John Coltrane Quartet - Ballads

Slow morning...
 

Miles Davis at Newport 1958

It's a Miles Davis afternoon... 
 

Miles Davis — trumpet, Cannonball Adderley — alto saxophone, John Coltrane — tenor saxophone, Bill Evans — piano, Paul Chambers — bass, Jimmy Cobb — drums.

Making Lunch Music

The making of ham sandwiches is VASTLY improved by the playing of this record.  Science will no doubt verify this assertion.  Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery, Smokin at the Half Note.  ...I love Wynton's playing... 

Kind of Blue

The greatest record ever made? Yeah, I think so...

 

The Jazz Loft Project

Once upon a time there was a really incredible documentary magazine called DoubleTake. Issue 18 had Zoot Sims on the cover and an accompanying story entitled, “Nights of Incandescence” about the loft W. Eugene Smith had in New York in the 50’s and 60’s. Sadly, DoubleTake is no more, but that cover story grew into The Jazz Loft Project. Currently on exhibition at the gorgeous but labyrinth-like Chicago Cultural Center until September 19th.

“From 1957 to 1965, [photographer W. Eugene] Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at the loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career. He photographed the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He also recorded legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.”

I went yesterday and it was amazing. If you live in Chicago and have an interest in photography and/or jazz, it is not to be missed!

…Happiness

I grew up listening to the radio. I used to listen to talk radio when I was in junior high and high school. That was before talk radio became the fascist soapbox that it is today. Back then it was Steve and Gerry and Jonathan Brandmeier. In college I got addicted to public radio while working the overnight shift as a janitor. At that time I had a cheap Walkman knockoff and when the tape I was playing got played one too many times I’d tune into public radio and listen to the news. Years later when I got a 9-to-5, still addicted to public radio, I’d hold up in my room on the weekends and listen to This American Life and Dick Buckley; week after week for years. All those Sunday afternoons spent getting drunk and reading or writing fragments of stories no one would ever see with Buckley playing all his favorite “good old good ones.” What an education Buckley gave me in jazz!

Dick Buckley died yesterday at the age of 85. He was a Chicago institution. He had an encyclopedic mind when it came to jazz. Truth be told, he was a horrible DJ. He’d flub lines and forget what he was talking about, play the wrong record, or just have dead air for a minute; but all that and his conversational manner just made him all that much more endearing. He was like that crazy uncle, spinning his jazz records, going on and on about them.

Radio is such a strange thing. When it’s done well there can be this bond that develops with a DJ, a certain kind of intimacy having this voice there in the room with you, day after day, or week after week. I don’t listen to public radio much anymore. They’ve taken the humanity out of it somehow. Bob Edwards has been relegated, This American Life is a pretty packaged product, and they never play jazz anymore. The personal has been replaced with an overly produced, glossy, corporate feeling, antiseptic thing. Going or gone are the likes of Jean Shepherd and Joe Frank and Harry Shearer. Gone is a simpler kind of radio with someone at the microphone talking, playing some records. Someone’s voice there in the room with you week after week to help pass those drunk’n afternoons.

Rest in peace Dick Buckley. Happiness…

Coltrane - "Naima" - 1965