It's really not definite that there will be a (...2) following this - but there could well be. I'm thinking ahead here XD
Aaaaaaanyway... I mentioned the other day that I am trying to get myself back up to speed by putting together an exhaustive (and accurate... above all, accurate) list of all the different recordings of B's music in my possession. Naturally these will end up running the gamut from single tracks of dubious provenance on the one hand - or single oddities such as "Vanguard" by Ran Blake* - to nine-CD box sets, and pretty much everything in between. (OK, and as I also mentioned last time out, I shan't actually need to list all the albums I own as official releases, since they are now all in one place anyway and I'm finally in no danger of losing track.)
Advance notice: this post may appear to be complete filler, but it contains a number of useful observations - and will end up bringing any fully attentive reader up to date with my understanding of B's music, in all its head-spinning, complex glory; in the (admittedly rather unlikely) event than anyone is actually following at this point with that in mind, they will want to be sure they read this one carefully. (Then again, this month's second 1973 post also contained "new knowledge", or at least new working hypotheses... and hardly anyone read that one...)
The updated photo included in the second half of a post from March shows how many CD-Rs I amassed, back in the days when (apparently) all I did was listen to music and burn CDs and write out track listings. I must point out that the intimidating stack** on the left of the picture consists of all the stuff which is not related to B. as such - although there are doubtless a few exceptions which have slipped through the cracks. Those on the right are the ones I've been working through - not listening to them all, obviously, but making a brand-new list to replace the outdated one I made in 2012***. As it turns out, much to my relief, the list of bootleg live recordings I made back then was still usable. Another list of the box of tapes is also fine, for the simple reason that I never got round to dealing with the buggers (yet). But although I have now got a workable list of the actual albums (and fragments) featuring B. - and which I do not yet own in official form - there are a few things missing. Familie is accounted for, but where is The 8th Of July 1969? Marion Brown's Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun is probably with the other albums by that player-leader in the left-hand stack, assuming I even have it (and at this point, I honestly can't remember whether I do have that one); but I didn't come across Jacques Coursil's Black Suite or For Players Only by Leroy Jenkins and the Jazz Composer's (sic) Orchestra... definitely got those. Most irritatingly, I didn't come across Royal Vol. 1; that one is going to piss me off if I can't find it (and I am hoping it's just tucked away with a load of other Derek Bailey titles). The others... I can live with that small degree of uncertainty, for the time being.
Some observations which I made, along the way:
1. I seem to have collected more Circle recordings than I will ever need, most of which feature the same material over and over again (especially Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti" and the standard "There is No Greater Love"). Most of the longer sets also include at least one piece of B's - oddly enough, the composer least featured in these outings is Corea# - but generally this tends to be (inevitably) Comp. 6f. However the March 1971 Hamburg## concert also includes Comp. 6a and Comp. 6i, the latter being a special favourite of mine (and a cause for some excitement, whenever I came across another rendition of it); so I will actually make a point of listening to this one again sooner rather than later.
2. Something which I have looked at carefully, but not yet found time to play - as is the case with most of this stuff, obviously - is identified as The Rare Music Curator's Podcast #22. There is no context with that, to tell me at this point who this person was or how many other episodes s/he produced - but the one featuring B. was enough of a curiosity that I burned a copy, despite what must evidently have been decidedly "lo-fi" sound. Wouldn't you know it, included on there is "Confirmation", the number most obviously missing from AB's Charlie Parker Project. (Funny how these things work out, isn't it?)
There's no precise date with that, just October 1993 at the Bimhuis. Amsterdam, in turn, is listed as one of the venues which supplied the material for the NBH box set; but then, given that in that case we are clearly talking about a live date, is it really the case that Han Bennink was only present for that one night, in Zürich? I'm not at all sure I can buy that. (I was prompted to check the list of tapes, and I don't have a recording from Amsterdam, only from Antwerp - so, another live date.) Yes - confirmation is exactly what will be needed, before I can assume that those detailed recording credits listed on Discogs are fully reliable.
