January 2012 was a good month for jazz shows in New York City, with more shows than I could sneak out for. Of the four I did catch, I was lucky to score recordings of each.

The sound quality might not be up to the standard you’re used to here, but the performances are well worth it.

For more about this episode, including a list of the artists and tracks appearing, visit www.burningdervish.com, click on “Podcast” and look for the episode, “Tales from the Concert Crypt”

If you like what you hear, support the artists; buy their music and go see them live. Until next time, peace.

Jamaican dub of the roots reggae era is the direct antecedent of modern remix culture, which spans music, the visual arts, and even high technology. For the purposes here, it is dub’s immediate effect on the brain that is most impressive…

For a setlist and details about the music in this episode, visit www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcast” and look for the episode, “The Majesty of King Tubby”.

As always, if you dig the music in this podcast, please support the artists by buying their music and where possible, going to see them live. Thanks.

Enjoy. And let me know what you think. And until next time…Peace.

This music was recorded over a six month span in 1961 and illustrates the breakneck speed with which jazz was transforming.

In late May and early June 1961, Tyner was part of the John Coltrane group that recorded the ground-breaking Impulse! album Africa/Brass. By early November, the month that record was released, the core group of Coltrane, Tyner, Elvin Jones, Reggie Workman and notably, Eric Dolphy, were turning the jazz world upside down with the aggressive music they made across four nights at New York’s Village Vanguard. Track the evolution here.

For a setlist and other details about this music, visit www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcast” and look for the episode, “McCoy Tyner: 1961″. Enjoy. And let me know what you think.

Remember, if you like what you hear, support the artist. McCoy is still out there gigging and making records. Go to a show and buy some recordings.

Until next time, peace.

In that spirit I want to share a bunch of songs that I enjoyed discovering throughout 2011, all from records released during the calendar year. I have no idea if this was the “best” music issued or even what that means but I hope your ears are tickled and your curiosity is piqued enough to dig in further.

If you do want to learn more about the music here, go to www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcast” and look for the episode “2011 - A Year in Music”. There you will find a complete details concerning the tracks featured here as well as links to my original reviews of each of the albums these were pulled from or in one case, an interview I did with one of the artists.

If you like what you heard, please remember to support the artists: buy their music and go see them live. Enjoy. And let me know what you think.

Also, if you are inclined, please consider kicking in a buck or two to support this podcast. Every little bit helps with the hosting and streaming and keeps us from being victims of our own success. Thanks.

Until next time…Peace.

Each of these have a backstory worth digging into. To that end, I have included links to information about most of them on burningdervish.com. Visit the site, click on “Podcast” and look for the episode “R&B Lost and Found”.

If you like your soul music with a little bit of funk and a psychedelic edge, you’ll get that here, especially if you make it through to the tracks at the end…

If you like what you hear, please remember to support the artists: buy their music and go see them live. Until next time…Peace.

For about 15 minutes 20 years it ago it was Lenny Kravitz. More recently, we had Amy Winehouse and just this year, Adele.

Many artists fashion superstar careers mining retro gold. Others register barely a blip.

For this episode of the Burning Dervish Podcast, we are going to focus on Back Door Slam, one of those lesser-known artists who hit the scene, made some noise and went their separate ways.

For a complete rundown of the set, please visit www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcast” and look for the episode “Back Door Slam”.

Across just nine months in one corner of that world, pianist McCoy Tyner played on a variety of sessions that together serve as a concise illustration of the ground bop was ceding to modality, melody and more. During this time, he began his tenure and apprenticeship with saxophonist John Coltrane, led his own first sessions and participated in the creation of music whose excitement and ingenuity has yet to be surpassed.

This podcast is adapted from a playlist I originally created for the website AllAboutJazz.com. For a complete rundown detailing the artists, albums and songs featured here, please visit www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcasts” and look for the episode “McCoy Tyner: 1960 & 61″.

Two nations - Ethiopia and Jamaica - connected by one people, much common lore and shared yearnings for repatriation and unification.

Music is another shared connection. Bear witness here.

For a complete rundown detailing the artists, albums and songs featured here, please visit www.burningdervish.com. Click on “Podcast” and look for the episode “Exiles from Eden”.

If you like what you heard, please remember to support the artists: buy their music and go see them live. Until next time…Peace.

For a complete rundown of what you’ve heard, please visit the “Podcasts” page on www.burningdervish.com.

Enjoy.

