🧵 Happy Birthday, Herbie! Maestro @herbiehancock turns 84 today. Saw him in Detroit 2 weeks ago and he was as brilliantly spontaneous as ever. As great a soloist & composer as Herbie is, never forget that he's also one of the best accompanists in jazz history. Some favorites: 2. "Stella by Starlight" w/Miles, 1964. What an intro! 4 rubato bars of perfection. Telepathy w/Miles is off the charts; Herbie playing in the cracks. Harmony, touch, melodies & rhythms link Miles phrases in ballad or swing time. Same thing behind George.

🧵King Frederick

Freddie Hubbard would have turned 86 today. Here's a countdown of 20 favorite solos I've toyed with for a few years. Don't have time to tweak for 2024, so it's a repeat from last year. Hope folks don't mind. 20. “Straight Life” (Paris, 1973). Hello! Freddie’s best working band: Cook/Cables/ Brinkley/Carvin. Freddie plays a short solo, a warm-up, but it’s potent--stronger than most cats at full force. Some trademark lip slurs in the blowing over the coda.

🧵Greatly saddened by the death of Tony Bennett at 96. While he wasn't a jazz singer, he spent his life exploring the sometimes porous borders of jazz & pop in the context of the Great American Songbook. He told me in 1991: “I’m not a jazz singer; I’m a singer who likes jazz.” In his honor, here's a Playlist of some of his best jazz-oriented performances. "Cloud 7” (1954) marked a departure from his early pop hits. Still, his uneven diction & overripe vibrato here mark him as a work-in-progress. With guitarist Chuck Wayne. /2

🧵In honor of what would have been his 97th birthday today, here's a Miles Davis Top 10 comprised of my favorite recordings. Rules: No compilations or posthumous box sets. Only releases that appeared during his life or live performances issued after his death (bootlegs allowed). I've allowed myself two individual bonus tracks at the end (house rules). And since it will likely come up in responses, if you want the Plugged Nickel recordings — I didn’t — you can’t take the whole box; it has to be either the Japanese LP (1976) or the American twofer (1982).

🧵Thrilled that @nytimesarts has devoted a "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love" feature to Mary Lou Williams, but disappointed, and a little alarmed, that not one panelist chose one of her widely if quietly influential big band arrangements, arguably her most important work. 2. So, by all means, celebrate all of her middle and late-period work as a pianist, small and small-group music, but please don't overlook her large ensemble writing during the swing era and early modern period. It's definitive. Here are some choice examples.

🧵Today marks the centenary of one of my greatest heroes: Thad Jones, composer, arranger, trumpeter, bandleader. As I wrote in Jazz from Detroit: "When you take the scores apart, you see the craftwork, but there's a soulful resonance beyond technique. Jones tells stories. 2. "He gets under your skin where your emotions live. He excites the imagination, elevates the spirit."

The opening ensemble choruses, the trading between sections. Whew!

🧵
The great Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani has died at the age of 97. She was an exceptionally expressive and versatile singer, with a powerful but beautifully modulated voice that she funneled into a wide range of roles and vivid characterizations. 2. She was also a celebrated teacher, mentoring such singers Angela Brown, Sylvia McNair, and Elina Garanca. As it happens, she also played a transformational role in my own development as a journalist.

1. Nice piece today by @Wesley_Morris about Streisand's earliest recording (previously unreleased) from 1962. Headline promises "the sounds of a star being born." Essentially true, but the REAL sound of her musical birth would be tapes from Detroit in 1961 -- if they existed.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1588857185722826753

@Wesley_Morris 2. The backstory: After being “discovered” in New York, Streisand’s first real gig as a professional in early 1961 was in Detroit at a swanky downtown restaurant called the Caucus Club. She did three residencies in March, April & July-Aug totaling about 10 weeks. She was 18.

1. I'm not one of the participants in this nice feature, though that's my 2004 profile of Ornette for @freep that quoted/linked near the top. ("In New York, I'm telling you guys literally would say, 'I'm going to kill you. You can't play that way.'") freep.com/story/entertai…

https://twitter.com/MarcusJMoore/status/1587779304695517184

@freep 2. In addition to this profile, I also filed a sidebar that commemorates the single most memorable moment of any interview I've ever done--when Ornette handed me his alto and gave me a lesson on the spot. Here's what happened.

What are the 10 greatest minor-key bebop solos on record? First two nominations that come to mind: Bud Powell, “Tempus fugit” (1949). And Sonny Rollins, “Strode Rode” (1956)

What else is on the list? Speaking of Bud, his last Blue Note LP, “The Scene Changes” (1959) is a clinic in minor bebop — a majority of tune ms on the record qualify and all have strong solos. Maybe Bud’s most moderated record. He’s in great form.

🧵Happy 92nd birthday to the greatest of them all --
@sonnyrollins. I have no bigger hero in or out of jazz. In his honor here's a playlist of 30 brilliant live performances that span nearly 50 years, from 1957-2006. Never forget that live Sonny is the best Sonny. @sonnyrollins 2 “Bye, Bye Blackbird” w/Miles Davis 5qt, Café Bohemia, NY, 7/27/57. Fun to hear Miles in this era with Sonny rather than Trane. Sonny sounds a bit sassy here, and he's seriously swinging. Red, PC. Art Taylor. (Note: Tape runs 1/2 step sharp.)

1. Still in a Sonny Rollins rabbit hole and revising the Top 10 list I posted yesterday. These are my favorite official releases (no bootlegs). A "best of" list would look different, though I'm comfortable defending my Nos. 1-4 in the same slots on a best-of list. 2. I've also given myself five bonus tracks and an encore track to grab some individual performances I wouldn't want to live without. At some point I'll annotate this list but this will do for now.

🧵In honor of what would have been his 96th birthday today, here's a Miles Davis Top 10 comprised of my favorite recordings. Rules: No compilations or posthumous box sets. Only releases that appeared during his life or live performances issued after his death (bootlegs allowed). I've allowed myself two individual bonus tracks at the end (house rules). And since it will likely come up in responses, if you want the Plugged Nickel recordings — I didn’t — you can’t take the box; it has to be either the Japanese LP (1976) or the American twofer (1982).

@ethan_iverson I agree: “I wonder if Ornette, faced with people like Schuller and everybody else at Lenox who could read and notate the most complicated music as easily as Ornette could create it, felt compelled to come up with his own alternative system that he could teach and talk about.” @ethan_iverson Inventing a “system” was a rejoinder to those who claimed he didn’t know what he was doing. Ornette understood that a "system" is a currency of respect in European music (and jazz in a way). Even if skeptics would never understand harmolodics, they'd at least recognize a system.

1. Happy Birthday, Herbie!
Maestro @herbiehancock turns 82 today. As great a soloist and composer as Herbie is, never forget that he's also one of the best accompanists in jazz history. Here are some of my favorite examples in no particular order. @herbiehancock 2. "Stella by Starlight" w/Miles, 1964. What an intro! 4 rubato bars of perfection. Telepathy w/Miles is off the charts, Herbie playing in the cracks. Harmony, touch, melodies & rhythms link Miles phrases in ballad or swing time. Same thing behind George.

King Frederick (thread)

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard would have turned 84 today. In his honor, here’s a countdown of 20 favorite solos that I've been toying with for a few years. I added five new ones this time around. Included are studio recordings and concert performances. His best work was mostly in the 1960s (no arguments, please), but I've allotted 8 slots for the '70s & ‘80s.
Coda: The extraordinary audio of a Boston TV show in
1966 that was floating around YouTube has regrettably disappeared. Otherwise, it would have been represented here.

1 H/T to @JohnChacona for reminding me that Eric Dolphy recorded his masterpiece "Out to Lunch" on this day in 1964. 2 In a 2008 interview with StopSmiling, Bobby Hutcherson told this extraordinary story about Dolphy and a rehearsal for the date:

I've been unusually sequestered working on a project so I've only just learned from @mcbridesworld that the incomparable jazz & blues singer Ernie Andrews has died at 95. There are no words for how great he was and how underappreciated he was. A master.

Andrews' early '60s recording with Cannonball Adderley is a stone classic but not nearly as well known as the Cannonball/Nancy Wilson record. Listen to this ballad singing. Good God ...

Source of this footage is Soupy Sales’ late-night TV show in Detroit in 1956. I had a chapter about Soupy ready to go in “Jazz From Detroit” but had to cut it at 11th Hour for space. He found this kinescope of Brownie in his garage in the mid ‘90s. #JazzFromDetroit

https://twitter.com/saladjazz1/status/1492279207690268675

Here are some of the other jazz musicians Soupy had on his show in Detroit between 1953-59: Bird, Monk, Miles, Duke, Armstrong, Lester Young, Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Getz, Earl Hines, Yusef Lateef, Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan.

1. The Lead Sheet LP Packaging Thread.

Earlier I posted the inner liner from Bobby Hutcherson’s 1978 LP “Highway One” (Columbia), which includes five lead sheets from the material on the record. An inadvertent nudge by @natechinen led me to pull a lot more examples of the genre. 2. Most of these are from a handful of labels that did this a lot — Enja, Artists House, Horizon (A&M), but other labels sometimes got in on the action. I’m not posting the transcribed solos that were sometimes included, because, well, this has already taken up WAY too much time.

1. The Sage and Soul of Detroit and The Conscience of Jazz
My obituary for maestro Barry Harris has posted at npr.org/2021/12/08/106…. What follows is an annotated playlist of recordings & videos. As always, the music survives. It's all here: Truth and Beauty. 2 “Hopper Topper,” 1950. Barry’s debut record. “Cherokee” changes with no theme. Striking confidence for a 20-year-old. The even attack, precise beat & jabbing left hand remind me of Horace Silver. The young Frank Foster comes directly out of Sonny Stitt.