Guitarist James Blood Ulmer has passed away at I think age 82. The high point of his career in the US was in the 1980s, parallel to Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s […]
Category: daily best music in the world
Max fast – 02
Here are some pretty remarkable videos of Max Roach playing live. The first is in Norway in 1977. The tune with the group, “It’s Time”, is fast, and 20 minutes long, including a solo played […]
Daily best music in the world: Ornette in Berlin ’71
Ornette Coleman playing in Berlin, 1971, with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell. It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve seen any decent video of Blackwell playing before— there have long been […]
Daily best music in the world: Mickey Roker fast
Here is Mickey Roker absolutely killing it on the tune Impressions, on A London Bridge, a live recording by Milt Jackson. Tempo is about 334 bpm— half note = 167. And it does pick up […]
RIP Al Foster
By now anyone who would read this site has heard that Al Foster passed away. Here are some notices: Ethan Iverson | Downbeat | NPR | WBGO – Foster @ The Village Vanguard in 2012 […]
Daily best music in the world: Port of Entry
Weather Report absolutely crushing Port of Entry live in London, 1980: Originally recorded on Night Passage, one of my favorite albums ever. I made a loop from that that is really fun to play with. […]
Daily best music in the world: Tony Williams day
Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I’m at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story. In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams’s birthday, […]
Daily best music in the world: Michael Griener solo set
Here’s an incredibly beautiful solo set by my friend, and friend of the site, Michael Griener. News of Roy Haynes’s death broke during the set, and it feels like we’re sending him off… At Richten 25, […]
RIP Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones passed away early this morning. I’m not equipped to write anything meaningful about him, so here are some links: notices from the Associated Press, and from Variety. “I’ve never been bored or lonely in […]
Daily best music in the world: a good first jazz album
If we learned about music in a nice orderly way, where everything started at a logical beginning with music that was clear and expository, this would be a good first record for finding out about […]
Daily best music in the world: Elvin recorded wrong
A little listening experiment. My brother played this record for me, I forget how he set it up— clearly there was something wrong with it, he wanted my reaction. I said, this is somebody I […]
Daily best music in the world: Art Ensemble of Chicago – 1983
While I figure out how to work Musescore, here’s some Art Ensemble of Chicago. My German friends told an interesting story last year about how they got all of this Paiste gear… by some rather […]