#80's jazz

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Gerry Mulligan feat. Scott Hamilton - “Gone” Swingin' Jazz for Hipsters, Volume 2 Song released in 1986. Compilation released in 1997. Jazz

From Gerry Mulligan's obit in the New York Times:

Mr. Mulligan was one of the great improvisers of postwar jazz. In his hands the baritone saxophone, usually a burly, stiff creature, became supple and elegant. Mr. Mulligan was after grace and gentleness when he improvised, and his solos, whether at a ballad tempo or at a faster speed, always have warmth to them that makes them seem personal.

Gerry Mulligan was probably the greatest baritone sax player that's ever lived. His fingerprints are all over Miles Davis' groundbreaking Birth of the Cool album, and from there, he went on to form his own jazz concoction, a piano-less quartet, which was a newfangled idea at the time, that included Chet Baker. And despite not being from the west coast, he somehow became a pioneer of the west coast jazz sound, too. Not to mention the long list of other legends he had the pleasure of performing with during his career, like Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Stan Getz, and Quincy Jones.

However, by 1986, Mulligan had landed on the west coast juggernaut jazz label, Concord, and this time, for the album, Soft Lights and Sweet Music, he, along with alto saxophonist Scott Hamilton, had a piano player backing him by the name of Mike Renzi. Soft Lights and Sweet Music contains a song called "Gone," which Concord then later included on the second volume of their Swingin' Jazz for Hipsters series.

"Gone" is a song that's a bit of a marvelously smoky unraveler. Initially, Mulligan and Hamilton trade leads that stick to a certain script, but after each trade-off, they find themselves wandering way off course and progressively deviating from the rhythm that had once guided them. It's a wonderful free-flow of ideas whose unpredictability is key. And Renzi manages to get in on the action, too, at the end, soloing with his right hand while maintaining a semblance of rhythm with his left. Impressive stuff all around.

Long after Gerry Mulligan's peak, he proved that he still had plenty left in the tank with songs like this one.

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Today’s compilation:

This Is Acid Jazz, Vol. 1 1991 Acid Jazz

Favorite tracks:

Break 4 Jazz - “Break 4 Jazz” A Man Called Adam - “Earthly Powers” Night Trains - “The Killer” Izit - “Stories” Hip Joints - “Rock Hopper” A Man Called Adam - “A.P.B.” The Cool Beats - “Trinkets and Trash” Homeboy - “Control Yourself Cousin”

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Today’s compilation:

A Jazzy Wonderland 1990 Jazz / Smooth Jazz / Jazz-Pop

So, here's the thing: you probably didn't go to a department store this month. And you usually go to them every December, but this year's different. Guess what you missed out on: that generic, smooth Christmas jazz that lightly plays over the store's crappy speakers. You probably didn't even realize that you didn't get to hear it this year, and it's likely a piece of your Christmas shopping experience that you've taken for granted this whole time. But as you're reading this paragraph, you're realizing that you're actually kinda missing it right now.

Well, fret not, because here's a jazz comp from 1990 that'll take you straight back to those days of frantically sifting through the Bugle Boy table at J. C. Penney's on a frigid Christmas Eve night. Columbia's A Jazzy Wonderland is chock full of exclusive tunes and more than a third of them come courtesy of members of the Marsalis clan. If you're someone who knows a little something about jazz, then you may be familiar with Ellis Marsalis and his two talented sons, Wynton and Branford (Wynton despises hip hop music, but Branford is more open minded!). But did you know there's more jazz-playing Marsalises? Like Delfeayo, who's brothers with Wynton and Branford and plays the trombone? I didn't! He's on this comp's inexplicable second rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy"!

But this whole thing doesn't entirely emanate that department store Christmas jazz type of vibe. One track sounds like on-hold music for some grifty, over-the-phone Christmastime prayer service ("Thank you for your saintly patience. He is currently busy. Please continue to hold and He will be with you as soon as He can"); there's a tune by Joey DeFrancesco & Dwight Sills with a high-strung, winding organ solo that sounds like they, uh...might have... put some "Christmas snow" in their nostrils...; and the first rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy" sounds like a song that a small craft store might play in December whose main clientele consists of antivax moms!

