king ubu

glad for your confirmation - otherwise my post above might have been proof of madness sometime in the future

Still need to get "Manhattan Fever" - the OJCs are pretty nice, but rather slight... "Kofi" is fine, I find! But we're derailing the thread... I see though Tom Storer is posting, I'm sure he'll bring us back on track with his concise upcoming comment!

Yes, still with some of these musicians it didn't lead to very... positive results. I still prefer old Harold Land ("Study in Brown") over anything of his work with Hutcherson. Foster and Land are obviously better examples than the musicians I listed - didn't think of either of them (though I recently got hold of the two OJCCDs by Foster which are roughly from the period in question).

And what about those earlier stages? I realise the topic title deals with swing > bop, but how about earlier similar stylistic developments? Jazz musicians from New Orleans, Chicago or NYC had different approaches, how did the transitions work? Was it similarly hard to adapt, or were those merely different dialects, while bop - to remain in the metaphor of languages - was a different language alltogether (though of the same family of languages, of course)? Take Earl Hines - he went from the early days into swing, and touched bop with his big band as well - quite a trip! Bechet for instance never embraced swing, but there must be a bunch of swing era guys who were active before. Was this change of style/set of rules an issue back then as well? Or was bop the big revolutionary break, the one, the first one? (up to what was referred to as the october revolution of jazz, at least...)

Yes, I thought of that when putting Jimmy Heath's name in that list... but those tenor sax players were already rooted in modern jazz. What did they look for in Coltrane? His vision, his spirituality? Or just technical stuff? More advanced playing techniques, harmonies? Or was Coltrane actually already in another stage that went beyond modern jazz/bop as bop went beyond swing? Probably in the end he was, roughly 65-67, but when did his influence become so overbearing that even seasoned guys like Thompson, Golson, Heath, Mobley etc. felt a need to take healthy or exagerrated doses of his playing and add that to their own styles?

I've heard little of his music, but those Blue Note Jazzmen dates are glorious! Also I think he turns up to good effect on a Condon date (included in the Classics - or is there only that Fats Waller guest appearance? - I have five or so Condon volumes, none of JPJ's alas)

Yes, MG - but in the end guys like Lucky Thompson or Benny Golson were able to bring another "voice" into bop. Budd Johnson as well (now that's one of the true individualists who continued to work in a most varied range of settings for several decades... for instance on Randy Weston's great Verve album "Tanjah"!) was able to adapt to many kinds of settings. And someone like Bennie Wallace then was able to bring a sound likened after Webster's into harmonically through and through modern jazz. Not to derail your point at all, just making some remarks that might even more strongly proof your point.

Interesting thread here! I'm not sure about all these topics myself, but my experience of late (or rather: of about the past 2-3 years) has been that more and more my listening went backwards in history. I figure I must have about as many pre-bop discs (is "swing" really a good label? Or rather "Swing" it should be... but if you take into account stuff like Luis Russell's band, "Swing" is certainly not a large-enough label) as I have 50s/60s discs. When I started listening to jazz, it was stuff like "Back at the Chicken Shack", "Money Jungle", "Mingus Ah Um", "Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet", then also "Ascension" and soon after more Miles, Mingus, Coltrane, then Adderley and Monk. From there I went on to the other end of the 60s - Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Jackie McLean, those artists stretching the boundaries of the genre. I became more and more interested in improvised music, free jazz (two more difficult labels), various kinds of European jazz (i.e. the output of the Hat label, Cecil Taylor, Ayler, also some FMP stuff, Irene Schweizer, etc etc). But over the time, as I got into this quite a bit (see the "funny rat" thread), I got somehow not tired of it, but I stopped listening to much music of that kind. I didn't go back to Blue Note and hardbop though, but rather started exploring earlier jazz - the point of entrance was Lester Young, I guess, and Lunceford, then Billie Holiday, Ellington... (before I'd heard some of those 50s Verve mainstream albums, Hawkins encounters Webster etc) - and there's so much glorious and individual music to discover there that it could turn out into a loooooooong journey! One point that goes beyond labels/styles/eras, that I have been thinking of quite often in those recent times: there was much wider a variety of styles within the general style referred to as "Swing" in this discussion. Many more individual voices, some even I dare say idiosyncratic. Think of Ellington's band, for instance - each of the guys had his own voice. If you play those 1927 OKeh sides long enough, you'll be able to tell the trumpet players apart... but in the larger picture: think of, for instance, Dicky Wells, Bennie Morton, Vic Dickenson, Tricky Sam Nanton, Lawrence Brown, Miff Mole, Jack Teagarden... just for tromboninsts. Then there were Jay and Kai and somehow everything got smooth and similar. Sure some guys turned that kind of playing into perfection and were extremely fascinating individualists (Rosolino comes to mind), but there was bad need for guys like Roswell Rudd and Julian Priester and Jimmy Knepper to break up the style of trombone playing again. Same on tenor... even today, most of the younger guys are so influenced by Coltrane, it's just boring (albeit on a high technical level, of course - but what's that then, high gloss boredom?). Before that you had musicians like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Chu Berry, Don Byas, Hershel Evans, Lucky Thompson, Illinois Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Bud Freeman... I'm not sure I really have a point - but in general to me it seems like the individualism in hardbop got more boiled down to nuances (of course there's still Mobley, Griffin, Lateef, Golson, Jimmy Heath and a few others who largely were able to escape the Coltrane/Rollins dominance, at least for large periods). But the general variation diminished... possibly? And as a post-script concerning free improv: I still attend concerts in that genre more often than any kind of mainstream concert, but in a week or so I could catch Evan Parker and Schlippenbach again... and o vey, this already bores me before being there... (it's a great festival that used to present more local and younger musicians, there's still someone like Peter Evans on the programme, but they seem to rely more and more on the well-known "safe values", which is a rather ironic/sarcastic term to describe that crowd, but in the end guys like Brozziman, Schlippenbach and Parker are just that by now, and quite formulaic as well...)

