Make a Jazz Noise Here

[Bogey]

What is your overall take on Monk, Karl?

[karlhenning]

What is your overall take on Monk, Karl?

I can't get enough of his work, Bill. It really sings to me, somehow.  I must have some 7-8 discs' worth now. Why, I've even started reading a biography.

Oh! And say, did you get an e-mail message I sent maybe half a week ago? . . .

[jlaurson]

'empty' post to be notified on activity hear. enjoy reading along...

[Leon]

I can't get enough of his work, Bill. It really sings to me, somehow. 

If you "can't get enough" of Monk - and if you have not already done so, and care to expand the circle out a bit from Monk - try some Herbie Nichols, Andrew Hill and Mal Waldron.

For sure, all are quite different in their own right, but also, all would be natural suggestions to someone who is especially fond of Monk. 

Here's a place to start:

Herbie Nichols

The Complete Blue Note Recordings

The best box of his music, only three discs.

There is also a series of three discs by some younger, good, jazz guys who record under the name The Herbie Nichols Project.  This group is made up of Frank Kimbrough, Ben Allison, and Rob Horton who have re-recorded much of his catalog, but have expanded the trio to include horns.


Andrew Hill

His Blue Note recordings from the 1960s are classics, and have were gathered together in one Mosiac box set, but that is not available any longer.  You could get introduced to this phenomenal musician with these:

Compulsion

Judgement

Point of Departure

I'd avoid the remastered versions if possible, they are not as good, to my ears, as the original transfers.

Mal Waldron

The first four recordings, all called Mal/1, Mal/2, Mal/3 and Mal/4  are all trios dates, that are fantastic.  He has a huge discography, and most is good, but the early stuff is especially worth checking out. 

Another essential disc (that is sometimes credited to Eric Dolphy, but was really his date) is Quest.

[Elnimio]

Check this out:


http://www.youtube.com/v/zCfmV7G0v_4

[Leon]

Enabled by new technology, Joe recorded his improvisations at home on a cassette deck (and later with MIDI in his home studio he and Maxine dubbed "The Music Room"), and then either used them directly as the tune's base (as with "Nubian Sundance" and "Jungle Book" on Mysterious Traveller), or transcribed them note-for-note so that the band could play them as Joe originally conceived them. It was a method Joe would use throughout his life.

Joe Zawinul Biography (from the website operated by the Zawinul estate)

[jowcol]

Rensin also asked Zawinul if he thought he'd left Miles Davis behind. After taking a moment to consider the question, Zawinul said, "No, I don't think we've left Miles behind. We are just somewhere else, man. Another entity that grew out of him. He's the father and we are the sons, and even when you are small and you stand upon the shoulders of the father, you are going to see further than he. That's what we are doing, and one day I hope to have many sons of my own.

[Leon]

An sub-genre of jazz that I find myself becoming more and more interested in is "Gypsy Jazz", also known as Gypsy Swing, Jazz manouche – and generally considered invented and popularized by Django Reinhardt and a few others in the 1930s-1950s, primarily in Europe, specifically in Paris.

The style is characterized by the drumless five or six piece combo with an instrumentation usually containing a lead guitar, two rhythm guitars, violin or accordion and bass.  Reinhardt's Quintette du Hot Club de France is one of the most famous exponents of this music, but there were many others such as brothers Baro, Sarane, and Matelo Ferret and Reinhardt's own brother Joseph "Nin-Nin" Reinhardt.   The classic makeup of Reinhardt's group is well known and included jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

Outside of France, the music was expressed in several Baltic states, Romania and Macedonia especially.

The music is typified by a strong rhythm drive provided by the two rhythm guitars and fast runs by the lead guitar often combining a jazz/swing feel within a dark, chromatic harmonic and melodic context.

Although Django Reinhardt died in 1953, the music has remained popular and spawned many musicians who are active today.

One is the teenage prodigy, Biréli Lagrène, who at age 13 played such a convincing version of the Reinhardt style that expert aficionados had trouble telling the difference between his debut recording, Routes to Django, and the Reinhardt originals.  He later went into electric fusion and departed from the Reinhardt style but has returned to his roots; now with a unique voice and no longer merely a Reinhardt imitator.

