Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet at Uncle Pö´s

[Gheorghe]

Hello friends,

Before our last record shop in Vienna closed, I purchased this double CD since I allready have some from this series. 

Now I had the time to listen to it and what can I saw, it´s fantastic. It´s some of the best all acoustic jazz I heard in the last months. 

I must admit I hadn´t paid so much attention to Junior Cook until then. In my memories he was a solid hard bop tenor who had played with Horace Silver, but I hadn´t known he can play as great and daring as he does on this one. 

They all are what I´d say is my idea of perfect musicians. 
With the exception of Junior Cook I had them seen live separatly: Louis Hayes with Diz, Ronny Matthews for some years with Griffin, Woody with his own group, Stafford James with Woody. 
Great tunes, maybe the most exiting is "Itchi-Ban". Listen how Louis Hayes really lifts up the stage as a great drummer must do. 
I just closed my eyes and listend to every aspect of it, each phrase of the soloists, really exiting. 
And Ronny Matthew was a fantastic pianist, maybe too underrated. He was the highlight of the Griffin Quartet of 1978-80. 
I just saw that this group also made a studio recording for Timeless, but I see it´s very short recording time, so I think I´ll keep listening to that 2 hours of live performance. 

Highly recommended. 

[Eric]

6 minutes ago, Gheorghe said:

Hello friends,

Before our last record shop in Vienna closed, I purchased this double CD since I allready have some from this series. 

Now I had the time to listen to it and what can I saw, it´s fantastic. It´s some of the best all acoustic jazz I heard in the last months. 

I must admit I hadn´t paid so much attention to Junior Cook until then. In my memories he was a solid hard bop tenor who had played with Horace Silver, but I hadn´t known he can play as great and daring as he does on this one. 

They all are what I´d say is my idea of perfect musicians. 
With the exception of Junior Cook I had them seen live separatly: Louis Hayes with Diz, Ronny Matthews for some years with Griffin, Woody with his own group, Stafford James with Woody. 
Great tunes, maybe the most exiting is "Itchi-Ban". Listen how Louis Hayes really lifts up the stage as a great drummer must do. 
I just closed my eyes and listend to every aspect of it, each phrase of the soloists, really exiting. 
And Ronny Matthew was a fantastic pianist, maybe too underrated. He was the highlight of the Griffin Quartet of 1978-80. 
I just saw that this group also made a studio recording for Timeless, but I see it´s very short recording time, so I think I´ll keep listening to that 2 hours of live performance. 

Highly recommended. 

Great post and great CD - I have a copy!  Will re-listen on my way to work tomorrow.  Great series - hope there is more to come.

[Dmitry]

6 hours ago, Gheorghe said:

Before our last record shop in Vienna closed, I purchased this double CD since I allready have some from this series. 

 

There are no more record shops in Vienna?

[jlhoots]

I need to relisten to my copy too.

[John L]

High Note released some other fine live recordings of this band from the same tour, although they took a promotional liberty to headline Woody Shaw's name instead of Junior Cook.    

[Gheorghe]

2 hours ago, John L said:

High Note released some other fine live recordings of this band from the same tour, although they took a promotional liberty to headline Woody Shaw's name instead of Junior Cook.    

This must be interesting too. Never heard about that label but I think somehow I lost the trace. When I was younger and could memorize more, there were not so much labels, you had CBS, BN, Prestige, Impulse, the more conservative Verve and so on, and nowadays there is such a little fan community we are like rare whales in the ocean and don´t meet others like it was or browsed through the records in the shops. 
I sometimes think there are much more labels but less people who listen to that music.....

But those were only thoughts that came to me, the point is that I´m sure those two volumes must as same interesting as the Uncle Pö´s . I heard there is a Timeless record also. Timeless is a wonderful label, but the shortness of a studio album, only 40 minutes could not capture the impressions I got from those two hours live music. Maybe this was also to big big disappointment, when I bought the 36minutes Studio VSOP, having been used to the live double albums....

