Basie and Charles McPherson

[Larry Kart]

Two good ones I just picked up:

Someone may have mentioned this recently, but Lockjaw is on fire on Basie's "Get Together"--  indeed all parties are in fine form, Freddie Green and Gus Johnson being crucial in the rhythm section.

 

The McPherson "Live at the 5 Spot" from 1966 has about as strong a "live" feel as any recording I know, thanks in part to Billy Higgins and some of the most vigorous McPherson and Barry Harris I know. I also enjoy the sometimes hit or miss playing of trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer; he is of necessity always in the moment.

 

 

[Peter Friedman]

Larry, I share your opinions here 100%. These are two damn good recordings. The terms "on fire" and "vigorous" have hit the bullseye.  

[T.D.]

Thanks. Not familiar with the Basie, but strongly agree on the McPherson, a long-time favorite. Also agreed on Hillyer's playing which, though seemingly very short on chops, winds up strangely fascinating. Also, Live at the Five Spot is one of those Prestige 2 LP on 1 CD (possibly w. 1 tune dropped) releases that offers a lot of bang for the buck. There are some good Lockjaw/Griffin recordings in that format (The Tenor Scene and Live at Mintons).

Edited February 16, 2016 by T.D.

[JSngry]

That McPherson thing has gotten expensive...

I wasn't really paying attention at the time, but Norman Granz recorded Jaws a lot for Pablo. Just one solo album, but he's on a bunch of "jams". I've been enjoying casually finding them over the years.

[king ubu]

Oh, wow, just thought there was a new Basie jam turning up with Charles McPherson on it ... kinda surprised I wasn't the last one here to get the McPherson disc (I bought is a few years back) - it's mighty fine.

And "Get Together" is great! Budd Johnson makes sure Lockjaw can do no coasting!

[soulpope]

Thumbs up reg the McPherson platter ....

[Tom 1960]

Thanks Larry for the headsup. I've been making a few purchases recently based on your recommendations and have faired very well. The Shorty Rogers Plays Richard Rogers and the Eddie Higgins Haunted Heart are just 2 examples. Keep them coming!

[Larry Kart]

Thanks. I'll try.

[JSngry]

So...one day Larry gives the McPherson rec, I go looking for it, it's too damn expensive everywhere, but Dusty Groove lets me put it on my want list. The next day, DG gets a copy in, I carpe diem on the notification email, and today the copy arrives. Who did DG get their copy from just in time for all of this to sync up, eh? Fate, in a pleasant mood?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

1. There were 2 Jaws leader albums on Pablo, Jim.

and

I haven't got either yet but lots of the jam sessions.

MG

[T.D.]

7 hours ago, JSngry said:

So...one day Larry gives the McPherson rec, I go looking for it, it's too damn expensive everywhere, but Dusty Groove lets me put it on my want list. The next day, DG gets a copy in, I carpe diem on the notification email, and today the copy arrives. Who did DG get their copy from just in time for all of this to sync up, eh? Fate, in a pleasant mood?

Half.com (worth checking every once in a while) has a copy for $11.99 + S/H.

[Disclaimer: I'm happy with my copy and am not a seller...I used to work on Wall St., and in that cynical world people who issue buy recommendations are, more often than not, actually sellers!]

[JSngry]

Got lucky with the McPherson at DG and have had it as car music for over a week now. Don't know if I'm awed by it or anything, but it is very enjoyable. The two things that jumped out at me right away and have yet to jump back are A) how many of the standards played are, apart from "I Can't Get Started", of then-recent vintage, none even yet 15 years old; and B) am I the only one who hears Lonnie Hillyer here ending up sounding like Don Cherry in spots? Not in intent but in result?

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Got lucky with the McPherson at DG and have had it as car music for over a week now. Don't know if I'm awed by it or anything, but it is very enjoyable. The two things that jumped out at me right away and have yet to jump back are A) how many of the standards played are, apart from "I Can't Get Started", of then-recent vintage, none even yet 15 years old; and B) am I the only one who hears Lonnie Hillyer here ending up sounding like Don Cherry in spots? Not in intent but in result?

