Friday Night Jazz: Newport Jazz Live
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This is truly a Friday Night Jazz: Via the NYT, we learn that Wolfgang’s Vault has a substantial collection of pristine audio recording from the Newport Jazz Festival.
Some of the recordings will blow you away — I suggest the Count Basie concert, but all 3 are excellent (free registration required).
There is also Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (1959) and Dakota Staton (1959).
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Thank me after you’ve listened to some of these gems . . . more stuff after the jump
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Source:
Historic Sounds of Newport, Newly Online
BEN RATLIFF
NYT, November 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/arts/music/11vault.html
Featured Artists
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Count Basie & His Orchestra 07.02.1959
One of the most important figures to come out of the Swing Era, Count Basie presided with regal authority for 50 years over a dynamic big band that defined the art of group swing. This 1950s edition of the Count Basie Orchestra, sometimes known as the “new testament” band, was running smoothly on all cylinders in this dynamic show. The uncanny tightness in the horn section provides maximum punch, and vocal performances by Joe Williams and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross complement the band beautifully. This was easily one of the most invigorating and memorable sets of the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival. -
Dakota Staton 07.03.1959
A wonderful interpreter of ballads as well as an inveterate swinger, Miss Dakota Staton is one of those singers from the 50s who seems to have fallen through the cracks of time. And while she may not be as widely regarded today as jazz vocal legends like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, the sheer expressive power of her voice is undeniable and her dramatic delivery as compelling as her tough, sassy stage presence. Staton’s scintillating performance at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival was one of the highlights of that Saturday evening.
The Jazz Messengers 07.04.1959
A dynamic presence and charismatic personality who led his hard-swinging ensembles from the drum set, Art Blakey was a widely respected figure in jazz for nearly 50 years. A super talent scout as a well as an exciting player on the bandstand, he recruited scores of emerging talents into the ranks of The Jazz Messengers over the years. The lineup that Blakey brought to the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival on July 4th included the stellar young trumpet sensation Lee Morgan (just six days shy of his 21st birthday at the time of this gig), bassist Jymie Merritt, pianist Bobby Timmons and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley.
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click thru to Vault, then click PLAY for streaming concert
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November 13th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Concert Summary
Count Basie – piano
Billy Mitchell – tenor sax
Charlie Fowlkes – baritone sax
Marshall Royal – alto sax
Frank Wess – tenor sax
Frank Foster – tenor sax
Joe Newman – trumpet
Thad Jones – trumpet
Wendell Culley – trumpet
Snooky Young – trumpet
Al Grey – trombone
Benny Powell – trombone
Henry Coker – trombone
Freddie Green – guitar
Ed Jones – bass
Sonny Payne – drums
Joe Williams – vocals
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross – vocals
November 13th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
This website is fanfrakingtastic. I would thank you BR, but I signed up a couple weeks back.
November 14th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Thanks for the link Barry,
Our Monday night band attempts some of these charts (with limited success). Great site!
November 14th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Thank You Barry, this awesome recording is helping me wake up this morning, I gotta work.
Have a great day !!
November 14th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Awesome sound quality, too.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:23 am
[...] (Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture.) [...]
November 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Thanks for the awesome link. My dad, born 1922 loved this guy. He was listening to this quality stuff while I was listening to KISS. Man did he use to scratch his head. Now I know why…
LS
November 15th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Great stuff,
for my rainy jazz nights I go to Joe Jackson, great musician.
http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/joejackson/albums/album/321510/review/5946102/body_and_soul
November 15th, 2009 at 10:52 am
As much as I hate to say it, I think Jazz is a dying art. I go to the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, CA for Jazz on Thursdays and for Sunday Jazz Brunch. The Lighthouse was THE Westcoast Jazz venue in the 1950s. A quick Amazon search will give you a laundry list of live albums recorded there by a variety of Jazz greats. And basically every Jazz great played there. This past Thursday there were 5 of us in the audience watching the Charles Owens Quartet, which was fantastic. If a 60 year old Jazz venue with no cover can only pull 5 people with no cover, the future is not bright. And if it weren’t for the efforts of 83 year old Gloria Cadena booking the shows for free out of love for the art and the venue, it would already be gone.
If you stop in, tell Gloria (Glo) that Keith sent you.
November 15th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
When Bill Graham passed on, his son sold the name to Clear Channel for $$$$$
from what I’ve heard, Wolfgang’s is the result of that transaction!
The Fillmore lives on!
November 15th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
“Thank me after….”
Indeed. Thank you very much.
-t
November 15th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Keith, re “Jazz is a dying art (?)”:
Well, the problem is that music theory is more or less exhausted. All the big shifts in Jazz during the 20th century were breakthroughs in applied music theory (new rhythms, new tambres, new uses of harmony, new song forms). That pattern extends back well before the 20th century in western music – e.g., the differences between the baroque, classical, and romantic eras. By the late 20th century, the space of possible music was at least roughly completely mapped out with representative samples to be found from just about every region of that space. Everything from here on out is derivative of the past in a way that it wasn’t, say, 40 years ago. Among the genres, Jazz alongside orchestral and chamber were the forms most concerned with theory breakthroughs as opposed to just tweaking knobs on existing forms. Thus, those three forms have something of an existential crisis if you believe in them as “living” forms as they were back when.
-t