Miles Davis - Bitches Brew Live

“‘We played a lot of half-empty clubs in 1969,’ Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography. The jazz market was dwindling, and so even as he was making some of his most revelatory music, Miles Davis was not a major draw. Often, his hot new quintet - keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and mainstay saxophonist Wayne Shorter - was playing places like the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn or Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Los Angeles. But what a difference a year can make.

“In a way, Davis and Newport Jazz Festival impresario George Wein were in similar places in 1969. Both were facing declining sales and wanted to move with the time. And both came to the same conclusion: explore the possibilities of rock music. They met with very different results.

“Even at 43, in an era when the mantra was ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30,’ Davis retained a formidable cool. But jazz had not. ‘Rock was happening.’ For a restless artist like Miles Davis, being ‘a happening’ may well have been a larger part of rock’s allure than the music itself.

“In order to resuscitate waning ticket sales, Wein decided to take the blasphemous step of booking rock bands for the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. Besides iconic jazzers like Buddy Rich, Art Blakey and Dave Brubeck, the bill included Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and Sly & the Family Stone, among others. In ‘66, Davis had rented a boat and docked it in Newport Harbor so he wouldn’t have to hang out backstage. He just walked off the boat, played his set, then got back aboard and split back to New York. But in ‘69, Davis stayed on site the whole weekend. ‘He watched every group and he watched the response of everyone in the audience, who got the most applause, what music they were playing,’ Wein recalls. ‘He wanted to be part of that world because that’s where it was happening.’

“The Miles Davis Quintet played Saturday afternoon, July 5th, on a bill with Gary Burton, John Mayall, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Tal Farlow, Red Norvo, the Newport All-Stars and Ruby Braff. It was about three weeks before the release of ‘In a Silent Way’.

“Every Miles Davis show was unique. But some were more unique than others. The Shorter-Corea-Holland-DeJohnette lineup is called ‘The Lost Quintet’ because they never recorded in the studio as a fivesome. But the band that played Newport that day could be called the Really Lost Quartet - Shorter got stuck in traffic and missed the gig.

“Before he even played a note, Davis’ clothes signaled what side of the cultural divide he was on - he’d forsaken his trademark sharp Brooks Brothers suits and was now sporting gigantic bug-eye shades and a blue denim suit that laced up the legs. ‘Miles was very consumed with being outrageous all his life,’ says Wein. ‘He wanted to walk into a room and have everybody look at him.’

“Their set was brief but dense with incident. The cool, elegant sound of Davis’ first electric albums, ‘Miles in the Sky’, ‘Filles de Kilimanjaro’ and ‘In a Silent Way’, so unlike the cataclysmic social climate of the late ‘60s, belied live performances that didn’t just reflect the tenor of the times, but their accelerated pace and din. ‘My group is loud,’ Davis noted. ‘That’s just the times we live in.’

“‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’ only found its languid Nawlins strut in the studio; this version burns hotter and faster. You can feel the rush of excitement from the younger players, who had been playing with the maestro for less than a year, but the feeling is clearly mutual. Davis starts with a fairly restrained solo, lays out for maybe ten bars, then plays another solo in a different mood as the band erupts around him - it’s almost as if, lacking Shorter, Davis is simulating the effect of a second soloist.

“The ‘Bitches Brew’ sessions took place six weeks later, so not all the music on the album was totally improvised - the band had been playing ‘Voodoo’, ‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Spanish Key’ before they recorded them, something Davis rarely did after 1963. During ‘Voodoo’, Corea quotes from ‘John McLaughlin’, originally a section of ‘Bitches Brew’ - so it too was kicking around before recording.

“Davis was in top shape - vegetarian, drug-free and on a boxer’s workout regimen; it shows in his float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee playing. Corea is on fire, digging into the overtones of the electric keyboard, indelibly personalizing what many had considered an impersonal instrument. DeJohnette is absolutely rolicking and yet rarely ignoring the backbeat, and although Holland is all but drowned out, he was holding down the fort. They bring ‘Voodoo’ to the brink and back, never letting up until Davis steps in, takes it down and builds it up again over febrile riffing. Davis cues them with the tune’s theme and it’s into ‘Sanctuary’.