Agree about Hillyer and Cherry. I'm not awed by the album either, but its freshness really struck me -- this from a band that at the time I might have thought of as a bit self-consciously "retro" in its bebop homages. By the same token, at the time McPherson's drenched in Bird approach hit me the same way; now it seems attractively detailed, not at all by rote, and with a good deal of individuality to boot. But then I heard McPherson at a jam session in San Diego (his hometown I think) in maybe 1978, and he played a ballad, probably "Body and Soul," that knocked me out. BTW, I've since picked up a studio date from that era on Prestige with McPherson, Harris, Carmel Jones, Nelson Boyd, and Albert Heath. Doesn't have the electricity of the live date, and I prefer Hillyer to Jones on this occasion, but Boyd is a treat -- perhaps one of the models for Wilbur Ware. 

[paul secor]

I remember enjoying Nelson Boyd's playing on that record - one of his last recording dates? Or perhaps his last?

[JSngry]

Hey, I tend to love me some Charles McPherson of any vintage! "The Chill Of Death", good god people, listen to that!

What didn't jump out at me right away but not did soon enough was that his "vocal" inflections tend to be not straight from Bird, but rather Bird through Dolphy (if such a line is to be mapped, though, let it be figurative instead of literal out of respect for anybody's individual voice). I wonder who the "foreign pianist who has been living here for a few years" who dubbed the band :ghosts" (and that line has stuck with me over the years, read the liner notes way back when but never bought the album until now, not because of that, though).The most obvious(?) guess would be Zawinul, but who knows, who that could have been...Paul Bley maybe...anyway, that comment is what made the recent-ness of the standards included jump out to me.If they were truly ghosts, it would all be pre-WWII stuff, things that were already getting played out, not "I Believe In You" for crying out loud, which is not necessarily the best/easiest blowing vehicle in terms of symmetricality, but geez, what a great song, and bill Evans, Sinatra, and who else was bringing ito any kind of anybody's vernacular at taht time?

 

 

[Larry Kart]

59 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

Agree about Hillyer and Cherry. I'm not awed by the album either, but its freshness really struck me -- this from a band that at the time I might have thought of as a bit self-consciously "retro" in its bebop homages. By the same token, at the time McPherson's drenched in Bird approach hit me the same way; now it seems attractively detailed, not at all by rote, and with a good deal of individuality to boot. But then I heard McPherson at a jam session in San Diego (his hometown I think) in maybe 1978, and he played a ballad, probably "Body and Soul," that knocked me out. BTW, I've since picked up a studio date from same era as the first album on Prestige; it has McPherson, Harris, Carmel Jones, Nelson Boyd, and Albert Heath. Doesn't have the electricity of the live date, and I prefer Hillyer to Jones on this occasion, but Boyd is a treat -- perhaps one of the models for Wilbur Ware. 

 

43 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Hey, I tend to love me some Charles McPherson of any vintage! "The Chill Of Death", good god people, listen to that!

What didn't jump out at me right away but not did soon enough was that his "vocal" inflections tend to be not straight from Bird, but rather Bird through Dolphy (if such a line is to be mapped, though, let it be figurative instead of literal out of respect for anybody's individual voice). I wonder who the "foreign pianist who has been living here for a few years" who dubbed the band :ghosts" (and that line has stuck with me over the years, read the liner notes way back when but never bought the album until now, not because of that, though).The most obvious(?) guess would be Zawinul, but who knows, who that could have been...Paul Bley maybe...anyway, that comment is what made the recent-ness of the standards included jump out to me.If they were truly ghosts, it would all be pre-WWII stuff, things that were already getting played out, not "I Believe In You" for crying out loud, which is not necessarily the best/easiest blowing vehicle in terms of symmetricality, but geez, what a great song, and bill Evans, Sinatra, and who else was bringing ito any kind of anybody's vernacular at taht time?

 

 

Don't think it was Paul Bley; Ira Gitler wrote the notes -- right? --and I don't imagine that he and Bley would have been talking much at the time or ever actually. Zawinul doesn't seem quite right to me either. Nico Bunick? Bunick was Dutch and was a member of Mingus' band with Hillyer and McPherson. If it was Bunick, he might have looked down his nose at the style of the Harris-McPherson-Hillyer combo versus that of the Mingus band in which they had played together.