Along with Biréli Lagrène, Tim Kliphuis, Stochelo Rosenberg, Joscho Stephan and Angelo Debarre are other active Gypsy Jazz stylists today.

The Benelux countries, Netherlands, Germany, Hungary and Romania all have bands performing this music, with their own regional twists.  Originally the Hungarian and Romania bands employed the traditional instruments kobza and cimbalom but some recent manifestations of this music have replaced them with electric guitar and synthesizers creating a kind fusion jazz heavily influenced by the older music.  However, a revivalist school has chosen to keep the violin, accordion, fiddle and saxophone of the original bands.

The guitar preferred by these groups is one of special construction first made by the French instrument maker, Selmer – but who ceased manufacturing the guitar in 1952.  The original guitars are very rare and  quite expensive but several luthiers are making very good replicas of the Selmer design.

The guitars are large, and broad shouldered with a distinctive sound hole, either a wide-mouthed "D" shape or a smaller vertical oval.  The guitars with the D-shaped sound hole are mostly used by the rhythm guitarists and the small oval sound holed guitars used by the lead players.  But both guitars are known for their loud projection, unique tone and ability to cut through large ensembles.

JWC Guitars is a well known maker and has a nice gallery on their website.

Here's another website devoted to Gypsy Jazz (they chose a horrible format with the grey against black and I find it hard to read) that is a kind of one-stop-shop for CDs, books and even instruments.

I have always been interested in this music, but only lately have I made a concerted effort to track down some recordings by other bands beyond the Django Reinhardt originals and Lagrène tracks.

I think anyone interested in jazz guitar would enjoy this music.

[Henk]

I think in his music he always kept loyal to a sort of mystical experience he writes about in his autobiography. Whether you like his playing or not, he always was authentic and creative. Speaking for myself Miles Ahead is the only recording I really like to listen to.

Above all Miles was a great personality, a self-steerer in the 20th century, for whom one can feel a lot.

Henk

[Henk]

Zawinul wrote in In A Silent Way ... and was just as responsible for creating the sounds on Bitches Brew too as were the others.. incl. Shorter who also wrote all the best pieces during the 2nd Quintet phase. Or how Evans was key to Kind of Blue's sound. Miles's let the players in his band do there thing and be creative - he didn't really interfere or give directions much.

That just says what a great leader he was.

I don't agree completely. Miles had strong ideas about music and really was a leader of his bands. When things didn't go as he wanted, he took control. Do you know btw he liked ideas of Stockhausen and applied them in his music?

Henk

[jowcol]

A lot of the distinctions here are very interesting, because I think the creative tensions between composing, soloing, improvising and band-leading are what make Jazz such a vibrant and varied art form.  Sorry for the length of this post, but it's so easy to oversimplify some pretty complex and interesting issues with generalizations.

But Miles never really developed or evolved greatly as a player, he always essentially played the same in his simple style but he changed his personnel around him quite a bit though

To a large degree I agree with this-- he was more of a bandleader/catalyst than soloist or composer.  In his autobiography he described some of the changes he need to make with his style when he moved to electric effects, but I don't see a huge evolution in the playing itself. In terms of the settings he played in, I think he was a major case of ADHD. 

But Miles <...> changed his personnel around him quite a bit though - and often took all the credit.

Interesting, but note that Zawinul blamed Teo for the credit claiming over IASW/Its About that Time--  I'll provide a reference further down.

Duke was a pianist-composer-bandleader and he essentially kept the same band together for half a century.

Pianist:  I'm not sure if Duke every evolved his playing style much more than Miles did.

Composer:  Yes and no.  Ellington did write out music, but the degree to which it was followed was very questionable. 

As Lawrence Brown said when he joined Ellington's Band:

There were no third trombone parts, so I had to sort of compose my own parts.  Then, as the new numbers came in, they started arranging for third trombone.  All bands at that time were ear bands.  Whatever you heard you'd pick a place to fit in, a part to fit in. Whatever you heard was missing, that's where you were.

Bill Berry had this to say about the written arrangements he encountered when he joined Ellington's band.

I had a library of music, it must have been six inches thick, but none of it was titled or numbered, and we didn't play any of it anyway!  I know it sounds fantastic, but it's the truth. You can ask anyone who was ever in there and they'll tell you.  There wasn't any music.

At one point he asked Cat Anderson what to play at the end of a number, and Cat replied "Pick a note that sounds wrong and play it".

Johnny Hodges could not read music-- he'd listen to the rest of the band rehearse a song, and then work out his parts.

Keeping the Same Band together: While Ellington certainly differed from Miles in keeping the same nucleus together, it's estimated that more than 800 musicians had passed through that band from one time or another, Several notables who had played with Ellington at one point or another  (Sidney Bechet, Cootie Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Ben Webster etc. ) were much better known for their work outside of Elllington's band.  And he seemed to have as much luck with retaining bassists as Weather Report had with drummers.

Zawinul <...> just as responsible for creating the sounds on Bitches Brew too as were the others.

It's interesting to consider that point in light of a quote from Zawinul himself, who didn't seem to think he had much to do with the final product.

"After the Bitches Brew sessions Miles took me home in a limousine, and I didn't say anything. He asked, 'Why don't you say anything?' and I said, 'Because I didn't like what we just recorded.' We had played a lot of stuff that was OK, but I was not impressed. Several months later I walked into the CBS offices, and through some closed doors I heard some enormous,
fantastic music. I asked 'Wow, what is that?' and a secretary replied, 'Well, Mr. Zawinul,
that's you playing with Miles on Bitches Brew!'"

I think the role he played in Miles bands  is a complex issue.  In IASW, I think that Zawinul did not get enough credit. Here are some interesting quotes from Zawinul and Miles about In a Silent Way.  It's clear they disagree about the relative contribution, but interesting to note that, at least here, Zawinul points the blame for not getting enough credit at Teo.

Miles Davis: We changed what Joe had written... cut down all the chords and took his melody and used that. I wanted to make the sound more like rock. In rehearsals we had played it like Joe had written it, but it wasn't working for me because all the chords were cluttering it up... When we recorded I just threw out the  chord sheets and told everyone to play just the melody, just to play off that. They were surprised to be working in this way."
(Miles: The Autobiography, page 286)

Zawinul: (irritated) There were no chords. There was always a drone from the beginning.
You can hear the original version on my Atlantic album [Zawinul, 1970], which includes an
introduction which Miles did not use. The section of the tune he used, and which now has become famous, never had any changes, apart from a couple of chords going up. Until today I believe that Miles was wrong in taking these two chords out, because the tune does not have the climax it could have had.  But there was no note in the melody changed, and no chords were stripped.
By the way, I also wrote the 2nd part of "It's About That Time." I wrote the melodic bass line and the descending melody.  I never got any credit for that in terms of money. The bass line is what made that tune. I blame Teo, because he always put things together so that it came out as if Miles had written it. But that's not correct.
{as quoted in Miles Beyond}

Miles's let the players in his band do there thing and be creative - he didn't really interfere or give directions much.

The degree to which Miles "controlled" a band, and the way he did it, was a pretty stark contrast to  Weather Report after the Vitous era .  Here are a series of quotes from musicians who appeared in the In A Silent Way sessions.  In some way, going through these, it's like watching the movie Rahsamon, where the same story is narrated by for different people, and is different each time.

Herbie Hancock: A Miles Davis sessions was always different because Miles was such a master of understanding how music and art relate to life. He knew that it was about risk taking, and encouraging the musician to capture the moment, how you're feeling in that moment, and having the daring and conviction to go for it, even if you don't make it. What was also different around that
time was that Miles began stacking several keyboards on a track. We might have two or three keyboardists going. And we'd all try to go somewhere, play some ornaments that would add a different element to everything else that was going on.

Zawinul: It was a nice session, with lots of youngsters, including myself. We all had seriously large egos, but there were no ego-problems. Nobody stepped on the other's feet. There were three keyboard players, and nobody interfered with the other person. It was a combination of not being overly careful on the one hand, and on the other hand having enough respect to listen to each other.
This had a lot to do with Miles's presence. He told John McLaughlin to play as if he didn't know how to play the guitar. As a result John's playing was among the best of his career. I think the way he plays on 'Early Minor'  [one of the previously unreleased tracks issued on The In A Silent Way Sessions], he's never played that good. The things he played with Miles were very creative and not so busy, not so much about speed.

Chick Corea: His genius as a band leader was in his group way of thinking, and in choosing the musicians and leading them forward by what he played, and by the way he used the ideas he or someone else brought to the band. It was always interesting to see what he did with someone's composition. Miles would take the basic piece and often only play certain notes from it, and
leave the rhythm section to play other notes. He didn't write that much as a composer, but he was an incredible, brilliant arranger.  Miles suggested how to play the melodies, when to play them, how long to play them for. He'd open them up and then close them  down and leave notes out. Like with some of Joe Zawinul's pieces, Miles would only play certain notes, and  leave the rhythm section to play other notes.

Dave Holland: It was quite an education to see Miles take a piece of material and adapt it to what he wanted it to be. I don't remember Miles ever playing someone else's tune the way they had written it. He always changed it. He'd take a section, did something with it, and made it his. If there were many chords he'd just have the bass play one noteunderneath all the moving chords, so that you get a pedal point. He did this with Zawinul's ' In A Silent Way .'

Some interesting points raised aboved -- Corea and Holland tend to side with Miles more than Zawinul on the degree to which IASW was modified, and the solo realease Zawinul cited DID come out three years later.   I wasn't there-- I can't tell you what happened-- but I wish I were a fly on the wall.

Corea's citing Miles as a "brilliant arranger" doesn't fit what what I would consider an arranger-- I think of this more as a bandleader role, but I think it did identify what Miles did and did not bring to the table.

The recurring themes  of "capture  the moment" , "risk taking",  "not being overly careful" and his Miles general restlessness in not playing a tune the way it was written are some that I'd like to come back to.

A final point on IASW and the relationship with Teo.  I mentioned before that their collaboration on Quiet  Nights was considered by Miles to be a disaster.  Going back to the autobiography, this was the one session where Teo was most involved DURING THE RECORDING.  Miles didn't seem to mind handing off creative control during the editing process.  See below:

Teo Macero: Miles would record his stuff, and then he'd just leave. He would sometimes say, 'I like this or that,' and then I'd say: 'I'll listen to it and I'll put it together. If you like it, fine, if not, we'll change it.' So I was the one with the vision. Miles also had a vision, but he wasn't really a composer, he didn't compose in an organized way. It was happenstance. He played with these great musicians, and when they had played enough, I was able to cut out the stuff that wasn't good, and piece something together from the rest. When we began editing In A Silent Way we had two huge stacks of 2" tape, 40-something reels in total. They were recorded over a longer period. It was one of the rare times Miles came to an editing session,  because I'd told him, 'This is a big job, you want to get your ass down here.' So Miles said, 'We'll do it together.' And we did. We cut things down to 8 ½ minutes on one LP side, and 9 ½ on the other, and then he said to me, "That's my record.' I said, 'Go to hell!' because it wasn't enough music for an album. So I ended up creating repeats to make it longer. A lot of the stuff we cut was bullshit, and some of it  is put out on this new boxed set. I raised hell at Columbia the other day and told them it was ridiculous  they're putting this bullshit out.

I think we can all agree (maybe-- this IS the Diner after all) that Miles was never a composer. 

Zawinul was such a major talent & a genius, one of greatest ever. It's quite amazing that those compositions were improvs like that ..."

Okay-- some more thoughts on Zawinul's process, about improv vis a vis composition which reinforce what Leon had previously posted.    Here are some quotes from ZawinulOnline:

A hallmark of Weather Report's recording style was the on-the-spot in-studio jam  and post-production manipulation that either improved on original compositions, or led to entirely new ones. Zawinul clearly benefited from his experience  recording with Miles Davis (though Zawinul might say it was the other way around),  and applied those lessons to Weather Report. Johnson says,
"They would just start rolling tape and the song would start immediately from the first note. Then later Joe and Wayne would go back and splice the tape. So what may have been the middle of what we did would all of a sudden become the introduction, so it would start at a high point."

Peter Erskine reports that the process was basically the same during his tenure: "The band's mode of operation was [that] at all times some form of tape recorder had to be recording—cassette, a reel-to-reel that they would use  over again if there was nothing worth keeping, and the multitrack. The idea is, we'd play something as a take and  leave the machine going. At one point, Jaco sat down at my drums and started playing—which was a little threatening to me at the time—and started playing something, and Joe joined in, and that became the tune '8:30', the opener on the
studio side [of the album of the same name]."

There are some definitely similarities and differenences in how Miles and Zawinul approached the use of improvisations vis-a-vis composing.  Miles was bascially "fire and forget"-- he was too restless to revisit and old work, and as a live performer this created what some may perceive as a lot of variety during a single tour.  Zawinul (and to a lesser degree SHorter, who most would agree took a less active role in WR in the the later years) would use improves to identify elements to base compositions on, refine them, and also provide parts for other members.  The finished result is not what I would consider a spontaneou improvisation (more on that later), but the use of improv as in input into the composing process.

It is interesting that, in the quote below,  Alphonso Johnson said that Zawinul  several times credited Miles' approach to adapting material.

Further insight into Zawinul and Shorter's genius can be found in the way they adapted and improved the work of others.  Alphonso Johnson remembers, "'Scarlet Woman' [from the album Mysterious Traveller] was a song that I wrote,  and I'd conceived it totally differently to the way it turned out! Joe, in his infinite wisdom—and Wayne too,  actually—he was the one who said a lot of times, when he was with Miles, he would bring in a chart and Miles  would just play the intro, and that became a great song. So that's kind of what they did: they took that  [sings descending four-note melody], and they eliminated the other three-fourths of my song.  I like their version better. I've never even recorded the rest of the song. What they did was perfect."

Oops.  The Genius word just popped up. 

another player who had a compositional driven approach to improvising (like best WR);

Actually, based on the material Leon and I have provided, I believe it may be the other way around, if anything.  However, there is always a healthy tension between composition and improvising in jazz, and different artists have made valid contributions at different points on the spectrum.


Over the last few days I've gone back over WR, Miles, and Mahavishnu-- not just the commercial releases, but a lot of live boots.  (Which, gasp, includes a lot of stuff on cassettes from my tape trading days.)    SOme of my major impressions:

Miles's live tours varied, and it is easy to get mislead by the commercial releases from that period as to what to expect.   For example. John McLaughlin rarely played live with him, (but there is the 1969 Ann Arbor show with a live Bitches Brew)  A lot of the live stuff in 1968-69 doesn't come close to IASW and BB, which shows how important Teo's contributions were on those albums.   However, I LOVE the way his band jelled around the time of Cellar Door sessions, and if you compare the source recordings of that 4 night stand with the material on Live Evil, I don't think Teo can be given much credit for transforming that material as he did the classic studio fusion albums.  It's a shame that his live band of 71 wasn't as well documented.  By the time you reach the 73-75 period, I think that band's live sound was much more compelling than, say, the studio release of Get Up With It, and having heard several boots from those tours, it's pretty safe to say that Teo wasn't responsible for heavily editing those live releases. (For my, the 1975 Tokyo show was much more coherent than either of the Osaka shows released on Agartha and Pangaea.) 

The one thing that stands out for me in terms of quantifying the improvisation is that, even in successive shows on a given tour, Miles band's would take the same general setlist and play it very different each night, where most of the "songs" were assembled as a medley, in in successive nights could shrink to five minutes or stretch to thirty.  I would call this very "spontaneous", and a clear example of collective improvisation.  (Of course, this apporach had its share of train wrecks, and I never liked Mile's keyboard interludes) .

