Woody Shaw - Elektra Musician Reissues

[tranemonk]

Just finished listening to Master of the Art in the car....

A great seat! The interview is actually pretty good... I wish it was a bit longer...

Just ordered the other one!

Edited April 11, 2009 by tranemonk

[poetrylover3]

I ordered both Elektra Musician reissues of Woody Shaw's music. I'd almost forgotten this material existed. Thanks for bringing it to my attention with this thread.

[ShowsOn]

I received the Wounded Bird reissue of Night Music this week, only to find out that both of these albums are available on iTunes Store for $5.99 each. U.S. iTunes store links: Night Music and Master of the Art.

[Larry Kart]

I would say he 'burned' more than swung, a different kind of 8th note.

Interesting point and way to put it.

[fasstrack]

I would say he 'burned' more than swung, a different kind of 8th note.

Interesting point and way to put it.

What I mean is it's a less 'loping' 8th note, and maybe straighter. Closer to a Latin feel almost. Tom Harrell does this too, to me---and I love both he and Woody. Tom is really closer to bebop than Woody to me, but that's a choice I think he perhaps made).

I think it has to do with the time they came up in, a different approach to swing perhaps, possibly b/c of rock/funk/R&B influences that weren't around as much in the 40s-60s. Sweets Edison perceived 8th notes from a different point of view IMO. Woody, Tom, Joe Hen., and other great recent players came of age in the 60s-70s. They did different type gigs and were exposed to different type time feels possibly.

Edited April 16, 2009 by fasstrack

[poetrylover3]

Thanks for the reminder about these reissues. I ordered them, got a prompt response and have been happily listening for the past few days. Woody Shaw was certainly a "master of the art" who I regrettably never got to see. IIRC Steve Turre later played with Bobby Hutcherson and was (is) an unjustly neglected, under-recorded artist.

[Larry Kart]

I would say he 'burned' more than swung, a different kind of 8th note.

Interesting point and way to put it.

What I mean is it's a less 'loping' 8th note, and maybe straighter. Closer to a Latin feel almost. Tom Harrell does this too, to me---and I love both he and Woody. Tom is really closer to bebop than Woody to me, but that's a choice I think he perhaps made).

I think it has to do with the time they came up in, a different approach to swing perhaps, possibly b/c of rock/funk/R&B influences that weren't around as much in the 40s-60s. Sweets Edison perceived 8th notes from a different point of view IMO. Woody, Tom, Joe Hen., and other great recent players came of age in the 60s-70s. They did different type gigs and were exposed to different type time feels possibly.

If I understand what you're referring to, and I think I do, my guess is this change came about from playing more often on more or less modal material versus tunes of the Standards era and originals that had a similar fairly active style of harmonic movement. In the latter two cases, if the rhythmic accents you'd make weren't outright dictated by the changes, they often were suggested by them -- the rhythmic implications of the harmonic framework were frequent and always potentially present. In more or less modal settings, that was much less the case (harmonic events being less frequent and more ambiguous) and one tended to lay a "burning" rhythmically straighter line on top of what was a much more planed-down harmonic backdrop that dictated, and/or suggested, rhythmic responses much less frequently, though one could argue that for some players such rhythmic suggestions as were there became in practive even more insistent, just of a different character and spaced further apart.

[JSngry]

A pentatonic based/derived harmonic language seems to me to dictate a "straighter" eighth note, at least instinctually. But that's what was so beautiful about Joe Henderson - he'd play that newer language and still lean back into the older bebop bob & weave. Maybe he was retro that way, but hell, that's what made him so damn hip for me. The cat phrased like Bird or Rollins a lot of the time, but with a distinctly non-bebop sense of harmony. Not too many people have went there, then, or now.

Then again, maybe it's all evolutional, so maybe the "straighter" eighth note/pentatonic connection is/was a result of cats not having it so fully absorbed so as to be able to reflexively play with those intervals in that phraseology. Wider intervals in the basic scalar constructs, wider spaces between changes, chromaticism often became applied to"episodes" of a solo more obviously than inside a single phrase, quite possibly because now there was the space to do so (no need to oodly-boppily-be-bop a bunch of passing tones and extensions in 3.5 beats when you got beaucoup bars. So maybe the need for a more even phraseological structure was needed to air it all out. All them relatively constant eight notes were there to allow the space to exist. Or maybe it was just the coke.

Either way, the key word here is "intensity", which is what was the order of the day on and off the bandstand. I've said it before, but might as well say it again - the role model here was Trane/Elvin, and what too many people missed out on (but not cats like Woody, who swung no matter in what "manner") is that those guys weren't intense because they played that way, they played that way because they were intense.

