Jarle Vespestad: Musician

It has become far too rare a thing nowadays to be able to study three outstanding, highly-trained and eminently soulful musicians practicing their craft in front of an appreciative (but small) live audience. I treasure these moments, of which I had many these past twenty-five or thirty years, and tonight I was given the opportunity to add a special highlight to these experiences.

I have written about the Tord Gustavsen Trio several times before, although only a shorter piece survived the many reincarnations of this site, but today – and I warned the other musicians of the trio before posting this – I’m not going to write about the wonderful concert experience as a whole, but about Jarle Vespestad. It seemed like the other two didn’t mind. Continue Reading →

“Forgive me if I don’t have the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.” (Ella Fitzgerald)

The Tord Gustavsen Trio

The Tord Gustavsen Trio from Norway has only released two CDs so far, but those two shot to the top of my list within seconds upon release – not a bad feat if you consider that the list is several thousand CDs long – and they have remained at the top of the list ever since they got there. You could say that I have become addicted to them and that what we have here is one of those extremely rare occurences: 2 CDs I don’t seem to be getting tired of, at all. Continue Reading →

The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia

God, I don’t know how often I hit the various online shops to check for prices … until I managed to snatch up a copy for 60 Euro on Amazon.fr. In December of 2004, Christmas came two weeks early to this household when “Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944)”, a ten-disc collection the size of a 78 album sleeve, arrived here in pristine-perfect mint condition.

Before I unpacked this stunning box, I opened one of the better wines I had left (a difficult-to-find 1992 “Puyfromage” from one of the smaller vineyards in southern France) and sat there sipping my wine while looking at the as-yet unopened Amazon package. Continue Reading →

Monty Alexander and Ray Brown

Once in a while CDs just sneak up on me. More often than not they have been lying around forever and suddenly, while crawling around in front of my jazz collection, which is housed in low shelves, CDs literally jump out at me. I just have too many CDs and when the bug bites me, I try to listen to sessions I haven’t heard at all or just sampled and shelved away for some reason.

I wonder what went wrong when I went on a Monty Alexander and Ray Brown buying binge and stowed the CDs away. I was probably hooked on some other stuff (I did buy the CDs discussed below just when I entered one of those retro fits after having purchased the remastered Status Quo back catalog, which transported me back to my childhood and lots of air guitar playing in my 9 square-meter room at the time, so that might be an explanation). Continue Reading →

Shorty Rogers Meets Tarzan

I can’t remember who it was on which forum, but there was this guy prancing around asking everyone if they had heard “Art Pepper Meets Tarzan”. To cut a long story short, everyone’s instinct was right when they told this person to look for other places to hang. Art Pepper would never … but Shorty Rogers would. If you know your Art Pepper, you know that he wasn’t the Hollywood guy, but Shorty Rogers was, almost exclusively from about 1962 onward. Continue Reading →

Cuba: I Am Time

Trying to jam-pack roughly 100 years of a nation’s music history onto 4 CDs is never an easy task, and, as far as I know, has never been done successfully either. Of course, “Cuba – I Am Time” cannot succeed either, but for the more casual listener it is an excellent overview that only falls short in the liner notes department.

Packed in a cigar case (it even has a cloth thingy you can pull on to get the CDs and the booklet out without having to turn the box upside down) and supplemented with a 112-page booklet outlining the history of and influences on Cuban music from the very early times until 1997, this boxed set is a real beauty and treasure. Continue Reading →

Buddy Rich Sessions

In November of 2005, Mosaic Records will release released ” The Complete Argo, Emarcy and Verve Small Group Buddy Rich Sessions” (MD7-232). This boxed set will contain 7 CDs at a list price of $119. Continue Reading →