“‘Sanctuary’ gets a bit deflated - the climactic riff becomes an unadorned melody line rather than the expansive Davis-Shorter fanfare. Davis played a pensive lick that recalls his intro, signaling DeJohnette into a double-time beat that launches ‘It’s About that Time’ from ‘In a Silent Way’. There’s a lull, as if they’re catching their breath, then boom, DeJohnette uncorks a fast snare roll, Davis spews a dizzying flurry of notes, and it’s like the band got shot out of a cannon. Corea eventually calms things down and Davis picks up the mood, Corea occasionally hinting at the tune’s theme, but DeJohnette lights a fire under things very quickly, Davis is playing punchy, rhythmic licks, then tootles out traditional set-ender ‘The Theme’ while things are still airborne.

“A lot of the audience hadn’t yet heard the electric Miles Davis in concert. But note the big applause. People dug it. Of course they did - the set, as Davis would say, was a motherfucker.

“Wein doesn’t recall the show. ‘It was so hectic, I didn’t know what the hell was going on,’ he says. ‘I was concerned with not having a riot.’ He’s serious - on two days, hordes of rock-crazed hippie kids crashed the festival fences and bedlam ensued. Wein had argued that jazz and rock had common ground - the blues and improvisation - but the deeply divided audiences told otherwise. George Wein never again invited so many rock bands to Newport. ‘I definitely sold out that year, no question about it,’ he admits. ‘Because my festival was dying. But after that, I said let it die, we’ll keep struggling.’

“Some people felt Miles Davis had sold out too. But in fact he’d gained a new lease on musical life and was on the brink of attaining one of his greatest triumphs.

“Shorter left in early 1970, eventually replaced by former McCoy Tyner and Max Roach sideman Gary Bartz, who’d recorded some hip late ‘60s albums under his own name. Davis also added Brazilian percussionist Airto and another keyboardist, Keith Jarrett, who’d played with DeJohnette for jazz-rock pioneer Charles Lloyd. The septet played mostly rock venues that summer, opening for the Grateful Dead, Santana and Neil Young. They learned what worked for the rock crowd and they were right.

“Situated on an island off the southern coast of England, Isle of Wight ‘70 was one of the biggest rock festivals ever, attendance estimated as high as 600,00. Headliners included The Who, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix. The atmosphere was often contentious: a hippie with delusions of grandeur interrupted Joni Mitchell’s set and tried to declare a free festival. But no one dared interrupt Miles Davis. ‘He’s a pretty cool cat, Miles,’ note Murray Lerner, director of the Isle of Wight documentary ‘Message to Love’. ‘What was there to attack?’

“They began playing just as the sun began to go down on that hot August day. They followed Tiny Tim, whose silly but wildly well received performance was an ideal set-up: people were ready for something heavy.

“They took the stage, the only jazz band of the festival, all big hair and bell bottoms, and opened with a longtime set-starter ‘Directions’, a Joe Zawinul composition that was an outtake from a November 1968 session. They vamp for several minutes, as if synchronizing their musical watches; once they’re locked in, Davis cues the tune’s angular theme, complete with world-tilting bass line by Holland. His switch to electric bass guitar is key: its sonic gut-punch means you can now hear everything Holland plays - and just as importantly, so could the band. That and the two electric keyboards underscore the notion that, galvanic as it was, the Newport ‘69 band was stranded between two worlds; Isle of Wight ‘70 is full-blown electric Miles.

“Jazz was originally body music - funky, not just cerebral - and Davis wanted to reclaim, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘that roadhouse, honky-tonk, funky thing that people used to dance to on Friday and Saturday nights.’ By the Isle of Wight, ‘The funkiness and the sort of primal stuff that he wanted,’ said Jarrett in Lerner’s documentary ‘Miles Electric’, ‘was finally coming out.’ This was Miles Davis you could dance to.

“At Newport, it was as few as three people playing at once; now it’s usually six. ‘Bitches Brew’ exemplified the same economy of line as Zen painting, the metaphor used by pianist Bill Evans in his famous ‘Kind of Blue’ liner notes. But Davis wasn’t doing Zen painting anymore; now the canvas was dense with brushstrokes. Wisely, they all throttle back the density and tempo a little. Corea (in the right speaker) plays much less densely than at Newport, spinning out guitar-like chords and motifs, even imitating feedback and wah-wah effect with an effects box he kept on his keyboard. Meanwhile Jarrett (in the left speaker) pounds out hard-grooving bolts of pure energy. Brilliantly, Davis placed Corea and Jarrett on opposite sides of the stage so they couldn’t hear each other. By design, they often clash. But they’re superlative musicians, so they clash gloriously.

