Make a Jazz Noise Here

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I want to investigate Tord Gustavsen and his ensembles. Anyone got specific recommendations?

So I had to answer my own question...got the album The Ground, on the basis of consistent good reviews. Listened much in the last week. A subtle album that creeps up on you. If you like pensive tunes, cool textures, and a general mood of restraint and wide-open space (i.e. typical ECM stuff), this might be for you. Good dinner music, and I mean that in a positive way.

[king ubu]

Charlie Haden's journey has come to an end - I'm at a total loss for words. A devastating loss.

Playing this beautiful disc of deeply moving and soulful music while trying to come to grips with these extremely sad news:

[jochanaan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K_RJHOArRo&app=desktop

[torut]

I was considering the latest duo album of Charlie Haden and Keith Jarrett, Last Dance.
The duet with Jarrett on Closeness is stunningly beautiful, and the other duets with Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, and Paul Motian are also excellent.

[king ubu]

I was considering the latest duo album of Charlie Haden and Keith Jarrett, Last Dance.
The duet with Jarrett on Closeness is stunningly beautiful, and the other duets with Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, and Paul Motian are also excellent.

Hm ... Haden made some wonderful duo recordings with several piano players - the ones with Jarrett, while good, rank at the bottom of my list (I only know "Jasmine" so far, but will probably get the second helping eventually). My favourites clearly are the two with Hank Jones, followed closely by the ones with Hampton Hawes and Chris Anderson. There are good ones with John Taylor and with Kenny Barron, too.

[torut]

Hm ... Haden made some wonderful duo recordings with several piano players - the ones with Jarrett, while good, rank at the bottom of my list (I only know "Jasmine" so far, but will probably get the second helping eventually). My favourites clearly are the two with Hank Jones, followed closely by the ones with Hampton Hawes and Chris Anderson. There are good ones with John Taylor and with Kenny Barron, too.

Ellen David, the duet with Jarrett on Closeness, written for his wife, is a very lovely tune.
I didn't know that there are so many piano-bass duo albums by Haden. I will check them.

[king ubu]

I didn't even mention them all .... there's also one with Denny Zeitlin which I don't know yet! He also made a few with guitar players - notably the one with Pat Metheny, with whom he made a good trio album on ECM as well. And then there's the Montréal duet with Egberto Gismonti which I really love! (Much more so then the two trio albums the two made in 1979 with Garbarek added.)

He also made a pair of duo albums featuring a series of musicians (Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Paul Motian, Hampton Hawes), performing one track each with Haden: "Closeness" and "Golden Numbers". And he made an entire album of duo performances with Ornette: "Soapsuds, Soapsuds".



I guess if I had to mention a few favourites of Haden's (omitting Ornette albums), it could look like this (in chronological order):

Liberation Music Orchestra
Charlie Haden & Hampton Hawes - As Long As There's Music
Liberation Music Orchestra: The Ballad of the Fallen
Charlie Haden with Paul Bley & Paul Motian: The Montréal Tapes
Charlie Haden with Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Paul Motian: The Montréal Tapes
Quartet West: Always Say Goodbye
Charlie Haden & Chris Anderson - None But the Lonely Heart
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones - Steal Away
Liberation Music Orchestra: Not in Our Name
Rambling Boy
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones - Come Sunday

Not quite sure the pick of Quartet West will stand the test of time - the entire run of albums that group made is pretty darn good (including the two disc set of archival live shows by naim - one of the two has Paul Motian on drums). "Rambling Boy" is Haden's back-to-the-roots country album - he sang on radio as a two-year-old in the show of his folks, "little cowboy Charlie". We get to hear his extended family (wife Ruth Cameron, the Haden Triplets, Josh Haden, friends like Rosanne Cash, Pat Metheny, Elvis Costello and others dtrop by). Ruth Cameron's "Roadhouse" (with a band grouped around the Quartet West rhythm section of Alan Broadbent, Haden and Larance Marable, adding Ralph Moore, Brad Mehldau and others) is pretty wonderful, too.

The duos with Hank Jones, to me, are pure magic. Subdued versions of spirituals, not much improvisation at all, but wow, there's really no need for that if you can make music as simple yet so deep. The second one - one of great Hank Jones' last recordings - is short and to the point, lasting just 40 or so minutes, many of the songs lasting but 2 or 3 minutes. But really, it's all there - and it's more than words can say, to use an old cliché.

Also, you might want to check out one or two of the more high-gloss albums like "Nocturne" (a quiet album of cuban boleros, mexican tunes and some originals with Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Ignacio Berroa plus guests Joe Lovano, Pat Metheny, David Sanchez and Federico Britos Ruiz), "Land of the Sun" (an album built around Rubalcaba's arrangements of songs by mexican composer José Sabre Marroquín, again with Berroa on drums plus Lovano, Miguel Zenon, Lionel Loueke a.o.), "The Art of Song" (a Quartet West album adding plenty of strings and vocals by Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson on four songs each, plus one lone vocal by Haden, who had to stop his singing career as a teenager because of polio ... it what post-polio syndrome that stopped his performing career a few years back and had him, as it seems, suffer through some horrible times), or, finally, "Sophisticated Ladies" (another Quartet West album w/strings and singers, but this time a whole row of 'em: Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Melody Gardot, Norah Jones, Renée Fleming and Ruth Cameron).