[JSngry]

god DAMN, Michelle Lee...I had no idea...not about the hotness, but about the skills...talk about making you want to get up in the morning to go to work and then coming home to get up to go to work in the evening...whew...

Ok, yeah, Nelson Riddle...HAD to be!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061791/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

 

[AllenLowe]

McPherson is capable of great lyrical playing - but I really prefer when somebody lights a fire under him. There are some things with Mingus, usually in live situations, where he exceeds himself.

as for Hillyer, a real great one when he was healthy; there are some fascinating tapes of Clarence Sharpe form live sessions in NYC in which Hillyer really hits his stride -

at the 2nd annual Barry Harris concert he had Hillyer and Tommy Turrentine doing a slow ballad duet on Star Eyes. It was really....precarious, though they made it through. At intermission I ran into Hugh Lawson and he said, very loudly in the lobby, "those two guys are FUCKED UP."

sadly it was true.

 

[Peter Friedman]

As I read some of the comments  here, one thing that struck me was how sometimes opinions formed about a recording when it is first released may change over the perspective of time. Larry's comment about this McPherson group being considered as "self consciously retro" when first issued, can now be heard differently.

This often can work the opposite way too. As I re-listen to recordings I bought and admired in the 70's , 80's and 90's, some of them have lost whatever appeal they once had for me. Those go into my disposal box.

[JSngry]

I'm still trying to get my head around reevaluating Michelle Lee...that might be the most riveting movie/screen performance of a non-documentary song I've ever seen and heard, the combination. The song itself, the singing of it, and the acting to accompany it. It's like, if Laura Petrie did Final Battle with Michelle Lee for best...Motivational Reason To Be A Success At Life, there would be a cosmitological seismetism of redefinitional proportions, life as we know it would no longer be as we knew it after that decision was realized.

This is the same chick that did that POS "L. David Sloane" and The Gong Show, and Knott's Landing? WHOA! Either she got some really bad breaks, or didn't get any of the right ones, or else she didn't really go down the road where they lived, or else maybe that was the very best that she had in her and they got it there...whatever it was, damn, Michelle Lee, DAMN!

I've never had a look at How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, long-time aversity to Musicals per se, "Bobby Morse" (loved Robert More in Mad Men, thoguh), and all that stuff in general. But between seeing bits of the Bob Fosse choreography and now knowing that there's a Nelson Riddle score and that DAMN! MICHELLE LEE!!! performance within, hey, it's time for me to check it out.

Tie that back into the retro-evaluation any way you want too...I'm prone to think that the characterization of the McPherson group at the time was (mostly) correct, but also incomplete and/or besides the point past the point. My aversion to all the things that have kept me from peeping How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, probably the same thing, such as it is.

 

[JSngry]

McPherson had some guts tackling "I Believe In You", truthfully, and the making it work as well as he did. It's not a tune that is intrinsically ready-made for jazz, as witness:

I don't believe in that.

I keep forgetting about Empathy, one of the the Bill Evans Verve sides I really dig (Shelly Manne, always ready to bring it), but even here, for such a self-professed "song" guy he seems to need to get past the song in order to get into it instead of the other way around (that bridge is a trip, face it, totally driven by the character/lyric, not intended for improvisation). Ok, but...

On the whole, Michelle Lee, still, but BIG props to Charles McPherson for carpe-dieming on it like that. He gets the song, more than Lonnie, more than Barry, they're looking for where the licks go in this slightly off-beat structure (not in a bad way, mind you), McPherson knows.  He called the tune, I'm sure. Hell, he played with Mingus, you thing that unusual form/symmetries gonna fuck with Charles McPherson? I don't think so!

 

[paul secor]

Barry Harris' Newer Than New has some very good playing by both McPherson and Hillyer.

[Peter Friedman]

3 hours ago, paul secor said:

Barry Harris' Newer Than New has some very good playing by both McPherson and Hillyer.

I would quickly add - very good playing by Barry Harris too.

[JSngry]

Still car-ring this one, and ain't it a hoot how "Epistrophy" becomes "Sidewinder" for a quick minute before going back?

Also really, really, digging Barry Harris' comps, both harmonically and rhythmically, now that's bebop!