[fasstrack]

I would say he 'burned' more than swung, a different kind of 8th note.

Interesting point and way to put it.

What I mean is it's a less 'loping' 8th note, and maybe straighter. Closer to a Latin feel almost. Tom Harrell does this too, to me---and I love both he and Woody. Tom is really closer to bebop than Woody to me, but that's a choice I think he perhaps made).

I think it has to do with the time they came up in, a different approach to swing perhaps, possibly b/c of rock/funk/R&B influences that weren't around as much in the 40s-60s. Sweets Edison perceived 8th notes from a different point of view IMO. Woody, Tom, Joe Hen., and other great recent players came of age in the 60s-70s. They did different type gigs and were exposed to different type time feels possibly.

If I understand what you're referring to, and I think I do, my guess is this change came about from playing more often on more or less modal material versus tunes of the Standards era and originals that had a similar fairly active style of harmonic movement. In the latter two cases, if the rhythmic accents you'd make weren't outright dictated by the changes, they often were suggested by them -- the rhythmic implications of the harmonic framework were frequent and always potentially present. In more or less modal settings, that was much less the case (harmonic events being less frequent and more ambiguous) and one tended to lay a "burning" rhythmically straighter line on top of what was a much more planed-down harmonic backdrop that dictated, and/or suggested, rhythmic responses much less frequently, though one could argue that for some players such rhythmic suggestions as were there became in practive even more insistent, just of a different character and spaced further apart.

I don't happen to agree with your basic premise, that rhythm is dictated by changes, but the whole modal thing you open up is food for thought. But regarding rhythm itself, every period has a rhythm---I mean every historic, not only musical period. I think things changed up in the 60s in music rhythmically with people like McCoy Tyner/Trane and many others. That music was dependent more on endurance/energy/spirit of the moment perhaps, rather than the song form discipline which immediately preceded it in bebop, and swing before that. The thing that decides something's 'lastingness' to me is if it's built on what preceded it and has use to practitioners and, in this case, listeners. Time will tell about modal/energy. But we still can make a few declaritive statements perhaps, and one is that the eight note changed---to my ear anyway---in the 60s. It got straighter, less 'loping'. Just like bebop 8ths were different from swing, but based on them.

I think the real challenge in modal playing, and one that is troubling to me personally from an artistic viewpoint, is that it may be a dead end musicially in many cases. I think people like Miles, Bill Evans, Cannonball (as per 'Know What I Mean') may have risen to the occasion more than many who followed. There was a certain lyricism, a certain dicsipline in the use of those scales to my ear that was on a higher musical level than what followed, with hog-wild superimposing scales on one chord for marathon lengths of time. I think that tends to wear ears out and maybe people grew tired of it and voted with their feet, since the jazz audience dwindled. Strong opinions, I know, but ones come to after years of observing the scene and people's reaction to what has been placed before them on bandstands. I think there's no way of getting around the basics of swing and song. Vamps are great, but just that, vamps. IMO if you make your whole thing a vamp you'd better be pretty damn resourceful musically, and most guys just aren't to me.

To get back to Woody Shaw, to me he was on to something. Harmonically he was an explorer, and---again---it had roots. It doesn't bother me that it came from classical, shit, that's where Western music lives, you know? As lonmg as the roots are there you can take it somewhere valid, and he did, plus his work had beauty to me. He was an informed avant cat, and there are plenty of the other kind, in other words bullshitters---the kind that want to 'take it out' but can hardly get through Happy Birthday. Rhythmically I would say he was a product of his era---the straighter 8th note period. Joe H. was too, but to me just had more rhythmic balls, a value judgement I know, but just the way it strikes my ears. I place Woody as a real innovator, though, and as such eminently worthy of study. There are a couple of 'harmony-first' cats who remind me personally that maybe I just check them out and perhaps add to the arsenal a bit. Besides Woody they include Richie Beirach, the late Mike Brecker, and Dave Leibman.

Thanks for your thoughts, Larry (and Jim).

Edited April 19, 2009 by fasstrack

[marcello]

There was a certain lyricism, a certain dicsipline in the use of those scales to my ear that was on a higher musical level than what followed

Well, there ya go!

[Larry Kart]

I don't happen to agree with your basic premise, that rhythm is dictated by changes...

Great points above, but what I said was different: "if the rhythmic accents you'd make weren't outright dictated by the changes, they often were suggested by them -- the rhythmic implications of the harmonic framework were frequent and always potentially present."

