Jazz for aficionados

Today's Listen:

Count Basie  --  APRIL IN PARIS

Nice booklet, with a few great photos.   Recorded 1955-56.

Notes:  "For the greatest  in big band music, start here!  April in Paris is the high water mark for Count Basie's legendary orchestra and includes the most famous version of the title song, a performance that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.  Above all, this recording embodies the best of what a highly synchronized big band at the top of its game can do---inspire dance, swing, and repeated listening."

I assume this was back when the Grammy awards meant something.

april in paris  (alternate take)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3HhxLKHnYg   

magic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMm-PH90SwU   

corner pocket
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcmPGdDecw   

shiny stockings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWqbQDjLK44  

april in paris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCmcoZktZG4 

Cheers

Chick Corea Friends LP
Chick Corea Mad Hatter LP
Any Dexter Gordon!

McCoy Tyner / McCoy Tyner and the Latin All-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57XAyxxA0AY

Rosita 
pretty pretty tune from Coleman Hawkins meets Ben webster

happy new year!

frogman Thanks for the response on the question of "mindless riffing". I was busy celebrating the new year and had not the time to answer.

i assume "mindless riffing" can also be associated with "improvisation" if one does not, for want of choice, or cannot, for want of talent, stick to the guidelines you mentioned in your lengthy and helpful summary.

Since the passing of Coltrane most Jazz critics (yuk), and I have read this in too many articles to count, name Sonny Rollins as the "greatest living improvisor". Here is just one example:

In one sense the history of the last thirty years in jazz might be written in terms of the length of the solos that its horn players have been able to sustain. Certainly one contribution of bebop was that its best players (but only its best) could undertake longer improvisations which offered a flow of musical ideas without falling into honking or growling banalities. I do not mean that the younger players of the forties were either the first or the only jazz musicians to be able to do this, only that for some of them a sustained solo was a primary concern. However, a great deal of extended soloing in jazz has had the air of an endurance feat—a player tries to keep going with as little repetition as possible. But when the ideas are original and are imaginatively handled, such playing can have virtues of its own. However, a hornman’s best solos are apt to be continuously developing linear inventions. Sonny Rollins has recorded long solos which, in quality and approach, go beyond good soloist’s form and amount almost to sustained orchestrations.

Excerpt of an article written From Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 183-93.

Full article here:

Sonny Rollins: Jazz Improvisation | Saxophone | Analysis - Mara Marietta