Listening to Jam Gems: Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Health “Live”
at the Left Bank, with a super- enthusiastic Left Bank Jazz Society audience
testifying volubly throughout is good for what ails you, COVID-19 or not. I own
several albums of LBJS material and wish that more were available. Jam Gems
is pretty much all Freddie and Jimmy, although Wilbur Little, Bertell Knox, and
Gus Simms provide solid rhythm support. Hubbard had amazing chops and a
fearless attack, out to flamboyant use on this date, and Heath is, if anything,
even more impressive (in the liner notes, he says “I took some of my longest recorded
solos”). I’ve included the first track (All Members) and a link to the
entire album of up-tempo killer tracks. Even Lover Man is more burner than
torch song. Kick back and enjoy, and thank you, Baltimore!
The recent death of trumpeter Claudio Roditi prompted me to
pull out Freewheelin,’ his Lee Morgan tribute album. I remembered it as
being an excellent hard bop outing and relistening has confirmed that
recollection. I do have a couple of additional thoughts, though.
Lee Morgan was a fine composer. Aside from The
Sidewinder, his biggest hit (and check out Bob Cranshaw’s amusing account of how
that recording session went down), tunes like The Joker and Our Man
Higgins are deservingof more attention than they usually get. I especially liked the somewhat plaintive Peyote.
Andres Boiarsky. Years, ago, when he was a part of
Slide Hampton’s Dizzy Gillespie big band, I heard him at James Moody’s 80th
birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center. I had never heard of him, but he
played an outrageously good solo that left him and the sax section beaming.
Like Roditi, Boiarsky is Argentinian, and he’s still active on the jazz scene
there. His playing is great throughout this album.
Nick Brignola. He’s on only a few tracks on baritone
and soprano, but he’s always a pleasure to hear. He goes after every tune with gusto.
Claudio Roditi. In his obituary, I learned that he
played a rotary valve trumpet, which looks like it’s being held sideways,
rather than the more common piston trumpet, as you can see on the album cover. Supposedly the rotary trumpet
produces a mellower tone, but it would take better ears than mine to detect it
based on this album, which finds Roditi in a definite Morgan groove. What a
fine trumpeter he was! He'll be much missed.
The rhythm section. Mark Soskin on piano, the
ubiquitous Buster Williams on bass (and I really want to see the new documentary
about him), and Chip White on drums all contribute mightily and get some solo room, too.
This is some of the hottest music I've listened to in quite a while. I've always loved Jackie McLean's music but I have to plead ignorance about most of his post- Blue Note output. I've read that in his later years, his teaching duties took him away from performing, and even that his playing suffered as a result. On The Jackie Mac Attack Live, recorded at a jazz club in Belgium in 1992, "attack" is the operative word. From the first notes of Cyclical, the first track, McLean is burning. No matter what the tune or tempo, he really chews up the music . Ably abetted by the wonderfully named South Africa Pianist Idris Hotep Galeta, with strong support from the fine drummer Carl Allen (I heard him a couple of years ago with the Mack Avenue All Stars) and bassist Nat Reeves, this is a no BS, hard-charging recording from start to finish. Note: The CD I bought was billed as "new," but I had serious playback issue on a couple of tracks; when I looked at the disk, it looked worse than a lot of used CDs I've seen. Just sayin...
I occasionally post on the Best of
the 60’s Music Facebook page. As a result of having too much time on my
hands, I sometimes riffle through YouTube to check out both familiar and unfamiliar
sounds from that decade. I recently ran across My White Bicycle, a
really excellent song by Tomorrow, now known mainly as the band from which
Steve Howe left to join Yes. I was so taken with t that I ordered Tomorrow’s
one and only album. The band started out as the In Crowd, playing soul covers (“we
played Otis Redding and Otis Redding”). In 1966, the drummer Twink joined up,
after which the band changed its sound and name. As Tomorrow, they cut My
White Bicycle, based on the Dutch Provos’ distribution of free white
bicycles for public use. After the all-too-common ego clashes, the band declined
and broke up by 1969.
Tomorrow the
album is in many ways an artifact of its era. Strongly influenced by the Beatles
and the Kinks, some of the songs are interesting albeit derivative, especially
a couple of Eleanor Rigby-style “personality songs, but they lack Paul McCartney’s
genius or Ray Davies’s irony. On the other hand, songs like Three Jolly
Little Dwarfs, Now Your Time Has Come, and Hallucinations have
a quirky charm all their own. There’s also a nice version of Strawberry
Fields Forever. Like many bands, they had great potential that was never quite
realized before they broke up. Their one album is well worth a listen.
Here's My White Bicycle (later covered by Nazareth!).
There were so many great jazz pianists in the Sixties that
some of them, like Ronnie Mathews, never got the attention they
deserved. His first album as leader, Doin’ the Thang!, highlights both
his playing and compositional gifts. The first three tunes—The
Thang, Ichi-Ban, and The Orient—all have a pleasingly exotic
sound. The Thang) is a 5/4 blues, Ichi-Ban is derived from a bass warm
up that sounded Oriental to the composer, and The Orient is based on Well,
You Needn’t. In contrast, Let’s Get Down is boppish all the way, and
a nice change at that point in the album. I get the feeling that Mathews put a
lot of thought into his first date—at least the tune sequence seems to
reflect that. Duke Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss gives Mathews a chance
to play some Tatumesque runs (Tatum was an early influence on him, as he was
for just about every jazz pianist then).