In fact, given the fluidity with which the various aspects of music can interact, it may have been as much a taste for more planed-down or "straighter" rhythms that led to more planed-down, "open" harmonic frameworks as it was the other way around.

[JSngry]

In a typical Billy Harper composition, the rhythm & and the changes are basically the same thing. Same is true for many Charles Tolliver pieces, but Billy's writing is...in a class by himself imo.

Thing is, this is a very "populist" (or "popular" if you like, but...) approach to jazz composition, putting the harmony and the rhythm so snugly in bed together. Hell, that's what "Louie Louie" does! It creates a dance groove that a lot of other post-Trane "non-free" jazz just doesn't get too, or even act like it wants to get to. I've seen people dance to some of Billy's shit, in the streets NYC and in a museum garden in Dallas! I wasn't alive for Trane, but the stories of people getting tranced put and moving around in some "dance"-like fashion are out there from those who were.

So I'm not so sure that "modailty" per se is a "problem, so much as is the unwillingness or inability or lack of awareness or whatever to grasp that in vernacular american musics, the bottom is still where it's at, not the top. The "jazz eight note" has evolved, continues to evolve (hell, in its latest incarnation, it appears to be an eight note triplet that's escaped from the grave of Warne Marsh....), but if it's not accompanied by a similar evolution of the underpinning, then that's when stuff goes off the track altogether. Shit's still gotta dance, and the best jazz has always danced, even the abstract.

This is hardly a new theme for me, and I apologize to long-time readers of this froum and Board Krypton for continuing to bring it up. But dammit, look at Ornette's Tone Dialing (no longer "new" by any stretch of the imagination, damn how time flies...) - abstract like a MOTHER on top, but grooving like another mother on the bottom. And the end result is SWING. Not ching-chinga-choing Noun Swing, but heyIgottaMOVEtothisshitbecauseit'sgettinINTOme Verb Swing. And if you ask me, that's the way the bulk evolution needs to go if survival is to be maintained - evolve the bottom to keep it dancing in sync with the (non-industry-dictated) rhythms of the times. Keep the Verb Swing alive.

[fasstrack]

I don't happen to agree with your basic premise, that rhythm is dictated by changes...

Great points above, but what I said was different: "if the rhythmic accents you'd make weren't outright dictated by the changes, they often were suggested by them -- the rhythmic implications of the harmonic framework were frequent and always potentially present."

In fact, given the fluidity with which the various aspects of music can interact, it may have been as much a taste for more planed-down or "straighter" rhythms that led to more planed-down, "open" harmonic frameworks as it was the other way around.

OK, but my head hurts now Thank God I don't think about this shit when I play............I'm already half shot

[fasstrack]

In a typical Billy Harper composition, the rhythm & and the changes are basically the same thing. Same is true for many Charles Tolliver pieces, but Billy's writing is...in a class by himself imo.

Thing is, this is a very "populist" (or "popular" if you like, but...) approach to jazz composition, putting the harmony and the rhythm so snugly in bed together. Hell, that's what "Louie Louie" does! It creates a dance groove that a lot of other post-Trane "non-free" jazz just doesn't get too, or even act like it wants to get to. I've seen people dance to some of Billy's shit, in the streets NYC and in a museum garden in Dallas! I wasn't alive for Trane, but the stories of people getting tranced put and moving around in some "dance"-like fashion are out there from those who were.

So I'm not so sure that "modailty" per se is a "problem, so much as is the unwillingness or inability or lack of awareness or whatever to grasp that in vernacular american musics, the bottom is still where it's at, not the top. The "jazz eight note" has evolved, continues to evolve (hell, in its latest incarnation, it appears to be an eight note triplet that's escaped from the grave of Warne Marsh....), but if it's not accompanied by a similar evolution of the underpinning, then that's when stuff goes off the track altogether. Shit's still gotta dance, and the best jazz has always danced, even the abstract.

This is hardly a new theme for me, and I apologize to long-time readers of this froum and Board Krypton for continuing to bring it up. But dammit, look at Ornette's Tone Dialing (no longer "new" by any stretch of the imagination, damn how time flies...) - abstract like a MOTHER on top, but grooving like another mother on the bottom. And the end result is SWING. Not ching-chinga-choing Noun Swing, but heyIgottaMOVEtothisshitbecauseit'sgettinINTOme Verb Swing. And if you ask me, that's the way the bulk evolution needs to go if survival is to be maintained - evolve the bottom to keep it dancing in sync with the (non-industry-dictated) rhythms of the times. Keep the Verb Swing alive.

