Branford slams Miles

[Scott Dolan]

2 minutes ago, Milestones said:

Curious that you say Branford and Kenny Garret are "the same."  Even if one grants they are of roughly equal quality (which I don't think I would), is it a compliment  to say of one jazz musician that he/she is the same as or identical to another? 

 

I meant it as neither a compliment or an insult, to be honest. I just find them to be very similar to each other, and most seem to like Kenny Garrett a lot. So the disconnect has to be a political one, no? It certainly doesn’t seem to me that it would be related to the music. 

[clifford_thornton]

I wouldn't take it as one.

[Milestones]

Fair enough, but I wouldn't find really close similarities, and a record like Beyond the Wall is to my ears much more adventurous than anything I can think of by Branford.

 

 

[Scott Dolan]

4 minutes ago, Milestones said:

Fair enough, but I wouldn't find really close similarities, and a record like Beyond the Wall is to my ears much more adventurous than anything I can think of by Branford.

 

 

Nah. Contemporary Jazz is just as adventurous. As is Footsteps Of Our Fathers. The latter was actually the first of his quartet that I heard, and was amazed how free it was. I’d only ever heard him play with Sting and on the Tonight Show. 

Been a long time since I’ve listened to any of his music, but I think I recall Requiem and Braggtown both being rather adventurous as well. 

8 minutes ago, clifford_thornton said:

I wouldn't take it as one.

As I said, it wasn’t meant as one. But when I hear similar musicians, what am I supposed to do, not note it? 

But, at the same time I wouldn’t walk up to any musician and say, “you know who you sound a lot like?” 

[Milestones]

"But, at the same time I wouldn’t walk up to any musician and say, You know who you sound a lot like?"

Indeed, exactly my point.

"Adventurous," of course, can be hard to define--just as we bandy about such words as "creative" and "deep."

I think I lost some of my interest in Branford because he has been so locked into the quartet format for a long time.  Why not expand ore reconstitute?

[Scott Dolan]

Yeah, I would have to say the same thing, because I’ve not listened to any of his music since Braggtown, and that was released in 2006. It just seemed that his group had reached some kind of weird stasis, similar to Masada in the way that once you heard two or three of their albums, you’d pretty much heard them all. But at the same time, those two or three albums were pretty damn good! 

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

Do you like Kenny Garrett? I find no real differences between he and Branford. 

At the end of the day, I just think people let what the Marsalis boys say color their perception way too much. Then again, I could listen to Wynton, Branford, and Ingrid Laubrock in one sitting and enjoy all of it. I’m not going to listen to Wynton and think, “now THIS is how Jazz is supposed to be played!” Nor will I listen to Ingrid and think, “THIS isn’t real Jazz!”, because I don’t let a couple of loudmouths dictate my reality or how I perceive the music I’m listening to. 

I like some Garrett -- IIRC "Songbook." Other more recent Garrett (don't recall the titles) I found kind of semi-simplistic, even pop-ish.

[bgugg]

I like Brandford atmospheric contribution to https://www.amazon.com/Wake-Up-FiBnd-Out-Uniondale/dp/B00LNT6E2U

Looks like I am not alone and he will be remembered as a footnote of Grateful Dead history indeed ...

 

[Scott Dolan]

4 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

I like some Garrett -- IIRC "Songbook." Other more recent Garrett (don't recall the titles) I found kind of semi-simplistic, even pop-ish.

Last I heard from him was Beyond The Wall, also from 2006, oddly enough. I think that’s when I’d finally had my fill of the 60’s Coltrane school and started looking for something fresh and new to my ears. 

[Milestones]

I think that on Beyond the Wall the singing, the expanded group (including Hutcherson), and the Eastern elements take it well beyond the typical Coltrane tribute or update. 

[Scott Dolan]

Well, yeah. I’m not saying everything they do sounds exactly like the Coltrane Quartet influence. Just that their catalog by and large does. And even on Beyond The Wall you still clearly hear the influence. 

Or let me use Coltrane as an example. Things like Africa Brass, Om, and Ascension are well off the beaten path as far as his 60’s catalog is concerned, but it’s still Coltrane playing as Coltrane did. Does that make more sense?

[JSngry]

The difference between Branford and Kenny Garrett is that Branford never sounded like Sonny Stitt's dirty drawers.

[Late]

When Branford played alto with The Jazz Messengers, his solos (I'm thinking of the Blues Alley video) sounded a lot like Wayne's solos from the Plugged Nickel recordings. (I actually mean that as a compliment.) I like some of his early work on Columbia. His treatment of Kenny Kirkland's composition "Dienda" in particular is outstanding.

I wonder if his comment on Hancock, Carter, and Williams was meant as a testament to their level of mastery coming into Miles' band. Of course they learned from Miles. Bill Evans learned from Miles. Herbie Hancock learned from Bill Evans. Musicians jumped at the chance to play with Miles. Any bandleader is a teacher in some form or another.

Did McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones learn nothing from Coltrane?

Did Jaki Byard learn nothing from Mingus?

Did John McEnroe learn nothing from Bjorn Borg?



 

[Scott Dolan]

Trio Jeepy, Requeim, Contemporary Jazz, Eternal (my personal favorite), and Footsteps Of Our Fathers are all outstanding albums, IMO. His earliest albums do absolutely nothing for me, and I’ve haven’t heard any of his recent material. 

Kenny Kirkland was excellent, but I actually came to appreciate Joey Calderazzo even more. 

Although, I think it’s only fair to note that between Wynton’s Big Train, and Branford’s Romare Beardon Revealed, they may have released the two worst album in Jazz history. 

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

5 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Any citation for the Marsalis/Carter/Drummond story?

 

 

 

no, i just googled reddit thread on why people dislike marsalis, to try to get a better understanding of it all-

8 hours ago, felser said:

There it is, another Russian plot to destroy us all!

 

lol

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

do we all agree that Kenny > Wynton?

[Pim]

2 minutes ago, chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez said:

do we all agree that Kenny > Wynton?

What does > mean?

[Scott Dolan]

5 minutes ago, Pim said:

What does > mean?

The symbol for greater than. 

 

[Pim]

Ah in that case I agree. Don’t like all his output but Pursuance, Standard of Language and Beyond the Wall are all very nice records. But also think it’s hard to compare a saxophone player to a trumpet player... anyway thanks for explaining Scott  

Edited April 18, 2019 by Pim

[Scott Dolan]

5 minutes ago, Pim said:

Ah in that case I agree. Don’t like all his output but Pursuance, Standard of Language and Beyond the Wall are all very nice records. But also think it’s hard to compare a saxophone player to a trumpet player... anyway thanks for explaining Scott  

My pleasure! 

I would say that's a hard call, personally. But I think Branford is the superior musician to Wynton, so I guess I'd have to also say that Garrett is as well. But Wynton has Black Codes (From The Underground), Think Of One, and the Village Vanguard box which are also excellent. 

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

yeah- I like smooth jazz-- im just never got into kenny directly

but i was never a fan of sidestepping avant-garde post bop jazz!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

1 hour ago, chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez said:

yeah- I like smooth jazz-- im just never got into kenny directly

You are dramatically mixing up your Kenny G's.

[JSngry]

 

[Mark Stryker]

I have been sitting out the substantive debate here over Branford and will continue to do so. But I do feel compelled to say that whether you are fer'em or agin'em  (or somewhere in between 'em), you really can't make an honest judgement about the state of his music today unless you take the time to listen to something recent. I see references earlier in this thread from Branford's friends and enemies to records from 2004 and 2006 and some that go back to the late '80s -- that's a LONG time ago. Branford's current band has mostly been together for nearly 20 years, and if the last record you heard was something from more than a decade ago, that's not where the band is at today (and doesn't include the current drummer, Justin Faulkner). I think Branford sounds different than he used to, and so does the band. Some may think the music sounds better, some may think it sounds worse. Some may hear the differences as nothing more than re-arranging deck chairs on the Titantic. But it is different.

At this point, I'm not talking about the meta debate about whether the Marsalises are/were good or bad for jazz, or the debate over innovation vs. conservatism, or the neo-liberalism critique of the jazz business, or whether Branford's latest remarks about Miles are ignorant or insightful. I'm just talking about the music itself and what it does or does not have to offer. 

At the same time, I also wonder whether folks who have been so invested for 25 or 30 years in either the pro-Marsalis or anti-Marsalis camp -- for any reason be it musical, personal, sociological, capricious or the result of a carefully considered aesthetic or political worldview  -- can at this point even listen objectively enough to change their pre-existing opinions. I'm certainly not immune to this reality with certain musicians. There are neuron pathways in my brain that by now have been locked into place for so long that anything I hear by some players tends to result in confirmation bias one way or the other. Dammit -- why are we all so, um, human?

Anyway, here's Branford's latest record. Listen (or not). Comment (or not). 

 

 

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Here's a transcription of Kenny's solo on this tune. Because of how this video is edited -- they've taken out the tenor solo -- you can hear how much tempo the the band has picked up from the start of the tune  

 

Edited April 19, 2019 by Mark Stryker

[JSngry]

 

13 minutes ago, Mark Stryker said:

Anyway, here's Branford's latest record. Listen (or not). Comment (or not).

Hey, it's almost like 1978!