Smokin' At The Half Note

There's no way of telling if the photo of Wes Montgomery reproduced on the rear of this LP's sleeve was taken at the Half Note, but he is undoubtedly smoking: a lit cigarette in his mouth as he plays his guitar. The photo of Wynton Kelly looks to have been taken in a recording studio if the out-of-focus reel of tape on his piano is anything to go by. He isn't smoking, but concentrating intently on the keys before him. Both men are wearing white shorts with skinny black ties: Montgomery also in a dark-coloured jacket; Kelly in a cardigan and a beanie-type hat.

Only half of Smokin' at the Half Note was recorded in June '65 at the Half Note Club on Hudson Street in New York. The intention must surely have been for it to be entirely a live album, but producer Creed Taylor, presumably dissatisfied, had insisted on some of it being done over a few months later in a studio setting. The two tracks on side A are the live ones; the three on side B those from Rudy Van Gelder's studio. Its hybrid and piecemeal origins don't detract in the least from what is an excellent LP. My copy is a 1966 German stereo pressing in middling condition. I bought it in Monmouth four or so years ago for about £10.

I've heard some of Wynton Kelly's recordings as leader and found them good but not remarkable. As a collaborator, sideman & accompanist, however, he was one of the best, and, while he may not have been an extraordinary virtuoso of Wes Montgomery's calibre, his contributions here are often exquisite, such as in the elegant opening to Tadd Dameron's ballad 'If You Could See Me Now'. Also playing at their considerable bests are Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Montgomery, however, is the star of this show, with his solos on 'Unit 7' and 'Four on Six' (the latter his own composition) some of the highest of the many highlights on this record.

Comments

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...

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...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog