Name some Blue Note cds you find overrated

[JSngry]

And, to continue with the finance bit, avant garde jazz albums could be small hit albums, too. Not many and not until 1967, but....

Nov 67 John Coltrane - Expression 3 wks on pop chart

Aug 69 Pharoah Sanders - Karma 4 wks pop., 8 wks R&B

May 70 Pharoah Sanders - Jewels of thought 2 wks R&B

Jul 71 Pharoah Sanders - Thembi 3 wks pop

Nov 71 Alice Coltrane - Universal consciousness 2 wks pop

Nov 71 John Coltrane - Sun ship 3 wks pop

Oct 74 Alice Coltrane - Illuminations 8 wks pop, 7 wks R&B

Apr 78 Pharoah Sanders - Love will find a way 5 wks pop, 10 wks R&B

(I don't know the last 2 - were they AG albums?)

Not much, but they have to hide a much larger number of albums that weren't hits but which enabled people to recognise something or other in the albums that WERE hits.

I'm very inclined to think that avant garde jazz wasn't ever thought about as a tax write-off for a short period of time, anyway.

MG

Coltrane died in 67. And those were all (except one) Impulse! albums by Trane, his widow, and his right-hand front-line man. Impulse was well-positioned to sell their records. And again, impulse! after Theiel left was a different label. impulse! agressively marketed their new music roster, but also brought in some Californian tihngs too, a very interesting subset of the LA scene of the time.

However, Alice & Pharao were both moving into a more overertly" "spiritual" music, which was not at all the type of "avant-garde" of, say, Marzette Watts, or even Cecil Taylor.

Love Will Find A Way was on Arista, produced by Norman Connors iirc, and was pretty much a pop album. I love it, actually, it's got the great single "As You Are", but it's not relevant to the discussion here at all.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

And, to continue with the finance bit, avant garde jazz albums could be small hit albums, too. Not many and not until 1967, but....

Nov 67 John Coltrane - Expression 3 wks on pop chart

Aug 69 Pharoah Sanders - Karma 4 wks pop., 8 wks R&B

May 70 Pharoah Sanders - Jewels of thought 2 wks R&B

Jul 71 Pharoah Sanders - Thembi 3 wks pop

Nov 71 Alice Coltrane - Universal consciousness 2 wks pop

Nov 71 John Coltrane - Sun ship 3 wks pop

Oct 74 Alice Coltrane - Illuminations 8 wks pop, 7 wks R&B

Apr 78 Pharoah Sanders - Love will find a way 5 wks pop, 10 wks R&B

(I don't know the last 2 - were they AG albums?)

Not much, but they have to hide a much larger number of albums that weren't hits but which enabled people to recognise something or other in the albums that WERE hits.

I'm very inclined to think that avant garde jazz wasn't ever thought about as a tax write-off for a short period of time, anyway.

MG

Coltrane died in 67. And those were all (except one) Impulse! albums by Trane, his widow, and his right-hand front-line man. Impulse was well-positioned to sell their records. And again, impulse! after Theiel left was a different label. impulse! agressively marketed their new music roster, but also brought in some Californian tihngs too, a very interesting subset of the LA scene of the time.

However, Alice & Pharao were both moving into a more overertly" "spiritual" music, which was not at all the type of "avant-garde" of, say, Marzette Watts, or even Cecil Taylor.

Love Will Find A Way was on Arista, produced by Norman Connors iirc, and was pretty much a pop album. I love it, actually, it's got the great single "As You Are", but it's not relevant to the discussion here at all.

Thanks Jim.

Yes, I noticed Trane died in '67 And that those were all Trane-related albums. The point I was trying to make was that those albums couldn't have been hits without what one might call an infrastructure of other music being widely heard to enable a decent section of the pop market being able to relate to the stuff. Getting onto the pop chart isn't a matter of quality so much as hooks; you can't get the hooks though, unless you are just a little bit familiar with the language.

And marketing is also of key importance - which may be why 'Jewels of thought' made it, but 'Izipho Zam' didn't.

(I've always wanted to get that Arista album, but never seen it. Always harboured a bit too much suspicion of Clive Davis to search hard. Maybe I'll look now.)

MG

[JSngry]

Trane had a tremendous crossover appeal. All the "hippies" knew Trane.My Favorite Things was a pretty big seller, and it wasn't all jazz people buying it. It was a big part of the whole 60s zeitgeist thing. And then, of course, A Love Supreme crossed over, and that sealed the deal.

