All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
“
| — |
from “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin
|
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
160 plays
Bobby Timmons - Popsy (1961)
Albert “Tootie” Heath and especially a young Ron Carter supply the rhythmic sails for Timmons as he navigates this groovy little whiff of blues at the Village Vanguard.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
31 plays
Bobby Hutcherson - Mirrors (1963)
Friday afternoon vibes care of Bobby Hutcherson, recorded one month after and with the same personnel as Grant Green’s seminal Idle Moments.
This would have been Bobby Hutcherson’s first LP as a leader for Blue Note, but it wasn’t released until 1999 as part of the Blue Note Connoisseur Series. This Joe Chambers piece offers a premonitory glimpse at the type of sound that Hutcherson and Chambers would cultivate throughout the 60s together.
The very effort to put the fragments together transformed them—so that in place of true memory they now summon to mind pieces of legend. They retell the stories as they have been told and written, glamorized, inflated, made neat and smooth, with all incomprehensible details vanished along with most of the wonder—not how it was as they themselves knew it.
“
| — |
Ralph Ellison, from the essay The Golden Age, Time Past
|
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
110 plays
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
50 plays
Sonny Clark - My Conception (1960)
I previously shared one other example, but it is rare indeed to find Sonny Clark in a solo setting. Stripped down to nothing but his piano (and a flourish from Max Roach at the end), Clark reveals his plaintive side, a side that belies his swinging, deep-in-the-pocket accompaniment for which he is legendary.
For you jazz geeks out there, compare this version of My Conception with a version recorded with a truly outstanding quintet.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
50 plays
Louis Smith - Tribute to Brownie (1958)
Cannonball Adderley was a busy man February 4, 1958.
This session is recorded the same day as Miles Davis’s legendary Milestones session, on which Cannonball also stars; this LP serves as an unexpected companion piece to Davis’s better-known session.
Louis Smith’s LP compares favorably, especially on this ringer with Louis Smith doing his very best Clifford Brown impersonation, and Cannonball, well, being Cannonball. On a side note, due to contractual obligations at the time to Mercury Records, Cannonball appears under the comedic pseudonym “Buckshot La Funke.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
50 plays
