Posted in Jazz on Dec 4th, 2008 No Comments »
I have posted here my account of the concert I went to last night in celebration of Kenny Ball’s 50 years as a jazz band leader, and my appreciation. I was hoping to post here his most famous recording ‘Midnight in Moscow’ but my 45rpm record of it has been played to death and is now unplayable. Here in appreciation of Kenny Ball - Jazz Legend is his recording from the same time, 1962, of ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’.
Thank you Kenny.
Posted in Jazz on Nov 6th, 2008 No Comments »
In December 1956, following his tour of Europe, Louis Armstrong entered the recording studios and over a period of two months re-recorded (or rather re-created) some forty or so classics from throughout his career - from his days in Chicago with King Oliver in the early 20s, through his classic Hot Five period and into the 1930s when he reached the peak of his early fame. Now, though, he was a young man no longer; he was in his mid fifties. For some reason, this exercise of re-creating his early hits seems to have inspired him - to the extent that some of his re-creations equal, and even better, their originals. When these recordings came out as a boxed set of four LPs as his ‘Musical Autobiography’, they were hailed as classics of their kind - a new peak, in his long career. He introduced each track with a spoken reminiscence. For this track, That’s My Home, he pays touching tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton who played it for him as his departing train pulled out of the station, on his way home to America.
Louis wasn’t the man he was in his youth. His trumpet had no longer the breathtaking technique of thirty years earlier. Yet it has something else - a majesty and poise that only maturity brings. And that trumpet tone - the sound of a golden sunset.
Posted in Jazz on Aug 29th, 2008 2 Comments »
One of my first posts on jazz here was about this classic recording of mainstream jazz. It was recorded in December 1953 as a jam session by a band led by trumpeter Buck Clayton. The other members of the band were trumpeter Joe Newman, trombonists Urbie Green and Henderson Chambers, Charlie Fowlkes on baritone sax. The rhythm section was Count Basie’s – without Count Basie – Freddie Green on guitar, Walter Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums. ‘Sir’ Charles Thompson was on piano and he composed the piece. You have to bear in mind what was happening in modern jazz at the time. That febrile, nervy and essentially neurotic music called bebop had swept the classic and swing jazz of Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Lester Young into the dustbin of history. That was the intention. Well, it hadn’t - any more than Wagner swept Mozart into oblivion. Classical values endure. And here it is - composed, relaxed, comfortable and at ease with itself. Not all art is revolutionary - and the best often isn’t.
Posted in Jazz on Aug 25th, 2008 No Comments »
This is one of those odd jazz encounters between two men whom you wouldn’t ever expect to share the same stage - Ian Wheeler, traditional jazz clarinettist, and Joe Harriott, avant-garde alto sax player, England’s answer to Ornette Coleman. They are accompanied by a rhythm section of banjo, bass and drums. To try and get a sense of its oddity, imagine John Coltrane playing with Eddie Condon’s Dixieland Band or the Firehouse Five plus Two. But it works and it’s’wonderful. Listen to them chase each other round and round this Gershwin tune, Wheeler the more outgoing, Harriot more introspective. I wrote my original appreciation of this 1961 concert recording here.
Posted in Jazz on Aug 3rd, 2008 No Comments »
My admiration for Charlie Parker has always been grudging. It comes as no surprise to me that he was a egomaniac sponger on everyone he came into contact with – you can almost hear it in his music. That acid tone, the flippancy of his phrasing – that irritating Woody The Woodpecker phrase – and his clever-dick quotations – the clarinet break from High Society being the one he seems to throw in most often when he runs out of ideas. And there are rarely any moments of silence in his solos. Everything is a waterfall of quavers, semiquavers and demisemiquavers, endless and unstoppable, bludgeoning you into admiration, an exercise in domination, putting us all in our place. A harangue at the top of his voice. I sometimes catch myself listening to him with my mouth open.
Lester Young plays no more notes than he needs. As if no-one else was there. We’re listening in on a soliloquy. His silences are eloquent, as if he is searching for his note, like the right word, to express just what he feels. His improvisations are parallel melodies, conjured in an ethereal world of the sublime.
Here is one of his greatest solos. ‘Embraceable You’ from a live performance in 1949. Roy Eldridge opens with a lovely, and uncharacteristically subdued, chorus. Young follows him. After Young, Tommy Turk on trombone. Then Parker, seemingly calmed by his surroundings, and the tune, into thinking a bit more carefully what he wants to say. At times he still plays twenty notes where one would do, but there’s less of the incontinent rush than is normal. A fine final solo from Flip Phillips on tenor.
Posted in Jazz on Jul 15th, 2008 No Comments »
Carla Bley from here “Live” album 1981. As Old Fogey, this sort of music oughtn’t to be on my radar. But I heard the Humphrey Lyttelton band play one of her numbers at a concert several years ago, which sent me back to the original. Some of her longer pieces outstay their welcome and she doesn’t always avoid tricksiness or pretentiousness. But at her best, as in Song Sung Long, her music is exciting in the visceral way jazz used to be, before the intellectuals started to make it into an ‘artform’. The trombone player is the magnificent Gary Valente.
There is a fuller appreciation of this album on my other blog here.
Posted in Jazz on Jul 4th, 2008 No Comments »
I offered this song, “Miss Brown to You”, here, as a quintessential Billie Holiday recording of the 30s, when she was fresh and unselfconscious – before she got exploited by men, and before she started to get self conscious about what she was doing, and, God forbid, think of herself as an artist. That moment of death for all art.
Here she is, twenty years old, not a care in the world, and the best she ever was
Posted in Jazz on Jul 1st, 2008 No Comments »
Scott Hamilton recorded this at a concert in Brecon, South Wales in 1994. It proves that jazz wasn’t killed off by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp. He is a throwback to the great jazz sax players of the 1930s - Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Ben Webster, Chu Berry. It is natural that he should find a home among Old Fogey’s Favourites. A fuller appreciation of this recording is on my other blog here.
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