9. Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane – Nov. 29, 1957 – Carnegie Hall
The 2005 issue of these two stupendous sets from Carnegie Hall allowed listeners to at long last properly hear Monk’s legendary “Five Spot” band at its peak, making this Smithsonian discovery one of the most significant in the history of jazz. Before getting to the music itself though, a discussion of why the Five Spot gig was so important to the careers of Monk and Coltrane …
6. Billie Holiday – May 24, 1947 – Carnegie Hall
This wonderful, short set comes from an early Norman Granz Jazz At the Philharmonic concert. Apart from her immortal Columbia recordings with Teddy Wilson, Lester Young et al in the late 1930s, these are the Holiday sides I find myself turning to most often. She does just four songs here – “You’d Better Go Now”, “You’re Driving Me Crazy”, “There Is No Greater Love” and “I Cover the Waterfront”. …
3. Don Byas and Slam Stewart – June 9, 1945 – Town Hall
This one is truly incredible, a once-only, bravura performance of two up-tempo numbers by the unusual duet of tenor saxophone and bass. Both these jazz masters were in towering form and thank goodness it was recorded.
The occasion was a concert put on by one Baron Timmie Rosencrantz, an eccentric and somewhat wealthy Danish emigré who was a writer and sometime salesman for the Commodore Music …
Jazz history is full of celebrated examples of brilliant improvisation – the 1928 Louis Armstrong-Earl Hines duet “Weather Bird”, Charlie Parker’s solo on “Ko-Ko”, the 1939 reading of “Body and Soul” by Coleman Hawkins are obvious cases, where an artist or band sets a new standard or at least reaches rare heights. But such evaluations are only possible because the performances themselves have been preserved and codified by virtue of having been recorded, otherwise they would be long gone …
Yes friends, I’m stooping to the vanity-project gesture of including a recipe here, but, what the hell, maybe something with a practical application for a change on this site is not such a bad thing.
This is basically a variation on a Bolognese sauce that I’ve been fooling around with for years and it turned out so well last night I decided to post it here. It’s quick, easy and relatively cheap to make; the main difference from a …
As discussed in part one, Edmonton has a rich arts and culture scene, maybe surprising to some for a city of its middling size and northern isolation. This is amply demonstrated by the versatile and classy Citadel Theatre and in Edmonton’s long-standing main jazz club, the “Yardbird Suite.”
As its Charlie Parker-inspired name signifies, the club is operated by people who know and love their jazz, namely the Edmonton Jazz Society. Imagine that, a jazz club run collectively by …
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Alberta and have come to understand this ambivalence recently – I don’t care much for Calgary, but I do like Edmonton. Calgary is very head-office, a button-down, corporate oil town with all the character of drywall. Edmonton though is funkier and more interesting, with a much stronger arts and culture presence, which was hammered home for me this past weekend. “The Flying Beavers”, as I’ve dubbed the trio of John Alcorn, Reg Schwager …
Earl Weaver’s death over the weekend was a jarring and unpleasant surprise, but coming as it did on a baseball-themed cruise, it was maybe an appropriate exit. Earl loved to hang out and talk baseball with anybody who would listen – old players, young players, reporters, coaches, fans – I can just see him on the cruise ship, bending an elbow and yakking it up in his scratchy, hoarse voice. There are worse ways to go and given his …
This past weekend brought momentous baseball news – the deaths of all-time Cardinal great Stan Musial at 92 and celebrated Orioles’ manager Earl Weaver, suddenly on a baseball-related cruise at 82. Because Musial was older and his career more distant, I read less commentary on him, so will deal with him first and Weaver later, in a separate entry.
“Stan the Man”, baseball’s “perfect, gentle knight”, suddenly gone at 92. It’s perhaps not appropriate to mourn the passing of …
Last Friday, my wife and I were flicking around on the tube and came across a Dick Cavett – Mel Brooks “sit-down” show where they just talked and told stories, bouncing things off each other. It had us on the floor and Cavett told a couple of really funny stories that surprised us with their risque-ness and ripe language, he was always so dry and suave on his old talk show, a gentleman.
One of them was about Talullah …
A nicely edited version of this piece can be seen at: http://music.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2012/11/Ed-Bickert-the-Gary-Cooper-of-Canadian-jazz
This story concerns the guitarist Ed Bickert, who’s had a huge impact on jazz in Canada and certainly on me and other musicians of my generation who came up listening to and playing with him as an elder statesman. A lot of this will be written in the past tense, which doesn’t feel quite right because Ed is thankfully still very much well and among us. On …
The brilliant musician Mel Powell had a jazz career unlike any other I can think of. It had a stop and start, double-life quality with very long gaps, none of which were caused by the usual problems of drug addiction, imprisonment, alcoholism or nervous breakdowns. He was so prodigiously gifted that he was torn between jazz – as a top-flight pianist/arranger – and the world of “straight” music, where he was a respected composer of modern classical music (eventually …
World Series sweeps are hardly ever expected from the outset, and the one just completed by the Giants was no exception. After all, in theory a least, the World Series pits the two best teams left in baseball against each other in a best-of-seven format. Each team is likely a strong one and given what they must go through to even reach the Series, it would seem likely and reasonable to expect one of the teams to win at …
Had the ghost of John McGraw been magically transported to Game Two of this World Series last night in San Francisco, he would have at first seen much that would have bewildered, outraged, maybe even frightened him, though he sure didn’t scare easily in life. A thousand questions and confounded thoughts would have flashed through the hard-headed old manager’s mind in an instant.
Jaysus, where am I? My Jints are in white, playing at home, but what have they …
This site is devoted equally to both jazz and baseball, and though I have a number of music pieces on the go, baseball will take a front seat for the next little while as, a), it’s World Series time and b), I’m really busy with gigs for the next week or two.
Being busy is a nice problem to have and I’m not complaning, but it always seems to be the case that it never rains but it pours …
To many, the St. Louis Cardinals in this year’s post-season looked to be repeating their celebrated, longshot run of last year. This time around they snuck into the playoffs by an even thinner margin, winning the brand new second wild-card, then beating the favoured Braves in Atlanta in the one-game, loser-goes-home playoff. When they shockingly beat the young and talented Nationals by scoring eight runs in the final three innings of Game Five, erasing a 6-0 deficit, it seemed …
The above tongue-in-cheek headline refers to one of the veteran character actor’s most famous movie roles, “The Invisible Man”; Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, though the conspicuous centre of a benching controversy, was pretty much invisible in the ALCS (1 for 9) and his replacement Eric Chavez was, believe it or not, even worse (0 for 20.) Yes, I realize Claude Rains has been dead for a long time now, but given the cold wind blowing around the Yanks’ …
Although not all bad music is funny, few things are funnier than really awful – as opposed to merely mundane – music. Provided, of course, that it was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place. You know, musical bloopers, clams, kacks, orchestral train wrecks, blown lyrics and so on. I’ve had a ringside seat on various bandstands for many of these over the years, which has no doubt warped my taste and judgement. I suppose the …
As you readers out there are compos mentis and all – sane and normal types, no offense intended, you’re likely not saddled with my baseball name obsession. So you’re probably not aware that the Detroit Tigers lead all of baseball in weird and funny pitcher’s names. It’s really quite something and I only just began to notice. I must be slipping.
Their two best pitchers are Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. Verlander isn’t really a funny name, but Scherzer …
Tax season is never a fun time for musicians, or anyone else for that matter. But for me, this annual April bother is always tempered by the memories it brings of Bob Price, who was a very fine jazz bassist, a wonderful guy and an accountant to boot. He’s been gone a while now and I always feel the pang of missing him in early spring, but it’s also pleasant to remember him and how lucky we were to …
So there’s bad news and good news swirling about the Blue Jays as their toilet-bowl circling season enters its final, “let’s play the spoilers” phase.