Sorta the same thing with Ravi Shankar...don't know if he was on the pop charts or not, but World Pacific was putting out a buttload full of Ravi Shankar records in the late 60s...but did hippies buying Ravi Shankar records mean that everybody was digging into Indian music , that the market was open to all kinds of offshoots, not just one guy playing ragas? it just means that they had heard Ravi Shankar somewhere (he played at Monterrey, remember) and decided that he was a meaningfully worthwhile lifestyle accessory.

What ended up happening, and god love 'em for it, is that impulse! built on that to build a legitimate post-Trane legacy..at least until the corporate structure shifted and put an end to all of that. Truly The House That Trane Built. But do note that "avant-garde" in the 70s was an evolving propostion becoming less and less about the pure "energy/fire" music of the mid-60s.

But that's impulse! and that's the '70s.

Avant-garde jazz (or inside/outside music) was perhaps the main attraction in terms of critical response...

And here you accidentally made my point for me.

That is what is called "getting in on the ground floor". Great record executives try to stay ahead of trends, or at least recognize them as quickly as possible. When the critics are lauding, you best move your ass.

In other words, if this had simply stayed an underground thing that the critics ignored (or if they had all gone down the John Tynan rabbit hole), Alfred Lion wouldn't have been recording it just because he thought it was important to document. That's just a silly Wikipedia quote.

Well, now you're getting closer to it.

Of course, Lion thought the music was important, and of course he hoped it would sell some records.

But recognizing the true importance of an artist & then wanting to present them on your label in the marketplace because you feel that theirs is a worthwhile music deserving of an audience is nowhere near the same as waking up one day and saying oh shit look at downbeat, this avant-garde stuff is taking over, I better get off my ass here before everybody stops buying three Sounds records and I go broke I GOT TO GET ME SOME AVANT GARDE RECORDS ASAP, I mean, those are two wholly different propositions..

Allusions to feeling "left out" or deperation moves or whatever do not take into account Alfred Lion's dedication to quality, and his seemingly perpetual refusal to put out product that he himself did not believe in.

Of course, Lion was coming to all of this from somewhat of a "reactionary" standpoint. It took him a while to grasp the meaning and importance of Monk, for crissakes, he came into the game a deep "trad" guy after all. So he weighed evrythng new against his rooting. But, like any "progressive conservative", he was open to change, and would get behind it once convinced of its value. He was not the only "old guard" jazzperson to come to hear the continuity of the tradition in these guys in a what now seems like a relatively soon time. It's worth noting that Blue Note's "avant-garde" records were almost all done by it's established roster. Signing Cecil, Ornette, and Cherry....that's not going on an AG binge just to have product, the streets were "teeming" with AG people waiting to be discovered if that would ahve been the game, that's an acknowledgement that these are leaders of their time doing important work within the tradition, and they should be heard on my label. If I were to put money on it, I'd put it on ego more than profit being the motive. Again - nobody's suggesting that he was making these records expecting to lose money, but the implication that he made them becuase AG was "hot now" so they would move product like Jazz Beatles is just...not a credible argument to me.

To use the Goddard Lieberson model again, Cecil, Ornette, these were "status signings", meant to enhance the overall catalog, not to get out the hits and generate the cashflow. The hope is to keep the product out there for it to find its audience over time, not to throw product out there to fly off the shelves. The one strategy is of long-term investment with delayed payout, the other that of a sure thing cashflow generator. It's not a question of do you expect to make money or not, it's a question of how you expect to make it.

Failure to take this into serious account reuslts in a distorted picture of what was going on. The musical effectiveness of these records is certainly debatable, but seeing the motives behind them as any sort of cluelees reactionary panic move is just not based in the known realities of the particulars.

And really really really - Lion selling and then leaving the label changed everything.

[Scott Dolan]

... but the implication that he made them becuase AG was "hot now" so they would move product like Jazz Beatles is just...not a credible argument to me.

I agree. I'm glad no one here implied anything like that.

[JSngry]

Indeed. Nuance is not just what you get when your uncles remarry.

[ep1str0phy]

Speaking on a total tangent, I'm always really thrilled when the boards erupt into conversation like this. I was walled off with gigging for one day, and all this knowledge got dropped. Organissimo was a huge part of my learning process when first getting into this music (which is odd to say, but I guess that's part of how lore has been communicated since the inception of an affordable public internet), and this makes me feel weirdly nostalgic.

