king ubu

I love the Swiss Movement record! Benny Bailey is quite good on that one, too (although he himself seems to dislike the album...). I heard a broadcast of a Bill Evans (sax player) concert from some german jazz festival (maybe two years ago), where Les McCann was added to the group as a special guest (piano & vocals) for two of the broadcasted tracks. I have no idea to what he(McCann)'s up today, however. ubu

I've seen her live (with the band) probably in 2001. A great show! Rich Perry, Scott Robinson,... you get several good solosists/instrumentalists, and then you get the lavish yet very controlled and nuanced sound of her beautiful orchestrations of her (or other band members', I think) compositions. I got her second CD (Coming About), and it is quite similar in style to the concert I heard (it was the 30 year Enja Winckelmann jubilee tour, I saw Dhafer Yousef the next day, too. The first Enja release, by the way, was a Mal Waldron record, if I remember that right.) Hope you'll hear a great concert, EKE! Edit: just reread your post; you will be hearing the same show she did yesterday in Zurich (I missed it as I am currently in the accompanying orchestra of a theatre staging Brecht/Weill's Threepenny-Opera, and did miss the whole - though terribly bad programmed - Zurich jazz festival which took place last week). ubu

uh, and, generally, I'm more on the side of the Saints than the Kings... or rather: on the side of what the Saints had to say about Kings (such as Saint-Just) ubu

Cool! Hell, I only saw that thread today. I vote for King Ubu because, he, roi des polonais, is nowadays the true winner of the war in iraq (as polish writer Andrej Stasiuk said in the german newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung some months ago). He prevents Sadam from stealing all those beautiful blonde polonaises... B) Another personal favorite: King Bumibol (of Thailand, sp?). He jammed with Benny Goodman. The only jazz-addict king known to me. Bev, how's that Peter Burke book? I read some of his stuff, but not this one. Have you read that little book by Robert Darnton (in german it was called "Poesie und Polizei", I would have to look up the original title) on those nice poems about Mme Poisson etc? ubu

Ain't that Speer's Berlin Reichskanzlei?

Sorry 'bout that. I was browsing the Universal France site and saw that, and thought I'd post albeit in French...

source: http://www.universalmusic.fr/servlet/Front...t_id=4400675662 Waiting for this! Her last couple of albums were GREAT ones!

I love it! It's quite modern small group stuff. Not in the Grappelli vein. Some very able sidemen. Michel Portal makes his recording debut there. Would have to listen again to make more elaborate comments. ubu

I have just gotten Harris' "For Bird and Bags" and do really enjoy that album! There is not Harris thread here, so I thought we could start discuss his music here. One of my favorite 32jazz releases was the 2CD set by Harris including "The In Sound", "Mean Greens", "Tender Storm" and "Silver Cycles". There is a lot of very good music to be found on these dates! Harris' sound is unique by all means. He was truly his own man. What's your opinion about him? Which are your favorite albums? Let's start some discussion of the man and his music here! ubu

A great album! It's been some time since I heard it first, but it's a very good one! Is there any catalogue (online) of available Koch Jazz releases/reissues? ubu

I like it just right. It's a little rough (mainly the playing of Morgan and McLean), but it's true, bluesy, and yes, thoughtful, maybe. ubu

I like the Jacquet very much. It was among the first 10 of my Mosaics. I never did care about the sound, but it might be as good as possible with existing sources etc etc. It's from the forties, so no one expects something pristine. The music often is quite r'n'b influenced, sometimes with vocals, some jump stuff, one big band session, and (this has been mentioned) there are many ballad masterpieces. Get it while it's around! ubu

I got the CD last week. Have only had time to listen to the first 15 or 20 minutes, but my first impression is positive. Sounds like an interesting disc!

You're right, Jim! I'd buy such a box myself, too! Hell, that would be a GREAT one! Here is the information on the Mingus Europe tour of 1964 (the links don't function here, click the source for that): (source: http://webusers.siba.fi/~eonttone/mingus/1964.html) B) actually means b ) ubu

