Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC , Nat Hentoff The Fabled Blue Notes The two partners were of indeterminate age, unfailingly polite, and passionately knowledgeable about black jazz. Since 1939, they had operated...
...Putting a Blue Note record on at home was like being part of an after-hours session at a club...
...Everyone listened to each other...
...And so, many of the most influential and ceaselessly astonishing jazz recordings remained unavailable...
...But Alfred was willing to listen again to what he had not at first understood, and so in time he recorded Thelon-ious Monk and Bud Powell—the best recordings they ever made...
...Francis Wolff took photographs of the sessions and, I assume, was involved in the business end as well...
...A superb set of Wolpe's music is Enactments/From Here on Farther/Second Piece for Violin Alone (Nonesuch 78024) performed by Continuum...
...Eventually, Alfred and Francis Wolff went elsewhere...
...That's a vividly accurate description of his own music, as well as of some contemporary jazz...
...There was a spacious warmth in the sound, the rhythms, the deeply involved instrumental conversations...
...From time to time, reissues were put out from the Blue Note vaults, but they were not kept in the catalog because they didn't sell enough...
...He liked boogie-woogie pianists, Sidney Bechet, and big-souled, big-toned, swing-style tenor saxophonists...
...But when he performed, Hank Williams embodied the blues as well as the quintessence of honky-tonk music...
...Each set contains newly released performances as well as alternate takes, along with lucid historical and discographical notes...
...Each shared a distinctive ambience...
...When he did, it was in a European accent...
...I also remember Charlie Parker speaking of him...
...No musician ever seemed to want to show off...
...Tragedy of much darker drama and grim fatefulness is the very essence of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky (London 410.164) with Riccardo Chailly conducting the Cleveland Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Irina Arkhipova...
...Among the restored treasures to come are complete Blue Note collections of Bud Powell, and a set of the Blue Note Jazzmen with James P. Johnson and Edmond Hall...
...From the very first ominous, pitiless, arctic notes, this score for the Sergei Eisenstein film evokes the barbarism as well as the heroism of Thirteenth Century Russia...
...and for a long time, the less modern jazz, the better...
...The more improvisation, the better...
...He was only twenty-nine when he died, having managed to be as prodigious an alcoholic as he was a drug addict...
...Lion, originally from Germany, had heard his first black American band, Sam Wooding's, in 1925 at a Berlin ice rink...
...The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis (MR 3-103), and The Complete Port of Harlem Sessions (MR 1108...
...Over the years, he developed clear preferences in the music...
...For a catalog and price information, write Charlie Lourie, Mosaic Records, 1341 Ocean Avenue, Suite 135, Santa Monica, CA 90401...
...m Choice Cuts Another find is Hank Williams/Rare Takes and Radio Cuts (Polydor 823 695-1 Y-l...
...It was being on the inside emotionally...
...In Russia no enemy shall stand...
...The latter is a formidably skilled group of musicians intent on expanding the audience for music of this century...
...The re-engineering is remarkable, bringing out nuances of sound that just weren't audible the first time around...
...He died, for instance, asleep in the back of a Cadillac that was moving through West Virginia on a series of one-night stands...
...I first heard of Stefan Wolpe from jazz musicians, particularly the clarinetist Tony Scott...
...No one in country music has been as insinuatingly expressive as Williams, both as performer and songwriter...
...He said that one should "mix surprise and enigma, intelligence and abandon, form and antiform...
...A Blue Note record—with its blue-and-white logo—was no ordinary recording...
...They will certainly accomplish that for Wolpe with these performances, which will take you places you may not have thought existed before in the realms of sound and feeling...
...They have made a deal with the present owners of Blue Note, along with the owners of other labels, which enables them to lease jazz material of their choosing and issue it in limited-edition boxed sets...
...He would never volunteer the information, for he hardly ever spoke...
...Since 1939, they had operated a small record label, Blue Note, in New York...
...The music is so compellingly evocative that it's like being on the ice of Lake Chud as the two armies inexorably come toward each other—the Teutonic Order of the Sword Bearers with their huge crosses and the forces of Alexander of Novgorod...
...Far from rejoicing, Prokofiev, a contemporary of Stalin, suffered some unease whenever there was a knock on the door at night...
...At last, Michael Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie, two unusually knowledgeable veterans of the recording industry, have rescued some of the fabled Blue Notes for their own firm, Mosaic Records...
...Rejoice, sing, Mother Russia...
...The songs range from "Lovesick Blues" to "My Son Calls Another Man Daddy...
...The Berlin-born composer who lived in New York from 1938 to his death in 1972 was a writer of star-tlingly imaginative energy...
...Among the original Alfred Lion sessions now available on Mosaic are: The Complete Blue Note Recordings ofThelon-ious Monk (MR 4-101...
...Blue Note was bought by one of the corporate record firms...
...While Hank Williams's life had a tragic dimension, its end was not in the classic mode...
...Alexander won...
...On this set, there are performances never released before, as well as five air shots...
...The last includes some of the most subtly penetrating and powerful blues story-telling in all of jazz history, with trumpeter Frankie Newton, trombonist J.C...
...Alfred Lion produced the recordings...
...I have been hearing "Daybreak Blues" and "Port of Harlem Blues" for more than forty years, and they are no more dated than a walk in the woods on an autumn night...
...Higginbotham, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and guitarist Teddy Bunn...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
