Nostalgia in Times Square
	Artist: Mingus Big Band

Who's your favorite jazz artist?

Who By Fire

Wow, what can you say about such giants of music playing together?

Can you think of some other stellar collaborations?

(hat tip: Schmoochie)

Spent a lazy weekend kicking back with the bf, reminiscing about the music that made the biggest impacts on us Way Back When. ‘Horace Silver’, says the bf. Oh, yeah, then a lazy weekend afternoon arguing about just which of Horace Silver tracks was The Best – The Preacher? Doodlin’? Opus de Funk? Filthy McNasty? Nica’s Dream? Sister Sadie?

Silver isn’t one of those names that have impacted on the American consciousness in the same way Nat King Cole or Billie Holliday or Louie Armstrong or Bennie Goodman or Ella Fitzgerald have – names that even those who don’t know their music still recognise – but he pioneered Hard Bop jazz that fused gospel, rhythm and blues and jazz into an art form unsurpassed then or since. He composed numerous arrangements and his recordings were almost exclusively his own original works. For half a century, his music has influenced younger musicians and he himself has promoted and championed succeeding generations of musicians. And not just jazz; Steely Dan’s biggest hit, ‘Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number’ used the bass riff that opens ‘Song for My Father’. Silver has always been conscious of and active in tense social and cultural issues, via the medium of jazz music in the 60s and early 70’s with his three albums, United States of Mind, and has spent much of the last couple of decades exploring deeper philosophical questions through his music.

In recent months, it’s been a depressing litany of RIPs of major musical artists, and I’m so happy to be able to say Horace Silver is still with us. So sit back and enjoy what the bf and I finally agreed was our favourite tune, Senor Blues, recorded here in 1959.

This afternoon I was doing what I always do when I'm not doing something else: clicking around YouTube listening for fresh jazz revelations. Somehow I got to this strikingly intense solo from a pianist I hadn't heard of, and Googling around for the work of this "Robi Botus," discovered a band he was in led by an extraordinary musician. Mark Brown is a Toronto-based bass play with a sound fat enough to eat Ontario entire. He calls his band Rinsethealgorithm" (a MySpace link; check out especially the lyrical track "Like Sleepwalking With Headphones On," which has much better sound quality than the video). Which I learned from this interview comes from a bit of London DJ slang: "rinse" means doing something really well. Totally absorbing it in fluidity, I suppose. A very jazz-like ideal. Considering that an algorithm is a template for solving a problem, "rinsing the algorithm," to Brown's mind, means handling any problem really well. That he does.

Check out the whole interview: it's a perfect expressional of what I call the "jazzitude"—the mix of humility, open-mindedness, large-soulness, and improvisational five-sense mindfulness that you so often hear when jazz musicians describe what they're trying to do with their lives.

He explains that he spent a long time not listening to any bass players, just horn players and, especially, singers: "to learn the ornaments, the vibrato, anything that would help me to emote on my instrument." It shows. He rings out every note with a different articulation, like he's singing.

Rinsing the algorithm. Dig it.

As John Amato will tell you, when I'm not trying to figure out wingnuts and writing about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, I'm prowling YouTube for jazz videos to send my soul into the stratosphere. I've been promising John a Music Club post for forever, but I've been procastinating—I had an idea to write some intricate essay laying bare the true spirit of jazz improvisation, etc., etc.; but we writers always think the words can do it better than the music. Stevie Wonder and Toots Theilmans prove us wrong.

The way I personally listen to jazz is, like jazz itself, improvisational. I never buy CDs or downloads from the iTunes store. I just spend hours leading my ears on wonderful YouTube adventures, letting the recommendations lead where they will. It's a great way to discover whole new genres, and it's fun to be evangelical about what you find: when I uncover something exciting and new to me, I tweet it. I hope my jazz leanings don't come as a surprise to the hundreds of folks who follow me on Twitter to learn what I'm thinking about wingnuts and Richard Nixon. (That stuff I update on Facebook: feel free to join my group as a friend—I'd love to have you.)

Two major distinguishing factors that make Eddie Harris an innovator had to do with his teacher at DuSable High School in Chicago, and his use of the Varitone Saxophone. It’s a pickup for saxophone. If you look closely at the video, you’ll see he’s got a line going from his instrument to a black box, and that he fiddles with it from time to time. This was a now defunct piece of technology invented by H & A Selmer, Inc., in an attempt to give the saxophone the same versatility as other electrified instruments.

His teacher was Walter Dyett was the kind of music teacher many serious musicians would love to have. Many of his students were successful professional musicians: Gene Ammons, Nat "King" Cole, Bo Diddley, Dorothy Donegan (and Dorothy Donegan again), Julian Priester.

Which old standards (players or pieces) have your ear?

Note: Our sister site Newstalgia has Backstage Weekend with Massive Attack - Live at the Phoenix Festival 1996.

What a lineup! John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones in 1961 in Germany crushing through 'Trane's modal masterpiece "Impressions". What more could you ask for?

Bumping the 50 State Strategy until tomorrow night to pay respects to Kenny Rankin.

AP:

Kenny Rankin, a brilliant pop vocalist and highly regarded musician-songwriter whose stylings ranged from jazz to pop to the world music influences he picked up as a child in New York, has died of complications related to lung cancer, his record company announced Monday. He was 69.

Rankin died Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Mack Avenue Records spokesman Don Lucoff said.

UPDATE:

John Amato:

I just found out about his death a little while ago and I'm stunned. I met Kenny about 12 years ago and he was a really nice guy. He had an angelic voice that seemed almost impossible for a man of his size to produce. I saw him play at the Catalina a few weeks after we met and he was incredible. I never had the honor of playing with him, but one time about four years ago he asked me to bring my flute to sit in with him (after he heard me play with some friends) at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles and I couldn't make it. What a treat it would have been for me to jam with just him and his guitar. And it's a loss I can never make up.

We'll miss you Kenny. You brought a lot of joy to the world with your incredible voice and heart. RIP...

Max Roach was a drummer, percussionist and composer. He was the first jazz musician to receive the MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius Grant,’ in 1988. For the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation he composed, along with Oscar Brown, the ‘Freedom Now” Suite. The album cover of ‘We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite’ recalls the diner sit-ins of the sixties.

Eddie Kahn, bass; Clifford Jordan, saxophone; Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, piano. Abbey Lincoln sings ‘Freedom Day’ from the suite.

Live! With Robben Ford