Skip to main content

Moanin'

Another CD I picked up from the seemingly now-defunct Kriminal Records in Newport is this 2010 2-disc issue on the "Not Now" label. Disc 1 contains the 1958 album Moanin', while disc 2 has Orgy in Rhythm, originally released on two LPs in 1963. The Jazz Messengers only appear on the former, with the latter the fruits of a separate project where Blakey played with no fewer than three other drummers; along with a quartet of percussionists plus bass, piano and flute. Interesting & unusual as they are, I haven't yet taken a shine to the Orgy in Rhythm tracks.

Moanin', on the other hand, is a firm favourite. From the opening piano notes of the title track, one feels in safe hands, and the quality barely dips though the whole record. The Jazz Messengers on this occasion were Benny Golson on tenor sax; Lee Morgan on trumpet, Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass. For me, the most memorable instrumental moments on the record come from Morgan, such the spectacular start to his solo on 'Moanin'' itself. Golson is also excellent, if less obviously showy - four of the tunes are also compositions of his. Timmons wrote one too, but that (the title track) turned out to be just about the Messengers' single biggest hit.

From a time when being a jazz musician came with any number of life-threatening health hazards, it's heartening that a few of this band have lived to a good old age. Neither Morgan or Timmons made it to 40, but Blakey was 71 when he died, and Merritt an impressive 93. Golson, meanwhile, is still with us, having recently reached his own 93rd birthday.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more