Rabshakeh

I've plugged for Artlessly Falling by Mary Halvorson's Code Girl, which I haven't heard yet, and taken a punt on Pat Thomas and the Locals' new Play The Music of Anthony Braxton. I'm always happy to support Pat Thomas, who never seems to get many breaks. The Coronavirus and lockdown seem to have pushed him to record a bit more. Or perhaps OTO is just offering him some more recording opportunities to replace the three or five hundred gigs he would have otherwise played for them last year...

Resurrecting an old thread for exactly the same reason as the Original Poster: I'm listening to The Cape Verdean Blues and I'm struck by how colourful the drumming is. Apart from the two Silvers and the one Carmell Jones record, are any of his other performances notable? Did he record with Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott? Are any of his leader dates any good?

Fantastic! The Landry reissue is great news. I love Solos.

Damn! I have it coming up as released '81 for some reason.

Noice!

Without wanting to repeat the comments above, I am so up for this.

Currently listening to, and enjoying, B.C. by Jan Klare. It's one of a run of solo saxophone records that's that came out last year (although it was apparently recorded in 2019, back when it was still normal to have non-solo records...). I don't know anything about Klare. I have checked my collection and he doesn't play on any records that I have. Does anyone know anything about him, or have any other records of his (leader or sideman) to recommend?

Shame. Very sad. My favourite output of all the Wailers.

Nice. Thank you. Does anyone know anything about the writer?

All three thumbs up! Having a lot of fun at the moment with last year's Of Things Beyond Thule, Vol. 2 by Joe McPhee, Dave Rempis, Tomeka Reid, Brandon Lopez and Paal Nilssen-Love. Definitely a record that is as good as if not better than the sum of its parts. If you like any of those players, I'd recommend it.

I don’t know - Is that right? I’ve always thought that mainstream jazz’s right turn into acoustic academic fustiness was a bit of an outlier, in the age of new wave, hip hop, dance hall, etc.

Keep it up! I'm really enjoying reading it. There's always more Mal to know about.

Half an order in from Discogs. Just gone into the office for the first time in three months to pick it up.

Not Chick specific, but....: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/26/experience-i-was-in-a-scientology-jazz-band.

Beaver Harris' 360° Music Experience's In:Sanity (Black Saint, 1976) Hot, eclectic stuff.

I’m a big fan of the two recent Nate Morgan rereleases.

For some reason this one had totally passed me by. No idea why. Gotta listen.

It was a good reissue.

Currently on CD 2 of Ornette's In All Languages (the Prime Time one), having finished the first Original Quartet CD.

Absolutely!

From reading backwards, it seems like this was a concern right through to the mid-sixties, and was itself one of the reasons for the musicians' embrace of fusion, before it became a reason for the embrace of neo-traditionalism. I have no idea whether any of these developments actually succeeded in recapturing the imagination of their intended audience though.

I'm generally just glad those sorts of polemics are past. Whilst some of the various attitudes linger, the jazz world seems in the last ten years to have finally worked its way through those early 80s talking points. Certainly the new crop of musicians and whoever is backing them seem to be prepared to get more interesting work out there to the audiences. From my perspective, the one task that is left for the present (at least as regards the Young Lions' legacy) is the re-evaluation and promotion of the music of the losers to the Young Lions trend. The discussion on and media representation of jazz in the 80s and 90s (including informal media, like blogs) still leans heavily on the value or lack thereof of Marsalis's music. There is occasional reference to those artists from a few limited sets that, for whatever reason, proved categorisable and so saleable in spite of the marketing onslaught (e.g., Zorn & Co, Metheny, M Base, Vision Fest, Jaco), but that's basically it. The records made by non-mainstream or even perfectly mainstream artists who fell on the wrong side of the polemics are still not re-issued or explored and remain largely unavailable or a matter of insider knowledge (I'm thinking of Lester Bowie solo, Thomas Chapin, Geri Allen, 80s / early 90s Braxton, etc.). I would love to see an upspring of interest in rediscovering and promoting the back catalogues of such artists, similar to the recent re-evaluations of other "jazz genres", labels or periods like Black Jazz, Blue Note's "rare groove" or "outside" periods, Strata-East/"spiritual jazz" or, long before them, Blue Note's late 60s post-bop catalogue. Until then, the musicians on the wrong side of the Young Lion marketing campaign are still just getting passed over by anyone who wasn't there at the time. It is as much of a dead zone for the Average Intelligent Hip Young Jazz Consumer as soul jazz or 70s indie label bop, which we talk about a lot on this board. With jazz doing quite well in sales terms (relatively) and getting more column inches than I ever remember, it feels like now would be a good time for this to happen. All that said, I would still love it if there were a book that compiled the main articles, speeches and liner notes in each installment of the "Jazz Wars". It's one of the subjects that remains most discussed, but the actual statements comprising the subject were by their nature ephemeral. I hate speaking from hearsay.

I may have skipped over it, but I hadn't seen any of his records so far. Very good artist, but not my favourite, I guess, but I think that if this were a different board, he would be extremely prominent. The recent Jazz Times polls, that were discussed in a different thread, were roughly 60% Metheny from the 80s onwards. Or at least they seemed liked that.

Funny / surprising how little Pat Metheny there is in this thread...

I guess that the X factor is getting the public to believe it, though. Music history is full of failed marketing campaigns and squandered budgets. For some reason the audience in the early 80s really was receptive and was willing to be sold a story of acoustic swinging jazz messiahs redeeming jazz from the pit of fusion and avant garde. The fact that it was the same major labels, same artists (sometimes), same execs (George Butler etc.) behind it all troubled noone. Mainstream jazz audiences in the '80s wanted tradition and quality, I suppose. Or at least, they wanted something that looked like tradition and quality. I think it's probably worth remembering though that those same labels/execs had just (I think) had their fingers singed on a first attempt, with records like Lenox Avenue Breakdown etc. All Columbia's marketing didn't shift that record, even though I suspect most members of this board would regard that album as rather heavier in both tradition and quality than anything in the catalogue of the Brothers Marsalisov.