What does that mean: 'the bottom is where it's at, not the top'? Do you mean the melody is less imporant than the groove? I didn't quite get you.....That sentence was a bit dense. I'd like to hear what you really meant, it's interesting.

[JSngry]

Well, I thought I had said what I meant, but I've been listening to myself for so long I can easily be deluded into thinking so...

Short answer- it don't mean a thing, etcetcetc.

Longer answer - In my world, in my life, in my time, the pulse drives everything else. It is the impetus for all that follows. A chord is just a sound, and a melody is just a series of notes until something forms it, and that something is for me the pulse - be it irregularly regular, afro, jazz, latin, funk, bebop, swang, disco, whatever, maybe even something new, who knows. But if it don't begin from a/the pulse, then it's gonna come up short with and for me.

Loaded answer - Miles said that a lot of white folks didn't get his electric music becuase they don't understand that black folk compose from the bottom up. Me myself, I don't think it's a race-specific thing, although I don't think it hurts to say that different pulses might well have different "cultural heritages". But hell, I can't hear Bach w/o hearing the pulse first. So in that sense, yeah, from the bottom up is what makes it real as opposed to just "nice". And nothing pisses me off faster than a bunch of people obsessing over "melody" with a limp pulse underneath it. YUCK! But I can say the same thing about texture or harmony or any other element of music. Understand though, that for me, "pulse" does not necessarily = "beat". "Beat" is just one type of pulse. Pulse is just an urgency of rhythm, the (safety?) net against which all else bounces up and down and all around.

All of which is to say that the "pulse" of life is constant throughout time, but the manifestations of it do evolve, both locally and globally. And this, I think, must be not just accepted but embraced (as well as that "pulse", implying vibration as it does, also extends to timbre, color, and by extension, instrumentations, and ok, while we're at it, ideas of "form" that best let the evolving pulse(s) of our evolving times best fit into, i.e. - be , whatever they will be)).

Does that make more sense?

Edited April 20, 2009 by JSngry

[fasstrack]

Well, I thought I had said what I meant, but I've been listening to myself for so long I can easily be deluded into thinking so...

Short answer- it don't mean a thing, etcetcetc.

Longer answer - In my world, in my life, in my time, the pulse drives everything else. It is the impetus for all that follows. A chord is just a sound, and a melody is just a series of notes until something forms it, and that something is for me the pulse - be it irregularly regular, afro, jazz, latin, funk, bebop, swang, disco, whatever, maybe even something new, who knows. But if it don't begin from a/the pulse, then it's gonna come up short with and for me.

Loaded answer - Miles said that a lot of white folks didn't get his electric music becuase they don't understand that black folk compose from the bottom up. Me myself, I don't think it's a race-specific thing, although I don't think it hurts to say that different pulses might well have different "cultural heritages". But hell, I can't hear Bach w/o hearing the pulse first. So in that sense, yeah, from the bottom up is what makes it real as opposed to just "nice". And nothing pisses me off faster than a bunch of people obsessing over "melody" with a limp pulse underneath it. YUCK! But I can say the same thing about texture or harmony or any other element of music. Understand though, that for me, "pulse" does not necessarily = "beat". "Beat" is just one type of pulse. Pulse is just an urgency of rhythm, the (safety?) net against which all else bounces up and down and all around.

All of which is to say that the "pulse" of life is constant throughout time, but the manifestations of it do evolve, both locally and globally. And this, I think, must be not just accepted but embraced (as well as that "pulse", implying vibration as it does, also extends to timbre, color, and by extension, instrumentations, and ok, while we're at it, ideas of "form" that best let the evolving pulse(s) of our evolving times best fit into, i.e. - be , whatever they will be)).

Does that make more sense?

Uh huh. But me, I think of melody and rhythm as equal partners. Harmony got a little cocky lately and I think we have to put him in his place and put melody back---well---on top. Just my opinion. As Phil Woods said, getting a little too emotional at a HS clinic Q&A: 'Thank you for my life'.......

[JSngry]

Yeah, ok, put it on top. But where there is a top, there must be a bottom. And if you're like me, you like a good strong bottom that takes good care of what's on top.

[fasstrack]

Yeah, ok, put it on top. But where there is a top, there must be a bottom. And if you're like me, you like a good strong bottom that takes good care of what's on top.

I'm getting a beer now. And it's 11 AM. Does that answer your question?