A 25-year-old Freddie Hubbard does some typically bravura
playing on the date—what a talent he was! I’ve admired Charles Davis’s baritone
work since I first heard him on Kenny Dorham’s Jazz Contemporary, and my
esteem only increased when I got into his playing on Illuminations, the great Elvin
Jones-Jimmy Garrison recording on Impulse. He’s typically fine, here, including
on 1239-A, his own composition. Tootie Heath and Eddie Khan provide sound support on drums and bass, respectively. Tootie is still going strong!
Doin’ the Thang! is an excellent recording, available
on a Prestige twofer (Mathews is also the pianist on the other date, led by
Roland Alexander), in those halcyon days before the soulless companies that currently
own this culturally important music stopped releasing their back catalogs and
ceded what market there was to the Andorrans. Comes the revolution…
By 1976, the whole late 1940s conflict between traditional
jazz enthusiasts (“moldy figs”) and modern jazz proponents (boppers) had pretty
much run its unproductive course, replaced by equally sterile arguments about the
avant-garde, jazz rock, and fusion. Maybe it was time to take a look at a middle ground, or at
least that was the feeling. At a traditional jazz festival in Paris, the
Anachronic Jazz Band began playing bop tunes in traditional style (quelle horreur!). A couple of
albums, along with some extensive European touring, provide the only aural documentation
of this interesting experiment but relatively short-lived experiment.
Anthropology, a two-CD compilation of those albums
and a cross-section of live recordings, says a couple of things about figs and
boppers. First, if traditional bands had stopped followed the Anachronic way
and stopped playing some of the old croakers in favor of some challenging new
material, a lot of great music could have resulted. Second, playing modern jazz
compositions in an earlier style shows that the gap between the two schools wasn’t
as wide as was assumed. As far as I know, though, the Anachronics haven’t
had any successors, but their legacy is pretty darn great.
I was really impressed at how easily tunes like Denzil Best’s
Move and Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring. Even the title tune makes a
lot of sense within the older idiom. Of course, it’s not surprising that Ask
me Now and Blue Monk work well; Thelonious Monk’s music has deep roots in the
tradition, and even Salt Peanuts and Giant Steps aren’t that alien
to the New Orleans tradition. Also, the soloists, like trumpeter Patrick
Artero, are consistently excellent throughout.
Happily, the Anachronic Jazz Band has reunited in recent
years, with some of the original players like Marc Richard (sax and clarinet) and
Philippe Baudoin (piano) still on hand.
Here are two live
performances: a Seventies version of Yardbird Suite (a couple of different
versions are on the CD) with a spectacular solo by Goran Ericksson on recorder;
and a more recent take on Charlie Parker's’s Confirmation (not on the CD―could
we hope for a new anachronic jazz recording?).
Doug Carn made a number of albums for the Black Jazz label
in the 1970s, but I had lost track of him until I saw Free for All, his latest album on Pete Fallico’s Doodlin’ Records. Doodlin’, as one might expect, leans toward the more soulful side of organ jazz, but Free for All,
named after the Wayne Shorter composition that electrified the jazz world when Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers recorded it, points forward to more hard bop and
post-Coltrane sounds. Carn uses two tenors―Howard Wiley and Teodross
Avery―who
blaze away on the title track, Bobby Hutcherson’s Little B’s Poem, McCoy
Tyner’s Search for Peace, and Woody Shaw’s Beyond All Limits.
Even Tadd Dameron’s On A Misty Night takes on a certain muscularity in the band's hands. Carn’s
organ playing supports and drives the band, with Dezron Claiborne on drums
keeps the rhythm going nicely. I enjoyed this record a lot, and makes me want
to seek out Carn’s first album, too.
I couldn’t find any tracks from Free for All on YouTube,
so go on out andbuy the album and give back to these fine musicians.
For a taste, here’s another version of Little B’s Poem with some of the same
players.
A few years ago, I explored the jazz
side of Manfred Mann, but it wasn’t the only Sixties rock aggregation that
came out of the jazz/R&B/ beat scene in the UK. After listening to Hammond
Heroes: 60s R&B Organ Grooves on Bear Family Records, maybe the
question should be which British rockers weren’t part of that scene. Tons of well-known
bands (Ten Years After, the aforementioned MM, the Spencer Davis Group, and
the Small Faces) and artists (Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Ronnie Wood, and Peter Frampton)
turn up in various incarnations on this record, playing jazzy, funky, and―dare
I say it?―groovy
organ-based instrumentals. The keyboardists aren’t bad either―Brian
Auger, Graham Bond, Keith Emerson, Stevie Winwood, and more. Some of the other
protagonists are more obscure (at least to me)―Dave Davani, Steve Miller (not
THAT Steve Miller), and Tony Ashton. An accompanying 48-page booklet provides a
track-by-track history of the players and groups. It’s almost like listening to
an alternative history of Sixties rock, in which Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff,
and Big John Patton replace Muddy Waters and Lonnie Donegan.
Note: out of curiosity, I took a look at the Amazon ratings
for Hammond Heroes;the two reviews seemed to think there was a
certain sameness to the music. Wrong! OK, there’s a lot of B-3 goodness, but I
found enough variety sustain repeated listening and enjoyment. For example, Brian Auger turns in a steaming performance on Ellis Island.
The Dave Davani Four sound like they're Workin' Out at the Key Club in Newark, NJ, circa 1965.
This track, unissued at the time features Steve Miller on organ and the amazing and much-missed Paul Kossoff on Guy Stevens Blues
o
Here's Grow Your Own, an outstanding unissued track from the Small Faces, Ian MacLagen on organ.
Finally, a great display of proto-prog from the Nice, With Keith Emerson going full bore on Charles Lloyd's Sombrero Sam.