Over these 70 minutes or so we rack up the miles, traveling from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to Africa via Jamaica, on into India and Persia. We listen in on Dubbers, Drummers, Mystics and Toasters. For a complete set list from this podcast please visit www.burningdervish.com, click on Podcast and look for the episode, “Lion Roam”.

John Coltrane and his Quintet (Coltrane on saxophones, McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Art Davis and Reggie Workman both on bass) played a late-summer residency at New York’s Village Gate in 1961.

On at least one of those nights, August 17, the band was a sextet and included Eric Dolphy on reeds. In addition, it appears Coltrane’s Atlantic Records stablemate Roland Kirk sat in as well.

The above-information comes from a terrific two-part, first-person account on the personal blog of a man who attended that night. His entire essay is worth reading so let’s forgo quoting it here and send you right over to his website for “Some Favorite Things I’ve Wanted To Write Down” and “Some Favorite Things I’ve Wanted To Write Down - Continued.”

If only more “regular” people who saw legendary shows like these told their tales…I would suggest leaving a comment or emailing the author if you enjoy his essay. Perhaps the psychic energy will encourage more people to come out of the woodwork with their experiences. These stories help remind us that these musicians were real people, not mythic figures from some forgotten past.

“After lighting up the indie blogosphere at the beginning of 2011 with his six-song EP, Cabazon (Moodgadget Records), DJ and producer Jacob 2-2 is back with Fantasiarexia, featuring more of his 1980s-derived electro funk. Drawing from a well of inspiration that includes not only Herbie Hancock, Jean Michel Jarre and Windham Hill but also film, TV and commercial incidental music. The veil of nostalgia hangs heavily over this music…”

Read my full review at All About Jazz.

Atlantic Records issued this collection 1976. It is made up of two tracks each from four of the most important pianists in the post-bop era. Excepting one piece, each pianist is represented here in trio format…

Read my full review at All About Jazz.

Download:
Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner - Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner

Within a roughly ten day period in May and June 1961, John Coltrane recorded both his first record for Impulse! (Africa/Brass) and his last for Atlantic (Olé Coltrane). That was it for studio work that year until late December, when he put down the first tracks for what would ultimately become 1962’s Ballads. For Coltrane, 1961 was a year of playing live and of rapid transition, as his music really began to open up, especially during the celebrated fall tour of Europe and landmark run of shows thereafter at the Village Vanguard in New York.

In 1961 there was no Newport Jazz Festival owing to rowdy crowds at the previous year’s installment. In its place some local businessmen staged a “Music at Newport” event that did, in fact, feature many jazz acts. That show is what we are concerned with here.

There is a great, low-generation soundboard recording of the show available online. The collector who transferred this music from tape to digital did not do any sound processing but with a little EQ fiddling (bass boosting primarily) you can produce an incredible sounding recording.

This show is of the era when Coltrane was experimenting with two bass players and the line up of his Quintet for this show was: John Coltrane: tenor and soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner: piano; Art Davis: bass; Reggie Workman: bass; Elvin Jones: drums.

It is not clear if the surviving tracks constitute the entire program. The recordings include an introduction from the stage announcer, “Impressions”, “Naima” and “My Favorite Things”.

This show is an important one as it really is different in style and repertoire from what Coltrane was doing barely six months prior. This was the beginning of the critically-maligned, “controversial” Coltrane that the world has since come to know and love.

Download:
John Coltrane Quintet - Music at Newport, Newport, RI, July 1, 1961

Click on the thumbnail images in this post for real-size cover art (front cover by Simmdale and back by laryddave).

The Sutherland Hotel, on Chicago’s South Side, hosted many of the country’s top jazz performers in the 1950s and ’60s. The shows were put on in the Hotel’s first floor lounge. The Lounge, like many of Chicago’s jazz establishments, was integrated and drew a mixed-race crowd, though there are oral histories online that note it was a primarily white clientele.

According to the Lewis Porter book, The John Coltrane Reference, Coltrane played a run of shows between March 1 and 12, 1961. At least some of these sets were broadcast on WSBC Radio in Chicago, hosted by Larry Smith. Coltrane’s band consisted of:

John Coltrane: soprano and tenor saxohpone; McCoy Tyner: piano; Reggie Workman: bass; Raphael Don Garrett: bass; Elvin Jones: drums.

There have been various recorded versions of these shows floating around over the last decade with some dedicated members of the music trading community doing their best to piece together the best of all known sources. As of 2011, there is a widely-circulated torrent known as “Coltrane Sutherland 1961 Definitive edition Pitch Fixed” available online, with detailed notes as to the source material and edit work performed.

