UPDATE

Thanks to loyal readers who have dropped me a note.  I wish to emphasize that the blog will be back in some form.  I want to be able to talk or write about jazz and present jazz, as I have tried to do here.  I want to do that without any legal or moral compromises. 

Our Northern State University Radio Station committee is moving toward the institution of an internet radio station, and I will host a jazz show.  I expect we will broadcast using Live365, which covers all the royalty issues.  I am already planning shows.  My first show, as I envision it, will focus on Miles Davis' two great quintets.  I'll play music from Cookin' and Workin', and maybe ESP or the Plugged Nickel recordings.  I will also include cuts from Trane, Red Garland, Wayne Shorter, etc.  This will mirror my own jazz collecting.  

The show will have a jazz collectors theme, but towards the end I will break free of that restraint and play some contemporary jazz or whatever pleases my fancy.  I am hoping to attract people newly interested in jazz, and introduce undiscovered jazz artists and albums to advanced jazz fans.  I am also hoping to encourage working jazz artists to send me their music. 

I have in mind a number of subsequent shows.  I will do one on Monk, and one on covers of Monk compositions.  I will do one on Trane, and maybe a show on Top Ten Jazz Men, and/or Top Ten Jazz Albums.  If you have been reading this blog, you know what to expect.  

I am open to suggestions for shows.  Right now my imagination is on fire, but I expect to need kindling eventually.  If you are interested in any of this, check back now and then.  I will keep you posted. 

Jazz Note Closes Down

I have some good news and some bad news.  The bad news is that this blog in its present form has run its course.  I have enjoyed doing it, and I greatly appreciate my readers.  I have turned on a lot of readers to the music I love.  I have taken some risk in offering music selections, and I am tired of having my posts shut down for that.  It  could have been worse.  I am also a little disappointed in the number of readers and the frequency of comments.  I am not scolding anyone here.  Things are what they are.  

The good news is that, the Jazz Gods willing, I will soon launch an online radio show.  Some industrious people at Northern State University, where I work, are determined to start a radio station.  KNSU or something like that.   They have asked me to produce a jazz show.  Well, I don't know..., yes.  When I grow up, I want to be Ken Laster.  

I expect that this blog site will be reborn as a companion to the online show/podcast.  So don't delete the bookmark.  With luck and fair winds, and royalties paid, you'll be hearing a lot more jazz from me in the future.  

Again: thanks to everyone who has read this blog, listened to my music, and posted a comment.  I love you all.  As the Terminator said, "I'll be back." 

Maximum Max Roach 4 Pennies

My eMusic subscription renewed yesterday.  As I noticed the renewed credits, I was thumbing through the Penguin Guide and came upon the Max Roach recordings.  I have the core collection entries, the Clifford Brown collaborations (Alone Together) and the civil rights hymn We Insist!  There is a lot of jazz history and heart in those two issues.  I have also commented on Roach's collaboration with Anthony Braxton.  

As I was contemplating all this, I noticed that a four and a half star PG recommendation was on eMusic for two credits.  That adds up, doing some math on the subscription price I pay, to about 80 cents.  There are some reasons it's so cheap.  The subtitle, Max Roach Quartet at the Jazz Workshop, makes it sound like an essay. The recording consists of two long numbers.  Probably not album of the month.  

In fact, this is brilliant jazz.  The two segments are what rock fans would call jams.  With Roach as leader, Clifford Jordan on tenor, Mal Waldron on piano, and Eddie Khan on bass, they take a simple blues line and milk it for all the passion it is worth.  It's worth a lot.  

Here is a sample.  It is about half of the first number.  Don't listen if you ain't got the dough to purchase the whole thing.  

Max Roach Quartet/Speak, Oh Brother, Speak/Speak! excerpt

Tal Farlow

When I purchased my first decent stereo, I was still trying to learn to play the guitar.  I didn't.  I wanted to play jazz guitar, because I admired jazz guitarist like Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall, Joe Pass, and Wes Montgomery.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  

Anyway, I read about a set of Verve albums that the label was reissuing.  This was in the mid-eighties.  I think I read about them in Guitar Player.  I managed to get a couple of them.  I was in Grad School at the time, and money was almost as precious as music.  One of the albums was a duet with Jim Hall and Bill Evans.  It was wonderful.  The other was by guitarist Tal Farlow.  I loved both records and listened to them over and over.  