Fun for the whole family! Merry Christmas to all those who partake!

Highlights:

Joey DeFrancesco & Dwight Sills - "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" Tony Bennett - "White Christmas"

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Ernestine Anderson - “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” Swingin’ Jazz for Hipsters, Volume 1 Song released in 1983. Compilation released in 1997. Jazz

“Honey at dusk” is how Quincy Jones, a frequent collaborator and longtime friend, describes Ernestine Anderson’s sound. “She can sing the blues, and she can sing a ballad. She can swing you out of the country!” Etta James has gushed. Ernestine Anderson was a truly dynamic gem whose career outlasted many of the singers she came up with. As a teen, a vibrant Seattle jazz scene embraced her, but things really started happening for Anderson when she moved to New York City. By the late 1950s, she began to earn her due praise on a national scale, receiving a glowing write-up in Time in 1958 and the coveted “New Star” Award in the authoritative jazz publication DownBeat in 1959.

But that initial success was fleeting. Jazz would take a permanent backseat to rock and roll in the 60s and the work for Anderson dried up. She spent a couple years in the UK, where earning a living as a jazz musician was still a viable option, but she ended up back in Seattle and then decided to quit singing entirely.

After about a decade of answering phones and working as a hotel maid, Anderson agreed to perform at a jazz festival on Vancouver Island. It wasn’t long after that set that she signed a contract with the Concord Jazz label, enjoying a total career resurgence, earning more recognition and praise than when she first achieved fame. It’s not exceedingly rare, but it’s certainly uncommon for musicians to get a second sustaining wind in their careers. However, it’s almost unheard of for the comeback to outshine the past glory. During her second stint, Anderson racked up four Grammy noms and performed at countless festivals and in some of the world’s most renowned venues.

In 1983, well into her tenure at Concord, she released an LP called Big City, on which she sang about the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life and some of its scenes. For one of the tracks, Anderson inventively took Simon & Garfunkel’s whispered chill and brimming-with-sunshine folk tune, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” and transformed it into a sweet piece of intimate, soft, and sultry vocal jazz. It was only right, after all. New York City, where the 59th Street Bridge is located, is basically the home of jazz. Simon & Garfunkel’s original was one for the folk-dominated coffeehouses of the 60s, but it deserved a version for the smoky jazz clubs, too.

Despite how different Simon & Garfunkel and Anderson’s renditions may sound, both songs still manage to imbue feelings of relaxation and blissful contentedness. But while Simon & Garfunkel provide an upbeat, skip-and-whistle-while-I-stroll airiness to their version, Anderson practices with a hushed, lay-in-bed-all-day-with-the-windows-open kind of soulfulness instead. In the end, it goes to show that there’s multiple ways to arrive to the same emotion, and it seems like Anderson was cognizant of that fact. She wanted to make a tune that could. paradoxically, sonically contrast with Simon & Garfunkel, and still generate the same type of sentiment. And she pulled it off wonderfully here, with touches like her super light, high-note, smiling rasps accompanied by Hank Jones’ varying piano patters. 

Excellent cover of a sunshining 60s folk classic from this vocal jazz legend.

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Today’s compilation:

Pacific Coast Highway 2000 Smooth Jazz / Easy Listening

Highlights:

Marc Antoine - “Pacific Coast Highway” Third Ave. - “Achilles” Dave McMurray - “My Brother & Me” Avenue Blue - “Pick Up the Pieces”

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Ernestine Anderson - “Someone Else Is Steppin’ In” The Concord Jazz Heritage Series: The Sampler Song released in 1985. Compilation released in 1998. Jazz-Blues

“Honey at dusk” is how Quincy Jones, a frequent collaborator and longtime friend, describes Ernestine Anderson’s sound. “She can sing the blues, and she can sing a ballad. She can swing you out of the country!” Etta James has gushed. Ernestine Anderson was a truly dynamic gem whose career outlasted many of the singers she came up with. As a teen, a vibrant Seattle jazz scene embraced her, but things really started happening for Anderson when she moved to New York City. By the late 1950s, she began to earn her due praise on a national scale, receiving a glowing write-up in Time in 1958 and the coveted “New Star” Award in the authoritative jazz publication DownBeat in 1959.

