Music Monday: Cannonball, Shaw and Shepp

I have very much enjoyed listening to the newly remastered release of Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans, Know What I Mean? from 1961. It’s an absolutely classic which starts with Bill Evans’ iconic “Waltz for Debbie” and ends with his “Know What I Mean?” To my ears, the other highlight on this album is their driving and confident version of George Gershwin’s “Who Cares?” The album was recorded a couple of months before Evans’s brilliant live recording at the Village Vanguard.

I’m not sure that there remastering made much of an audible difference to my ears, but the album certainly sounds good. One of the quirky, but enjoyable moments in the album comes right after Evans’s intro to “Waltz for Debbie” when they turn on the studio microphone for the rest of the band. You can suddenly hear the studio space along with the interaction between the musicians. It’s a compelling moment and demonstrates how recording engineers (in this case Bill Stoddard) make a difference.

I spent a few days last week searching for a CD copy of Woody Shaw’s 1986 album Bemsha Swing (Live from Baker’s Keyboard Lounge) in Detroit. It features Roy Brooks on drums, Geri Allen on piano, and Robert Hurst on bass. Apparently, it was recorded by Brooks. Brooks and Shaw play brilliantly together which makes both of their tragic lives all the more painful to understand. Allen, Hurst, and Brooks, it’s worth noting, were Detroiters giving us a window into the long tail of the vibrant Detroit jazz and club scene. Geri Allen is fantastic on this album. I’ve not listened to enough of her work, but I have time this week and I aim to rectify that! The album features, as the title suggests, a number of Thelonious Monk songs performed in the characteristic voices of Shaw and Allen and ably anchored by Brooks and Hurst. There is so much vitality and power here. 

(By the way, I finally ended up buy this album from Apple in MP3 format. It is weird and depressing that this album is available on TIDAL [my preferred streaming service] and that used version of it on CD cost close to $50). 

Finally, I’ve been really enjoying Archie Shepp’s and Richard Davis’s duet album Body and Soul from 1991. It’s a live recording of the two performing in London a couple of years previous. It shows Shepp in a deeply bluesy place fitting Davis’s remarkably intuitive accompaniment. In keeping with a mildly-Monkish theme to this post, check out this bluesy version of Monk’s “Panonica”:

And Monk’s “Body and Soul”:

This is late night music listening if I’ve ever heard it.

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As a little bonus, check this out: