Frank Foster

[Larry Kart]

"Leo Rising" is very good. Interesting in light of some of what's already been said on this thread is how firmly/avidly Foster tried to absorb Coltrane after he left Basie band -- the results being a good deal different and I would say less personal than his earlier work. By the time of "Leo Rising" though it seems to me that his playing had become personal after a somewhat new very muscular fashion, though the Trane influence still was evident.

It might be interesting to consider all the players of Foster's vintage (I think there were a good many)  who altered their already distinctive, celebrated,  and seemingly firmly in place styles in the direction of Trane, for better or worse. Harold Land is one who comes to mind. Other candidates? 

I would guess that the main underlying impulse behind such developments was harmonic -- i.e. Trane's world of new harmonies was felt by these players to be at once so hip (if you will) and also fairly compatible with these players' pre-existing modes of playing that Trane's approach had the effect on them of a magnet on iron filings. And once they got into Trane's harmonies, much else -- changes in rhythmic thinking, timbre, choice of frameworks to play on -- inevitably came in its wake. One player by the way who seemed unaffected, perhaps because he had already traveled a good way down his own "advanced" harmonic paths, was Oliver Nelson, although the evidence of how Nelson sounded in "blowing" contexts diminishes a good deal about this time. I should reiterate that I'n thinking of players of the Foster, Land, Nelson vintage -- not younger figures like, say, Joe Farrell, who were already in the process of becoming themselves but in the face of the onrushing Trane train virtually had to climb aboard or be run over. 

[JSngry]

5 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Schrodinger's jazz article.

?

4 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

I would guess that the main underlying impulse behind such developments was harmonic -- i.e. Trane's world of new harmonies was felt by these players to be at once so hip (if you will)...

Sorry,, but i won't.

"Hip" had nothing to do with it (at least not for anybody who took it seriously enough to go deeply into it. It was simply new knowledge. You're already playing changes and trying to find new things to say, and then THIS comes along, and it's like, oh shit, now there's THIS. And you know, you either decide that you don't want to deal with learning that, or else you go ahead and learn it.

Benny Golson was another one. There was a Cadence(?) interview with him where he said at first, Trane was like, ok, we were all working on this in Philly, and then one day it was, oh wow, we weren't working on THIS. And when Golson came out of his studio writing years, it was with a very expanded harmonic palate.

Cannonball was another one. Hell he stood right beside that for long enough to hear it in the realest of real times. And ture to his style, he took notes and took his time. But he paid attention, and learned. Cannonball in, say, 1974 was nothing like Cannonball in 1964.

"Hip" is not synonymous with math and science, you know?

[Rooster_Ties]

28 minutes ago, JSngry said:

?

I probably don’t understand Schrodinger's Box paradox well enough to have made a precise analogy…

But the idea of the cat being both alive or dead (with no way to know which), seemed analogous to this jazz article in a folded up newspaper — too brittle to actually open — so there’s no way to tell… …if the cat is alive or dead (if the article in question has the relevant details to our discussion, or not).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

[felser]

37 minutes ago, JSngry said:

?

Sorry,, but i won't.

"Hip" had nothing to do with it (at least not for anybody who took it seriously enough to go deeply into it. It was simply new knowledge. You're already playing changes and trying to find new things to say, and then THIS comes along, and it's like, oh shit, now there's THIS. And you know, you either decide that you don't want to deal with learning that, or else you go ahead and learn it.

Benny Golson was another one. There was a Cadence(?) interview with him where he said at first, Trane was like, ok, we were all working on this in Philly, and then one day it was, oh wow, we weren't working on THIS. And when Golson came out of his studio writing years, it was with a very expanded harmonic palate.

Cannonball was another one. Hell he stood right beside that for long enough to hear it in the realest of real times. And ture to his style, he took notes and took his time. But he paid attention, and learned. Cannonball in, say, 1974 was nothing like Cannonball in 1964.

"Hip" is not synonymous with math and science, you know?

Art Pepper was another one to my ears, by the 70's when he was again being widely recorded.  

[Larry Kart]

55 minutes ago, JSngry said:

?

Sorry,, but i won't.

"Hip" had nothing to do with it (at least not for anybody who took it seriously enough to go deeply into it. It was simply new knowledge. You're already playing changes and trying to find new things to say, and then THIS comes along, and it's like, oh shit, now there's THIS. And you know, you either decide that you don't want to deal with learning that, or else you go ahead and learn it.