Word broke yesterday that the Jays will be relocating their AAA farm team from Las Vegas to Buffalo, essentially trading places with the Mets. Some baseball friends and I heard rumours to this effect from Buffalo fans during a Bisons game at Coca-Cola Field this summer. It’s something we had all wished for – …
The stylish singer John Alcorn launched a series of Wednesday night musical offerings this week at the Flying Beaver Pubaret (488 Parliament St.), accompanied by Reg Schwager on guitar and yours truly on bass. John is calling this the Songbook Series; each week he will be presenting two sets of songs by a different major contributor to the GAS (Great American Songbook), kicking things off with fifteen of Cole Porter’s best. I promise this will be the last of …
Some highlights and stories from this year’s very enjoyable Prince Edward County Jazz Festival.
I’ve had my nose to the grindstone pretty good for a while now and this has had me feeling every inch of my age and then some. My birthday came and went on August 16 in Picton and joining the 56-year-old club would normally have lead to some angst and hand-wringing over what a drag it is getting old, as The Rolling Stones once …
Have you noticed how nicknames have pretty much disappeared from jazz and baseball? What happened, where did they all go? There’s still the odd half-decent one around, like say Joey Bats, or Trombone Shorty. But these days it seems the only celebrities in any number with colourful nicknames are rap or hip-hop “artists”, and I’d happily say goodbye to their soubriquets if it also meant the musical genre would just disappear, forever and without a trace. Forgive my white-ass, …
I’ve done a lot of general reading about my two main interests, jazz and baseball. Histories, biographies, collections of reviews, stories and reportage, you name it. It’s odd, but every once in a while in a lifetime of random reading, two unrelated subjects can intersect and lead to the very same little dot in time, like two different GPS locators of history.
Over the course of thirty-five years of this indiscriminate rambling around in the past, I chanced to …
I’ve been playing a steady gig at a hotel bar for a while now with a trio that consists of pianist Bernie Senensky, drummer/leader Dan Bodanis and me on bass. Bernie took most of March off to do a tour of the U.S. with another group and as this approached he was scrambling around trying to line up subs and confessed to me he wasn’t really looking forward to the road, that he’d miss our gig and was worried …
There were some Ray Bryant stories I wanted to get to in the earlier piece about him, but it was too long, as usual. I’m considering a reverse Tom Waits: having had a bottle in front of me for many years, I may opt for a frontal lobotomy in the hope it might shorten my writing. It’s not as if it I’m a mental giant or anything, there would be no great loss involved. Anyway, here goes.
Though he …
The pianist Ray Bryant died in June of 2011 and has recently been on my mind a lot, mostly because I chanced to hear some of his records again lately. Though he made a lot of good ones, most of them don’t quite do him justice. You really had to hear him live to get the full impact and joy of his playing. Luckily for me, I both heard and played with Ray live quite a bit – a …
I heard a cardinal in high-fidelity just as I left my house the other morning – “bwordy, bwordy, bwordy” echoing down the street. The trees being still bare, it was easy to spot him by following the song – he was up in the top of a maple about forty yards away. As he shifted briefly from one branch to another, the light caught him at just the right angle, bringing a brilliant rush of crimson even at that …
If the pitcher Rip Sewell is remembered at all these days, it’s for two things – a noted 1934 fistfight with Hank Greenberg, and the 1940s invention of the bloop pitch, which has appeared since from time to time in various guises, under various names.
Sewell was a right-handed pitcher whose career took place almost entirely in the National League from 1932 to 1949. He was a Southern country boy born May 11, 1907 in Decatur, Alabama and like …
I was fooling around doing some baseball research on-line the other day and ended up on a site called baseball.com – how do they come up with these imaginative names? It was a decent enough site, and I noticed it had a Top 100 players of All-Time List, so I checked it out. It included major stars from the Negro Leagues, which is nice – a lot of these lists don’t bother. Otherwise, it had mostly the names you’d …