In the morning

In the morning, I enjoy some light jazz. Anthony Braxton's "Seven Standards" are extremely appropriate. Here he is, playing Coltrane's "Impressions":

Black Medicine jazz

Black Medicine has some cool, unidentified jazz this morning, and the sound is good enough to make the bass solo audible. I like this place (both of them, the Nicolson St one and the Marchmont Crescent one; I am writing from the latter).

… And now they're playing one of my Rolling Stones favourites, Midnight Rambler!

So What?

From a friend

Roland Kirk Lover Man
Uploaded by boberwig

Dailymotion Jazz Group

This made my day. Some of the videos are exceptionally good, just like Miles Davis.

Are you still here?

Jazz tracks

Two tracks from my secret list of favourite jazz tracks ever:

• Herbie Hancock, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” on his amazing live with Chick Corea (An Evening With…, 1978)
  
  
• Mike Ratledge, “Slightly All the Time,” on Soft Machine's Third album (1970)
  
  

The video supply for these tracks is not that bad, thanks in particular to the jazzheads who are spending their days downloading from the French National Audiovisual Archives (INA) and uploading them on Youtube instead.

It is obvious that you should not trust live recordings to reflect album performace, but I think they will give you a pretty good idea. Third has been remastered in 2007, while the Hancock/Corea live was already perfect on first take: you can hear some slight humming over the piano at some point, but nothing critical like in Gould's Variations for instance.

Jazz “experts”

Over coffee with a friend-of-a-friend:

”Do you like jazz?”
“– Oh yes, but I'm nothing like a jazz expert”

But there is nothing like a jazz expert. I thought I knew something about jazz, and then I read a bit of Boris Vian's columns for Jazz Hot, and I knew nothing again. I thought I knew a bit of Jimmy Smith, and then I read Robert Wyatt's comment on Mike Ratledge (French interview, Rock & Folk, 1967), saying his work was probably the most innovative since Smith, and I realised that I had missed what now seems so obvious to me.

I do not believe in jazz experts and I am not even sure jazz allows the concept of a jazz expert. In Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963), there are only two types of audience people: those with jazz, and those without (“squares”). And the fact that a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society allowed for the growth of jazz music must be a proof that no one is condemned to squareness.