That's good to hear. Perhaps I'll check it out when I get a chance. I also heard that Burn doesn't give 60s jazz its due. If so, that would be a shame. That's my favorite time period for the genre.
Chuck0 -------------
I've watch about four hours of it. It's okay, but... It's like anything to do with the arts, it always takes the superficial turn, and there is not enough music in it. I mean complete, solid, beginning to end pieces. You know with a careful selection and a few hints, the music will tell the stories.
The other problem is that I am not that crazy about Winton Marsalles. I like his voice, I like what he has to say, but he is stuck on New Orleans. I like how he describes music and am glad to hear about the technical details, and I especially like it when he explains something by playing it, but... It's his taste that bothers me a little. It's not just that New Orleans is old, and more than a little corny, which I can get over---but something else. WM has sophisticated and developed his taste into a particular kind of refinement, and that refinement is just not the direction that jazz took in the move from swing to bebop---which is exactly the point that I like. WM didn't make that turn, and because of that he isn't quite cued into how that works (at least for a listener).
So, yes I am interested to see what he has to say about Parker, Gillespie, Monk, and then Miles Davis and John Coltrain. What I am really looking for is how WM and Burns deals with Coltrain. I've sat down and listened to JC's four or five versions of My Favorite Things in sequence (many times) just to figure out what he was following to get himself out that far. The other thing is to see how much McCoy Tyner gets credit for. If you listen to those Impulse albums enough you will see that MT is doing an awful lot of work to make JC's flights come out right. I personally think McCoy Tyner should get a lot more credit than I think he gets for some of those big pieces, like Love Supreme. They had a really beautiful friendship, like Ellington and Straighthorn, and developed together.
Late in the forties or early fifties Ellington had a trio and did some really avantgard things---they were better than Debussy and very close to that kind of impressionism---all kinds of colors. I've only seen a film clip of this once at the Pacific Film Archives. I suppose if I bought every remastered CD and looked hard enough I could find recordings of these. They set you back in your seat, because I can hear Ellington working in and around the European avantgard, playing with some of its ideas, say like Eric Satie.
And there is crazy, wildly funny Count Basie. What a fucking character, sitting over on the far left with his all white piano, all white suit. There are a few film clips of Basie featuring Billy Holiday in the late Thirties in small club sets that are some of the best jazz on film, I mean for the feeling that I associate with jazz---completely hammered and listening with my whole mind, lost in the city at night.
There is another trip, and that is to take a song you like and listen to everybody you can find who played it. `Round Midnight' is good for this. I like `The Man I Love' and it is waay corny. But listen to the Benny Goodman Trio version, and then change over to an early Miles version---they are very close---which is a big surprise. There are two cuts of Miles on Prestige with Milt Jackson on vibes of the The Man I Love (Round Midnight is on this, with Monk, Coltrain). Then change back over to a couple of Billy Holiday versions The Man I Love. What you get by doing something like this is a feeling for the musicians talking to each other---Hey check this out. No that isn't the way it goes, it goes like this, see...
I was lucky that my mother worked in record stores in LA during WWII, so I got to discover Fats Waller, along with Louie Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Josh White, Nat Cole, Billy Holiday, Basie, Ellington, and so on. Even so, it was a big change to discover BeBop as a college kid just as I burned out on R&R. It was like discovering art for the first time, especially Monk, Miles, and Coltrain.
Too much babble. Burns has the same problem. I put on an old Monk, Blue Note Album.
Chuck Grimes