Tag: Terence Blanchard

World of Jazz Radio Show – 10th May 2012

On this weeks show – which can be heard here:

1 Austin Peralta The Underwater Mountain Odyssey Endless Planets
2 Cannonball Adderley The Sidewalks of New York Things are getting better
3 Ahmad Jamal Mystifying Picture Perfect
4 Etta Jones Yes Sir That’s My Baby Don’t go the strangers
5 John Coltrane Aisha Ole Coltrane
6 Terence Blanchard Touched By An Angel Choices
7 Thelonious Monk Blue Bolivar Blues Monk’s Dream
8 Codona Codona Codona
9 Oregon Margueritte Winter Light

Notes

  1. From the 2011 album on the Brainfeeder lable – piano prodigy Peralta delivering exciting modern jazz with the assistance of Zane Musa (alto sax), Ben Wendel (tenor and soprano), Hamilton Price (bass) and Zach Harmon (drums).
  2. Cannonball with an all star band from October 1958 on the Riverside lable with Percy Heath(bass), Art Blakey (drums), Wynton Kelly (piano) and Milt Jackson (vibes).
  3. Recorded in New York in 2000 and released on the Birdology lable –  Ahmad Jamal: piano; James Cammack : bass; Idris Muhammad: drums.
  4. This 1960 album was Etta’s  first album for  Prestige  , and although she  had been releasing records since 1944, including a dozen reords for RCA in 1946 and an album for King Records in 1957, she was treated as an overnight sensation when the title tune from the album went gold, hitting the Top 40 on the pop charts and reaching number five on the R&B charts.
  5. Classic ‘Trane from 1961 and a co-composition with McCoy Tyner – great solos from Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dolphy.
  6.  Blanchard’s debut recording on the Concord label from 2009. The band features pianist Fabian Almazan, with Derrick Hodge on bass, drummer Kendrick Scott,  Lionel Loueke on guitar and  saxophonist Walter Smith III.
  7. Columbia Records 1962 debut release featuring the Thelonious Monk Quartet of Monk (piano), Charlie Rouse (tenor sax), John Ore (bass), and Frankie Dunlop (drums).
  8. The name of the band, album and tracks are derived from the letters of the forenames of Collin Walcott (tabla, sitar), Don Cherry (tpt, p, hunter’s guitar), and Nana Vasconcelos (per). This is multi-ethnic improvisational music, emerging from Walcott’s interest in Eastern Indian rhythms and Vasconcelos’s Brazilian heritage.
  9. Walcott appears again here with Paul McCandless, Glen Moore and Ralph Towner which was the classic Oregon line up. A 1974 release on the Vanguard Lable.

World of Jazz #51 – some you might not know

As mentioned on the previous blog on World of Jazz putting together the show can be a bit of a hit and miss affair. The issue with something which is as broad a church as jazz is that you cannot please all the people all the time. One man’s Jamie Cullen is another man’s dyspepsia as it were. From studying the number of hits on the Mixcloud hostings of the show it’s fairly obvious that the less extreme forms of jazz are the most popular. So, for example, the Blue Note Special of a couple of months ago has proved to be the most popular whereas those shows with the higher levels of fire/free music don’t quite capture as much attention. So the puzzle is really how to make a show which is attractive to most but also a little bit cutting edge?

For this particular show I was short of time and had to rely on longer form pieces with which to fill the hour (its actually 55:39 for technical reasons too complex to go into). I also thought I would shake things up a little bit with some artists who are not regularly featured in the best of jazz charts.

Marion Brown who sadly died last October was on ‘Tranes massive “Ascension” session and hung around the fringes of jazz popularity for many years never quite getting the success he deserved.  His 1974 release on Impulse “Sweet Earth Flying” is probably his best album with the added value of both Paul Bley and Muhal Richards Abrams on keyboards.

Codona – a jazz supergroup? The name is derived from the letters of the name of Collin Walcott , Don Cherry , and Nana Vasconcelos.  This is jazz in the realm of multi-ethnic improvisation, mostly down to Walcott’s interest in Eastern Indian rhythms and Vasconcelos’s Brazilian roots. Cherry’s experiences with folk music of Scandinavia, Morocco, and Africa adds to a melting pot of styles, sounds and ideas. I selected the title track from their first album.

The short-lived New York Art Quartet was  trombonist Roswell Rudd, altoist John Tchicai, drummer Milford Graves(succeeded by Louis Moholo) and several different bass players including Lewis Worrell, Reggie Workman and Finn Von Eyben. Their music was   free, emotional, and unique for the trombone-alto frontline.  The 2010 album “Old Stuff” pulls together their  last recordings, as they went their separate ways shortly after this session.

The Claudia Quintet are one of the top five progressive jazz units in the U.S. and the world at the moment. The 2010 album “Royal Toast” continued their excellent work with some fantastic modern jazz.

I always turn to Thelonious Monk when I want to break a show up a little. I find his particular approach to music allows the balance of a show to be shifted easily. Criss-Cross – his second album for Columbia Records – features some of his finest studio work with his ’60s trio and quartet. The album both revisits and  reinvents classic Monk compositions.

Joe Farrell, known in the ’60s as a solid hard bop tenor saxophonist, developed a broader style  in the ’70s. This is evidenced on the classic “Joe Farrell Quartet”  album, he is  joined by a stunning line up of   Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette.

In 1986 Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison continued their homage to the famous Eric Dolphy/Booker Little duo with a second set of performances recorded at Sweet Basil. The featured track is “Bee Vamp,” one of the  tunes the original duo immortalized during their Five Spot performances.