[fasstrack]

Listened to Lotus Blossom (Flower?) yesterday. Nice recording. Good tunes and energy. Woody's sound (all trumpet, no flugel) is bright and I always dug the way he uses vibrato. It's also nice to hear a quintet w/trumpet and bone. I never was knocked out by his choice of tenor players, anyway. Too much of that modal stuff and they didn't sound like they knew tunes.

Also checked in with Moontrane in the last week and I like that also. That was a working band so that made it a real document. If you listen to Tom Harrell's first leader date, called Aurora and reissued as Total, you can really hear the influence on his playing and also with the use of percussion, etc. At least that's what I hear. I like Aurora a lot, BTW.

[Larry Kart]

But me, I think of melody and rhythm as equal partners. Harmony got a little cocky lately and I think we have to put him in his place and put melody back---well---on top. Just my opinion.

To me, putting what's pretty much the same thought a bit differently, it's that melody and rhythm (and harmony, and let's not forget timbre/tone color) are always potentially talking to each other. Further, in jazz especially, any thought or act that's arguably melodic, rhythmic, etc. in origin/inspiration can be transformed into/flow into a thought/deed in one of the other "realms." In any case, if the pulse ain't in potentially open dialogue with some or all of the other realms, then my bottom will be moving with the bottom, but my mind soon will be wanting more.

P.S. I'll be off-line for about the next ten days, maybe more. Major home-remodeling (paint the walls, refinish the wood floors, demolish and re-do the kitchen) calls for me to unhook the computer, etc. and take everything out of the back half of the house for starters. I could hook it up in the living room for a while, but that room probably will be stuffed with stuff until the back half of the house is done. Maybe I'll sign on at the library.

[JSngry]

In any case, if the pulse ain't in potentially open dialogue with some or all of the other realms, then my bottom will be moving with the bottom, but my mind soon will be wanting more.

Well, yeah, of course, but if all I get is a "pretty melody" or "interesting harmony", without the sense that it's being driven by the pulse, the I get the sense that I'm expected to be a passive observer who's supposed to be blown away (or at least "impressed") by how.....superb it all is.

It's like, would you rather "look at" life or get all up in it to one degree or another?

[Larry Kart]

In any case, if the pulse ain't in potentially open dialogue with some or all of the other realms, then my bottom will be moving with the bottom, but my mind soon will be wanting more.

Well, yeah, of course, but if all I get is a "pretty melody" or "interesting harmony", without the sense that it's being driven by the pulse, the I get the sense that I'm expected to be a passive observer who's supposed to be blown away (or at least "impressed") by how.....superb it all is.

It's like, would you rather "look at" life or get all up in it to one degree or another?

I don't understand why a melody or a harmony that isn't being "driven" by the pulse but instead is in open dialogue with it has to be a merely "pretty" melody or a merely "interesting" harmony -- and merely seems to be what you mean by your use of "pretty," "interesting," "passive" and "be .... 'impressed' by how.....superb it all is." IIRC, you brought Bach into this a few posts back; check out the opening movement of the St. Matthew Passion, which certainly has a pulse to it but also (to an exceptional degree) that dialogic (top down, bottom up, sideways and slantwise) intertwining of melody, pulse, harmony, and tone color and tell me that it's aimed at "a passive observer who's supposed to be blown away..." etc. Just to be clear, I mention this is not because we're supposed to kowtow to Bach and the St. Matthew Passion for any culture vulture reasons but because it's amazing music. The spiritual aspect, too, but there YMMV. The music, though, I can't imagine you being cool toward.

[JSngry]

I don't understand why a melody or a harmony that isn't being "driven" by the pulse but instead is in open dialogue with it has to be a merely "pretty" melody or a merely "interesting" harmony --

That's not at all what I mean. I think you might be talking me too literally?

[JSngry]

I mean, "open dailogue" pretty much guarantees a lack of passivity, no?

Perhaps that would be a better way to put it - I have no use for playing or hearing any mushc where the pulse (which again, does not have to be "a beat", much less "regular" or "metered" is passive in the face of any other element. Now, for some, that might not be the same as being "driven by" the pulse, but in my life, musical and otherwise, the best things happen when one first finds/feels the pulse and then brings it to life through the other things. The "dialogue" still occurs, but it's inevitably one of seeking resolution with the pulse, not of seeking dominance over it.

Maybe not everybody hears/feels/plays it that way. In fact, I'm sure that they don't. Oh well about that. They got their lives, I got mine. To thine own self, and all that.

Just spare me "beauty" that just sits there. Please.

[Larry Kart]

OK, I've got to shut down the computer now. See you all in a week or so.