ready rudy?

oh this is a fine recording. i've had mixed success getting other persons interested in this, but for those who get it, it is really something. someday soon i will figure out the chords to "the moontrane", after which i will be happy for a while.

while listening i am realizing that everyone on this record is no longer with us, sad to say. i am fortunate to have heard both elvin jones and woody shaw perform in concert, at very different times as it goes. larry young passed early on; joe i might have had a chance, especially with his resurgence in the 1990s, but it was not to be. so sorry.

elvin i heard at a detroit-montreaux festival, either 1999 or 2000, with his usual band of young lions, whose names i do not recall. i only heard a little bit (i was on a break from playing at another stage) but he was doing his thing, swirling around in the midst of what sounded the rhythms of a dozen drummers. he was truly remarkable. woody shaw i saw back in the old days, maybe 1979 or so, after he starting recording for columbia, with the group on "rosewood": carter jefferson, steve turre, victor lewis, onaje allen gumbs, buster williams (maybe). that was at hill auditorium. those were those years right after high school when i believed, as much as i could believe anything at that age, that i could spend my life as a jazz musician, writing and playing and working and creating.

i am still writing, anyway.

speaking of blue note recordings with elvin jones and joe henderson, i was also checking out "four by five" from mccoy tyner's "the real mccoy" album, and heard with renewed dismay that an important chunk of the piano solo is missing in this digitally remastered version you get on the internet these days. ass!! having memorized the entire recording it is especially aggravating. as far as i can tell it isn't even an even number of bars, possibly a fraction of a bar; it's hard to count with ron carter and elvin doing their darnedest to confound placement of the downbeat. so anyway, what the fuck? was rudy van gelder on the pipe or something? of course not; shame on me. the only thing that makes sense is that a portion of the original tape was damaged somehow, and that a splice was made to salvage as much as possible.

*shudders convulsively*

it's times like these when i am thankful for the (relative) permanance of vinyl.

now it's on to "inner urge"...