 

[Pim]

Got it on vinyl. It’s great indeed. Superb band

[Rooster_Ties]

I’ve got all of the first 4 High Notes (vol 1-4) under just Woody’s name — but I know I’m missing 1-3 of the various but numerous Woody Shaw related “previously unreleased” releases from the last 8-10 years or so. (Not that I’m complaining about how many there’re been of late, as they’re all excellent!). But it doesn’t help that a couple of them are similar, and both labeled as “Vol 1”.

I think(?) all I’m missing is one of the Vol 1’s — and the also similar Louis Hayes (which is a double CD, iirc). And I might(?) be missing just the 2nd volume of Woody/Hayes “One Tour” single disc, also on Highnote (iirc) — but maybe not (can’t remember if I got it once on eBay really cheap, maybe).

There’s so many, it’s hard to keep track!  Can we compile a simple list of them ALL (all the ones from the last 10 years) by title, and organized (grouped) by label??  Something a person could use as checklist for what they have, and don’t?

I can give it a go over the next few days, what I have anyway, but my CD’s are all spread out at the moment (the pandemic has me listening to more music than I have in years, but my bad habit of never putting things back is really out of control).

Edited January 14, 2022 by Rooster_Ties

[Д.Д.]

On 1/12/2022 at 2:16 PM, Dmitry said:

There are no more record shops in Vienna?

There are a couple of classical CD stores that still manage it somehow (but pale shade of what they were back in a day) and a few second-hand CD / Vinyl stores (one of them, Black Monk, is actually quite good). I've seen a few new small Vinyl-only stores, but I have not been inside.     

[Pim]

I’ve ordered quite some stuff from Black Monk. Great and diverse assortment 

[Gheorghe]

19 hours ago, Д.Д. said:

There are a couple of classical CD stores that still manage it somehow (but pale shade of what they were back in a day) and a few second-hand CD / Vinyl stores (one of them, Black Monk, is actually quite good). I've seen a few new small Vinyl-only stores, but I have not been inside.     

Hello, didn´t know we are three guys here from Vienna. 
Yes, classical CD stores..... there is one very small store in my district (Hietzing Ekazent), and sometimes they have a few jazz CDs also. But really jazz sortiment, that´s gone. I was a regular at "Radio Kratz" in Mariahilfer-Strasse, and at "Red Octopus", then until last autumn, if I was in Vienna 1 district with my wife, we would have a look at the EMI, where we always found something. 

[sidewinder]

On 12/01/2022 at 6:50 AM, Gheorghe said:

And Ronny Matthew was a fantastic pianist, maybe too underrated. He was the highlight of the Griffin Quartet of 1978-80. 
 

Gheorge - I saw Ronnie Matthews with T.S. Monk’s group around 1995 and he was great - a very supportive pianist to the group, I thought.

I need to get a copy of this Hayes/Cook CD and also the one featuring Dizzy Gillespie. It is a good series.

[Gheorghe]

11 hours ago, sidewinder said:

Gheorge - I saw Ronnie Matthews with T.S. Monk’s group around 1995 and he was great - a very supportive pianist to the group, I thought.

I need to get a copy of this Hayes/Cook CD and also the one featuring Dizzy Gillespie. It is a good series.

Ronny Matthew with T.S. Monk, I can imagine that. Matthew loved Monk, I witnessed it on a soundcheck, where he played a few bars of a Monk ballad and it sounded exactly like Monk, and everybody smiled. And you can here it on a tune dedicated to Monk on Griffin´s first comeback album "Return of the Griffin". 

Hayes featuring Dizzy Gillespie ? I didn´t know something like that exists. I saw a Diz Allstar Group in late 1983: Diz, Harold Land, George Cables, Herbie Lewis and Louis Hayes, but I have not heard about a recording they made..... anyway it was great.  

[sidewinder]

It was the Dizzy Gillespie Group at Onkel Po’s that I was wondering about, not with Hayes.

That T.S. Monk Group, as I recall it, had Don Sickler on trumpet and I think Bobby Poricelli on saxes. Not sure who was on bass. They played quite a few of the Sickler arrangements which are on the TS Monk Blue Notes, including some of Thelonius’s tunes of course but also gems by Kenny

Edited to say that the bassist, I think, was Scott Colley. Next time I saw him was in the UK with Jim Hall ! Can’t recall if Willie Williams was also in the band on tenor but he might have been.

Edited January 16, 2022 by sidewinder

[Gheorghe]

23 hours ago, sidewinder said:

It was the Dizzy Gillespie Group at Onkel Po’s that I was wondering about, not with Hayes.

 

Yes, the Dizzy Quartet from 1978 at Onkel Po´s . Featuring Rodney Jones on guitar, Benjamin Franklin Brown on bass, and Mickie Roker on drums. Very very fine. Towards the end, alto player Leo Wright , who was with Diz in the 60´s sits in. This Quartet was touring much, later they were replaced by Ed Cherry and Mike Howell. In 1983 J.C. Heard was on drums, that was one of the best Dizzy performances I saw live. 

[felser]

Those Onkel Po dates are so good, far exceeding my expectations in so many cases (Dizzy, Chet Baker, Griff/Lockjaw come immediately to mind).  Must be something magical about that hall.

[Gheorghe]

14 hours ago, felser said:

Those Onkel Po dates are so good, far exceeding my expectations in so many cases (Dizzy, Chet Baker, Griff/Lockjaw come immediately to mind).  Must be something magical about that hall.

All of those are great. I was only a bit disappointed with sound quality of the Griff/Lockjaw, since the piano of great Tete Montoliu is underrecorded and sounds sharp.

But nobody mentioned one of the greatests: The Elvin Jones group. That´s maybe one of the very best. 

[felser]

7 hours ago, Gheorghe said:

 

But nobody mentioned one of the greatests: The Elvin Jones group. That´s maybe one of the very best. 

Agreed.

[JSngry]

21 hours ago, felser said:

Those Onkel Po dates are so good, far exceeding my expectations in so many cases (Dizzy, Chet Baker, Griff/Lockjaw come immediately to mind).  Must be something magical about that hall.

Maybe they had some really good, uh..."refreshments" available?

[jcam_44]

 Not that he is for everyone but James Bookers set from Onkel Po’s is excellent as well. 

[sidewinder]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Maybe they had some really good, uh..."refreshments" available?

No doubt - wasn’t it somewhere near the Reeperbahn/red light district of Hamburg?

[bertrand]

Just picked up this release.

Junior Cook really does shine, in particular because he picks up the bulk of the soloing. My ears only hear Woody Shaw on 3 tracks: 1 and 3 on CD1, and 2 on CD2.

He was a full-fledged member, not an add-on for this gig. The liner notes do not address this. Maybe he was ill that night? I can understand one or two features for Junior but not 4 out of 7 tracks.

[Rooster_Ties]

6 minutes ago, bertrand said:

Junior Cook really does shine, in particular because he picks up the bulk of the soloing. My ears only hear Woody Shaw on 3 tracks: 1 and 3 on CD1, and 2 on CD2.

He was a full-fledged member, not an add-on for this gig. The liner notes do not address this. Maybe he was ill that night? I can understand one or two features for Junior but not 4 out of 7 tracks.

Wow, interesting. I’d still love to hear this, but I may try and wait to find a cheaper used copy at some point then — as Woody is the biggest draw for me (though I do certainly like Cook, don’t get me wrong).

[soulpope]

10 hours ago, bertrand said:

Just picked up this release.

Junior Cook really does shine, in particular because he picks up the bulk of the soloing. My ears only hear Woody Shaw on 3 tracks: 1 and 3 on CD1, and 2 on CD2.

He was a full-fledged member, not an add-on for this gig. The liner notes do not address this. Maybe he was ill that night? I can understand one or two features for Junior but not 4 out of 7 tracks.

Believe on this tour the disagreements between Shaw and Cook extended (the band broke thereafter) so this could be first signs of said situation ....

[sidewinder]

51 minutes ago, soulpope said:

Believe on this tour the disagreements between Shaw and Cook extended (the band broke thereafter) so this could be first signs of said situation ....

Think I mentioned it before but there were reports in the UK music press (Melody Maker, remember reading it) of on stage bust up situation at Ronnie Scott’s.

One of these days I’ll make a trip to the UK Jazz Centre in Essex, where the have a Melody Maker archive and dig out the reviews of that era just to check. Retirement project !

Edited February 9, 2022 by sidewinder