Perhaps one of the best known hard-bop albums, sax player Hank Mobley's "Soul Station" was released in 1960 under Blue Note Records.
It features jazz greats Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. With a lineup like that, you know it's gonna be huge.
At this period of jazz, many players were moving to more free playing; like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane; but Blue Note artists stuck to the winning formula, even if it felt dated to some, and that was the hard-bop sound.
Here's a Mobley composition from that album; good stuff!!
This track from the seminal 1959 album "Time Out" by the Dave Brubeck Quartet reached #2 on the Billboard Pop Charts; and the leading reason is the track, "Take Five".
The song is instantly recognizable and most of you probably heard it without knowing who it was by.
The song is in 5/4 time, hence Take "Five".
The simplicity of the music is what makes people go back and listen to it; this is cool west coast jazz at it's best.
The Blend Music Festival is coming up in less than a month! There will be more details and information rolling out in a few weeks time; until then, here's Lewis Chapman and myself jamming in preparation of the event!
Lewis is a very talented and unique musician with a great touch on the acoustic; it must be heard to be understood!
Tomorrow I will be jamming with Gary Ruston and Kevin Owen for the jazz set!
Alan Lomax, ethnomusicologist and folklorist, who went recording folk music in various countries and was instrumental in discovering the blues of Muddy Waters and Leadbelly among others, will have his collection of over 17,000 tracks available online, and:
'In all, there are around 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and countless pages of manuscripts. All of it will be available online, and much of it for free.'
Holy crap.
If you have the time then you are in for a treat!
One of his accomplishments is when Lomax toured the Southern USA in 1941 and recorded some country blues by then unknown McKinley Morganfield, Aka Muddy Waters. The rest, is history.
Here's Muddy Waters' song recorded on the cotton fields by Lomax in 1942:
I will be honest; I didn't actually go out looking for this animated film; it just turned up on Showtime while flipping through channels.
And I am glad I saw it.
"My Dog Tulip" is an adult-oriented animated indie film released in 2009. The movie is based on the 1956 memoirs of J. R. Ackerley, BBC editor and novelist about his fifteen-year relationship with his German Shepherd Queenie, who was named Tulip for the movie.
What I have read online is that this was the first full release animation that was used on graphic software; no paper animations were made.
The movie in it's design is very simplistic and it's mostly sketches; the narration by Christopher Plummer as J.R. Ackerley, is superb. Be warned though, it's all narrated by Plummer with minor one-liners from others; in a thick British accent and verbose tone, which might bore some people.
But the story is wonderful. It's about how Ackerley adopted Tulip and how his behavior changed through the relationship, and how Tulip acted (even discussing her bowel movements and sexuality).
All I can say was that I enjoyed the style of the animations and the stripped down minimalism, the narration style, and the heartfelt story.
Myles Boothroyd of Central Michigan University wrote a thesis a few years back called "Modal Jazz and Miles Davis: George Russell's Influence and the Melodic Inspiration Behind Modal Jazz".
19 pages written by an academic of music might be hard to digest, but for you music and jazz lovers there is some great history here about how modal jazz was conceptualized, the many technical aspects of modal jazz and discussions on Miles Davis' approach and the "Kind of Blue" recording.
On February 3, 1959, the Miles Davis Sextet, minus Miles, released an album as the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago, later reissued as Cannonball and Coltrane; interestingly, this album was recorded a month before the sessions of Davis' "Kind of Blue".
Track-list:
1. "Limehouse Blues"
2. "Stars Fell on Alabama"
3. "Wabash"
4. "Grand Central"
5. "You're a Weaver of Dreams"
6. "The Sleeper"
Personnel:
Cannonball Adderley - Alto Sax
John Coltrane - Tenor Sax
Wynton Kelly - Piano
Paul Chambers - Bass
Jimmy Cobb - Drums
It's a showcase of stylistic differences of each sax player; Cannonball as the concise heavy hitter and Coltrane as the chaotic explorer.
The sounds are moving away of the hard-bop idioms slowly and it's evident upon the release of "Kind of Blue" that there was no going back.
Here's a laid back bluesy number of the album, written by Coltrane:
