Odds And Ends
Private Eye: MD
I don’t have much to say tonight, so I’ll just pick up some bits and pieces, two of which follow on from my post yesterday. I then finish off with some Grateful Dead talk and a John Coltrane piece, so those of a nervous disposition might want to look away now.
The first, to answer a question, probably tongue in cheek, by my friend Stuart in a comment, no I hadn’t had extra coffee when I wrote yesterday. I have a couple of cups over breakfast; any more than that and I risk migraines.
More seriously, I went out to the shops today and picked up the latest Private Eye. I spotted the paragraphs I’ve copied to the right. It says pretty much what I think, but in many fewer words 🙂
The trip to the shops was ‘interesting’ as they say. There were noticeably more masks/face coverings being worn, but, given that wearing them is about to become mandatory in shops in Scotland, there was still only around 50% usage. Are people holding out until 10 July?
***
Much more prosaic and I dare say of niche interest only, I listened last night to a Grateful Dead show I’d never heard before. In itself that isn’t unusual: they played at least 2500 shows in their career. However, they only played four shows in 1975, the year they released my favourite of their albums, Blues For Allah. At Winterland in San Francisco on 17 June 1975, billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends, they played almost the whole album to an audience of Deadheads who’d never heard it before.
Several audience recordings are available on the Internet Archive and I listened to two of them. I was stunned by how tight and rehearsed they sounded. They played a 23-minute sequence that would thereafter become a standard until the end of their career: Help On The Way>Slipknot>Franklin’s Tower. It was utterly spellbinding, and I sat here in the kitchen with headphones on, wishing fervently I could have been there. Unusually, it was almost entirely instrumental because they hadn’t learned the words yet.
They also played a cracking version of Blues For Allah itself. They only played it live three times as far as I know. It is one of their most experimental pieces, and divides opinion.
This is one of the recordings:
https://archive.org/details/gd75-06-17.bertrando.unknown.233.sbeok.shnf/gd75-06-17d1t07.shn
***
Music. Someone I was chatting to on the internet a few days ago said he thought the Grateful Dead were really a jazz band who inadvertently played rock. I know what he meant but don’t agree. It is true, though, that they had a deep background in jazz, though more as listeners than players. Bob Weir based his approach to rhythm guitar on what McCoy Tyner played on piano for John Coltrane, Phil Lesh was a jazz fan from the late fifties onwards. At some point, they spent a lot of time listening to Coltrane’s Africa Brass, but that’s a bit hardcore for a Sunday night.
So here’s John Coltrane from late ’57 (released January 1958) when he was still playing bebop but on the cusp of developing his signature style. And what a cracker of a band he put together for the session:
John Coltrane – tenor saxophone
Lee Morgan – trumpet
Curtis Fuller – trombone
Kenny Drew – piano
Paul Chambers – bass
Philly Joe Jones – drums
Recent Comments