Fellas – if you’ve ever taken my advice about anything, watch this clip. If it doesn’t make your blood boil, you’re probably dead.
Continue reading...Jazz
178: The Claudia Quintet +1 feat. Kurt Elling, ‘Showtime’ (“What is the Beautiful?”)
What is the Beautiful?
(Hint: The best things in life are acquired tastes.)
168: Neal Hefti, ‘Girl Talk’
Women are a superior breed to men, but everyone from God to James Thurber knows they sure like to talk. Girl Talk.
I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.
109: Daniel Zamir, ‘Shir HaShomer’
Why does free jazz/Chabad soprano saxophonist Daniel Zamir draw materials from an old Israeli song glorifying a watchman from the 1930s? Why is today’s Israeli jazz a natural, organic expression of early Zionist settlement? Why is Jeff calling a 21-year old drummer a genius? The answer to these and many more questions in Song of The Week.
Continue reading...040: Lennie Tristano Quintet, ‘317 East 32nd’ (Live in Toronto 1952)
Desert Island music. Ice also burns.
Continue reading...153: Pete Christlieb & Warne Marsh, ‘Magna-Tism’
Pete Christlieb (Steely Dan/Tonight Show ) teams up with the legendary Warne Marsh, 1978. Listen to two tenor saxophonists set the studio on fire.
Continue reading...119: Tom Harrell, ‘Train Shuffle’
Loath as I am to resort to gimmickry, it’s hard to ignore the back-story of trumpeter Tom Harrell’s paranoid schizophrenia. He hears voices, maintains ‘a tenuous contact with reality’, is heavily medicated, and speaks like a zombie who’s just seen a ghost. Until he puts his horn to his lips, when he’s instantly and magically possessed by an utterly coherent aesthetic expressiveness.
Continue reading...027: Lennie Tristano, ‘Wow’
An obscure club date by an obscure pianist and his band, forerunners of cool jazz.
Music for snobs, with some virtuosic playing that would make Paderewski blush.
Ice also burns.