On a completely different note--I worked with Eddie for two or three years. The topic of his Blue Note albums came up constantly--so regularly, in fact, that we wound up re-recording several of the pieces for a "remix/remake"-type deal. It's actually on itunes. That project was very complex, if fulfilling, in no small part because I was only then exposed to Eddie as both a working bandleader and a working conceptualist. I had a number of issues with the regular repertoire in groups, largely due to a language disconnect in terms of "how" the free improvisation was supposed to happen (i.e., it was never clear if the band would play "free" because that was the direction the music needed to go on, or if we were going to play free because we couldn't collectively hold down a given form). It was an uncomfortable experience that had some pretty fucked up bumps, but I came out of it with a really profound understanding of what made his music tick--and a healthy dose of respect for Eddie as a man of musical vision.

Somehow, it was never addressed how Eddie got his Blue Note deal, but it was clear that it was related to the Cecil Taylor/Larry Young association (i.e., Eddie was a label alum). Knowing Eddie's aesthetic and being inside of the Ghetto Music bag, I'm pretty sure that Eddie's signing also had something to do with how his music tapped into both a psychedelic/Age of Aquarius ethos and Black cultural nationalism. Both of the Blue Note albums are heavily centered on community/family themes, and there are doses of new age esoterica ("Look at Teyonda") and protest music ("The Rain"--it's about acid rain) thrown in. Factor in obvious overtures to funk and soul grooves, and you have a unique synergy. It seems clear to me that Blue Note (as Impulse had with Albert Ayler) identified Eddie has having unusual crossover appeal for an AG artist--maybe even tapping into soul jazz markets looking for something left-of-center.

I should also note that the very things that made both Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening work so well are the selfsame characteristics that make Eddie's musical ethos so complex. His desire to embrace popular music endowed his BN albums with a sheen of commercial viability, but this same instinct produced some long term musical output that is, again, very complicated. (We regularly played a tune called "Jazz Rap" that was meant to hold down a backbeat in the A section and go into uptempo swing for the B/improv. This tune is notorious among Eddie sidemen for how difficult it is to finesse the transition--in the dozens of times we played it, we never got the tempo/feel change right--and the whole thing, admittedly, could have worked in uptempo swing.) Eddie's desire to stick to community gives the Blue Note albums a really unique and profound sort of groove, but it also led to some questionable hirings (including a rhythm section that never truly gelled, during my time).

But--Eddie's bag is one of those contexts that is deeply necessary and and positively ecstatic in its realest moments. Eddie has done an intense amount of charity work within his community, and his penchant for assembling unlikely groups collaborators and just letting them go at it is rare and admirable--he has some of that rare Sun Ra juju. And his playing never diminished--he played some insane shit during my tenure in the band. However it happened, I'm glad those Blue Note albums exist, because they capture both a very relevant facet of American life and the sort of music that I would wager no post-Wolff iteration of the label would ever be brave enough to champion.

[JSngry]

Much appreciate that, Karl.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Indeed! Lon played me part of 'Black rhythm happening' when I visited him in Austin and Shawn took me 'End of an Ear' and found the CD and shoved it under my nose. I'm most grateful for having been introduced to it.

It's really good to read that background about him.

MG

Indeed. Nuance is not just what you get when your uncles remarry.

I can't use the smilies because of issues between my browser version and the board software, so I have to guess what the code for rolling on the floor laughing my arse off is - is it

?

MG

Yes, I see it is.

MG

[Scott Dolan]

It was a funny line, and covered both sides beautifully.

Point - JSngry

[paul secor]

Speaking on a total tangent, I'm always really thrilled when the boards erupt into conversation like this. I was walled off with gigging for one day, and all this knowledge got dropped. Organissimo was a huge part of my learning process when first getting into this music (which is odd to say, but I guess that's part of how lore has been communicated since the inception of an affordable public internet), and this makes me feel weirdly nostalgic.

On a completely different note--I worked with Eddie for two or three years. The topic of his Blue Note albums came up constantly--so regularly, in fact, that we wound up re-recording several of the pieces for a "remix/remake"-type deal. It's actually on itunes. That project was very complex, if fulfilling, in no small part because I was only then exposed to Eddie as both a working bandleader and a working conceptualist. I had a number of issues with the regular repertoire in groups, largely due to a language disconnect in terms of "how" the free improvisation was supposed to happen (i.e., it was never clear if the band would play "free" because that was the direction the music needed to go on, or if we were going to play free because we couldn't collectively hold down a given form). It was an uncomfortable experience that had some pretty fucked up bumps, but I came out of it with a really profound understanding of what made his music tick--and a healthy dose of respect for Eddie as a man of musical vision.