Of the 16 or so tracks available from this run, only a handful are in complete or near-complete state. There are especially hot versions of both “Impressions” and “Greensleeves”, each with dynamic McCoy Tyner solos. These are flawed but very, very listenable recordings well worth searching out.

“Thanks to artists like pianist Pablo Ziegler, woodwind multi-instrumentalist Paquito D’Rivera and bassist Pablo Aslan, the union of jazz and tango has been made complete over the last several decades. Tango music, which like jazz has had a long and complex history often entwined with issues of class, has been present in the Americas for well over 100 years. As popular music, tango was in many ways the main (only?) rival to jazz in in the dancehalls of the 1930s and 1940s.

Also like jazz, tango after World War II moved out of the ballrooms and into clubs and concert halls, becoming music to listen to and watch, with a much diminished or even non-existent role for dancing. While saxophonist Charlie Parker and the other early beboppers were leading this transformation in jazz, Argentinean-born bandeneon player Astor Piazzolla was doing the same for tango…”

Read the rest of my review on All About Jazz.

Africa/Brass is the first John Coltrane record I ever bought. It thoroughly perplexed me.

I was maybe 15 or 16 and way into the Grateful Dead. I read an interview with the band’s bass player, Phil Lesh, where he spoke about how he turned his band mates onto Coltrane, specifically via Africa/Brass. I came to learn over the years that the band was incredibly impacted and influenced by Coltrane’s early ’60s work (there is an excellent breakdown of this here) and that happenstance introduction started me on my exploration.

I was not entirely unfamiliar with or ignorant about jazz at the time, but I had a very, very superficial exposure. I can’t even recall what I may have been aware of at the time but there was certainly nothing like Africa/Brass in my consciousness.

What I initially picked up was a cassette tape. This was the mid-80s and if I recall correctly, none of the Impulse! stuff was in print any longer, certainly not on CD. If it was available I wasn’t stumbling across it…anyway, I purchased said used cassette and was eager to see what mind-boggling music could have possibly so motivated my musical heroes.

I wish I could say that I was immediately drawn in and absorbed by the music, but that was not the case. The music was incredibly dense to my ears, not at all what I thought “jazzy” should be. Even “Blues Minor”, the most bop-like track on the record, was left-of-center for me. Quite frankly, I was confused. Not put off, but thoroughly confused.

I kept that cassette tape for years. As my interest in and knowledge of music grew I would revisit Africa/Brass. I wish I could recall when I finally “got it” but it probably did not take as long as my memory implies. By the early 90s Coltrane was already a familiar reference point to me and had prepared me for some of my favorite records, such as Sonny Sharrock’s Ask The Ages and McCoy Tyner’s Fly With The Wind.

Those endless hours of Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead and various heavy prog rock records did a great job of teaching me how to listen to and appreciate this other world of music. I love it all.

Listen to Africa/Brass on MOG.

Download
John Coltrane Quartet - The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions
disc one | disc two

mccoy tyner trio with special guests josé james & chris potter
‘john coltrane and johnny hartman’
42. deutsches jazz festival
frankfurt, germany
28.10.2011

source: dvb-s > techno trend tt-premium 2300 > hdd > nero wave editor > flac
(mpeg1 layer 2/320 kbps)

mccoy tyner- p
chris potter - ts
gerald cannon - b
joe farnsworth- dr
josé james - voc

01 Applause 00:43
02 Fly With The Wind 19:18
03 Announcement McCoy Tyner 00:28
04 Ballad For Aisha 15:03
05 Announcement Jose James 00:38
06 Autumn serenade
07 If I could write a book
08 You are too beautiful
09 My one and only love
10 In a mellow tone
11 I should care

Download here.

The last release of ‘new’ material Atlantic was able to get from their Coltrane archives until their Heavyweight Champion box in 1995, Alternate Takes is a 1975 collection of different versions of some of the better-known songs Coltrane recorded for the label.

Given that the tracks in question were culled from the sessions for Giant Steps, Coltrane Jazz, and Coltrane’s Sound and truly are some of the saxophonist’s most enduring songs from that period, this an interesting if not entirely essential set.

These takes are only available on CD as part of the aforementioned Heavyweight Champion box, though there are many copies of the 1975 vinyl issue floating around.

Download:
John Coltrane - Alternate Takes