A couple of thoughts on my (not so popular, alas!) album of the week, after another thorough listen: I love the opening Part I! That xylophone thing Russell plays has sort of a circus-quality, slapstick. The beginning of Part II ("Krupa") shows him to be a swing expert (an expert at both that thing so hard to describe in words and the style/era). "Blasé" (and "Gloomy Sunday", too) is a highly effective, very individualistic take on a quite seldom heard (at least these days) standard. Russell's soprano playing is marvellous! With "Dark Rapture" we enter groove territory. I love the sound of the bass saxophone (wish I had one myself!). Another groovy tune comes at the end ("Oh Well"). Much of the music on this album is dense, textural music, often the horns play rhythm parts, too (as on "My Little Grass Shack"). "For M" then, has some real good trumpet playing by Russell. It's fun how he jumps from cool directly to electric. He succeeds to make this a clear musical hommage to MD (you'd recognize that without knowing the title and narration), yet somehow it's still very much Hal Russell there! Another general observation is that this is group music. While the NRG Ensemble sometimes defies its name, on Part V (Birth of the Free) they really live up to their name! And Mars Williams has quite an energetic thing to say throughout on his tenor. The Ayler hommage is another of my favorite tracks on this disc. First you get the very effective coupled double basses, then the two tenors enter. They emulate Ayler, but if only for the duplication of tenor saxophone, it is something else than just a replica. (And that line in the narration "Then along came Ayler / Holy shit!" is another favorite moment of mine!). And after the Free part comes the rise of NRG. That passage where Russell plays over a didgeridoo-backdrop is great! They can produce so many sounds! That's one of the best things about this band (and this album in particular - in my opinion the still very good Finnish/Swiss album has a little bit more of a sameness, and more rock-influence in general, I think). A listing of the instruments played may help to get an image of the sound part: Russell: ts, ss, tpt, dr, xylophone, perc, gong, narration, vox Williams: ts, as, bass-sax, toy horns, wood flute, didgeridoo, bells, sounds, narration Brian Sandstrom: b, g, tpt, toy horns, perc Kent Kessler: b, tb Steve Hunt: d, vib, tympani, perc Hunt and the two bassists, by the way, do a great job on the whole album. From dance-inflected swing beats up to free colouring, funky grooves, rock to free pulse playing... The two encores are a nice (but actually not extremely necessary) addition. A lyrical tune, and another groove thing, they show the spectrum of NRG very well. Now once again, what strikes me most is that out of all these sometimes rather disparate influences, styles, components, comes a really great sound/band concept - and NOT a ecclecticism merging and melting together on a superficial level the parts of the puzzle. In some way, this is a post-modern album in the best sense. Not a "great narration" (although it is that, too, of course!), but a quizzical, comical, earnest, happy, sad, joyous, jumping, grooving, loud and often funny piece. ubu

This sums it up pretty well... ... though I picked up all her discs... I did like "Love scenes" when it came out, but it has been a long time since I last heard it. Then her first two records (the ones before the Cole) are quite good in my opinion. And I have to confess I do like some things on the one following Love scenes (can't remember the title of that), the first "diva" one. The strings one is pretty lame (though she does a pretty "Cry me a river"), but the live disc is another quite good one. ubu

quite good at least, I'd say! I like it a lot! The line up of this date and yes, Lon, the sound, is quite unique. Then, the whole vibe is not as commercial as on the (wonderful, in my opinion) Fat Albert Rotunda. And Johnny Coles, Garnett Brown and Joe Henderson are a great frontline, too! ubu

Yeah! And besides I might add that her liner notes to the Revenge set really deserve an award! A box of all that material would sure be great. But this would be some 15 or 20 discs, I think! ubu

John, the 4CD box "At Birdland 1950-1951 Volume 1" (got it recently) was also released as two 2CD sets, as far as I know. So maybe you saw volume two of this? ubu

Thanks for this, PDEE! I will have to get a closer look at that Savoy set and compare with your list! ubu

What's the best deal to get the box in Europe? Amazon France has it for 60 Euros. Cheaper than that anywhere? ubu

Claude, SWR2 usually has bi-weekly jazz live broadcasts on thursdays. Usually they broadcast stuff they recorded themselves (the so-called "SWR Jazz Sessions"), but now they have started a series called something like "From the SWR (actually SWF and SDR) Archives". The first in the series was an hommage to Albert Mangelsdorff, then came a Brubeck quartet date from the eighties (with Bill Smith) and now comes Mingus. In between they feature some new stuff. I think you get archivals once a month and new stuff once a month. Find more here: http://www.swr.de/swr2/sendungen/jazz/index.html ubu

Yes, I do have several recordings of this tour (the two Enjas, the 3LP thing from Amsterdam, a very cheap CD from Oslo, the Revenge set... and the "Great Concert" has recently been reissued, too). This is what I found on the Stuttgard concert: Source: http://webusers.siba.fi/~eonttone/mingus/1964.html So the upcoming broadcast will contain maximum half of what was recorded that night... And poor king ubu will have to hunt down those LPs nevertheless... ubu

Well, I looked at the Savoy 3CD issue (Odyssey or something), and at the Proper box. This raises some questions. I do own the RCA 2CD set (and consider it essential), and the Bird 8CD Savoy/Dial etc. box. Now: are the Dizzy sessions included in the Savoy box complete? Or are there tracks missing? As I get it, the Proper does not have any of the DeeGee stuff of the Savoy. Is this music worthwile? The Musicraft dates are also in the Savoy box? (The May 15, June 10, and July 9, 1946 dates) Somehow it seems I could pick up the Savoy thing and disregard the Properbox, but the Proper does include the Manor date (Jan 9, 1945) and the Dial session (Feb 6, 46) as well as two tracks released on Phoenix and Guild respectively (Feb 9, 1945). What's the best way to get all this music? Chronological Classics? thanks for clarifications / recommendations! ubu

This might be of interest to our german (and swiss - hell, I love talking to myself...) friends: This concert is available on some bootleg, but it's certainly nice to hear it again (or, as in my case, hear it for the very first time), in what might be the best possible sound quality. It seems they play LPs in their recently started "Archives"-series, but usually, it's in quite good quality! ubu