What Jazz are you listening to now?

[KevinP]

Journey in Satchidananda is a perfect introduction to Alice Coltrane, though by no means the only valid one.

[JBS]

Journey in Satchidananda is a perfect introduction to Alice Coltrane, though by no means the only valid one.

Thank you!

[vers la flamme]

My favorite Trane album these days is one I never knew about until recently, John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman. I've also been getting into Meditations.

Now playing;



John Coltrane: Live at the Village Vanguard

[vers la flamme]

& now;



Clifford Brown & Max Roach

Second time hearing this after finding it at Decatur CD in Decatur, Georgia over the weekend, and it's actually sounding much better this time around. Clifford Brown is just a crazy good trumpeter; much like my favorite bassist Scott LaFaro, he tragically died in a car accident at age 25. I'll need to hear more of his work.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Native Dancer - Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

& now;



Clifford Brown & Max Roach

Second time hearing this after finding it at Decatur CD in Decatur, Georgia over the weekend, and it's actually sounding much better this time around. Clifford Brown is just a crazy good trumpeter; much like my favorite bassist Scott LaFaro, he tragically died in a car accident at age 25. I'll need to hear more of his work.

Nice album while Richie Powell is mediocre in contrast to his brother, Bud Powell.

[KevinP]

True, but that's also true of most pianists.

I really got into Clifford Brown in the mid-80s because American music stores carried few CDs at the time, and all the ones they carried were imports. For whatever reason, one local store had a slew of the Japanese Emarcy Brown titles, so I eventually got them all.

Haven't listened in a while, but man, there was some amazing playing and musicality on those sides..

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

True, but that's also true of most pianists.

I really got into Clifford Brown in the mid-80s because American music stores carried few CDs at the time, and all the ones they carried were imports. For whatever reason, one local store had a slew of the Japanese Emarcy Brown titles, so I eventually got them all.

Haven't listened in a while, but man, there was some amazing playing and musicality on those sides..

Probably I'm biased, but I don't care Richie Powell's playing. Still I'm a big fan of Clifford Brown and Max Roach.
When I was in Japan late 80s - early 90s, I sent Miles in Berlin to my friends in USA several times. Same for some blues CDs as well.

[Karl Henning]

I don't often listen to this 'un, but I love it whenever I do.

[brewski]

A friend introduced me to Samara Joy, and she's marvelous. Listening to the classic "Guess Who I Saw Today," and her version can rank with the best. Excellent, moody video, too.

-Bruce

[aligreto]

Billy Cobham: Spectrum

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Joe Pass Live at Dontes.

[KevinP]

Billy Cobham: Spectrum

Nice. I have it in this box, but that's easily the one that gets played the most.

[KevinP]

For years, the only Billy Cobham album I could get was Smokin' by Billy Cobham's Glass Menagerie. I only ever had it on cassette and it's never been re-released since CDs were invented. It was on the Elektra-Musician label, which went out of business. Many of their titles have never been re-released officially.

I suspect that in the grand scheme of his catalogue, it's a typical or even mediocre album, but I'd like to hear it again.

[vers la flamme]

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: Three Suites

I think the Norwegians were mad about this recording of the Peer Gynt Suites when this was released, something about it desecrating their national heritage. I think Grieg's colorful harmonies are a good fit with Ellington's rich big band textures.

[T. D.]

Journey in Satchidananda is a perfect introduction to Alice Coltrane, though by no means the only valid one.

That's a really good introduction.
Any of the Impulse! titles would probably work.
Ptah the El Daoud is an excellent more or less "straight jazz" album, I started out with that and recommend it, although her music rapidly gets more spiritually (Vedanta) oriented.
To my surprise, I really liked her "with strings" Impulse! albums (World Galaxy, Universal Consciousness, Lord of Lords), though I don't often listen to that genre.

[T. D.]

Obscure '70s reissues:




Good if you like that sort of thing  ... I doubt they'll be playing these albums in any Florida classrooms (though the former doesn't have vocals). 

[aligreto]

Nice. I have it in this box, but that's easily the one that gets played the most.

It certainly is an energetic album and all of the instrumentalists are very good indeed.

[71 dB]

& now;



Clifford Brown & Max Roach

Second time hearing this after finding it at Decatur CD in Decatur, Georgia over the weekend, and it's actually sounding much better this time around. Clifford Brown is just a crazy good trumpeter; much like my favorite bassist Scott LaFaro, he tragically died in a car accident at age 25. I'll need to hear more of his work.