“‘Bitches Brew’ opens like some interstellar villain’s theme song but then Holland thrums out a lick, Corea responds and the groove is on. It morphs constantly: there’s a King Crimson-like interlude, and under Bartz’s beguiling solo, it gets so funky, it almost sounds like the Meters, leading to a breakdown that summons up extraterrestrial Dixieland. Sometimes they exult in pure sound, like that wind-blows electronic scree from Corea’s keyboard - a master musician truly at play. Like Corea, Davis had also come to embrace noise - Airto rarely plays time and instead basically plays sound effects, as in the way he use the whimpering sound of the cuica to bounce off Davis, like a hip-hop ‘hype man’ echoing and egging on the frontman.

“Davis’ lyricism, poise and skill in the midst of roiling clamor is what makes him not just cool but inspirational. But the whole band is heroic - part of the music’s incredible excitement stems from the fact that they’re basically jamming out on one chord the entire time, drawing on endless creativity and technique to remain utterly riveting the entire time. The listening, the intense focus, is audible.

“The band reaches a mind-blowing peak near the end of ‘It’s About Time’, Corea and Jarrett locked in a ferocious pas de deux. But Davis almost cruelly kills the momentum. What’s he up to? The music starts building and actually tops the previous peak, absolutely spine-tingling. They cool down with a quick ‘Sanctuary’ then crank it up on last time for ‘Spanish Key’. After a long absence, Bartz takes his final solo, screaming through his mouthpiece and then answering on the sax, Davis solos, the band vamping with almost unbearable tension - until he cues the tune’s theme and everything explodes into daylight. As ever, Davis cuts in with ‘The Theme’ while the party’s still rocking and leaves the stage. Jarrett strikes an ominous yet beautiful chord identical to one he played at the top of ‘Bitches Brew’ as the band’s final crescendo lapses into applause.

“A year before, Miles Davis had been playing small clubs. Now, four months after ‘Bitches Brew’, he’s got what was one of the best-selling albums in jazz history and instead of playing his new electric music before audiences of aging, disapproving jazz traditionalists, he’s blowing the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people. As Murray Lerner says, ‘It was a big, revolutionary moment when a person like that could play in front of such a large rock audience.’ At the Isle of Wight, Miles Davis had gone farther than any jazz musician had ever gone before - or since.” (Michael Azerrad, December 2010. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Miles Davis (tp), Gary Bartz (s/a-sx), Chick Corea (e-pi), Keith Jarrett (og), Dave Holland (bs), Jack DeJohnette (dr), Airto Moreira (pc)

1. Miles Runs The Voodoo Down

2. Sanctuary

3. It's About That Time (Theme)

4. Directions

5. Bitches Brew

6. It's About That Time

7. Sanctuary

8. Spanish Key

9. The Theme

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Joe Farrell Quartet

“Joe Farrell was not what you might call an ‘inspired’ artist, but he made up in technique and proficiency what he lacked in subtlety. After playing on some 200 albums as an accomplished sideman on all sorts of reed instruments, he got his first major break when he was signed to the CTI label in 1970. He immediately proceeded to cut his first album, aptly titled ‘The Joe Farrell Quartet’, recorded in July of that year, with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and John McLaughlin - a lineup that significantly contributed to the interest created by the album.

“In life, Joe was pretty much like his music - down to earth, direct, jovial, somewhat on the heavy side, but simple and affecting. He loved life, and enjoyed what he did to the hilt.

“He was born in December, 1937, in Chicago Heights, Illinois, of Italian parents, and manifested musical inclinations at an early age. By his 11th birthday, he had made up his mind to be a musician, and from that moment on, he set out avidly to play everywhere there was music to be played - at home, with his family; in high school, where he got his first introduction to jazz; and in amateur clubs which were flourishing at the time in and around Chicago. If there was any way in, Joe found it, playing an increasingly wider array of instruments. ‘I just played because I liked to play,’ he later recounted. ‘I practiced hard, but that was easy for me because I had an affinity for music.’

“While in college, Joe, then 19, got his first professional job with a name band - Ralph Marterie’s. For three months, he experienced working with seasoned musicians, and came out of it more convinced than ever to make music his business.

“After graduating, in 1959, Joe embarked on what he himself called ‘a wild summer’. He and a friend, Ira Sullivan, spent their time jamming like maniacs, sometimes spending as much as a whole day and a whole night jumping from club to club, without a break. At the end of the summer, after having literally surveyed the whole club scene in Chicago, Joe decided to go to New York, ‘to see what was happening’.

“As a matter of fact a lot was happening, and with characteristic drive and determination, Joe immediately looked for places where he could jam, the idea being that the sooner his name got around, the faster he would get a steady gig. A recommendation to audition for Maynard Ferguson landed him his first paying job. Within three months of his official debut with the band, he said, ‘I was playing one of the places I had always dreamed about, Birdland…’

“In the ensuing years, Joe’s career went through the usual ‘paying dues’ process, while he tried unsuccessfully to form his own group. The list of players he performed with during these formative years is indicative of the caliber of people he was getting involved with - Tito Rodrigues, Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Kenny Dorham, Paul Chambers, Wynton Kelly, and Thad Jones and Mel Lewis who band he joined in 1965, while keeping another job in the band of the Playboy Club, of course.

“This flurry of activity eventually paid off in the late 1960s, and Joe became a member of the legendary Elvin Jones trio. His tenure with Jones lasted until 1969, and gave him a lot of visibility in musical circles. ‘Farrell amazes with his highly vocalized yet essentially -musical- concept’, a ‘Down Beat’ reviewer wrote of a performance in London, England. ‘One of the troubles of the modern way of playing is the lack of musicality it allows, but Farrell has no problems either in the direction of musicianship or power…’

“True to form, while with Jones, he still managed to play with other bands and to keep a very active schedule of recording sessions with other leaders. It was during one such session that producer Creed Taylor spotted the young saxophone player, and finally signed him to CTI as a solo artist. As a leader, Farrell recorded six albums for the label, and one with Benson as co-leader. Each album was marked by a natural progression from fusion to funk to avant-garde, with a great deal of intensity to punctuate each instant.

“‘Jazz means burning,’ Farrell once said. ‘It’s got to be cooking, I don’t want to do background music, music that suggests something else to me. Jazz is the purest form of music because it comes from within. It’s not my impression of the world… It’s not political. It’s music for music’s sake.’

“After leaving CTI, Joe recorded for other labels, including Warner Bros. Records, and moved to the West Coast where he continued to work as hard as ever.

“He died of leukemia this past summer…” (Didier C. Deutsch, December 1986. From the liner notes to the 1987 CD reissue.)

Performers: Joe Farrell (s/t-sx/fl/ob), John McLaughlin (gt), Chick Corea (pi), Jack DeJohnette (dr)

A1. Follow Your Heart

A2. Collage For Polly

A3. Circle In The Square

B1. Molten Glass

B2. Alter Ego

B3. Song Of The Wind

B4. Motion

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Miles Davis - Live-Evil

“‘Live-Evil’ is one of Miles Davis’ most confusing and illuminating documents. As a double album, it features very different settings of his band - and indeed two very different bands. The double-LP CD package is an amalgam of a December 19, 1970, gig at the Cellar Door, which featured a band comprised of Miles, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Jack DeJohnette, guitarist John McLaughlin, saxophonist Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett on organ, and percussionist Airto. These tunes show a septet that grooved hard and fast, touching on the great funkiness that would come on later. But they are also misleading in that McLaughlin only joined the band for this night of a four-night stand; he wasn't really a member of the band at this time. Therefore, as fine and deeply lyrically grooved-out as these tracks are, they feel just a bit stiff - check any edition of this band without him and hear the difference. The other band on these discs was recorded in Columbia’s Studio B and subbed Ron Carter or Dave Holland on bass, added Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on electric pianos, dropped the guitar on ‘Selim’ and ‘Nem Um Talvez’, and subbed Steve Grossman over Gary Bartz while adding Hermeto Pascoal on percussion and drums in one place (‘Selim’). In fact, these sessions were recorded earlier than the live dates, the previous June in fact, when the three-keyboard band was beginning to fall apart. Why the discs were not issued separately or as a live disc and a studio disc has more to do with Miles’ mind than anything else. As for the performances, the live material is wonderfully immediate and fiery: ‘Sivad’, ‘Funky Tonk’, and ‘What I Say’ all scream with enthusiasm, even if they are a tad unsure of how to accommodate McLaughlin. Of the studio tracks, only ‘Little Red Church’ comes up to that level of excitement, but the other tracks, particularly ‘Gemini/Double Image’, have a winding, whirring kind of dynamic to them that seems to turn them back in on themselves, as if the band was really pushing in a free direction that Miles was trying to rein in. It’s an awesome record, but it’s because of its flaws rather than in spite of them. This is the sound of transition and complexity, and somehow it still grooves wonderfully.”  (Review by Thom Jurek for AllMusic. See here.)

