The New Jazz Musings

In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky, Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a mentor to Leonard Bernstein, created the Tanglewood Music Centre in Western Massachusetts. The Tanglewood Estate had been donated to the BSO three years earlier. It became the summer home of the orchestra, and a music school was established. The first faculty included the composers Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith. In 1950, what had remained of the estate including outbuildings, was purchased by a New York couple to create a performing space for folk musicians, including the conversion of one building into an Inn with accommodation. They also created what became known as The Music Barn, a venue that played host to many well known folk and jazz musicians.  In 1957 they also established a not-for-profit music school. Their faculty included Max Roach and Gunther Schuller. In 1959, just before his seminal album The Shape of Jazz to Come was released, Atlantic Records sent Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry ...

 A treat. Pianist Marian McPartland visited Alice Coltrane during early 1969 and walked away with a transcribed Giant Steps for piano. It was printed in Down Beat magazine. I've already been trying it out, super slow for now !

 It's so great I found these words from Stanley Crouch in a 1991 reissue of two recordings from 1969. There isn't much information available, and when Stanley really puts what was happening on the West Coast in perspective it's gold dust. "We are fortunate that Thiele saw his way to make these recordings". Amen "In 1969, when the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet and the Horace Tapscott Quintet made these recordings, Los Angeles was no longer considered much of a jazz town. Even though musicians like Lawrence Brown, Lionel Hampton, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Mingus, Art and Addison Farmer, Teddy Edwards, Frank Morgan, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Gary Peacock, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and others were either born and bred there or put together their music in that land of smog and movie stars, the scene these two bands found themselves in the middle of was essentially quite bleak. Long gone were the good times that rolled along the black community...

In my search for articles I'm finding that quite a few are articulate, intelligent, incredibly insightful and interesting. None more so than this 1971 piece by Barry McRae, published in the Jazz Journal. McRae writes about John Coltrane - The Impulse Years, but expands further outside for perspective and his contemporary position during the 1960s. I've noticed some earlier British articles on Trane miss out versus US journals because it was more difficult to get all the albums. Here however, McRae references not just Trane's Impulse output, but also that of Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. John Coltrane - The Impulse Years by Barry McRae That jazz has moved forward in both spiritual as well as a musical sense in the sixties is an obvious fact. Preoccupation with aesthetic values has sometimes obscured the total evolutionary picture, however, and a great number of words has been dissipated on the significance of the music rather than its style and format. The early free f...

 A couple of weeks back on my Insta I posted the CD reissue of a 1977 double album of (mostly) tunes from Coltrane's Stockholm concerts in 1963. Two being from Berlin. Norman Granz had organised another annual tour of Europe for the John Coltrane Quartet, playing eleven venues in eight countries. They played two shows at the Stockholm Konserthuset, the first date on the tour. Four days later they played the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The 2nd show didn't start until midnight and there seemed to be some issues. Perhaps Michael James was feeling a bit peeved due to the late start since his comments don't seem to gel with the actual recordings from a few days earlier. Having said that, perhaps the performance did suffer. Anyway, interesting review. The JOHN COLTRANE Quartet in Amsterdam by Michael James THE SCENE IN Amsterdam's Concertgebouw at midnight on Saturday, 27th October, was to my mind more typical of a rock-and-roll concert, and an ill-organised one at that, than...

paul bley by Len Dobbin. In 1950 Paul Bley went to NYC to study composition and conducting at Juilliard. He did quite a bit of jamming around town while he was in NY. My first meeting with Paul came in 1952 when the executive of the Emanon Jazz Society was meeting at Pat Sorrentino's home in the town of Mt. Royal. I had heard about Paul but had neither met nor heard him play. We lived in the same general direction and had a long conversation on the way home on the bus. He left inviting me to drop in on a rehearsal of his group. The next day after school was out I wended my way down to the Latin Quarter where Paul was rehearsing with Bob Roby, tenor sax, Neil Michaud, bass and Billy Graham, drums. The group was an excellent one and I was looking forward to dropping down to hear them in action but fate stepped in with a fire at the club and they never opened. Around this time Paul recorded some mambos which were released on the local Silver label. One was a very melodic original call...

1966 was a quieter recording year for Coltrane compared to the year before. He had evolved from his "Classic Quartet" and had settled into a new quintet format, but he still continued to experiment and add other musicians, especially at live concerts.  On Instagram I had posted all of Coltrane's output in vinyl from 1965. I then created two blog entries based on the posts :  1965 John Coltrane Recordings Part One  ,  1965 John Coltrane Recordings Part Two Having just created Trane's 1966 as six posts on Insta, I've now brought them together into this blog post. #1 of 5 for 1966. On Jan 23rd '66 Trane played at Stanford. Elvin and Rashied both on drums, but it was the night that Elvin called it quits, "The roof fell in". Click Link in Bio for a full description of the concert click here for link . The group minus Elvin then had a two week run at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, during which a recording session was held at Coast Recorders on Feb 2nd...