Azar Lawrence

[mrjazzman]

Saw Azar Lawrence at Yoshi's Wed night. Except for one funk oriented song, the show was absolutely fantastic. There was a moment where I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to Trane.............

[felser]

He is very gifted, and was at an incredibly early age (as evidenced by those albums with McCoy Tyner when he was like 21 and his first two leader albums on Prestige ).  Would be interesting to hear his life story at some point, including his "disappearance" from the national scene for decades. 

[JSngry]

The implication here is that he was pursuing a career in R&B as writer and producer:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/azar-lawrence/

[Gheorghe]

I think I only have his name on Miles´ Dark Magus, but it seems I listened more to Dave Liebman on that record.

[felser]

On 6/24/2024 at 5:17 AM, Gheorghe said:

I think I only have his name on Miles´ Dark Magus, but it seems I listened more to Dave Liebman on that record.

Go out immediately online and order this CD to hear peak Lawrence!

[Gheorghe]

4 hours ago, felser said:

Go out immediately online and order this CD to hear peak Lawrence!

Oh yes I have some McCoy on Milestone, but it must be from some years later, so from 1977 on, when I began to be more interested in acoustic mainstream. But I must admit I have very very little acoustic jazz from the early 70´s, it was not so much around then. But what I read here from the personnel sounds very very great. 
Joony Booth is or was a helluway bassist, and I had heard Alphonse Mouzon with his great Electric Band, and maybe later even with acoustic artists, I think Chet Baker ....

[clifford_thornton]

Juini Booth, yeah. Saw him a couple times in the early 00s, great player and could probably (weed) smoke any of us under the table.

[colinmce]

This is an excellent recent-ish disc that's worth tracking down:

[Gheorghe]

16 hours ago, clifford_thornton said:

Juini Booth, yeah. Saw him a couple times in the early 00s, great player and could probably (weed) smoke any of us under the table.

That´s how I saw him at Jazz Spelunke. 

It was during his stint with Beaver Harris and I think they had a day off and Joony Booth came in, and he was in company of a middle aged lady from Viena, who kind of spoke for him and translated to him. The question was, if there is a place that night where he can jam with some musicians. I remember he smoked a cigarette that looked like those hand made cigarettes some people smoke (I never was able to roll a cigarette, when I tried they looked like a snake that had eaten a rat. Well I didn´t know anything about weed and as receptive I was for harmful stuff like beer and booze, and have been smoking for 50 years (or even 51,52 if I really started at 13 on school toalet) , but never had the urge to smoke other stuff than tobaco. 

But back to Joony Booth : He came to Spelunke with that austrian lady who translated and they were not allowed to have live music later than until 10:00 pm because it was a building where other people had their appartments, so it was live only from 07:30 pm until 10:00, otherwise I would have been glad to jam with him.

Edited June 27 by Gheorghe