Performers: Miles Davis (e-tp), Steve Grossman (s-sx), Gary Bartz (s-sx/fl), John McLaughlin (gt), Khalil Balakrishna (e-sitar), Herbie Hancock/Chick Corea/Joe Zawinul (e-pi), Keith Jarrett (e-pi/og), Dave Holland (e-bs), Michael Henderson (e-bs), Jack DeJohnette/Billy Cobham (dr), Airto Moreira (pc), Hermeto Pascoal (dr/whistling/vo/e-pi)

A1. Sivad

A2. Little Church

A3. Medley: Gemini/Double Image

B1. What I Say

B2. Nem Um Talvez

C1. Selim

C2. Funky Tonk

D. Inamorata And Narration

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Charles Tolliver - Mosaic Select 20

"It was 1970, and Slugs' a 4 A.M. joint on a gritty street of Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was in the in-club, a scene of true-edge jazz. Hipsters, listeners, mack men, slick women, students, artists, activists, arrivistes—'Everyone went there, night after night,' remembers Charles Tolliver, trumpeter with Jackie McLean on the very first night live music was played in the place, in the summer of 1964.

""For much of the next decade, Tolliver's own Music Inc. was among Slugs' resident ensembles, in company with Sun Ra's Arkestra, Charles Mingus' combos and bands of such incandescent stars like trumpeter Lee Morgan, who, just off the bandstand, was shot dead by a jealous lover. Music Inc. 'Live at Slugs'', released originally by Tolliver's semi-collective Strata-East record label, has long been treasured as a like-it-was document of the high, hot music born in that smoky, boozy, seductive room (reopened in the mid '80s as the Nuyorican Poets' Café). Put this CD on, and you're there.

"'For jazz you'd start at the Vanguard, maybe hear Sonny Rollins playing to five people, then go to the Gate to catch Cannonball Adderley, who was often there, then pass by the Five Spot—all glassed—in on the corner of St. Mark's and Bowery, so you could see in before deciding if you were going in. You'd end up at Slugs',' Tolliver recalls with satisfaction.

"For a taste of the real thing; the hard, bright exuberance of clarity or the down and sometimes dirty but nevertheless spiritually untarnished intensity of urban dwellers grappling with that very day's practical, personal, social and aesthetic issues, finding rough and tumble answers often beyond conventions, limits or constraints. For instance, the music on this record—urgent, probing, hoodoo chasing performances, able to satisfy one's itch to get up, maybe bust open some new possibilities (dig the collective improv peak of 'Wilpan's'), or tenderly craft and linger in the luxuriance of a ballad (as on 'Felicite' and 'Orientale').

"Music Inc., live at Slugs', typically played generous sets, each tune easily running 10, 20 minutes or more. Energy was the watchword of the era's music, due partly to the influence of John Coltrane, among the jazz masters Tolliver idolized while coming up. Indeed, Coltrane's quest for musical fulfillment, and his great quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, informed Music Inc.'s horn/piano/bass/drums format and repertoire of modal improvisation, motivic melodies and stretched-out hard-bop minor blues. As for Tolliver himself: 'The whole point of Music Inc. was not to have an alternate — a saxophonist to spell me if I got tired,' he explains, 'and to gain urgency from having to deliver myself, as the only horn player and composer-leader. I had to keep my chops up and strengths about me all the time.'

"By the date of this recording, Tolliver had long distinguished himself as a comer among the full range of pace-setters of the day (including Miles, Dizzy, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell, Woody Shaw and others). His particular forte is the focus with which he unleashes dramatic strokes — and those strokes themselves, broad figures he brings to inspired heights. He'd gigged with Jackie McLean, Max Roach, Roy Ayers, Roy Haynes and Andrew Hill, woodshed with Joe Henderson, Jack DeJohnette, James Spaulding and Chick Corea, recorded on Blue Note and led his own band (featuring pianist John Hicks) up at Count Basie's, a lounge in Harlem. With firm command of attack, tone and tempo, in the tradition of trumpeters such as Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown and Booker Little, Charles Tolliver was not so modest as to eschew the dazzling showcase; here he blazons swaggering statements over churning rhythms, floats ultra-pretty, heartfelt lines upon mousse-rich piano chords, dares to try—and nails!—thrilling lip trill climaxes. But he also surrounded himself with colleagues who superbly supported, challenged and balanced him, for utmost interaction and groove. If they don't top the Coltrane quartet's transcendence, Music Inc.'s members for sure demonstrate admirable physical concentration and enviable musical imagination.

