I came across this just now and it completely blew me away so I thought I’d share it here. It’s a solo version of the John Coltrane tune Mr PC by the amazing (British-born) bassist Dave Holland. Words totally unnecessary. Wow will do.
Archive for the Jazz Category
Salty Dog
Posted in Jazz with tags Lizzie Miles, Salty Dog, Sharkey Bonano on April 16, 2011 by telescoperWell, that’s the end of term and I’m now free, from teaching at least, for three weeks. I thought I’d celebrate by posting a piece of bawdy good-time jazz. Here’s the fabulous Lizzie Miles singing with a band led by the shamefully underrated but wonderfully named New Orleans trumpeter Sharkey Bonano.
Just a gigolo
Posted in Jazz with tags Just a gigolo, Thelonious Monk on March 30, 2011 by telescoperMuch of Thelonious Monk‘s recorded output was based on his own original compositions, which include such classics as Bemsha Swing, ‘Round Midnight, Epistrophy, Brilliant Corners and Straight, No Chaser, but this is an exception to that rule. Just a gigolo is a little ballad that he took a bit of a shine to relatively early on in his career and performed impromptu versions of it on many subsequent occasions. Monk’s unique style is a joy to listen to, and this clip gives you a chance to see him too – watching him play the piano always makes me think of a kitten playing with a ball of string. For all the genius that he was, and all the problems he had with his own mental health, he never lost sight of the child within himself.
Now this is what I call awesome…
My Sweet Lovin’ Man
Posted in Jazz with tags Honore Dutrey, Johnny Dodds, King Oliver, Lil Hardin, Louis Armstrong, Warren "Baby" Dodds on March 21, 2011 by telescoperA high temperature and raging sore throat have confined me to the house today. I got up as usual at 7.30 but quickly realised I wasn’t going to be of much to anyone; trying to give a lecture when barely able to produce a whisper didn’t seem worth the effort. So off I went back to bed, after feeding the cat, and got up again about an hour ago.
I’ve been trying to cheer myself up by listening to – and transferring to digital using my USB turntable – some lovely old jazz records that I haven’t heard for ages. Not all of them came out well, but fortunately one of my all-time favourite records is actually on youtube anyway so I thought I’d put it up.
This is My Sweet Lovin’ Man recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on June 22nd 1923, in Chicago. It is a purely mechanical recording, meaning that the musicians stood shoulder-to-shoulder blowing into a horn causing a needle to cut the record directly onto a disk; copies would be pressed using this master which could be played back for the listener by a gramophone, usually amplified by another horn. Obviously the technology was very limited, but it’s good enough to reveal the superb musicianship involved in creating this wonderful piece of music.
I love jazz from all eras of its history, but there can’t have been many finer collections of musicians than this. It’s led by King Oliver, who plays cornet, with the young Louis Armstrong also playing cornet alongside him. Honoré Dutrey is the trombonist and the unmistakeable clarinet sound is supplied by the great Johnny Dodds. By the way, why is Johnny Dodds’ wikipedia article so brief? He was a colossal figure in the history of jazz! I must do something about that if nobody else does…
The piece was co-written by Lil Hardin, whose lovely piano playing is unusually well recorded on this track; pianos generally proved very difficult to record with the technology available in 1923. Lil Hardin, incidentally, became Lil Armstrong when she married Louis Armstrong in February 1924. The rhythm men are Bud Scott on banjo and Warren “Baby” Dodds (Johnny’s brother) on drums, who provide an insistent yet fluid pulse underneath the rest of the band.
King Oliver’s band never used written arrangements; the musicians worked out the ensemble segments together and then played them from memory. When Louis Armstrong joined the band, King Oliver at first led on cornet, with Armstrong providing decorative embellishments, but later on the two cornettists developed such an understanding that they were able to swap leads almost telepathically. Their playing together on this track is sublime. The improvised counterpoint provided by Johnny Dodds and Honoré Dutrey is also breathtakingly beautiful. Although it was recorded in Chicago, this is the classic form of New Orleans polyphony sustained throughout at the very highest level.
I think this is one of the greatest jazz records of all time, but it also reminds me that there was a move some time ago to refer to jazz as black classical music. It never caught on, but in this case the term seems to me to be perfectly apt. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Things to Come
Posted in Jazz with tags Big Band, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Fuller, James Moody, Paul Jeffrey, Things to Come on March 17, 2011 by telescoperI haven’t posted anywhere near enough music by the great Dizzy Gillespie on here so I thought I’d put up this clip which shows him in 1968 leading a phenomenal big band. Things to Come was an original composition by Dizzy Gillespie but it was Gil Fuller who provided the complex, gyrating arrangement which broke new ground when it was first performed (in 1946) in terms of the technical demands it made on the musicians, especially the trumpet section, but also in the sheer excitement it generated when performed live. This clip features a later version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band which re-formed for a time in the 1960s after a fairly lengthy hiatus, but it does contain several musicians who played in its earlier manifestation, including James Moody on tenor, who sadly passed away last December, but it is Paul Jeffrey who plays the wild tenor solo on this track. Star of the show, however, is undoubtedly Dizzy Gillespie whose staggering pyrotechnics threaten to blow the roof off!
I Mean You
Posted in Jazz with tags I Mean You, Stan Tracey, Thelonious Monk on March 8, 2011 by telescoperAnother Thelonious Monk tune, this time I Mean You, played by the superb British pianist Stan Tracey, who will be 75 later this year. He’s not very well known outside the UK, but I think he’s as good as any living jazz piano player anywhere in the world. See if you agree. This is just a fragment of a performance, recorded in London about 5 years ago, in which he demonstrates the highly unusual technique he uses to make music that’s inspired by Monk and Duke Ellington but which nevertheless manages be always uniquely Stan Tracey…
Evidence
Posted in Jazz with tags Evidence, Jaki Byard, Roland Kirk on March 6, 2011 by telescoperI’m aware that I still haven’t posted a follow-up to my introductory article about Bayesian Evidence, so I apologize to those of you out there that thought this was going to be it! In fact I’m just a bit too easy with other writing tasks at the moment to tackle that, but will get around to it as soon as I can. Yesterday’s post was about a kind of Evidence too.
Today I thought I’d post about yet another form of Evidence, i.e. the number of the same name by the great Thelonious Monk. Here it’s played by the Jaki Byard quartet of the 1960s, starring the wondrous Roland Kirk (in pre-Rahsaan days) who plays tenor saxophone on this track. It’s a typically eccentric composition by Monk, with characteristically fractured melodic lines and stop-start rhythms, but integrating over the parameter space defined by the chord changes, I think the best explanatory model for it is that it’s a “variation” on the jazz standard Just You, Just Me, although “variation” in this case doesn’t really describe the drastic nature of the overhaul. Anyway, Roland Kirk certainly doesn’t get lost in Monk’s labyrinth – his playing on this track is simply phenomenal. Listen to the staggering speed and originality of his improvisation during the first couple of minutes and I’m sure you’ll be wondering, as I did, where and how he managed to breathe!
It Never Entered My Mind
Posted in Jazz with tags Blue Note, It Never Entered My Mind, Miles Davis on February 21, 2011 by telescoperBefore going to bed I couldn’t resist a late night post of this wonderful version of a Rodgers & Hart ballad called It Never Entered My Mind recorded by Miles Davis for the Blue Note label in the early 50s. Listening to the later Miles Davis playing a standard tune such as this is a bit like trying to recognise an old friend from a photograph of his skeleton, but here he sticks quite closely to the original composition. With that hauntingly melancholic tone, however, it is pure Miles Davis all the way through.
The composition is a standard AABA form, but with interesting harmonic movements: the A sections (which aren’t identical) consist of repeated notes followed by descending scales whereas the B section – the middle eight – starts with a drop of a minor sixth followed by an ascending scale. It’s a simple device but wonderfully effective, especially in the hands of a genius. I think this track is an absolute gem.
The other musicians featured are Horace Silver (piano), Percy Heath (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). Bonus marks to those who can put names to the other jazz legends shown in the photographs, but don’t let the task of identifying them distract you from the beautiful music…
Portrait in Jazz
Posted in Jazz with tags Autumn Leaves, Bill Evans, Jazz, Paul Motian, Portrait in Jazz, Scott La Faro on February 5, 2011 by telescoperAt the end of a very busy week (during which I haven’t had much time to post), I decided to relax a bit this morning by listening to some old favourite Jazz CDs. When I got to this one, Portrait in Jazz, by the Bill Evans Trio I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t played it for so long. Surely I can’t have forgotten such a masterpiece? Anyway, I decided to write a post about this wonderful album. If it helps just one person discover this timeless music then it will have been worth it.
Bill Evans was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Jazz pianists of all time. Among other things he practically created the modern piano trio, converting it from what it had been before – a pianist with bass and drum backing – to an equal partnership of these three very diverse instruments. To make the format work required partners of equal brilliance and compatibility and it was a while before Bill Evans found the right musicians to join him. Eventually he formed his first regular trio with the superb Scott La Faro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.
Innovations based on collective endeavour rarely succeed immediately, however. It took Evans and La Faro a long time, and two or three albums, before the latter was able to work out how his bass lines might comment on and blend with the piano improvisations instead of merely underpinning them. As their relationship changed and matured, Evans’ contributions actually became a bit more fragmented, so as to leave room for the bass to burst through, and increasingly their performances became like dialogues for piano and bass. Not that we should ignore the contribution of the drummer Paul Motian either; he does far more than just keep time in the way old-fashioned drummers when playing in a trio format.
But on Portrait in Jazz, their first album together, the accent was still predominantly on Evans the soloist and because his playing here is so entrancing one has to acknowledge that the eventual change of emphasis, however justified from an artistic point of view, was in some ways a mixed blessing.
What characterises this album is Evans’ lyricism and lightness of touch. He doesn’t try to overwhelm with virtuosic flourishes. Each phrase and indeed each note is finely shaded. Confidence in his timing enables him to make subtle use of the space between phrases and bring off the most dazzling rhythmic displacements, almost casually.
I’ve picked one track to give as an example. It wasn’t an easy choice but I think this – the standard Autumn Leaves – is the best track on the album. After the opening statement there’s a fine example of the interplay between the three members of the trio that was to become more prominent on later albums, but eventually (about two minutes) they kick into tempo and Evans launches into a stunningly beautiful solo improvisation in which every note sings with a sustained emotional intensity few, if any, pianists have ever achieved in any idiom. As Miles Davis once said of Bill Evans “He plays the piano the way it should be played.” Amen.
Follow @telescoperThe Pilgrims’ Chorus
Posted in Jazz, Opera with tags Don Lambert. Pilgrims' Chorus, Harlem Stride, Jazz, Tannhauser on January 21, 2011 by telescoperSo a long and difficult week ends, with quite a few beers in the Poet’s Corner and me about to collapse into bed. I think this is a good time to wheel out something you hopefully find quite amusing, i.e. a Harlem Stride piano version, by Don Lambert, of the Pilgrims’ Chorus from the Opera Tannhauser by Richard Wagner. I think I can safely say that if Wagner was alive today he’d be turning in his grave to hear such a frontal assault on his music, but I think it’s a blast…
In the Dark 