What jazz music are you listening to?

[PHC1]

Keep coming across husband/wife efforts...

Very pleasant listen.

[bart]

Hank Crawford - Double Cross
via Qobuz




Recorded in '65 and '67.

Very soulful album.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by bart

Hank Crawford - Double Cross
via Qobuz




Recorded in '65 and '67.

Very soulful album.

Was listening to it the other day. Nice.

[bart]

Janne Mark - Kontinent
with Arve Henriksen
Qobuz 24/96




ACT brings out a lot of interesting releases.
Sometimes unlistenable (to me) but often real gems.
This album is from the latter category.
Janne Mark has a fantastic voice, and meanwhile, you sharpen your knowledge of Danish.
Henriksen's trumpet sound makes you melt.
This one goes into my Roon library!

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by bart

Janne Mark - Kontinent
with Arve Henriksen
Qobuz 24/96




ACT brings out a lot of interesting releases.
Sometimes unlistenable (to me) but often real gems.
This album is from the latter category.
Janne Mark has a fantastic voice, and meanwhile, you sharpen your knowledge of Danish.
Henriksen's trumpet sound makes you melt.
This one goes into my Roon library!

Beautiful album. While I do not understand the lyrics, I sense they are nostalgic? Foggy, rainy day is what I am sensing in her lyrics and instruments playing... Nordic nostalgia?

[PHC1]

And yet another husband/wife. It's not even funny anymore but it is a great album.

[PHC1]

Between all the great trumpeters like Freddie Hubbard, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Donald Byrd... Thad Jones may get lost in the shuffle.

I think Thad Jones has a wonderful trumpet tone and playing style and is worth a listen from time to time.

[PHC1]

Ira Gershwin famously said, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them”.



Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless.

[PHC1]

Body and Soul
Written in 1930, this tale of heartbreak, yearning and devotion is considered an essential jazz standard by musicians, and is a favorite song of singers and instrumentalists alike.

It is relatively harmonically complex, one of its distinguishing features being the fact that its ‘bridge’ (the ‘B’ in its AABA structure) begins in the key of D major, half a step up from the D flat major home key.

The composer, Johnny Green, wrote various other songs that have become jazz standards, including ‘Out of Nowhere’ and ‘I Cover The Waterfront’.

Classic version of Body & Soul: Coleman Hawkins
Hawkins’ two choruses (available to hear on various compilation albums) are shockingly modern for 1939, when this landmark recording was made.

Considered by many to be the father of the tenor saxophone in jazz, his dense, chromatic lines foreshadow bebop, which would become the dominant style over the course of the following decade or so.

The recording is unusual in that he barely refers to the melody, so to hear the song a little closer to the way in which the composer intended, try Ella Fitzgerald’s version from Ella Swings Gently with Nelson.

John Coltrane’s recording from Coltrane’s Sound is played faster with a lilting feel and various harmonic twists. This is one of the most recorded songs of all time, and many of the great artists of jazz and popular song have tackled it at some point in their careers.

[PHC1]

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
This piece was written as an elegy for Lester Young, who, as well as being one of the most influential tenor players of all time, was a cultural and stylistic icon, one of his trademarks being his wide-brimmed pork pie hats.

This sad, elegant melody has had lyrics put to it a number of times, perhaps most famously by Joni Mitchell on her collaborative album with the bassist, Mingus.

Classic version of Goodbye Porkpie Hat: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um
Mingus’s most famous album was recorded in May 1959, two months after Lester Young had died.

John Handy and Booker Ervin, both on tenor, play the 12-bar melody in unison first, then again an octave apart before Handy solos, making use of some distinctive flutter-tonguing.



Lyrics Goodbye Porkpie Hat:



Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Charles Mingus
When Charlie speaks of Lester
You know someone great has gone
The sweetest swinging music man
Had a Porkie Pig hat on
A bright star
In a dark age
When the bandstands had a thousand ways
Of refusing a black man admission
Black musician
In those days they put him in an
Underdog position
Cellars and chitlins'

When Lester took him a wife
Arm and arm went black and white
And some saw red
And drove them from their hotel bed
Love is never easy
It's short of the hope we have for happiness
Bright and sweet
Love is never easy street!
Now we are black and white
Embracing out in the lunatic New York night
It's very unlikely we'll be driven out of town
Or be hung in a tree
That's unlikely!

Tonight these crowds
Are happy and loud
Children are up dancing in the streets
In the sticky middle of the night
Summer serenade
Of taxi horns and fun arcades
Where right or wrong
Under neon
Every feeling goes on!
For you and me
The sidewalk is a history book
And a circus
Dangerous clowns
Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions
They have been handed
Day by day
Generations on down

We came up from the subway
On the music midnight makes
To Charlie's bass and Lester's saxophone
In taxi horns and brakes
Now Charlie's down in Mexico
With the healers
So the sidewalk leads us with music
To two little dancers
Dancing outside a black bar
There's a sign up on the awning
It says "Pork Pie Hat Bar"
And there's black babies dancing
Tonigh