If you want to check out unreleased live duo shows of Haden's with Jones (a decen AUD recording, they do some standards, too) and british pianist John Taylor (they have an official release on naim, which is pretty good, too, though I'm not that familiar with it yet), check out my blog (ubu roi/ubu's space). I hope mentioning this isn't an infringement of rules, it's recordings that are commercially unreleased, no one earns a single zloty, and the involved musicians are not on record as being opposed to having their shows shared.



Charlie Haden indeed is a personal hero.

In 1971, while appearing with saxophonist Ornette Coleman at a festival in Lisbon, Portugal, Haden dedicated his "Song for Che," to the black liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies. The day after the concert, he was arrested at the Lisbon airport. "I would actually have done some time if Ornette hadn't gotten the American Embassy to come and get me," recalled Haden. "It was really a fascist government then, and this was the first jazz festival that they had allowed there. But as soon as I made this dedication, they canceled the rest of the festival. It was scary."

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Charlie_Haden.htm

A luta continua!

[kishnevi]

Have you heard this one?  Oddly prophetic title it now seems.
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[king ubu]

Not yet ... usually takes me a while to check out new releases (even more so if they're overpriced as ECMs mostly are, can't buy them in shops here, they go for 30$ or more).

Anyway, as I said somewhere (I think?), the other one with Jarrett to my ears is behind a whole row of duo albums Haden made with piano players, notably the two with Hank Jones and the ones with Chris Anderson and Hampton Hawes. I like me some Jarrett all right (the Blue Notes box by the Standard trio ... and yeah, the American Quartet too, though somehow their output mostly feels like an on-going missed opportunity all too often), but I'm definitely not part of his cult.

[HIPster]

RIP Charlie Haden.

A nice remembrance from Fred Kaplan:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/obit/2014/07/charlie_haden_the_jazz_great_was_more_than_just_a_free_jazz_musician.html

[torut]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K_RJHOArRo&app=desktop

That is great. I have Fire! Orchestra album Exit!. I love the trio, with or without guest, such as Unreleased?, You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago, In The Mouth - A Hand. The small band is wilder, IMO.

[Artem]

Two LPs from 1973 on one CD.
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[early grey]

I have added to my site, which already has a large collection of Jazz from the 1920s and 30s, a selection of Benny Goodman tracks with his orchestra, trio and quartet. There is some marvellous stuff here beginning with four tracks featuring Jack Teagarden's lugubrious vocals and his trenchant trombone. Lionel Hampton gets to deliver "Exactly Like You", very much to my taste but maybe not universal.

http://www.cliveheathmusic.co.uk/transcriptions_15.php

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Listening to this nature-inspired album. The second Rypdal-Vitous-DeJohnette collaboration, from 1981:



This is a fairly obscure record, but I think it epitomizes much of the "ECM sound" at its best. "Cool" in both the jazz and the weather sense of the word; slight avant-garde feel, verging towards contemporary classical at times; atmospheric sonic landscapes.

[Karl Henning]

np: "Freedom Jazz Dance"

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[Karl Henning]

Listening to this nature-inspired album. The second Rypdal-Vitous-DeJohnette collaboration, from 1981:



This is a fairly obscure record, but I think it epitomizes much of the "ECM sound" at its best. "Cool" in both the jazz and the weather sense of the word; slight avant-garde feel, verging towards contemporary classical at times; atmospheric sonic landscapes.

Interesting; will check it out.

[North Star]

np: "Freedom Jazz Dance"

Excellent idea, I'll spin the whole of Miles Smiles - when I put it on, I'll never manage to listen to any less. 

[king ubu]

Don't forget to play some Eddie who every now and then. Doctor says you live longer that way!

Some bad news, alas:

Giorgio Gaslini (1929-2014)
http://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/musica/2014/07/29/news/la_scomparsa_di_giorgio_gaslini-92644559/?ref=HREC1-7

First heard (and saw) him in Michelangelo Antonioni's "La notte", a masterpiece that helped turn me into the movie buff I've been since my mid teens. Gaslini and his band (w/Eraldo Volontè on tenor sax) play their "Blues all'alba" in the early hours - Antonioni had them hang around all night there and play. They don't just pretend to be tired, they *are*. And from the set, Gaslini rushed straight to his day job at La Scala ... great musician and composer. Played some New Orleans funeral music in memory of him last night ... also in memory of Steve Lacy (it's been ten years a few days ago, hard to believe).

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

ECM Mini-Fest 2014 continues with this classic from Jarrett and his American quartet:



If Allan Pettersson had been a jazzman, he might have sounded like this. Long, relentless, and serious throughout.

[king ubu]

Drummer Frankie Dunlop has reportedly died early in July - been playing some of those Monk albums he's on this morning - to my ears, he was the perfect match for Monk's music, his playing has that dancing thing that Monk had (and did).

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[asin]B00006GO99[/asin]
[asin]B0045DO7Z2[/asin]

"Monk's Dream" is probably the one Columbia album of Monk's that ranks amongst my top favourites (though "Big Band and Quartet in Concert" is pretty amazing and none of the Columbias is bad or anything ... but I'm just especially fond of "Monk's Dream" as far as Monk's later output goes).