Indefinite Hiatus

There won't be any more posts here for the indefinite future. In the meantime, some of the more substantial and widely read posts are linked below. Thanks to those who have taken a look. 

Venus
Brasilia
Transition
First Meditations and Sun Ship
Acknowledgement

John Coltrane on alto saxophone, à la Gerhard Richter

Above: John Coltrane on alto saxophone, à la Gerhard Richter.

Konitz Coltrane Coincidence

In a recent performance with Tim Hagans and Dan Tepfer (following a conversation with Hagans), Lee Konitz played John Coltrane's "Resolution," kind of. 

Hagans mentions the record Live at the Half Note, which features Jimmy Garrison. Speaking of connections between Konitz and Coltrane: on the tune "You Stepped Out Of A Dream" from that very record, Konitz quite clearly plays the first five notes of "Giant Steps," just about a month before Coltrane first recorded it. We hear it over E-flat7 / A-flat in bars 6 and 7 of the chorus that starts at about 4:37.

Surely these coincidences happen all the time, but this one stands out to me enough to be worth remarking—same pitch transposition, same even rhythm (quarter notes here instead of Coltrane's faster-tempo half notes). And some great stepwise voice-leading, of course. Note how the B-flat minor triad in the first bar is transposed up a semitone (in contrast to the typical tritone substitution) in the following bar; the F-sharp continues ascending by half-step (in octave displacement) to the leading-tone G and finally to the local tonic A-flat, as D and B implicitly also rise chromatically to fill out the A-flat major triad. There is meanwhile a higher-level descending fourth progression over the course of those three bars: D-flat – C-flat – B-flat – A-flat. 

Marsyas Flayed

More to come, eventually.  

Lessons With Warne Marsh

"It's been really thirty years since there's been any major development in jazz, I think. Nothing's happened. There's no maturing of the music I heard in 1950. And yet it's opened up a really great potential, bebop did, not to mention Lennie [Tristano]."

Warne Marsh teaches at Troendelag Conservatory in Oslo in 1983: 

Jackie McLean Pizza

Excellent taste! Jackie McLean Pizza & Jazz from "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular," which aired in 1995. 

Noah Preminger, Pivot: Live at the 55 Bar

"…Of course, a musician that’s going to play any part of this music we call ‘jazz’ has to have a good understanding of what the blues is, and play the blues…” Jackie McLean

"As art it is savage and rough, but it lives — it weeps, nay it cries aloud, but it prays." J. K. Huysmans

"[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense … the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…” T. S. Eliot 

"Soul is a complex interaction of feeling and intellect." Robert Musil

...

Tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger has released a new record, Pivot: Live at the 55 Bar, featuring Jason Palmer on trumpet, Kim Cass on bass, and Ian Froman on drums. Buy it.