Thanks. I’ll definitely have to check some of those recordings out. I was a little surprised there was no mention of Alice Coltrane in there, though admittedly she was the only harpist I could’ve named before now, other than Harpo Marx.

I’d say this bit about Ashby’s playing sums up what I was thinking as I listened.

Her attack on the harp was different than most of her peers. Her style was more direct and commanding than the "blend in" harpists from the classical side. And as Ashby's many albums show, her technique and phrasing were first rate—strong improvisational ideas combined with a touching curiosity rather than just timidly adding a wash of angelic mist.

Her playing sounded more direct and focused rather than that wispy ethereal sound that you normally think of with the harp, which is nice, but can get old.

Don Cheadle's Miles Davis picture scheduled to debut this October. Guy's worked on it since he was 14 y.o. (feels like)

Been listening to a lot of drummers lately. Lovin this song.

Great stuff SH.

Ari Hoenig's a guy you can still go listen to. Arrows & Loops:




or Dafnis Prieto

Some of you may already have seen this (in fact I have a powerful sense of deja vu, feeling like someone's mentioned/posted stuff about the series here already), a segment from an episode of The Spoils Before Dying, a sort of noir movie homage-y series thing on IFC that features Michael K Williams, Kristin Wiig, Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph & others. None of them figure in this animated super-short (~2 minutes).

The clips I've seen have been pretty funny; I added one featuring Wiig doing some torch singing (I'd call it chorch-singing except it's on everything but)

What is Jazz?


Booze & Pills

drsmooth wrote:Some of you may already have seen this (in fact I have a powerful sense of deja vu, feeling like someone's mentioned/posted stuff about the series here already), a segment from an episode of The Spoils Before Dying, a sort of noir movie homage-y series thing on IFC that features Michael K Williams, Kristin Wiig, Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph & others. None of them figure in this animated super-short (~2 minutes).

The clips I've seen have been pretty funny; I added one featuring Wiig doing some torch singing (I'd call it chorch-singing except it's on everything but)

What is Jazz?


Booze & Pills

Made my day right there

Booze & pills can do that...

I haven't seen any of that series' episodes, but the cast and some of the youtube snips are encouraging

Here's another kind of curious/fun thing: LinkedJazz, which is basically an interactive social graph of jazz musicians' professional and personal relationships. Art Blakey is at/near its center. Like most such things, it is a quirky work in progress, which appears to strongly overweight one of its key sources: oral interview recordings of various people in and around the music.

Quirky? Billie Holiday has no link to Lester Young, but Jane Jarvis - certainly. Charlie Parker; no connection to Miles Davis, but Roswell Rudd's in there. Pops is in there - but from this thing, you'd swear Louis Bellson was at the center of jazz's social universe.

Anyway, kind of fun to play around with, as these things tend to be

missed out on a chance to hear PtK's old piano teacher, Kenny Barron, at Mezzrow last night, with Ray Drummond. Everyone was too pooped to bop (not me, of course)

This is a quirky thing, but kind of fun data to play with:

Recorded on This Day of The Year

Some guy basically ransacked his collection of jazz recordings and typed out the personnel & tune titles for recording sessions, and ordered them by day of the year when they were recorded.

The entries are only for his collection, so it's far from comprehensive - but it appears he has/had a pretty big collection, so.....

There's no functionality - it's just one big honking page of html - but if you search the page using browser features, you can find, for example, all of the instances when So What was recorded, and by whom; or how many different dates Horace Silver recorded on; or how many recordings featured baritone sax.

Like I said - quirky

drsmooth wrote:This is a quirky thing, but kind of fun data to play with:

Recorded on This Day of The Year

Some guy basically ransacked his collection of jazz recordings and typed out the personnel & tune titles for recording sessions, and ordered them by day of the year when they were recorded.

The entries are only for his collection, so it's far from comprehensive - but it appears he has/had a pretty big collection, so.....

There's no functionality - it's just one big honking page of html - but if you search the page using browser features, you can find, for example, all of the instances when So What was recorded, and by whom; or how many different dates Horace Silver recorded on; or how many recordings featured baritone sax.

Like I said - quirky

Interesting --

Giant Steps was recorded on my birthday!

drsmooth wrote:missed out on a chance to hear PtK's old piano teacher, Kenny Barron, at Mezzrow last night, with Ray Drummond. Everyone was too pooped to bop (not me, of course)

That's too bad. He's put a bit of weight on, but I heard him the La Paz Trio at the Healdsburgh Jazz Festival a few months back. I didn't track him down, it's been so many years and it got kind of tired once more than 15 years went by. Now 33 years since I studied with him...but nice to hear him still.

Philly the Kid wrote:
Giant Steps was recorded on my birthday!

Karma if there ever was some, Kid

Watching The Connection this evening. a 1961 movie made from a play of the same name. Freddie Redd is credited with the music, and appears in the movie, but my interest is that it features alto Jackie McLean.

It's mostly about junkies waiting for their connection to show, and is framed as a documentary of 'real' junkie life. Both McLean & Redd were, but are both mostly just playing and acting in the film (which they also did in the play's production). One of the conceits is the cameraman is/was also a junkie, an old friend of the film's featured players from Harlem. Basically he doesn't pay any attention to the square whitebread director. Kind of an 'inmates take over the asylum' subplot

McLean's a natural; too bad no one used him in other flicks. I love his manner of speech.

It wasn't too successful in either format, but did stir up some fuss when it was originally issued.

If it's December, it must be time to start picking through year end best recordings lists.

Here's a 13 best jazz recordings list in the ears of PopMatters, which I've never heard of, but whose choices I thought were pretty sweet. Items from Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, Jack DeJohnette(!), John Zorn, and others.

A curiously infectious (story of Bad Plus's life?) cut from the Bad Plus/Joshua Redman collaboration that made the list:

Short, sweet Rolling Stone piece on the making of the score for A Charlie Brown Christmas

Good stuff about the discovery and resurrection of Robert James Campbell's jazz (and other) photography. Check that shot of Bud Powell. Lots of other good ones, jazz & other


What's that you say - you've never heard of him? That's the point.

The page at the link is mostly about the years Jessica Ferber put in to assemble & publish her book on Campbell & his work. Nice story in itself of her labor of love/obsession.

Some chump tried to swindle Cecil Taylor out of his 2013 Kyoto Prize ($500g's).

Asked if he had any words for the miscreant, the 86-year-old Taylor replied: "Die"

Taylor looked spiff in court though:

A piece in something called Hidden City Philadelphia, on a germinal effort to restore Coltrane's house in Strawberry Mansion(?). Wish I'd seen it before March 9. Title comes from quotes attributed to the marvelously named Philadelphia tenor Odean Pope. Mods, edit if I've over-excerpted:

There Was No End To The Music

John Coltrane is a Philadelphia legend, but how does the city account for his time here and the influence of the city on his work and his work on the city? Most of the jazz world he inhabited, which Rob Armstrong has so lovingly revealed in this article below, is gone....The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia has begun thinking about that issue, convening a planning process to imagine uses for the Coltrane house in Strawberry Mansion. They’ve lined up two events in March: a Coltrane community workshop open to the public on Saturday, March 9th from 11AM to 2PM, for neighbors to share memories of Coltrane and ideas for revitalizing the house and a planning charrette later that month.


John Coltrane House is at left, 1511 N. 33rd Street | Photo: Peter Woodall

How come when I play Autumn Leaves it never sounds like this?

do you have a mustache