complete recordings.
Well, now it's on the hard drive, nostalgia on tap...
Doc Severinsen & His Big Band Swingin' the Blues
This is another one of those 'why not' CDs. When it's free and offered to you, sure why not? Doc Severinson? Sure. You usually (unless you'd gone to a live taping) only get to hear him in little bumper segments here and there. Why not find out what he sounds like when given more than 15-30 seconds?
There isn't anything other than name-recognition based curiosity. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson wasn't something I necessarily 'got.' I wasn't up on the daily news, so I didn't understand half of the monologue. I was too young to get the more scatological jokes no matter how overwhelmingly tame they were. I wasn't up on the latest whatever that the guests were there to promote and I could never remember anyone's name or face anyway, so the interviews were nothing much to me. What The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson meant to me was that I was up waaaay past my bedtime, and that was awesome. And occasionally someone would bring on wild animals that would mess with Johnny or McMahon. Or, as I knew him, 'that Star Search guy.'
I seem to remember listening to this, actually. I don't know why I remember this CD and especially don't remember listening to it, but I really think I did.
Something happened to Big Band music between its heyday and 'modern Big Bands.' There is a distinct sound change and it's not just in the way the band is mic'd. Where my High School band was modeled after the Basie orchestra, my second and final college band was a lot more like this. A lot of 'competition bands' sounded like this as well. I don't know enough about the influences or who affected these changes. I know I always associate it with Maynard Ferguson, but I don't know really.
I don't even know how to quantify the difference other than to say 'modern sounding.' I mean, it's the same book--In a Sentimental Mood, an Ellington staple, just ended. But the arrangements are different.
This is the kind of Big Band stuff I would run into a lot live. Mostly, as I said, at competitions. I was always a little uneasy with music competitions, but it meant that a lot of schools got together and played their music for something other than mandatory school assemblies and end of the semester concerts.
There's a track on here called "Doc & Snooky Banter" that's apparently just them making small noises back and forth on their instruments (both trumpets with the drummer wanting to play along) while the singer laughs. That might have been one of those things just for them that ended up on the album for the rest of us...
Usually at this point in the concert, if it's late enough and at something like a massive outdoor jazz festival, there is a group of older people dancing in front of the band. If that goes on long enough the people who know dances are joined by people who just move about. At some point, I get it in my head to join them, which when I was a teenager delighted the hell out of them. This isn't a 'cougar' thing, these are like grandmas who I think just pretend I'm their grandson taking an interest in them even though I've reached my 'too cool teens.' I don't do that anymore. It's not as 'adorable.'
Me and my brother spent a few minutes trying to get a decent sound out of my nephew's hunting horn the other day, confirming our notion that playing brass is at least 15% voodoo. I bring this up because the little intro Doc plays for West End Blues has that herald trumpet flare.
They're ending with a spiritual-induced The Supreme Sacrifice, complete with B-3 organ. It almost seems out of place, but there is a consistence of the sound especially in the horn voicings and the way it's all recorded. Easily, though, my favorite track on the CD.
I really have to find out what's making these CDs so expensive. I mean, I'm limiting myself to Amazon because...well, to be honest I want a new music player and if for some reason people start reading this blog and want the music I'm listening to I'll get a few pennies towards that goal, but at $30-some dollars for a used CD I might be better off opening a used store.
