The Lost Tapes: Jazz

Introduction This is one of the true treasures in all of music. I have the CD edition of Bird and Dizzy's 1947 Carneige Hall performance and the 1953 Quintet of the Year show with Max Roah, Charles Mingus and Bud Powell, and while the latter is a true favorie of mine I was absolutely blown away when a hitherto unknown recording from Town Hall in June 22 1945 was found in the most unlikely place and subsequuently remastered for CD. The story, as far as the find of this long lost gem and its release is concerned is almost as interesting as the music itself. It begins with Bob Suthenblick, a medical doctor and music collector.whose love for bebop and its off-shoots made him invest in a small record company. So practicioning MD by day, and releasing records by long forgoten jazz stars of the '40s and '50s by night. Uptown Records soon became home for new live recordings and even some studio ones (recorded by Van Gelder in New Jersey nontheless) by people like Frank Wess and

This is one set i really love, it's about 25 mintes and seems to be a radio broacast from a club or maybe a even an in-studio live broadcast. Either way it's a really good sounding Soundboard. While i'm a fan of the first Mahavishnu Orchestra incarnation, I sometime felt they could at times become too virtuosistic for their owng good. That's understandable considering you had one of the best guitarist/composers of alltime, perhaps the best jazz/fusion drummer of all time in Billy Cobham, and Jan Hammer and Jerry Goodman was definitely nothing to scoff at. The only member I felt was just taking up space (though he was competent enough) was Rick Laird. But its extremely rarely I revisittheir music despite having all thier records. For me its something missing on there for mch of it. Keith Jarrett had a quote about the Miles Davis band with Steve Grossman, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack De Johnette that was (and i para-phrase) - "they all had great solos but i

John Coltrane and his bands had a lot of love for the European people. In 1961, 1962 and 1963 they made long tours in several major cities from London to Sweden, It should be noted that Coltrane also was on a lengthy tour as part of Miles Davis group the very year before (his last one ever).  Paris, Denmark, West Berlin, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Milano to ame a few of the stops. Apparantly the first set of shows in England in '61 was met with downright hostiliy (similiar to Bird's first angry apperance in Paris with Miles Davis in 1960) but in most of the other countries it went down very well. 1964 was a European sabbath but what some might not know is that in 1965 they made a short tour of mainly Fance and Belgiu. For July 26 and 27 they were booked for the Salle Pleyel Festival in Paris. Most Coltrane fanatics knows that on that first evening a French pianist, promoter and fan had got a promo copy of "A Love Supreme" which was just about to be released in Europe

Lately I've been digging deep into the cataloug of the Second Great Quintet of Miles (both live bootlegs, retail LP:s, stuff like " Times Of The Barracudas " and " Falling Water ", and man  what a band that were. While moch of the albums they dropped  still remain somewhat of a personal pinnacle of what you could do within a a hard-bop setting without following the rules of the day they cleary stands as one of my absolute favorite bands of all-time. Their interplay was just out of this world from day one, and what's interesting about many of the captured live bootlegs is how a throughout and one-minded machine they were especially between 1965 and late 1967. Much thanks to Europeans who had little hindsight of the public service they did recording all those concerts, and in the case of Sweden often with a sound as great as official live recordings by labels like Riverside and Prestige. But when recording officially for Columbia they where tuy left to th