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.
027: Lennie Tristano, ‘Wow’
Song Of the week
105: The Boswell Sisters, ‘Crazy People’
The Boswell Sisters had 20 hits in the early 1930s, and are arguably THE best vocal jazz group ever. Their 3-part harmonies are tighter than Aunt Bertha’s girdle, and their arrangements are constantly chock full of unexpected shifts in tempo, major/minor mode, key, and tone, flipping cheekily from dead serious to insouciant comic and back. They have a wicked and sometimes rather racy sense of humor. Their vocals are so hot they were often thought to be black. They scat with the best of them, and do knock-out imitations of instruments and nonsense sounds. A pleasure and an education, 80 years on.
Continue reading...280: Charles Ives, ‘The Unanswered Question’
Founder of a successful insurance company. on weekends he composed modernist music that lay unheard for 50 years and “responded to negligence with contempt”.
My new role model.
099: Luciana Souza, ‘Baião à Tempo’ (“An Answer to Your Silence”)
I get that not everyone needs to go hacking through impregnable jazz jungles or crawling across atonal minimalist deserts or getting lost in endless Nordic a cappella virgin forests. But believe me, Luciana Souza’s “An Answer to Your Silence” is vocal jazz of singular, innovative genius – groundbreaking, underappreciated, and regretfully unknown. It is THE most interesting CD I’ve heard in the last decade.
Continue reading...276: Leo Kottke, ‘Eggtooth’ (New Acoustic)
Remember Paul Simon’s ‘Anji’? Remember Pentangle?
Call it what you want–New Acoustic, Fingerpicking, American Primitive, Folk Baroque–there’s a whole world out there of intelligent and sophisticated. virtuosic guitar music fingerpicked on a steel string guitar, using old blues and country techniques, full of fascinating directions.
275: Sandy Bull, ‘Blend’
Betcha you’ve never heard of Sandy Bull, the crossover fingerpicker bridging the Kingston Trio and Ornette Coleman via India and Arabia.
Don’t feel bad, almost no one has.
Betcha if you listen to him a bit you’ll really like him.
270: Laura Nyro, ‘Stoney End’ (Seattle Bootleg, 1971)
What her first album should have sounded like–
The unique, divine Laura Nyro.
095: Derek & The Dominos, ‘Little Wing’ (Jimi Hendrix)
One doesn’t usually go to Hendrix for his songs, rather for his disassembly of world order. However, ‘Little Wing’, is on jelly bread of a song, inspiring oodles of admirable covers, most notably Derek & The Dominos’ rapturous amalgam of 1967 Haight-Ashbury, ephemeral bliss with the very corporeal guitars of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman.
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