Benny Golson was another one. There was a Cadence(?) interview with him where he said at first, Trane was like, ok, we were all working on this in Philly, and then one day it was, oh wow, we weren't working on THIS. And when Golson came out of his studio writing years, it was with a very expanded harmonic palate.

Cannonball was another one. Hell he stood right beside that for long enough to hear it in the realest of real times. And ture to his style, he took notes and took his time. But he paid attention, and learned. Cannonball in, say, 1974 was nothing like Cannonball in 1964.

"Hip" is not synonymous with math and science, you know?

Sorry about my use\possible misuse of "hip." I agree with what you say above almost 100 percent, though I also think that while "hip" (as in merely trivially, fashionably hip) is not synonymous with math and science, there is or can be, in the minds of some, some possible residual sense of being hip -- as in being on the "right" side of rapid turbulent consequential developments in the realms of math and science when those development seems to be of the utmost practical and even spiritual  significance. One does not -- as in "and then THIS comes along, and it's like, oh shit, now there's THIS" -- want to be LEFT BEHIND, no? The forceful logic of the new in a garden of forking paths.

[JSngry]

41 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

I probably don’t understand Schrodinger's Box paradox well enough to have made a precise analogy…

But the idea of the cat being both alive or dead (with no way to know which), seemed analogous to this jazz article in a folded up newspaper — too brittle to actually open — so there’s no way to tell… …if the cat is alive or dead (if the article in question has the relevant details to our discussion, or not).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

Oh, ok. The paper is not so brittle enough that it can't be opened (almost is, though...) but it definitely cannot be placed on a scanner, at least not the one I have. I'll try to take a camera photo of it and see what can be done from there.

BTW - Woody Shaw is on the cover and it's got one of those "Bebop Is The Music Of The Future" ads by Maxine Gregg and hear company. I know how you like Woody and have thought about braving the scanner before now, but this shit is REALLY brittle. Like I said, a street paper.

[JSngry]

5 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

One does not -- as in "and then THIS comes along, and it's like, oh shit, now there's THIS" -- want to be LEFT BEHIND, no?

Not if one is seeing a furtheration of a path one is already one, but then one is not being "left behind" by not pursuing further/expanded knowledge, one is just "calling it a day" as far as further learning 9of that particular thing goes.

Like Trane's "3 on 1" thing...that got a little bit of attention, but not nearly as much as the vaguer, less rooted in reality, "sheets of sound" thing. The 3-on-1 thing was totally rooted in theory, math, actually do-able extrapolations of/from playing changes, you can do that yourself by looking at what you're already doing and now doing THIS with it...and doing that math may or may not give you even more idea about ways to work with that math.

George Russell's Lydian thing, that's another thing...never got into that past skimming it, but, yeah, if you REALLY get into it, there are ways to get into that and see what you can see. James Moody is one person who got into it (allegedly) and you definitely heard an evolution in his playing, he showed a noticeably broadened awareness of the implications and possible expansion of a song's basic changes.

and really - none of this is a deviation away from the basic impetus of bebop, which was as much about new extensions and substitutions of original song changes as much as it was that still-intrinsic rhythmic bobbing and weaving. Math and dance, the perfect synergy.

Of course, none of this is a guarantee that you will have an inspired math, this stuff is means to an end, not the end itself (hopefully...) but as they say, if you don't go, you'll never know.

[Larry Kart]

BTW, Jim, you may disagree but in this realm of successfully absorbing Trane's "new knowledge," Cannonball seems to me to be an interesting case in that initially and for a fair amount of time -- and we do have the fairly abundant amount recorded evidence of Trane and Cannonball playing side by side with Miles and in one key case with just the two of them -- Cannonball's period of learning from Trane and "taking notes" led to a not inconsiderable degree of "does this part fit with that part? -- i.e. do they fit for me" unease and awkwardness on his part. And how could it be otherwise given the what seems to me to be considerable distance in timbre, harmonic and phrasing habits (Cannonball more or less symmetrical, Trane anything but that), etc. between the two men. By contrast, based on the recorded evidence -- e.g. his playing on Wynton Kelly's "Kelly Blue" and Art Farmer's "Modern Art" -- for Golson to pick up on Trane's expanded harmonic vocabulary etc. was a much smaller and smoother step than it was for Cannonball; and for the likes of Bill Barron it was virtually no step at all. In any case, all the credit in the world to Cannonball for forging ahead through what might (or might not) have been periods of some relative frustration for him, albeit tempered by great popular success. After all, from 1964 (or even from 1958, when Coltrane was right at his shoulder) to 1974 is a LONG time.