Unfortunately I don't have this CD. The "Four Classic Albums" twofer I have includes:

Brown and Roach Incorporated, Jam Session, Study In Brown and New Star On The Horizon. My father has the Clifford Brown Quintet Vol. 2 compilation double vinyl and Memorial Album on CD. That's it! I don't know why my father doesn't have more clifford brown. The Clifford Brown Quintet Vol. 2 was one of those jazz albums I actually liked in my youth when my father played it. Some of the track on it are from Study In Brown such as the George's Dilemma which I like a lot.

Unfortunately Clifford Brown died at age 25 in 1956 just a few years before stereo sound era started. Just imagine what Clifford Brown recorded stereo in say 1962 would sound like. Mono sound isn't a massive problem with speakers, because due to room acoustics etc. left and right ears end up hearing a little bit different versions of the sound, but with headphones mono sound means the ears hear identical sound! That makes headphone mono sound unnaturally flat and dull. It is not about the lack of left-right information. It is about the feeling that the sound doesn't really exist in reality. It is like the ghost of a real sound.

Fortunately I am someone who understands these things and headphone spatiality is one of those things that interest me. I have wrote countless of Nyquist plugins for Audacity and many of them process spatiality in some ways. So, I ripped George's Dilemma into my computer and processed it in Audacity. The result is what I call diffuse mono. It kind of simulates what room acoustics does to mono sound, but even speaker listening benefits from it.

How much does the processing ruin sound quality? I would say not at all! The sound quality in these 50's mono recordings isn't that high to begin with and the steps of processing are such that the sound quality doesn't really suffer. The main idea of diffuse mono is to think about the sound in mid (M)/side form instead of left/right. Mathematically we go between these forms using a rotation matrix to rotate (and mirror) the [L R]T or [M S]T vector 45° into the other:

M = k*L + k*R
S = k*L - k*R

L = k*M + k*S
R = k*M - k*S

where k = sin(45°) = cos(45°) = 1/√2 ≈ 0.71. For (double) mono sound (R=L) we get

M = L*√2
S = 0

The fact that S = 0 tells we are dealing with mono sound. The is no "side" information. We need to create it in order to get diffuse mono sound. We start by copying the M to S:

M = L*√2
S = L*√2

This however doesn't work, because if we "rotate" this into left/right form we get sound that is all in the left channel and nothing in the right. If we do instead:

M = L*√2
S = - L*√2

We have the stereo sound only in right channel. The trick is to introduce random (but scaled according to human spatial hearing) delays into S which means the sound gets spread randomly from left to right. We also reduce the level of S frequency-dependently to better simulate human spatial hearing. So, the processing gets complex at this point, but what is above tells the basic idea.

The diffuse mono sound gets then panned binaurally to "drive home" the spatial cues of something that sounds stereophonic even if it doesn't contain any left-right information (meaning the different instruments are not separated in space). Without this step the spatiality is random, all over the place instead of something that is infront of the listener.

The processing includes some other minor steps that finetune the result, but this is the process. Especially on headphones the benefits are clear: The sound jumps out of the middle of the head to become a small "cloud of sound" inside which the listeners head is and the sound is more "alive". Compared to real stereo sound this processing gets about 30 % of that I would say. Technically this processing reduces sound quality just a little bit, but that's not relevant with old mono sound: We have more to gain than lose. What is relevant is perceptual sound quality. How good does it sound to your ears, and that's what is improved quite a lot imho.
 

[T. D.]

& now;



Clifford Brown & Max Roach

Second time hearing this after finding it at Decatur CD in Decatur, Georgia over the weekend, and it's actually sounding much better this time around. Clifford Brown is just a crazy good trumpeter; much like my favorite bassist Scott LaFaro, he tragically died in a car accident at age 25. I'll need to hear more of his work.

Clifford Brown was a legend who would have been an all-time great had he lived longer. Pick up anything you can find! If you like bebop, you might also enjoy Fats Navarro, who was perhaps the biggest influence on Brown.

Booker Little was another great trumpeter who died prematurely (kidney disease). Try anything you can find; the Five Spot recordings with Dolphy are probably the best known (poor Mal Waldron with that out-of-tune piano, though).

Since Navarro came up, I just had to listen to this on Youtube: