Best Live Jazz: Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot

Another Five Spot live recording that was dead spot on has Eric Dolphy and trumpeter Booker Little joining forces in 1961. If you follow this blog, you will know that I am a great admirer of Dolphy. He shows up at a lot of critical moments. Trane's works with Dolphy on board come to mind. His presence on Andrew Hill's marvelous Point of Departure is another. I would also add his appearance on George Russel's Ezz-thetics, and Oliver Nelson's magnificent Blues and the Abstract Truth. I find Dolphy's corpus, remarkably large for the small time (about four years) that he had in the spotlight, to be a rich vein in the corroding cliff face of modern music. He was a virtuoso on three instruments: flute, alto sax, and bass clarinet. I am especially attracted to the latter. I suspect that, had he lived a longer life, we would be putting him on the first shelf of jazz history. Maybe we will do that anyway.

The Five Spot recordings are jazz gems. Booker Little's trumpet takes second billing. Little also played on Dolphy's best single work, in my humble opinion, Far Cry. Like Dolphy, Little died very young, about three months after the Five Spot date. He left just enough work to whet an unrequited appetite. This was no ordinary horn.

If Dolphy and Little weren't enough, Mal Waldron plays piano. I have given a lot of attention to Waldron's later duets. I think that these latter works establish Waldron's position as a jazz genius of the first rank. He is not given prominence on the Five Spot recordings, but he certainly supports the show. Richard Davis joins him on bass, and Ed Blackwell plays drums.

The Five Spot date was documented on three albums: Eric Dolphy and Booker Little at the Five Spot, Volumes 1 and 2, and Eric Dolphy and Booker Little Memorial Album. Go ahead and invest in the set. All can be had at eMusic.

Here is a sample:

Eric Dolphy/Aggression/Eric Dolphy and Booker Little at the Five Spot, Vol. 2.

Best Live Jazz: Monk at the Five Spot

I am inspired to do a series of posts on 'best live jazz.' That's best out of my collection, of course. I have a modestly competent collection of hard bop and avant garde jazz albums. But that leaves a universe of great recordings out of my reach. Something else that's out of my reach is the level of jazz criticism in Stanley Crouch's Considering Genius. I have been reading Crouch on jazz and culture for more than twenty years. He is a musician himself and for that and other reasons writes with an authority that I can never measure up to. No one that I have read has a greater grasp of the whole trajectory of modern jazz, nor a finer ear for the action of any jazz composition, let alone the genius to put them together.

In Considering Genius Crouch has an essay on Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot. Rereading it this evening, I resolved to begin this series. Two albums came out of this 1958 date: Misterioso, and Thelonious Monk In Action. I'll let Crouch speak:

With a quartet that included a tenor saxophonist with the intellectual, emotional, and technical skills of Johnny Griffin, Monk was able to realize his orchestral desires by using the entire range of the horn, pivoting the motion of the band off the bass, with the piano and trap drums creating an ongoing arrangement of textural, harmonic, and melodic development.

Wow. I half understand that. Listening to the two albums, I can sorta see what he was hearing. Griffin was indeed amazing. These two albums are stellar examples of what can be achieved by a band of real genius in a small club setting. Ahmed Abdul-Malik is on bass, and Roy Haynes is on drums. Crouch has some fine praise for Haynes, but more for Griffin. The best I can do is say I have been enamored of Griffin's horn for a long time.

Here is a sample:

Thelonious Monk/Round Midnight/Misterioso

Drop me a line if you find this worth listening to.

From A to Zoot

I feel like posting but I don't have anything much to say. It's a cool night, and the moon is peaking out from a quilt of clouds. I am listening to Zoot Sims. It's one of those odd things, but just after I first listened to Zoot's brilliant album, Warm Tenor, I went out and mowed the lawn. I was thinking about the music as I pushed the mower. That was, maybe, thirty five years ago. Now, every time I listen to Sims, I remember the light in the back yard, and the roar of the air conditioning unit.

Well, here is a track that won't rouse such memories in you, dear reader. More apropos would be beer lights and wooden booths. Zoot rules the room.

Zoot Sims/The Touch of Your Lips/I Wish I Were Twins

Jimmy Rowles on piano, Frank Tate on bass, and Akira Tana on drums. Rowles is superb. What would life be like if this were happening every Saturday down on main street. Park next to the bicycle shop and walk in. Order a drink, and listen to Sims work the saxophone.

eMusic we hardly knew ye 2

I have benefited tremendously from my membership in eMusic. I owe this to my friend and benefactor, Ken Laster, who got me enrolled. Over the last year I have subscribed to eMusic's most generous plan. For just short of two hundred dollars, I got 75 downloads a month. That means 75 cuts off of a great selection of classic jazz. I have expanded my jazz library beyond my earlier, wildest dreams.

But recently eMusic has tightened the screws. The good news is that they acquired the Sony catalog, which means that I can get a lot more great jazz from such artists as Miles Davis. But the bad news is rather worse. The new music is more costly, for the most part. Miles In The Sky has six cuts on it, and eMusic counts that as 12 downloads. Worse still, after my current subscription runs out, I'll get only 35 downloads a month for about $171 a year. That's less than half the downloads for sometimes twice the price.

But tempted though I am to complain, eMusic prices are still way below what I would pay at any other source. Here, if it works, is a chart I made on Excel:

191.99	75	12	0.21	2.56
171.99	35	12	0.41	4.91

The first line represents what I pay now. For 191.99 a year, I pay 21 cents a song, or $2.56 per twelve song album. I certainly can't beat that anywhere else. And a lot of jazz albums have fewer than 12 cuts.

Under the new plan, I pay 41 cents a cut and $4.91 a 12 song album. That ain't nearly as inviting, but it's still better than iTunes.

I am working on my laptop battery right now, and I am running out of juice. I'll finish this post as soon as I can, with a clip or so for hungry jazz fans.

Well, I'm back and still discombobulated, as my Arkansas relatives sometimes say. It's one thing to charge more than one credit per download for music newly available. But it looks to me as if some previously available discs have risen in their credit price. I can't be sure about this, but I believe that Eric Dolphy's Stockholm Sessions was there before, and now it's twelve credits for eight cuts.

Still, that's $2.56 under my current plan and five bucks if I wait until after next February. Right now the disc is available at iTunes for $5.99. You can get the plastic on Amazon for $17! Perhaps the most infuriating thing about eMusic's big price increase is that they still have the best deals around, so their fans are going to have to swallow it. Well, I guess they ain't in business to be loved.

Dolphy's Stockholm album is one of a marvelous set of albums recorded in 1961. How many Dolphys were there? The gems of this collection are his incomparable Five Spot recordings with Booker Little. But the rest of the bunch all represent vintage Dolphy live.

A similar case is the aforementioned Miles in the Sky. This is one of the string of recordings made by Miles' second quintet. All of these recordings demonstrate brilliance and moments of breathtaking beauty. But they are wildly uneven overall. E.S.P. is the best of them. In fact, I would rank it as one of Miles' ten best recordings. Miles in the Sky is a work that is valuable chiefly because it is part of this string. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the first listen and I will listen again. But it is a series of rambling, unstructured solos. It is one of those albums that would trigger the key words: workshop, exploration, and transitional, if a computer were grading it. I don't believe I have ever seen a copy in a record bin. In short, this is the kind of thing interesting mostly to collectors like myself. If anything ought to be available at a discount price, this is it.

Here are a couple of samples from the discs under inspection. Given 'em a listen, and if you like them bite the bullet and get the recordings. They're still cheap from the folks at eMusic.

Eric Dolphy/Miss Ann/Stockholm Sessions

Miles Davis/Black Comedy/Miles in the Sky

Is Keith Jarrett Too Popular to be Good?

Here is a bit of personal jazz history. My first exposure to jazz came when I made friends with an English professor, Meade Harwell. He turned me on to Bill Evans, which might have been one of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me. Okay, now fast forward: I left Arkansas and went to college in Tucson Arizona. My best friend in my first year there had a copy of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. I remember asking Spet to let me borrow it, but he wouldn't let me play it on my old Panasonic suitcase record player. He did play it for me on his stereo, and I was entranced.

The Köln Concert is surely one of jazz music's best sellers. Like Kind of Blue, it continues to rake in the revenue, year after year. According to Wikipedia, it is the best selling jazz solo album. I don't doubt that. But unlike KOB, the success of TKC seems to have made Jarrett's status in jazz somewhat problematic. Jazz fans are used to the idea that the music they love best is never going to be top forty. It's easy to go from there to the idea that any jazz record that appeals to a large audience isn't really authentic. My daughter, who is a big indie music fan, seems to have that same attitude.

Jarrett's trio style certainly seems to be at home in the living room with the unused piano, the white carpet, and the city view out the window. Pour a wine spritzer, do some blow, and listen to Jarrett. But none of that is his fault.

Keith Jarrett is as serious a jazzman as his generation ever produced. There is real depth and genius in The Köln Concert. I am just beginning to explore his work. I picked up his Standards2. This is great trio. Bass is Life, you will like it. Gary Peacock (another Zen enthusiast) plays bass. Jack DeJohnette is on drums. The recording is stellar, the trio is feeling their way around a very large and resonant space. Here is a sample:

Keith Jarrett/So Tender/Standards 2

Give it a listen and then get the disc. iTunes has it. And keep me posted. I need confirmation!

More Esbjörn Svensson

As if you're interested, I have spent the last several weeks recording lectures onto computer files. I am teaching two classes in July: Intro to Philosophy, and Human Nature and Human Values (a course on the biological origins of political behavior). But I am going to be gone the first week of class. I am attending the Illinois Biology and Politics Institute. So my students will have to make do with canned Blanchard. Recording these lectures has been three times the work of a regular class. But I have been learning a lot of new technology.

Meanwhile I am working on a paper on Lincoln and Darwin. I can't wait to find out what I have to say.

But just right now I feel the need to post a bit of jazz, but I am too tired to say anything interesting. That's assuming anything I say is interesting. Anyhow I have been listening to the brilliant and unfortunately late Esbjörn Svensson. I commented on Svensson's Monk tribute album last month.

Two other albums put me on that shadowed, cobblestone walk, damp with evening dew. From Gargarin's Point of View is a title that suggest a genius for arrangement. Likewise with Winter in Venice. I have never been to Venice. But I cannot imagine that such a place exists in winter. Esbjörn Svensson could imagine that, and he does on this superb album. Both of these albums remind me of walking Boston, alone, on a rainy afternoon. Red stones and the smell of lobster boiling.

I will finish this damn paper if it kills me. But before it does, here are some samples from the two albums:

Esbjörn Svensson/From Gargarin's Point of View/From Gargarin's Point of View

Esbjörn Svensson/Semblance Part 2/Winter in Venice

Enjoy. And if you do enjoy them, post a comment. That's all I ask.

Nonstandard Standards & Ethan Iverson

I just read on an eMusic post that JazzTimes is suspending publication. This probably says less about jazz than it does about the publishing industry, which is deep in trauma right now. But it does worry me.

The history of jazz begins around the turn of the twentieth century, and probably ends in the 1970's. That period constitutes a history because it has what Hegel called a dialectic: each generation establishing a statement to which the succeeding generation could reply. It is a common idea in modern aesthetics that such histories ought to go on without stop, but that is not usually how artistic genres work. Each reaches a point where further avenues of progress are limited or not available. I don't see anything in jazz that is really new after the avant garde movement and the fusion movement.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. It happened to classical music much earlier, and maybe it is the fate of all genres. But it means that contemporary jazz is left exploring the contours of existing jazz space.

What is to be done? Lenin's question is answered for jazz by such works as Jim Snidero's Standards + Plus, and pianist Ethan Iverson's Deconstruction Zone. The latter, Iverson's standards album, shows what is to be done. The greatness of jazz lies, it seems to this humble fan, in two virtues. First, it established a basic sound, a wide avenue in music space, that was persistantly and uniquely its own. Wynton Marsalis thinks that is rooted in blues and swing. Second, it developed a taste for mining all the riches of any music melody, and building new structures in any number of directions.

Iverson's trio certainly exemplifies the latter virtue. He takes a number of standards, and my goodness what he does with them! Who could have guessed what realms were open from starting points like 'I'm getting sentimental over you,' or 'Have you met Ms. Jones?'

Here are two Iverson samples. Reid Anderson plays bass, and Jorge Rossy is on drums.

Ethan Iverson/I'll Remember April/Deconstruction Zone

Ethan Iverson/Smoke Gets In Your Eyes/Deconstruction Zone

If you like these, get the whole thing. It's available at eMusic.