 

[JSngry]

But keep in mind - Golson & Barron were both Philly cats who were, in Golson't words, all studying the same thing. So it's like they would have known how Trane was getting there, even if it was something more than they had gotten to yet.

Those Philly tenor players - Jimmy Heath's another one, so is Odean Pope, they all studied together, these guys did not each hole up in isolation chambers, you know? There was a lot of mutually known/shared data there.

Cannonball...a Floridian band director, not even the same thing. And yes, he was awkward as fuck for the longest. And i think he knew it, and he knew that awkwards as fuck is not a good look for an aspiring bandleader. So yes, he took notes, and worked on it on his own time, at his own pace. But make no mmistake - he heard it, and knew that he needed to get it.

[HutchFan]

I think this whole topic that we've stumbled upon is a really interesting one.

Do artists have an obligation to respond to the changing circumstances of culture and the art that's happening around them?  When is it slavishly following fashion?  And when is it beneficial growth, an extension of the art and artist?  And what about situations when it's neither of these things?

Since Coltrane's influence became SO far reaching -- and not just on saxophonists -- he's an excellent sort of "case study" to talk about these things.  I don't really have any answers... but people often speak of Coltrane's influence overwhelming other artists.  And I can think of examples of musicians who seem to disapppear into his style and never develop their own.  OTOH, I can also think of artists who responded to Coltrane in ways -- that to my ears, at least -- don't sound "copy cat"-like or derivative; it's just influence.

But different listeners have different reactions, no?  For example, I very much enjoy later Harold Land and later Art Pepper.  Other listeners prefer earlier work from these artists.  And Trane's influence was so profound that we can speak about these artists' music as pre-Coltrane and post-Coltrane.  But I'm sure that my reaction have more to do with my preferences and predilections than it does with the choices that these artists made in an abstract sense!

So is there a way to generalize about these things?  I suppose it has to be approached on a case-by-case basis.  But even then, when we take a particular artist as an example, those of us here on the board are almost certain to NOT agree about artists' direction.  And it's not even as simple as "old vs. new" or "conservative vs. progressive", etc.  It's MUCH more complicated than that.

I guess the only generalization that I could make is the artist is in the best position to make the decision about what's best for him or her.  Like Thelonious said, "The most effective artists are the people who are most willing to be themselves" (or something to that effect; y'all know what I'm talking about).  Maybe that's all anyone can say.

 

Edited September 20, 2021 by HutchFan

[JSngry]

Cannonball on "Milestones" (the song) is damn near embarrassing (and I've heard some of the hugest Cannonball-philes ever say that), and Cannonball on Kind Of Blue (minus, of course, the blues) is only somewhat better, probably because he knew what was going on and figured out how to at least cover himself. But to his eternal credit, he could multitask and not lose sight of anything, career or music.

I think it was a question of hearing where all those notes needed to fi, but not yet knowing what those notes actually were.

Pretty common problem when learning shit, actually. Reach exceeding grasp, or however that goes.

[HutchFan]

3 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Cannonball on "Milestones" (the song) is damn near embarrassing (and I've heard some of the hugest Cannonball-philes ever say that)...

Why?  Because he was playing the changes instead of playing modally?

 

[JSngry]

He was flailing.

8 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

Why?  Because he was playing the changes instead of playing modally?

 

He was flailing.

Also - there were no changes to play! Just the mode. Changes come with cadences, and two modes don't have cadences unless you put them there, which is something that people figured out how to do (in some spectacular ways, cf 63-65 Coltrane), But here...no, Cannonball didn't have a clue how to do this type of thing. No shame in that, especially because for years after, "playing modally" usually meant playing so literal of almost derivation of "So What" and playing some kind of "urgent" sounding blues licks over it. Jackie McLean could win at that because hell, that was essentially how he played changes as well. But everybody else...bandwagons are fine, but over time they don't fool anybody except the same type of people the fooled in the first place.