But that initial success was fleeting. Jazz would take a permanent backseat to rock and roll in the 60s and the work for Anderson dried up. She spent a couple years in the UK, where earning a living as a jazz musician was still a viable option, but she ended up back in Seattle and then decided to quit singing entirely.

After about a decade of answering phones and working as a hotel maid, Anderson agreed to perform at a jazz festival on Vancouver Island. It wasn’t long after that set that she signed a contract with the Concord Jazz label, enjoying a total career resurgence, earning more recognition and praise than when she first achieved fame. It’s not exceedingly rare, but it’s certainly uncommon for musicians to get a second sustaining wind in their careers. However, it’s almost unheard of for the comeback to outshine the past glory. During her second stint, Anderson racked up four Grammy noms and performed at countless festivals and in some of the world’s most renowned venues.

In 1985, well into her tenure at Concord, Ernestine Anderson deviated from her usual jazz and pop repertoire by releasing a blues album called When the Sun Goes Down. She had recorded the blues before, but nowhere near an album’s worth of material. And she pulled it off wonderfully.

In liner notes provided by British jazz pianist Leonard Feather, he gives some background to Anderson’s vengeful “Someone Else Is Steppin’ In”:

“Someone Else Is Steppin’ In,” a blues with a bridge, came to Ernestine’s attention when, during a visit to Houston in May of 1984, she heard it on jukeboxes sung by the composer, Denise LaSalle. “They play a lot of blues down there; I went out and bought a lot of things. It was also recorded by an incredible blues singer out of Chicago, Z.Z. Hill, who passed away a few months ago. I have three of his albums and three of Denise’s, and I love them all.” Ernestine and Red [Holloway, the album’s tenor saxophonist] capture a tremendous sense of blues vitality and authenticity on this irresistible performance.

On this recording, Anderson displays an impressive range of what she’s capable of as a vocalist, taking tried and true jazz techniques and fitting them into a blues framework. She shows off her deep and soft sultriness as well as her confident bravado. Anderson picks her spots to use nice vibrato and seamlessly reaches to low depths to produce a passionate gravelliness, which she briefly features at the song’s conclusion. The extended instrumental bridge that Feather alludes to is enjoyable as well as Red Holloway pulls off an exquisite tenor sax solo, backed by Gene Harris on piano.

Well into the second wave of her career, Ernestine Anderson delivered this tremendous piece of jazzy mid-80s blues.

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Stan Getz - “Easy Living” Jazz Moods: Jazz At Week’s End Song recorded in 1982. Compilation released in 1999. Jazz

Stan Getz was one of the greatest tenor saxophonists of all time. Self-taught, the man never learned how to write music and instead composed on the go. He played by ear, replicating what he heard by matching it on his sax. Getz’s career lasted from the 1940s into the early 90s when he died. Along the way, he played alongside such music and jazz legends as Jack Teagarden, Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Charlie Byrd, Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto, Chick Corea, and Huey Lewis and the News. Getz brought the bossa nova jazz craze stateside in the early 1960s, racking up a total of four Grammys from 1962′s Jazz Samba with Charlie Byrd, famous for “Desafinado” and 1963′s Getz/Gilberto with Antônio Carlos Jobim and João and Astrud Gilberto, famous for “The Girl From Ipanema”.