This week I bagged Chromatic Palette, by Farlow with my love Tommy Flanagan on piano and Gary Mazzaroppi on bass.  It is a splendid guitar trio.  It has the same bright spirit as Flanagan's albums with Kenny Burrell.  Here is a sample. 

Tal Farlow/One for My Baby excerpt/Chromatic Palette

Sun Ra Really Was From Another Planet

I downloaded Sun Ra's Atlantis a few weeks ago.  It confused me then and perplexes me now.  Sun Ra is playing some kind of toy piano.  Whatever this is, it is jazz.  

Sun Ra/Mu/Atlantis

 But what the Hell is it? 

Early Rollins

Sounds like a country singer: Early Rollins and the Out House Orchestra!  I spent nine days in Glacier National Park where I saw exactly nine bears, all but two of them on the same day.  None of them expressed any interest in jazz.  

When I got back, a prize was waiting for me: almost all of a Sonny Rollins box set: The Complete Prestige Recordings.  I say almost all, because when you buy a box set at a suspiciously low price, sometimes you get less than what you bargained for.  I got precisely four of seven discs in that set.  The whole thing new costs over seventy bucks, and I got the first four discs for well less than half of that.  

Oh, but jazz babies, here is proof that the Gods of Bop are smiling on yours truly.  The material on the missing discs was released as Work Time, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plays for Bird, and Tour De Force, and Rollin's magnum opus, Saxophone Colossus.  I already had all of those recordings.  By contrast, I had almost nothing on the four discs that I did receive.  He shoots.  He scores.  Nothing but net.  

The whole box contains (I believe) all Rollin's appearances for Prestige  between 1949 and 1956.  That is most of the early Sonny Rollins, and it tells a story.  Rollins was brilliant from the get go.  Slip one of the better pieces from this era onto a later album, fuzz up the more contemporary stuff a bit to allow for advances in technology, and the early recording will fit right in.  This says something about Rollins, but something more important about the organic history of jazz.  As the music evolves, new stuff gets added to the old stuff, but the old stuff isn't discarded.  What is brilliant and timely in 1949 lives on, alongside what is unprecedented in 1962.  I am not saying that Rollins doesn't develop or explore new avenues of improvisation.  He certainly does.  I am saying that, while he learns much, he forgets nothing of value.  

Enough analysis; here is a sample.  It's from a 1953 recording made in New York City.  The band: Julius Watkins (frh) Sonny Rollins (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Percy Heath (b) Willie Jones (d).  It appears on the album Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins.  It is so damn good it makes the tomatoes ripen in my garden.  Here is about half the number. 

Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins/Friday the Thirteenth/

 Have fun with that. 

The Music I love: Wayne Shorter

I didn't realize until well after midnight that yesterday was Friday the 13th.  It's a little too late to do a spooky post, but since when did that ever stop me?  I am leaving for a trip to Glacier National Park.   I expect posting will be light over the next week.  So I will leave you with this.  

Wayne Shorter is my favorite jazz man.  I think he is very under appreciated, but my love for his work might be out of proportion.  Anyway, I think that his composition 'Infant Eyes' is among the greatest pieces of music I have ever heard.  To say that it is haunting is a criminal case of understatement.  The title weaves into the music in a way that all jazz men aim at when they scribble a title onto a sheet of music.  Shorter achieved the aim as perfectly as it can be achieved.  

Shorter takes something that is very common, and turns it into a major mystery.  When you look into a baby's eyes, what is staring back at you?  Every mother and father has asked this question, more or less consciously.  Not one has ever had an answer.  What is the human soul before it joins the world as each culture defines the world?  I don't know.  Neither does Wayne.  But he asks the question, and reveals its spooky side.  This is music at its most profound level.  Anyway, listen here and be sensitive to the mystery. 

Wayne Shorter/Infant Eyes/Speak No Evil