Free Jazz Music

Great as a record of DeSylva,Henderson & Brown's contribution to popular music. Check out how many of the tunes you did'nt know you were familiar with.
The great pity then that the renditions of these classics are culled from ancient archives (sounding sometimes in something Before mono!.)

Good News! (1995 Studio Cast)
DeSylva, Brown & Henderson Revisited, Vol. 2
The Great American Composers - Desylva Brown & Henderson

I was present for this concert in Victoriaville in 2003; it was a pretty interesting but (I thought) somewhat awkward shotgun marriage between two very different groups. It's a sextet instrumentation, but basically this is two trios: the Evan Parker/Alex Von Schlippenbach/Paul Lytton trio (pianist AVS a replacement for bassist Barry Guy, who couldn't make the tour for personal reasons) plus Peter Brötzmann's Die Like a Dog Trio (with William Parker & Hamid Drake). Basically it's a single CD-length improvisation that falls into three long chunks, with brief sextet passages mortaring them together: the EP/AVS/PL trio, a trio for AVS plus the two drummers, & then the Die Like a Dog trio. Brötzmann's segment is ineffectual, but the other two chunks are excellent--especially the piano/double-drums sequence. If you were hoping for a real mano-a-mano encounter between the bands then you'll be disappointed: the interaction between the leaders is virtually nil beyond the opening & closing moments of the performance. I get the impression that Evan Parker wasn't all that keen on sparring with Brötzmann: at two key points he curtly cuts out the moment Brötzmann re-enters. (Onstage it looked like he was going into the wings to change a reed, but I wonder if that was a ploy....) For reasons of space the encore from the original concert has been left off the CD, which is a pity (as I remember it, it was pretty good, & was the full sextet all the way).

Four stars, I guess, for the best of this CD, though really it's a strange, awkward beast of an album. It's the kind of festival supergroup album that you suspect was the brainchild of the concert promoter (Michel Levasseur) rather than the musicians themselves--"Hey! let's get these two groups to play together!" The results are worthwhile, but for the best of the principals' work you probably should go to the releases by the individual trios (both of which have recent 2-CD sets in print).

Much like his album "3-D Lifestyles", which sought to breach the gap between hi-hop and jazz, this record seeks to do so with spoken word and jazz. An assortment of poets recite alongside Osby's stylings with varying degrees of interest and effect. it's a project that would likely be wholly embraced now, what, with the surge in popularity in poetry nowadays, but at the time went under the radar because it had no general audience. It's a wild record, careening over various styles and rhythms in true Osby fashion, but maintaining a sensible edge.

If you like poetry recordings, you'll dig it, though you may not play it much; thanks to Osby, it's a thinking person's poetry record, even if the poetry doesn't always reach the levels that the music does. Get it used.

This is another marvelous reissue from the America label which specialized in the late '60s in recording American expats living in Paris.
They recorded Braxton, the Art Ensemble, Paul Bley and others. This particular Archie Shepp date has a great odd lineup of musicians.
Shepp himself sticks to soprano sax thourghout, Noah Howard plays alto sax, Clifford Thornton plays trumpet, Leroy Jenkins plays viola, Julio Finn plays harmonica, Dave Burrell plays the piano, Earl Freeman is on bass, Chicago Beauchamp sings and chants, and the great Sunny Murray is on drums.
I am not going to say too much about the music since you can listen to samples. I will offer only the following observations. This is not one of those Shepp CDs that offer a lot of Burrell. He is essential to the session but as a very rhythmic compist. Murray, Burrell and Freeman provide an enormously strong pulse throughout. This is music to dance and march to. It is strongly melodic with the wilder and freer moments coming from Shepp, Howard and Thornton. Finn's harmonica and Beauchamp's chants and shouted encouragements add a real Chicago blues feel to the music. As for Jenkins, listen to the way he starts off Black Gipsy. It is hard to imagine the way strings have been used in jazz for the last almost fourty years without the contributions that Jenkins made at this period of the music's history.
It is odd not to hear any of Shepp's tenor but he sounds great on the straight horn. Mostly, he is to be praised for conceiving the possibility of music like this and for making it a collective vehicle instead of a solo expression of his greatness. I like Shepp quite a bit and regard this CD as one of his great works from the '60s. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.