Getz had a very unique sound. In 1991 New York Times obituary, Peter Watrous wrote that his sound “became known as the Long Island Sound by musicians. Reedy but full, it would change into a strangled cry on command. It gave the impression of being fully relaxed, but Mr. Getz saved himself from sentimentality with his hard, acute rhythmic sense.”

In a 1986 interview with Mel Martin, reprinted in The Saxophone Journal, Getz elaborated further on his sound and approach: 

I always wanted to take as much reediness out of the sound as I could and hear more of the breath. I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got, and I discovered that my dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room. I also did a lot of practice in the Hollywood hills in the open air...People think that I play effortlessly. I remember doing a record date with Bill Evans and afterwards he said to me, you make it sound so easy but when I get up right next to you you’re working hard and making it sound easy!

After a jazz fusion foray in the 70s with artists like Chick Corea, Getz returned to cool jazz in the early 80s, landing on west coast juggernaut label Concord. In 1982, he recorded some songs as part of a quartet. These were posthumously released in 1995 on an album called Blue Skies. One of those songs was “Easy Living,” a jazz standard that’s been recorded numerous times by tons of jazz musicians.

This is a piece to unwind to after a stressful week. Good for a nightcap with a classy cocktail and proper ambiance. Backed by piano, light percussion, and a double bass, Getz reproduces his trademark wispiness. By putting a lot of breath in, he has a way of making his approach sound effortless, when in reality it’s not. As he pushed along, Getz unexpectedly ventures into high notes every so often, briefly departing from his breathy sound.

Getz is followed byJim McNeely on piano, who likes to pair chords from his left hand and delightfully wander over singular notes with his right. Then Marc Johnson delivers a plaintively quiet solo on double bass before Getz returns to close out the final minute-plus.

A nice, calm piece of early 80s jazz, led by Stan Getz’s effortless-sounding tenor sax.

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Poncho Sanchez - “Co Co My My” Fiesta Picante: The Latin Jazz Party Collection Song released in 1988. Compilation released in 1997. Latin Jazz / Salsa

Poncho Sanchez is one of the greatest congueros (conga players) the world has ever known. Born in Laredo, Texas, he moved to Norwalk, Calfiornia, a suburb of Los Angeles at a young age, where he was exposed to a wide variety of music including Afro-Cuban jazz, American jazz, and funk and soul. Sanchez taught himself a handful of instruments and as a teenager decided to strictly pursue the congas. 

Although Los Angeles-based Latin jazz wasn’t considered to be significant on a national scale in the 70s, it did have a vibrant scene. In 1975, while Sanchez was making his way through the city’s club circuit, Tjader invited him to come perform a gig as a member of his band. In 1980, west coast jazz’s premier label, Concord, launched a Latin jazz sublabel, Concord Picante, and made Tjader one of its biggest signings. Up until Tjader’s death in 1982, Sanchez played an important role as conguero on Tjader’s recordings and in his performances. 

Before Tjader’s passing, he put in a good word with Concord owner and founder Carl Jefferson to sign Poncho Sanchez as a bandleader. And so, for nearly 30 years and almost his entire career, Sanchez recorded for Concord and its Picante sublabel. 1988 saw the release of Sanchez’s seventh album and his fifth for Concord, ¡Fuerte!, which features “Co Co My My”

Derived from Conjunto Africa’s 1974 song “Coco May May,” Poncho Sanchez’s version is completely different. The only similarity seems to be the common refrain, which is the song’s title. With a Latin jazz piano rhythm provided by Charlie Otwell and a bass rhythm from Tony Banda, “Co Co My My” begins as a conventional Latin jazz song with lively horns, switching between vocal sections and brief instrumental spots. Sanchez’s congas appear throughout, but he really makes his presence known in the final segment of the song. Following a high-pitched, bleating and blaring trumpet solo from Sal Caracchiolo, Sanchez launches into an extensive and free conga solo that hits its stride at the 4:18 

Fantastic late 80s Latin jazz that’s great for partying with a remarkable solo from Sanchez at the end.