3. Woody Shaw's The Iron Men is another one of those "sideman" dates for B. - see above for some further examples - and I'd forgotten I even had this. The maestro is one of two reedmen, however, and he only plays on three of the six cuts; rather disappointingly, Eric Dolphy's "Iron Man" is not one of them (but then if he had played on that, I would have made a real point of seeking it out - and would probably never have forgotten about the album). He does play on the second track, which is another one Shaw knew from the Douglas sessions which he recorded as part of Dolphy's group: Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz", where B. played clarinet (and which I somehow managed to "listen" to without actually registering his playing at all). But the third track, Andrew Hill's "Symmetry", features B. on alto - and he sticks out a mile with a fierce solo. ["Symmetry" is also part of the programme for the CIMP album which I highlighted the other day as being near the top of my current wants list. More synchronicity.]
Side two of the album is given over to Shaw's originals, where two shorter pieces bookend a much longer one, featuring both B. and Arthur Blythe; but the piece itself ("Song of Songs") is heavily indebted to modal-era Coltrane, and I didn't find a great deal memorable about it. Pleasant enough, but -
4. I flagged up recently the fact that the version of "Yardbird Suite" on ABCPP features B. on piano, not alto sax, and that possibly this was because he had already recorded the tune in 1985. What I had completely forgotten was that he recorded it again in 1988, with Ran Blake. Like anything featuring Blake, it's totally different from B's quartet version for Magenta; indeed the whole album sounds fresh and vital to me###. Unfortunately - and this came back to me as I was trying to listen to it - the files from which my copy was burned were corrupt, and there are annoying little sound faults every few minutes. This eventually became a form of water torture, and I gave up after three tracks. But the album is good enough that I will now look to buy a copy - I know! me, a standards album..! - there is nothing "standard" about these readings.
5. Two trio recordings from late 1979 with Ray Anderson and Richard Teitelbaum must, of course, be among the earliest performances of Comp. 94. The groundwork for this conclusion was laid when I read Lock's detailed liners for that album; as we know, by the time of the performance captured for eventual release, guitarist James Emery had replaced Teitelbaum, but these are examples of the prototype. I have a recording from Berlin lasting 48 mins^, and one from Rome which lasts 95 mins. Good to know! - and figuring this out prompted me then to check...
6. ... whether I might have another trio, with Lewis and Dresser this time, from Antwerp in '85. I don't, at least not among the CD-Rs... but there it is among the tapes, a full hour of it. When I move on to the tapes at last, this will very probably be the first one I listen to {{{{@@@}}}}
7. CDs containing the various performances which made up B's 65th birthday celebrations in 2010 brought back a lot of stuff I had (again) forgotten. Tzadik's outer packaging for the eventual CD featuring "the forces trio" playing collage-era repertoire makes reference to the big event, where Zorn himself was also present, but over the years, a lot of this information had just vanished from my memory. If you had asked me without giving me a chance to check, I would have said that the material the three players prepared for the CD included both Comps. 23c and 40(o), which is not actually true. What is true is that the live set in 2010 contained both numbers, and that I found this to be a disappointingly "safe" choice^^. (Only Comp. 23c made it to the CD, however.) Coming back to this stuff now, I was also startled to find a one-off quartet comprising Zorn, Dave Douglas, Brad Jones and Hemingway playing (among other things) Comp. 23d.
Everything about this event was not only known to me - not quite at the time (I didn't attend, for a start, nor was I asked to), but not long afterwards - but the story of how things had unfolded was gradually pieced together, right here in the blog..! (Those long years of inactivity just ate up chunks of my memory.) I did remember having written rather a lot about the Tzadik release, later; but most if not all of the events from 2010 had just evaporated. Well, the posts themselves have not gone anywhere.
I still think the trio was playing it a bit safe on the album, and especially with the material for the live performance - but there you go. In my first post about the latter, I was right about "Impressions" representing an unusual choice - this band tackling a standard, I mean, even if it's one by Coltrane^^^ - but still wrong, because it wasn't the first time they had done it. I wrote very recently (in the tenth footnote to another piecing-together-of-ideas post) about what may (or may not) have been the first such occasion of this, in 1992 at Victoriaville; back in 2010, I don't think I had that CD in my collection (although the information on its track listing, at least, was available on Restructures).