"Pianist Stanley Cowell was Tolliver's dream accompanist: percussive, rhnythm-grounded, sly yet churly-soulful, an evocative soloist and harmonic visionary with exemplary keyboard technique. 'I was so lucky to meet him at the beginning of my career,' Tolliver says. Bassist Cecil McBee was also indispensable, a fluid bedrock giving constant bottom and lift to the band. Drummer Jimmy Hopps stirred up and juggled a storm of polyrhythms, tending the pots, tubs and cymbals at a bubbling simmer as emphatically as at a ferocious boil. And he's exceptionally well recorded.

"'T always like to hear the drummer, yeah!' Tolliver enthuses. 'When I sat down to mix these recordings — which were recorded analog, of course, the format which I think retains the most warmth and punch — I made sure the drums were prominent. Because, you know: a trumpet player's got to have drums!'

"In the '90s, Jimmy Hopps has disappeared from view. Cecil McBee remains an internationally renowned, first-call New York bassist. Stanley Cowell, based around Washington, D.C., continues to perform and teach jazz. Tolliver lives in NYC and is a professor at New York City's New School for Social Research (Mannes School of Music).

"'We had a style then,' Tolliver says 'which endures in some players of the 90s I could easily name, which was based on being half-free, half-straight ahead. Or maybe 30 percent free to 70 percent straight ahead, mainstream — I don't know. Everything had a structure, but we could take the music any way we felt.

"'The music we created then is of course historical — but also, 30 years later, it still sounds as if it's just about to be conceived now. Some of that's the urgency which encompassed our lives at the time, also the necessity of having to deliver, on the fly! Some of it's because we're still living with Diz, Monk, Bird, Miles and Trane,' Tolliver considers.

"'Slugs' was a forum for us, an opportunity,' he notes, 'and we took good advantage of it, The audience at Slugs' was there to hear that kind of music, our kind of music, so we didn't have to satisfy them with standards or pop songs, didn't have to hold back or save something for another take or deal with producers who wanted to put other stuff under us than what we'd written ourselves. We were 95 percent acoustic — Stanley tinkered with the Moog and Fender Rhodes keyboards, but we always had an upright, not an electric bass. We got to play the way we were thinking at the time, and as long as we cared to.

"'Also we could always feel something from the audience there. Maybe not something specific about their responses: something intangible. We were able to play for ourselves, and for the real fans, members of the community who knew what we were trying to say, what the music meant. They're on the record, too, somehow, as much as Freddie Freeloader adding his ‘Yeahs!' to a Miles solo.

"'Of course, today, it's not written that I'm an enfant terrible, the way they used to,' Tolliver cautions. 'But I'm still playing, of course, and I've got to say I don't feel any different in 1998, at age 55, than when it came out, almost three decades back. It's all for real, and that's forever.'" (Howard Mandel, February 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)

"Slugs' Saloon, which was located on 3rd Street between Avenues B and C on the Lower East Side of New York City, was created in the mid 60s by two guys named Jerry and Robert. In its brief history, roughly 10 years, Slugs' became one of the main arenas to perform and listen to the music during those turbulent and extremely creative times.

"One day during the summer of '64 I got a call from the saxophone great Jackie McLean, who at the time lived just one street from the club, to do an afternoon ‘hit' at this new place called Slugs'. It would be the first time live music would be presented there. No bandstand had as yet been erected. So, in the middle of the club on a sawdust covered floor, Jackie, myself, Larry Willis, John Ore, and Billy Higgins inaugurated the place.

"The rest is history as just about every artist involved with creating the music during this period either played the club or passed through to see and hear what was going on. The music presented here is from a week engagement I made at the club in 1970 with my first Music Inc. group featuring Stanley Cowell, Cecil McBee, and Jimmy Hopps." (Charles Tolliver, 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)

"The music and philosophy of Charles Tolliver hails from a time when the most powerful artistic minds in Black America were in sync with its radical elite. As the trumpeter and self-made label executive puts it, 'One of the reasons the music of that era sounds the way it does is because there was at that time a oneness of purpose among Black people in general and musicians in particular. The whole push towards equality, along with John Coltrane's music, permeated everything we did for about five to eight years.'

"In 1971, under the influence of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and John Coltrane, Tolliver, along with business and musical partner Stanley Cowell, began what has become the most successful musician-run label in jazz history: Strata-East. But though the Strata-East story dovetails nicely with that of '60s, Black cultural nationalism and the desire for independence, Tolliver recounts also being motivated by the death of Kenny Dorham, a legendary trumpeter, friend and idol:

"'Kenny Dorham was truly one of my heroes and one of the greatest artists jazz has produced. As a player and composer he did amazing work, yet he died in obscurity. I went to see him just before he died and I asked myself, how does this happen, that someone who has recorded all this music has nothing? That's when I realized he didn't own any of his masters, and that recognition is what set me on the course I've been on to this day and I have not swerved from it. As musicians, I knew that we've got to leave something behind for our children.'

