Sunday Session: December 13, 2020

Branford Marsalis

Here's this week's roundup of various music-related items of interest:

* Revisit a Vibrant San Francisco Music Scene in Harlem of the West (San Francisco Classical Voice)
* The Treasure in Frank Zappa’s Secret Subterranean Vault (The New Yorker)
* Bob Dylan sells his entire catalog of songs to Universal (CNN)
* Paul McCartney opens up about friendship with John Lennon in new interview (NME.com)
* Matthew Shipp at 60 (CliffordAllen.me)
* How John Coltrane Introduced the World to His Radical Sound in the Groundbreaking Recording of “My Favorite Things” (OpenCulture.com)
* Knocking Down Barriers: An Interview with Abdul Wadud, 1980 (PointOfDeparture.org)
* 'Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s' Opens a Portal to the Past, and a Dialogue (WBGO)
* Wait, Bob Dylan Owned ‘The Weight’? An Explainer (Rolling Stone)
* There Goes the Neighborhood: What really caused the decline of 18th & Vine (ScalawagMagazine.org)
* Meet säje, the vocal supergroup thriving on female empowerment (Jazz.fm)
* ‘Mostly Hard Times’: How the City’s Few Jazz Clubs Are Hanging On, Barely (Curbed.com)
* Whit Dickey on the Path to Wisdom (Jazz Times)
* Jazz City: The Once — and Future — Sound of Memphis (Memphis Flyer)
* Ukulele Ike, a.k.a. Cliff Edwards, Sings Again (Jazz Times)
* Tough Times for Jazz Promotion (Interview No. 5 with Wendy Kirkland of Chesterfield Jazz Club) (London Jazz News)
* 82% of Musicians Earn Less Than $270 a Year From Spotify and Other Music Streaming Music Platforms, Study Finds (DigitalMusicNews.com)
* The New Vocabulary of Funkadelic (1970) (AquariumDrunkard.com)
* 'I'm a song catcher': 60 years of Arhoolie Records, the label for a lost America (The Guardian)
* Mary Lou Williams, Writ Large (DownBeat)
* Branford Marsalis on the Music of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’ and Chadwick Boseman’s Performance (Variety)
* George Benson Innovates, Crafts Pop Hits (DownBeat)
* Concert Industry Lost $30 Billion in 2020 (Variety)
* Our Revels Now Are Ended (The American Scholar)
* Joni Mitchell: “I know what I want and I’m not afraid to stand up for it” (New Statesman)
* He's the Leader: An Interview with Aretha's "Main Man" Fonzi Thornton (PopMatters.com)
* “Then there was the time I was buried in a hole”: Phil Minton at 80 (The Wire)
* Berkeley jazz clarinetist marks the days of pandemic in ‘Plague Diary’ (San Francisco Chronicle)
* Charley Pride, Pioneering Black Country Singer, Dead at 86 (Rolling Stone)

Get free downloads of rare material from Miles Davis, Human Arts Ensemble

A recent perusal of selected music-sharing blogs turned up three St. Louis-related jazz albums available for free downloading.

Via Penny Tray, Miles Davis All-Stars Live in 1968-59 featuring John Coltrane collects a number of radio airchecks (recordings from live broadcasts) of Miles Davis from the time when his group included such now-legendary players as saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly, bassist Paul Chambers, pianists Red Garland and Bill Evans, and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb.

It features a good chunk of the band's customary pre-Kind of Blue repertoire, as performed at Birdland and Cafe Bohemia in NYC and the Spotlight in Washington D.C., as well as one cut from a TV appearance featuring Miles, Cannonball, Garland and an all-star band.

The next two albums come from Nothing Is. First is Miles Davis: Philly May 12 & 17, 1975, a bootleg of a show from a Philadelphia club called Just Jazz. The band includes Davis on trumpet and organ, Sam Morrison (soprano sax, tenor sax, flute), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (electric bass), Al Foster (drums), and James "Mtume" Foreman (conga, percussion).

Regarding the session's origins, the post by NI blogger James Benjamin says, "Don't know much about this one other than that the recording is from May of 1975 right as Miles was getting ready to retire. The set is pretty much what one might expect to hear at a Miles gig around that time. Sound quality is a bit dodgy (as one would expect from a bootleg live recording), but gives a decent idea of how Miles and band were sounding at the time."

Finally, also from Nothing Is comes the Human Arts Ensemble's Streets of St. Louis, ripped from a long out-of-print 1978 Moers Music LP. This session was recorded September 6, 1974 at NYC's Studio Rivbea by a band including Charles "Bobo" Shaw (drums), Lester Bowie (trumpet), Hamiet Bluiett (baritone sax), Julius Hemphill (pictured, alto sax), Joseph Bowie (trombone), Abdul Wadud (cello) and Dominique Gaumont (guitar). The cuts include "Streets of St. Louis", "Miles Beyond", "Entensity Big" and "Hard Light".

As always with these sorts of things, there's no telling how long these downloads will be available, so if you're interested, it would be best to act quickly.