And oh my, don't ask Sam Rivers what HE though about "modal" playing!

 

[Dan Gould]

On 9/18/2021 at 0:16 PM, Peter Friedman said:

Love it !!!!

I kinda want it on a t-shirt.

On 9/18/2021 at 1:21 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

Far as Frank Foster goes, I sure am fond of Manhattan Fever — along with it’s previously unreleased sister-session also for Blue Note (the bonus material on the CD reissue of Manhattan Fever). And I seem to recall Garnett Brown really shines on a few tracks on the original album.

But I have to confess that those are the only Frank Foster leader-dates I have, or have ever heard. But on paper, it looks like The Loud Minority is maybe the next most obvious choice for me at some point.

No offense to Rooster but I started reading this thread with this post and almost missed "Well feel something in Bb, motherfucker."

[mjzee]

9 hours ago, bresna said:

I really liked that Frank & Frank session "Two For The Blues" but my favorite leader date would be "Leo Rising" on the Arabesque label from 1997. I've never seen their Concord recording, "Frankly Speaking", on LP or CD. Strangely, it appears to have only be released on CD in Japan one time back in the late 80's and never since.

I tried catching Frank live for several years but he didn't seem to come through Boston.

I have "Frankly Speaking" on King CD (K32Y 6054).  I was surprised to see that when I pulled it out.  At one point (early '90's?), Barnes & Noble had as cutouts all these Concord CDs put out by Bellaphon (Germany); I thought this was one of those.  I definitely bought it at the same time.

Edited September 21, 2021 by mjzee

[Larry Kart]

14 minutes ago, JSngry said:

But keep in mind - Golson & Barron were both Philly cats who were, in Golson't words, all studying the same thing. So it's like they would have known how Trane was getting there, even if it was something more than they had gotten to yet.

Those Philly tenor players - Jimmy Heath's another one, so is Odean Pope, they all studied together, these guys did not each hole up in isolation chambers, you know? There was a lot of mutually known/shared data there.

Cannonball...a Floridian band director, not even the same thing. And yes, he was awkward as fuck for the longest. And i think he knew it, and he knew that awkwards as fuck is not a good look for an aspiring bandleader. So yes, he took notes, and worked on it on his own time, at his own pace. But make no mmistake - he heard it, and knew that he needed to get it.

I agree again --certainly about the Philly connection and the sharing of data there -- and also about Cannonball being "awkward as fuck for the longest," though I don't think he was that awkward until and unless he was trying to incorporate oblique Trane-like information into his pre-existing relatively juicy and symmetrical vocabulary. Of course, he could still, if that's the way to put it,  pull back as with the hit "Live in San Francisco" album and deliver soul and good grease without fear or favor, but there was still the work Jim speaks of to be done. One could say that the drive to do this work speaks of a certain idealistic strain in Cannonball --because the distance he had to travel to get there was considerable, while in front of him he had a virtual cash register that probably wasn't going to stop ringing.

[JSngry]

15 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

One could say that the drive to do this work speaks of a certain idealistic strain in Cannonball --because the distance he had to travel to get there was considerable, while in front of him he had a virtual cash register that probably wasn't going to stop ringing.

And never stopped ringing!

In retrospect, Cannonball's role as self-starting "Black Jazz Entrepreneur" becomes increasingly visible. At the time, many of us could be forgiven for looking at some/lots of that stuff as simple pandering/selling out. And maybe some of it was, ultimately. But the total body of work (check out Big Man, and the glorious contributions Joe Williams makes therein)...artists and businesspeople do indeed make strange bedfellows, especially when they're inside the same head.

Ambitious idealism or Idealistic ambition...who knows? And what difference does it make, really. Judgement is one of those things that is seldom as easy as we'd like for it to be. At least about other people...

Well crap, that newspaper is somewhere in my closet that I cannot immediately see, so...this weekend, maybe.

A reasonable Plan B for researchers may be Coda, he did interviews there along the way that would have reached into that level of detail/interest. Wouldn't have been Cadence, I don't think, I wasn't reading it then with any regularity. So still going with the NYC Brittleprint.

[JSngry]

aHA!

I have a few sans of other things out of there from 2008. Here's the cover:

and here's a review of a Shirley Scott gig from the same paper, as well as Maxine's rather, uh...aggressive ad slogans.

The whole paper has that kind of vibe to it.

It was already getting brittle...

[JSngry]

Ok, DEFINITELY this magazine. Mr. Foster himself remembers it!

https://youtu.be/s3o5hHrXQVE?t=4853

[HutchFan]

15 hours ago, JSngry said:

Ok, DEFINITELY this magazine. Mr. Foster himself remembers it!

https://youtu.be/s3o5hHrXQVE?t=4853

Cool interview.  Thanks for sharing that.   

 

[mjzee]

Dusty Groove now has an NM- copy of the Frankly Speaking LP for $7.99: https://www.dustygroove.com/item/499189?format=lp&new_status=used&sort_order=date_added

[JSngry]

Ok, CORRECTION NEEDED!!!!

I found the paper, found the article, and my memory is only partially correct - he does talk about coming out of the road-cocoon and the shock thereof, but he talks about it in terms of the change in rhythm and in black popular taste. and he is very frank about that. But the Coltrane thing, he does not reference that, although it seems obvious to me that it affected his personal playing as much as the other did his gigging expectations.

There's a separate "Thank you" article that he writes in a tone that some would call "bitter", but I have to call fully reality-based, and darkly humorous.

I really hope that somebody somewhere has a digitized collection of this newspaper...the contents, the tone, everything about it, is something that does not exist today, could not exist today...like did you know that Larry Ridley hustled gigs as both a bassist and a fashion model? This paper is just FULL of stuff like this, very much a "Black jazz community" thing, priceless stuff.thing.

[Dan Gould]

8 hours ago, JSngry said:

 

I really hope that somebody somewhere has a digitized collection of this newspaper...the contents, the tone, everything about it, is something that does not exist today, could not exist today...like did you know that Larry Ridley hustled gigs as both a bassist and a fashion model? This paper is just FULL of stuff like this, very much a "Black jazz community" thing, priceless stuff.thing.

This site, which looks like a remarkable resource, ought to have it but no dice.

https://ripmjazz.org/journal/

 

[Peter Friedman]

On 9/20/2021 at 1:33 PM, JSngry said:

But keep in mind - Golson & Barron were both Philly cats who were, in Golson't words, all studying the same thing. So it's like they would have known how Trane was getting there, even if it was something more than they had gotten to yet.

Those Philly tenor players - Jimmy Heath's another one, so is Odean Pope, they all studied together, these guys did not each hole up in isolation chambers, you know? There was a lot of mutually known/shared data there.

Cannonball...a Floridian band director, not even the same thing. And yes, he was awkward as fuck for the longest. And i think he knew it, and he knew that awkwards as fuck is not a good look for an aspiring bandleader. So yes, he took notes, and worked on it on his own time, at his own pace. But make no mmistake - he heard it, and knew that he needed to get it.

While Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath were both part of the Philly "tenor" scene, Trane's influence effected Golson far more than it did Jimmy Heath. Though in his later recordings the Trane factor seems to have become less obvious in Golson.

[Mark Stryker]

On 9/20/2021 at 4:51 PM, JSngry said:

 

And oh my, don't ask Sam Rivers what HE though about "modal" playing!

 

OK, I won't ask Sam, but I will ask you: What did he think about modal playing? I assume you're referencing something specific e said in an interview somewhere. I do remember a Downbeat interview in which Sam made an interesting offhand comment about "Giant Steps," saying -- I'm paraphrasing -- that he wondered why people talk about "Giant Steps" as some sort of apex of difficult changes, when a song like "Con Alma" was actually harder to play over. (I assume what he meant here is that with GS, you can get away with running the changes by arpeggiating all the chords (math) and since they move every two beats you can give the impression of "melody," whereas with "Con Alma," you really can't default to change-running in that kind of highly mathematical manner.)

As a coda, I would quickly add that just because you can get away with playing Giant Steps in such a vertical fashion, doesn't mean you're actually playing anything of substance or creating true melody. For more on this, see Barry Harris' fantastic youtube colloquium about "Giant Steps" where at one point he says, "I want to hear it MELODIC!"  and them rips off a little more than a chorus and a half of the most sublime improvising -- carving out strikingly pure melody from the changes -- that I've ever heard on "Giant Steps." Here's just that short clip of that final moment.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 2021 by Mark Stryker