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Tag: Eric Dolphy

2011

Friday, May 20, 2011

Who else (besides, of course, Bob Dylan) has played so many different roles so brilliantly?

Miles Davis (with Robben Ford & guest Carlos Santana, guitars), “Burn”
Live, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey, 6/15/86

Listen to stuff long enough and it changes—or you do, anyway. Once I might have faulted this for being repetitive. But that’s a bit like faulting roast beef for being meat. Of course it’s repetitive. That’s part of what makes it soar.

More? Here.

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lagniappe

listening room: what’s playing

• Rashied Ali Quintet, Live In Europe (Survival Records)

• Paul Motian (with Chris Potter, Jason Moran), Lost In A Dream (ECM)

• Charlie Parker, The Complete Royal Roost Live Recordings on Savoy, Vol. 3 (Columbia Japan)

• Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot, Vol. 2 (with Booker Little, Mal Waldron, Richard Davis, Ed Blackwell; Prestige)

• Various Artists, Fire In My Bones: Raw + Rare + Other-Worldly African-American Gospel (1944-2007) (Tompkins Square)

• Reverend Charlie Jackson, God’s Got It: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles (CaseQuarter)

• Group Doueh, Guitar Music from the Western Sahara (Sublime Frequencies)

• Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, Helene Grimaud, Resonances (Deutsche Grammophon)

• Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23 (“Appasionata”) and No. 29 (“Hammerklavier”), Solomon, The Master Pianist (EMI Classics)

• Anton Webern: String Quartet, Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, String Quartet Op. 28, LaSalle Quartet (Brilliant Classics)

• Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet in D major, LaSalle Quartet (Brilliant Classics)

• Roger Sessions: String Quartet No. 2, Julliard String Quartet (Composers Recordings)

• Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus, John Tilbury, Morton Feldman, All Piano (London HALL)

• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Morning Classical (Various)
—Amazing Grace (Various)

• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Fool’s Paradise (Rex, sui generis)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)

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2011

Friday, 4/22/11

Happy (89th) Birthday, Mingus!

Charles Mingus, bassist, bandleader, composer
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979

In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day. We’re celebrating by revisiting some favorite clips.

**********

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.

That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.

Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964

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lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

(Originally posted 12/1/09.)

**********

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

(Originally posted 4/22/10.)

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2011

Monday, 2/21/11

Whatever I’d say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.

—John Coltrane

Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute)
June 20, 1928-June 29, 1964

John Coltrane Quintet (JC, tenor saxophone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums), “Impressions,” live, Germany (Baden-Baden), 1961

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(For whatever reason, this clip sometimes seems to play better, on my Mac, with Safari than Firefox.)

More Eric Dolphy? Here. And here.

More John Coltrane? Here.

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lagniappe

reading table

Leviathan

Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.

Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;

A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.

How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse—

We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable

Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance

And we have become the present.

We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.

—George Oppen

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2010

Saturday, 11/6/10

replay: clips too good for just one day

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

(Originally posted on 4/22/10.)

**********

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.

That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.

Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964

**********

lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

(Originally posted on 12/1/09.)

Leave a comment
2010

Thursday, 4/22/10

Happy Birthday, Mingus!

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

Want more? Here.

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

*****

Radio Mingus: all Mingus, all the time

In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day.

Leave a comment
2009

Tuesday, 12/1/09

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.

That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.

Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964

**********

lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

Leave a comment