So from reading the Jane Fielding thread, I learn that the tenor sax on the Fielding album isn't really Teddy Edwards (as the booklet says), but rather one Ted Efantis!? Fegh them spanish crooks! Can't they even do their homework and do at least a bit of research, before putting out their free-of-charge (for them, that is) releases!?

I like the ballad as well, MG! And Dan, I considered singling out "Moment's Notice"... but then "Lazy Bird" is great, too, and so is "Locomotion"...

I strongly disagree. Of course the title track is terrific, but for me, all four originals are classics!

Hm, definitely not a one-trick pony, but Johnny Griffin's "The Congregation" longtime had such an effect on me... his solo on the opening track has such drive, such momentum, so much joyful exuberance, in short, it may be the only Griffin solo I could almost sing along from beginning to end... after that, all that came on the album seemed rather lame and tame by comparison. As I said, not at all a one-trick pony in my current assessment, but back when I got it (on Conn vinyl originally, in the 90s) and had much less jazz experience, it seemed to be...

They're great with Martial Solal as well!

"to whomever" You're slipping, chewy. MG don't be so harsh, he attented a grammer school all summer for this!

Interesting observations by ms fong and mr thornton - my exposure to Mariano has so far largely been jazz-based discs (plus said duo with Sinesi - what's that, some kind of flameco-jazz?). In that area, he did quite a few marvellous albums, in my opinion. And I enjoy his early work - in the early/mid fifties he must have been one of the most individual alto voices around (next to Konitz I guess).

just finished playing a recent recording with Richie Beirach (p), Gregor Hübner (viol) and Veit Hübner (b), aptly titled "Beauty" (Intuition, rec. 2004):

About the redhead?

I only have the Fresh Sound live of those... should get the others I guess. But I'm debating a real buying stop so don't push me please

Yes, but I'm still not sure I won't pick it up on impulse some day... first I'd still be interested in hearing something about the... uhm extra-musical extras, mainly the book - anyone got this box by now, or is there indeed not one single board member who owns it?

Time to dig up those Mariano/Geller live shows I have on some dust-gathering pile... 185 years of great sax playing! Wow!

Happy Birthday, Charlie! A great, individual, yes unique voice on the alto sax! The duo album with Quique Sinesi and his Enja quartet album "Deep in a Dream" are marvellous!

This is all so lame... why don't they just put out the great Scheveningen 1960 concert as a bonus, instead of studio farts and the well-known (and much-loved in this house!) 1958 studio session? That was a big letdown about the Deluxe Edition of "Round About Midnight" already - why just the one tune and not incude the whole 1955 Newport session?

About time! That one was carried on from at least the first edition I own (4th I think).

You know, the confusing thing about those "jewel case originals" is that not only the few mentioned above were called like this, but a whole lot of other "regular" reissues over here were packed just the same, for instance: Benny Carter - Further Definitions (as opposed to the rule, that one was a straight reissue of the earlier digipack twofer in the Impulse Master Sessions or whatever that series was called) Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster Tony Scott - Music for Zen Meditation (those are just three I remember seing in a store today... not a full list by far, I guess there would be 20 more...) Some other discs were repacked as "Verve/Impulse/... Masters" (including "A Love Supreme", "Getz/Gilberto"). And finally, one more "Original" that I'm not sure where to put (but I'd guess it would be part of the actual series) is "1" by the Crusaders. And we'd agree that the Coltrane batches (also part of two boxes) were sort of like the Nina Simone Philips batch - same packaging, but not actually part of this series? (As if it would matter in the end... I'm getting nerdy, I'll sign off and have a beer now!)

I thought "Abaton" (ECM), a double CD set with a disc of compositions and one of improvisations in trio with Mark Feldman (her husband) and Erik Friedlander was pretty good. It's the only CD of hers I have so far. Caught her live in trio with Vincent Courtois and Ellery Eskelin - that was pretty good as well!