Michael Ullman
The centenary of bassist/composer Charles Mingus’ birthday is days away and I am listening to the beautifully packaged and processed and richly annotated 3 lps of Mingus’s Lost Album, recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s London club in 1972.
This cooperative music is deliberately international in instrumentation and personnel and theme, proffering its own characteristic, and often quite beautiful, mix of sounds.
With their shifting textures and compositional variety, the relatively short pieces show the ways — in this case mostly gentle and lyrical — five musicians can fruitfully interact.
Oscar Peterson always seemed at his best live, which is how we find the pianist in this beautifully recorded, newly issued set.
To this listener, the quartet generates a drama of gradual enlightenment, as if extroversion signified some sort of illumination.
“When you play with authority, then that’s what the music is about, like ooooh baby, and sing it.” — Cecil Taylor
Soprano saxophonist Emile Parisien’s new disc is deliberately, and satisfyingly, international.
The rewards of these and other recordings provide ample proof that, with its shape-shifting qualities, the string quartet will continue to be a powerful asset for talented jazz composers.
Whether playing together or apart, on this 1981 recording the two saxophonists couldn’t sound more gracefully inspired or more compatible.
The trio shares Cecil Taylor’s love of rational freedom and adventure, but it doesn’t try to reproduce the pianist’s rip-roaring intensity.
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