Somehow, it was never addressed how Eddie got his Blue Note deal, but it was clear that it was related to the Cecil Taylor/Larry Young association (i.e., Eddie was a label alum). Knowing Eddie's aesthetic and being inside of the Ghetto Music bag, I'm pretty sure that Eddie's signing also had something to do with how his music tapped into both a psychedelic/Age of Aquarius ethos and Black cultural nationalism. Both of the Blue Note albums are heavily centered on community/family themes, and there are doses of new age esoterica ("Look at Teyonda") and protest music ("The Rain"--it's about acid rain) thrown in. Factor in obvious overtures to funk and soul grooves, and you have a unique synergy. It seems clear to me that Blue Note (as Impulse had with Albert Ayler) identified Eddie has having unusual crossover appeal for an AG artist--maybe even tapping into soul jazz markets looking for something left-of-center.

I should also note that the very things that made both Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening work so well are the selfsame characteristics that make Eddie's musical ethos so complex. His desire to embrace popular music endowed his BN albums with a sheen of commercial viability, but this same instinct produced some long term musical output that is, again, very complicated. (We regularly played a tune called "Jazz Rap" that was meant to hold down a backbeat in the A section and go into uptempo swing for the B/improv. This tune is notorious among Eddie sidemen for how difficult it is to finesse the transition--in the dozens of times we played it, we never got the tempo/feel change right--and the whole thing, admittedly, could have worked in uptempo swing.) Eddie's desire to stick to community gives the Blue Note albums a really unique and profound sort of groove, but it also led to some questionable hirings (including a rhythm section that never truly gelled, during my time).

But--Eddie's bag is one of those contexts that is deeply necessary and and positively ecstatic in its realest moments. Eddie has done an intense amount of charity work within his community, and his penchant for assembling unlikely groups collaborators and just letting them go at it is rare and admirable--he has some of that rare Sun Ra juju. And his playing never diminished--he played some insane shit during my tenure in the band. However it happened, I'm glad those Blue Note albums exist, because they capture both a very relevant facet of American life and the sort of music that I would wager no post-Wolff iteration of the label would ever be brave enough to champion.

I heard Eddie Gale playing in a Cecil group - must have been not long after Unit Structures was released - obviously very different music from Gale's own BN releases. Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening seemed to have been made as crossover records (at the very least, crossover from the usual hardcore jazz audience - although that audience was already splintering by that time). I wonder how well those records sold in relation to, say, Ornette's and Cecil's Blue Note releases. I remember seeing them in record stores, but for only a short time.

[clifford_thornton]

yeah, they weren't around long I don't think - pretty hard to find albums, totally unique and definitely crossing over to Aquarian Age psychedelic soul (which is why a lot of the desirability factor has come from the DJ set rather than the AG set). I'm particularly fond of Ghetto Music.

Apropos of Alan Shorter, my copy of Parabolic came from Finland I think, bought in the late 1990s. I'm not entirely sure when/how the Verve/Polydor relationship came about, but the US pressing of the record is pre-PolyGram. Interesting that it went pretty much straight to the promo/cut-out bins, and I'm also rather curious about this 1966 vs 1968 recording date conundrum. Both years are believable (especially since Gato left Don Cherry by summer '66).

[Shawn]

Indeed! Lon played me part of 'Black rhythm happening' when I visited him in Austin and Shawn took me 'End of an Ear' and found the CD and shoved it under my nose. I'm most grateful for having been introduced to it.

Good times!

[Chuck Nessa]

yeah, they weren't around long I don't think - pretty hard to find albums, totally unique and definitely crossing over to Aquarian Age psychedelic soul (which is why a lot of the desirability factor has come from the DJ set rather than the AG set). I'm particularly fond of Ghetto Music.

Apropos of Alan Shorter, my copy of Parabolic came from Finland I think, bought in the late 1990s. I'm not entirely sure when/how the Verve/Polydor relationship came about, but the US pressing of the record is pre-PolyGram. Interesting that it went pretty much straight to the promo/cut-out bins, and I'm also rather curious about this 1966 vs 1968 recording date conundrum. Both years are believable (especially since Gato left Don Cherry by summer '66).

Don't know about the year thing (I believe 1968) but the record was never officially released at the time - only promos were pressed and semi-distributed. They were pressed at the Chess plant in Chicago and I saw them there while pressing the first edition of Roscoe's Congliptious.

[sidewinder]

Fascinating !

[AndrewHill]

I find trouble squabbling over these classic dates; just to show myself there can be a discrempesy I put on kind of blue n something else n the sidewinder n I'm confused if ur not moved; but subjectivity wins. But the ones that don't move me: ruff n tumble; with the 3 sounds or any 3 sounds n greens am I blue n lous work from lush life on n byrds work from 66 on just sayin

Edited September 30, 2014 by Holy Ghost