As for Zorn's quartet rendition of Comp. 23d: that was the only recording from the 2010 extravaganza which I revisited this weekend, and it was pretty cool. As far as I can remember (for all we can trust my memory on such things, ahem...), it was the first version I've ever heard of this piece which doesn't just start straight in at the beginning; the quartet ambles up to it, little by little, with Brad Jones teasing out a reference to the opening theme - which is then not picked up right away by the band, which works some other ideas around in its collective mouth for a minute or two, chewing away, before swallowing that and moving on to the piece proper. It's nice to hear such familiar material handled in such an unfamiliar way; although in the case of this tune, above all, it so obviously deserves to be considered a modern standard in its own right that there is also nothing wrong with playing it "straight", just so long as it gets played.
- Right, I'm calling it there: there were other entries on the list, but the process of sorting through stuff has not completely finished anyway, and this post is now in danger of getting unmanageably long if I don't break it in half. So as it turns out, there will be a (...2) after all - !
Oh, one thing which is strikingly obvious but still bears pointing out: my collection of (unofficial) recordings comes sharply to a halt in 2012. That is, I don't think I have anything recorded after then; I was already pretty well (self-)isolated from the online community by that point, and of course that only became more and more true over the next ten years. The process of picking up the threads - trying to add to the collection by gathering various bits and pieces recorded after that date - is not one I am in any position to embark on right away; but that's OK, because as you can see, I have plenty to be getting on with in the meantime..!
* This is the only track on Blake's Rapport album which happens to feature B's playing.
** There's a whole extra shelf which is not visible in this picture. In the case of the Braxton collection, that bottom shelf contains only a few things - a handful of CD-Rs without paper sleeves (which I've just been looking through, this very weekend - oh, and yes it is still the "weekend" here in the UK, today being the Spring Bank Holiday. They haven't taken those away from us yet...) - but the unit on the left contains another shelf crammed full of discs. There is so much material there, indeed, that I'm awfully glad I did not continue to indulge this particular obsessive habit of mine beyond a certain point...
*** The house move in 2014 didn't work out too well, in most respects; and specifically, as regards my present purposes, we ended up with tons of unsorted stuff crammed into cupboards and drawers "to be sorted later", which never got looked at again - or not until we were getting ready to move again, last year. Most of that painstakingly-annotated music spent eight years tucked away out of sight, while my recollection of exactly what was in there grew gradually hazier - and the likelihood of my being able to organise my thoughts sufficiently to resume writing about it receded, with each passing year...
# This does seem awfully ironic, when one considers the prevailing tendency these days to file Circle under Corea's name. (To be fair this is not his fault, nor is it unique to this group: labels and discographers etc tend to treat Air as a Threadgill project, too. There will be other examples.)
## This appears to be a widely-circulated recording. Individual tracks or excerpts from it turn up all over the place, but the complete concert is both in my CD-R collection and in the box of tapes...
### From memory - of London in this case, not Vienna: the Penguin Guide... was rather sniffy about this album, summing it up as "a trifle mandarin, and more than a touch pointless" (yes, this really is from memory - so I can't guarantee I have remembered the exact wording). Doesn't sound that way to me at all; but then I am not attempting to write a guide to a squillion CDs by different artists, to meet a publisher's deadline... so can take a little more time over my opinions instead of just phoning them in.
^ A copy of the Berlin date among the tapes purports to run for 55m. Hmm... interesting :)
^^ I exchanged emails with Alex Hawkins not long after writing about the Tzadik album, and he agreed with me that the choice of material hadn't seemed terribly adventurous. (Still, I daresay that this was at least partly driven by Zorn, who was producing the recording.) I still think that in my "ideal world", the trio got thrown a brand-new score they had never seen before - and just let themselves go wild with it. Just imagine..! But that would represent a completely different type of project, of course.
^^^ The idea of this band being asked to play "All the Things You Are" or "Body and Soul" makes me feel quite queasy. Naturally this says a lot about me, and not so much about anything else, but... well, no, let's leave that there. (For now, at least...)
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