Run-DMSteve

The four major musical genres I find at yard sales and estate sales are Celtic, Christmas, classical, and country. The fifth is probably whale sounds. Though I often find unexpected gold in these situations, to most of the CDs I dig up I would apply the term “not good.” However, I have found that whale sounds will chase people out of my office.

There’s never much jazz. Is the typical music consumer planning to be buried with her jazz records, or is it just that she didn’t buy much jazz in the first place?

I can’t answer this question, and I suspect I wouldn’t like the answer if I knew it. However, by combining all the jazz CDs I’ve found at these sales in various summers, I’m able to write this post. This gives me the chance to please Loyal Reader Seika, Jazz Commissar for Zone 22. It also means that once again I can TALK LIKE A JAZZ CRITIC! That is so boss.

On the downbeat!

Various artists from the Verve catalog, Talkin’ Verve Cool: 1957-66 (1997)
What is cool jazz? Is there a litmus test to tell cool from crud? Can someone from Massachusetts be cool? (No.)

Cool jazz, in my view, isn’t just hep cats snapping their fingers to incomprehensible music while turning the pages of incomprehensible books or trying to make themselves comprehensible to their heroin dealers. Cool jazz is cool because it doesn’t care if anyone else is in the room.

Talkin’ Verve Cool presents 10 excursions into the cool form, however you define it. The whole platter is cool (Quincy Jones & His Orchestra opens the set with the theme from The Pink Panther), but “Improvisation for Unaccompanied Saxophones” by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims is sublime. I had to listen to it twice just to grok how Al and Zoot hand off the parts to each other. It’s a flabbergasting 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Ramsey Lewis, Sun Goddess (1974)
Jazz piano legend Lewis backed by Earth, Wind & Fire. They don’t play at Lewis’ Valhalla-like level, but they compensate with their enthusiasm. The show-stopper is “Sun Goddess” (performed live by EWF the following year on their album Gratitude).

Ivan “Boogaloo Joe” Jones, Sweetback (1975)
I bought this CD just for the man’s nickname, which makes “Steve” sound like I’m a murgatroid from Dullsville. Ivan Jones was a guitar player in the style of 1960s George Benson without Benson’s cross-over appeal in the ’70s (“On Broadway”). Boogaloo waxed an excellent tune in “Sweetback,” but his reading of Stevie Wonder’s “You’ve Got It Bad, Girl” is the real pearl in this oyster.

Nicholas Payton, Payton’s Place (1998)
Payton is a hard-bop trumpeter and band leader with no time for squares. The odd thing about Payton’s Place is that it could’ve been recorded in 1958. There’s nothing here that says End of the Century. Notable for the technical virtuosity on every groove and for the track “Three Trumpeters,” which features Payton, Roy Hargrove, and the cat no one can escape, Wynton Marsalis.

Charlie Hunter Quartet, Songs From the Analog Playground (2001)
Hunter, who plays an eight-string guitar (that’s one louder than 10) can lay down a groove in any genre of music, just like Béla Fleck on banjo, Yo-Yo Ma on upright bass, and me on air guitar.

Songs From the Analog Playground is a funky platter of jazz fusion. Eight of the 13 tracks have guest vocalists, including rapper Mos Def (who sings) and a young Norah Jones on a cover of Roxy Music’s “Avalon.” The drummer’s chops on “Percussion Shuffle” are everything plus.

I thought the song “Mitch Better Have My Bunny” was a joke about Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” until I realized that Rihanna’s tune didn’t appear until 2012 and this was 2001. How did Charlie Hunter do this? This shows you how little I know about jazz.

Upper Left Trio, Three (2007)
There’s a fine line between improvisation and finger-painting. The piano-drums-bass Upper Left Trio trips over that line on almost every track. These cats are first-rate players (and, according to my colleague Lorna, at least two of them are “really cute”), but some of this stuff makes me want to petition the United Nations to intervene.

However, when this Pacific Northwest band is good, they’re clobberin’ time good, as on their reading of Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.”

It was a sunny day today, but summer’s heat is long gone, except in the Columbia Gorge where forest fires have been raging for weeks. I don’t know how all the critters out there will prepare for winter. As for us, I’m always reminded at this season of this quote from the writer and illustrator Ben Böst:

Soon the snows will begin to fall and we’ll be in for the duration. But with a roof over our heads, a fresh pot of coffee, old bourbon, and good books we’ll do just fine.

If you substitute “our favorite coffee shop” for “a fresh pot of coffee” and “non-stop shedding by the dog” for “old bourbon,” you about have us here at Run-DMSteve World HQ. Stay warm, cats, and keep swinging like sixteen.