The Mahavhishnu Orchestra had some great compositions, IMO, but also, after there more tentative live efforts in their first year, also were very good in shaking it up in performance.  The tune Birds of Fire was recording in August 1972 at nearly 6 minutes, and in a live show in Munich the same month was 8 1/2.  By the time of the legendary 11/09/72 Berkeley concert, it was 14 minutes, and covered a lot more ground (or, depending on how it strikes you, pointless meandering).

http://drfusion.blogspot.com/2009/09/mahavishnu-orchestra-winging-infinite.html

Another thing I liked about the MO was that, over a single tour, would select a different tune to stretch out. One example was  a 1973 show (Denver? I'm getting hazy) where they stretched Dawn out  to 30+ minutes.

My take on Weather Report was that the role improvisation played with them evolved from an initial focus on collective improvisation in performance, to a more structured use of improvisation as a compositional tool.   In the Vitrous era (well documented by the Live in Tokyo album), they were clearly improvising  a great deal in terms of the actual improvisational performance and use of loosely structured, and the one boot I have from that tour confirms this. (Closer to what Miles ahd been doing live)  On the other hand, most of my WR boots are from the 1977-1980 period, and, if you also compare them, (as well as the live tracks from theh  8:30 or the Live and Unrelead albums) to the studio sources, the delta between them (length, order of solos, etc) is not that dramatic.  Not to say that there is not some very inspired playing, because their was, (it's great to hear such a strong studio band be able to deliver the goods life) but my impression was that they were less likely to surprise you -- for good or bad.  The good news is their live material during this time was much more consistent.

Unfortunately, the bad news was that their live material during this time was much more consistent.

I don't mean to imply a value judgement either way.  It really depends on what one is looking for in terms of improvisation.  Do you want the blended fruit drink with the umbrella in it, or do you want a couple shots of rotgut straight up in a dirty glass?  In my twenties, I wanted something more control, focus, and emphasis on composition.  These days, I seem to find myself returning to material that is much more uneven and unstructured, and suffer through more blemishes and train wrecks in order to hear those moments you know can never be repeated.

[karlhenning]

Most interesting, thanks!

[Leon]

Nice post, jowcol.

I been listening to the Complete Montreaux box of Miles at that festival from 1973-1991, most from the '80s - and I find their playing really tight, inspired (on fire at times) and generally better, including Miles' playing which is some of his best from that period, than the released records of most of the same material.

[jowcol]

Again, no clue what you're getting at with all these unnecessary quotes from books etc. ...

Word.

[jowcol]

Yea ... I mean it's so stupid, I've read a lot of that shit myself .. but it's better to be well listened than read. We don't need the quoted & gushing testimonials etc. lol

If facts do not conform to theory, they must be disposed of.
N. R. F. Maier

[karlhenning]

"Unnecessary quotes." Classic!

[jowcol]

“Unnecessary quotes.” Classic!

Downright biblical.  I refer you to Ecclesiastes 12:12.

"Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

I would also consider adding  "put the books down" and "don't you believe in quality control?" to the list of classic quotes....

[jowcol]

Oh well, while you mull over poofed blankety meaningless quotes (another classic for you? lol) ...

Well, I've gotten a few LOLs, and I was REALLY hoping for a "blah-blah-blah"   

[jowcol]

Well at least you have the self-awareness to size-up your scribbles (posts) for what they really are. 

Or a familiarity with your oratory style... 

[Leon]

Two Miles "complete" boxes that I find especially worthwhile. 

The first, Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964, chronicles the formative period of Davis's "Second Great Quintet" from its first arrival, bassist Ron Carter in the spring of 1963, to its last, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter in the fall of 1964.

[asin]B0002YCVSI[/asin]

The other one, The Complete On the Corner Sessions, includes more than 6 hours of music - twelve previously unissued tracks plus five tracks previously unissued in full - covering sixteen sessions from On the Corner, Big Fun, and Get Up With it.

[asin]B000WPD38Y[/asin]