"Though the roots of Strata-East may lay in the above observations, the label's fruits were a catalogue of music that spoke to jazz as an art form in transition, poised between triumph and trauma. By the early ‘70s jazz had firmly established itself on the international scene as the definitive American contribution to world culture. The usual suspects, Monk, Mingus, Max, Miles, Ornette and Trane — a litany of giants really — had changed the face of 20th-century music in ways never predicted by Western modernism, and had proven the seriousness of jazz as a challenging aesthetic endeavor. For conscious and daring young African-American musicians of Tolliver and Cowell's caliber, the moment must have seemed like a rite of passage: one in which they would have to prove themselves worthy of assuming the mantle of their forefathers. Leaving Howard University's School of Pharmacy in his third year, Tolliver had come up in jazz the old-fashioned way, apprenticing with the masters. His post-college internships were with Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, Gerald Wilson and Max Roach. His recollection of that time identifies him as someone who caught the meteoric tail end of a golden age:

"'I played with all the great guys who were around then: Hank Mobley, Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Elmo Hope, Sonny Red, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey. I was close to all of them. The camaraderie was really high at that time, because everybody grew up playing together. It was really a once-in-a-lifetime period when everybody was living here. Old cats like Pee Wee Russell got a chance to see us and we got to see them. From 1965 to about 1975 there were a group of guys who played together, stayed together, did everything together. When Miles would come to the Five Spot, he was just one of the guys. And this even after he had given us several turning points in the music, like 'Round Midnight and Kind of Blue.'

"Anything but a retired veteran, Tolliver continues to oversee the Strata-East legacy, while actively performing and teaching jazz orchestration and the repertoire of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers at the New School. Quizzed on the musical instruction methods of his younger days, he cuts to the chase: 'the real players' way of letting you know that you could play back then was by calling on you for gigs. I never got instruction, nor did I ever harangue anyone to show me anything. You learned this stuff from your elders by listening to the records. If you've got any craft in you, that's going to come out as you're practicing anyway. Like the old saying goes, ‘if you can't hear it, you don't belong.'

"Musically, the question on the table for Tolliver's generation at the dawn of Strata-East's inception was deciding what parts of bebop tradition remained viable in an age set on fire by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. As can be heard on this and his other Strata-East releases, Tolliver's Music Inc. group proposed clear answers to such questions, with meaty and melodious playing that celebrated the classical virtues of swing, virtuosity and the unbridled expressionism and spontaneity that were the '60s stock-in-trade. Call it a case of eating your cake and immolating it too.

"The lengthy, open-ended forms Tolliver preferred provided for incisive explorations of a composition's crevices, fissures and depths. On Cowell's 'Effi', a superb mid-tempo ballad, as well as the band's sumptuous and dangerous reading of Thelonious Monk's ''Round Midnight', Tolliver puts his globular and molten tone (often compared with Freddie Hubbard's), to driven yet sublime use. (On the subject of those Hubbard comparisons by the way, Tolliver has this to say: 'We have a similar sound and attack but the idea usage is completely different. Because we used to hang out, people assumed I was sitting at his knees, but it wasn't like that at all.')

"Tolliver brings an assured and bold approach to ''Round Midnight', where he jumps from a languid introduction to a near triple-time explosion of crisply chosen bursts of brass that almost seem in flight from Monk's famous changes. His sudden return descent to cruising altitude is incredibly smooth and romantic, if only to sucker punch us again by flaring up an Afro-Cuban groove that brings the song in for a three-point landing. Bassist Clint Houston and drummer Clifford Barbaro make for an energetic and sympathetic rhythm section, and the passages where Cowell stops comping and leaves the trio to blaze without his harmonic signposts make for champion feats of agility and dexterity. Imbued in this music is a fanatical devotion to both viscerality and technical acumen that unabashedly proclaims the enduring impact of Coltrane on Tolliver: 'Trane was in every fiber of what I did and still is. And Bird too. The point was to mix it up and make something of it that's my own. That's what being a jazz musician is all about.'

"As 'Live in Tokyo' and all his Strata-East recordings make apparent, Tolliver's achievements as a musician and as an entrepreneur mark him as one of the great independent minds of the jazz tradition. As the music finds a pathway into the 21st century, he appears destined to remain an intrepid frontrunner." (Greg Tate, April 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)

"Charles Tolliver arrived on the jazz scene in 1964, just in time for the last cycle of the golden era of hard bop. Had he arrived 10 years later with the same considerable talents as a trumpeter and composer, he might hardly have been noticed. But in the 60s, jazz had an ad hoc infrastructure of its own. There were thriving labels, jazz on the radio, jazz clubs in all five boroughs and every major city, bandleaders mentoring sidemen, booking agents, managers and tours.

"And that infrastructure was real. Consider that the equally talented trumpeter/composer Woody Shaw hit Manhattan around the same time and how parallel their careers ran for the next six years. They both gained their greatest initial exposure on Blue Note sessions, worked with Jackie McLean who gave their compositional skills a platform and gigged and/or recorded with Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Willie Bobo, Archie Shepp and Andrew Hill.

"In May of 1969, Tolliver formed Music Inc., a quartet featuring his close friend and musical cohort Stanley Cowell. While there are a lot of quartets fronted by saxophonists and guitarists, the format is rare for a trumpeter. And for good reason. The physical demands that the trumpet places on a musician far exceed those that a saxophone or a guitar would have. In fact, there are very few quartet albums featuring trumpet, let alone working bands! 

"But Charles, a quietly determined man who sees no reason not to face a challenge head on, picked this demanding context and made it work. He picked rhythm sections that would engage and push him. He built a band book of contemporary pieces rather than familiar standards, which meant the originals had to be strong, varied and memorable.

"It's interesting to note that many of the originals on these three CDs had been previously recorded, but at the time of these sessions only versions of 'Truth' (Jackie McLean, 1964), 'Earl's World' (Tolliver, 1968) and 'Effi' (Max Roach, 1968) had been released. The original recordings of 'Orientale' (Bobby Hutcherson, 1969), 'Effi' (Hutcherson, 1968) and 'On the Nile' (Jackie McLean, 1965) would not be issued until years later. And the first recordings of 'Drought' (Roach, 1968), 'Felicite' (Yusef Lateef, 1969) and 'Wilpan's' (Charles Lloyd, 1966) are still unreleased. Still these compositions, especially those by Charles and Stanley, have had considerable currency once they were introduced into the jazz world.

"As the music on this set proves, Tolliver's Music Inc. met every challenge and then some. These live recordings from 1970 and 73 embrace hard bop in all its various approaches and epitomize the teamwork that is so essential to any successful jazz performance. And Charles' endurance is absolutely remarkable.

"In 1971, Charles and Stanley took on another risky venture. Partly out of self-determination and partly because of the fading recording scene at the time, they formed Strata-East Records, a label that would be run by Tolliver to issue albums produced and owned by the artists themselves. And he took to this task with typical drive and thoroughness. When the first release came out, he brought promotional copies to my apartment personally! Now free records are one things, but hand delivered by the president of the company!

"It was on Strata-East that two volumes of Live at Slugs' and one LP of Live in Tokyo were first issued. On the occasion of this Mosaic Select set, Charles dug into the vault and came up with another 73 minutes of unissued music from these gigs. Hopefully this is just the first in a line of co-ventures between Mosaic and Strata-East." (Michael Cuscuna, September 2005. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Charles Tolliver (tp), Stanley Cowell (pi), Cecil McBee/Clint Houston (bs), Jimmy Hopps/Clifford Barbaro (dr)

1.1. Drought

1.2. Felicite

1.3. Orientale

1.4. Spanning

1.5. Wilpan's

1.6. Our Second Father

2.1. Drought

2.2. Stretch

2.3. Truth

2.4. Effi

2.5. 'Round Midnight

3.1. On The Nile

3.2. Ruthie's Heart

3.3. Repetition

3.4. Impact

3.5. Our Second Father

3.6. Earl's World

flac/16-bit

The Fabulous Charlie Rich

Pairs rock and roll numbers with soaring, refined country ballads. Written by his wife, Mary Ann Rich, 'Life Has its Little Ups and Downs' is a high point of real, complex emotion. The ballads 'San Francisco is a Lonely Town' and 'It Makes Me Want to Cry', as well as Rich's original 'Sittin' and Thinkin'' are also high points that display his rich vocal talents and emotive depths in glorious tandem.

A1. I Almost Lost My Mind
A2. Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs
A3. San Francisco Is A Lonely Town
A4. Sittin' And Thinkin'
A5. July 12, 1939
B1. Bright Lights, Big City
B2. Raggedy Ann
B3. Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue?)
B4. A Picture Of You
B5. Love Waits For Me
B6. It Makes Me Want To Cry

mp3, 320kbps