Tag: McCoy Tyner

More Blue Note Favorites, Courtesy of Downbeat

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I did that post earlier today and mentioned that Downbeat had done a whole feature asking various artists about their favorite Blue Note records. I was able to dig up my copy of the magazine — I don’t have a subscription anymore, but I had purchased this one on the newsstand because of the cover. It was from March of 2009. The cover, as you can see, has Joe Lovano with his favorite Blue Note: Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Free For All, Blue Note 4170. It’s quite gratifying to see his picture with a vinyl pressing, and a mono vinyl pressing at that and perhaps even an original mono pressing. Inside, the magazine asked a variety of other jazz artists to name their favorite Blue Notes as well. Here are their replies:

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Today on Ebay: Fuller, Parlan and McCoy (For Sale)

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SHHHHHHHHHH. It’s so quiet on eBay today we wouldn’t want to disturb any of the sleeping buyers and sellers. I have a sense that the economy is starting to wreak a little havoc on the jazz collectibles market — not on the high-end collectibles — but in the mid-tier. We’ll see. These things tend to go in cycles. Perhaps it’s a good time to be buying. Anyway, it is quite quiet on eBay today, but there are a few things worth noting, including:

Curtis Fuller, Bone and Bari, Blue Note 1572. This is an original pressing in M- condition, both record and cover, and it features an autograph by Curtis Fuller. Not to mention the presence of Sonny Clark on piano. The opening bid price for this record is about $140 and, as of now, there are no bids. In the Jazz Collector Price Guide we’ve seen this record sell for nearly $700 in M- condition without an autograph. So maybe it is a time to be buying.

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Goodbye, Elvin Jones

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I was poring through eBay this morning, preparing today’s update, when my wife came into my office. “Did you see The Times?” she asked. “There’s an article that Coltrane’s drummer died.”

 It’s not surprising that The Times would refer to Elvin Jones as “Coltrane’s drummer.” That’s the way many of us came to find his music, on those great Atlantic and Impulse LPs of the early and mid 1960s. Jones’s contributions to Trane’s seminal quartet did more to influence the music than anything he might have accomplished before or since. Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison – they all must have known at the time that Trane was taking them on explorations that were redefining the music.

 I turned to my record collection and searched for my favorite Elvin moments from that era. Two albums caught my eye: Africa/Brass, Impulse 6, about which, ironically, I wrote last week; and Coltrane Live at Birdland, Impulse 50. The live LP, particularly the track “Afro-Blue,” exemplifies the way in which Jones drove the quartet to places no other drummer of the era could have taken them. Here’s an excerpt from the original liner notes to this 1963 LP, courtesy of LeRoi Jones: Read more

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