"Beauty Is a Rare Thing"

but say things about ORNETTE! i WUV him!!

Stefan J= does he write for any publications?

HOWEVAH scum list = second-hand, so i paid under the odds

also, his bassist (billy higgins?) and his little speech was about the only thing to actually move me in kb's jazz doc.

And yeah, listening to these recs now, after all the hoo-ha, it's just amazing to hear how tuneful they are - it really doesn't seem like that big a leap forward from Charlie Parker, there's the same sense of funky urgency and sheer joy in the playing. That moment in the middle of 'Eventually' where Don Cherry leaps in and repeats a little melody line that Ornette has just played = sublime.

SJ = secret pussycat. Always one of the nicest ppl I ever served during my time at the R+T. A line he wrote in a Sonny Sharrock review for FE has always stuck in my mind - "noize ain't just abt some hairy twat bending over an amp". Once saw SJ play a REALLY painful set with a saxophonist at the Purcell Rooms - major audience walk- outs, esp. when he started sticking bits of metal into his guitar strings. It made my teeth ache (really!)

one of my favourite evah r*chard cook pieces (in WIRE #3!!) was about don cherry's playing on these records

Was it Alan Wilkinson on saxophone, andrew? I've got a CD of this duo called 'In a Sentimental Mood' on Incus. It is painful and beautiful as well. I have to see jaworzyn live. Hopefully it'll happen.

Pretty well definitive as far as these things go (though does not have the later "double quartet" session with Cherry, Bobby Bradford, Steve Lacy, Haden, Izenzon, Blackwell and Moffett, the tapes of which may or may not have been lost in a fire) though feel uneasy about the Ken Burns/Marsalis way of appreciating OC, i.e. the Atlantics and maybe the Golden Circle Blue Notes are all you need, smartly skirting the need to address his considerably more radical later music (Science Fiction - my personal favourite and the fifth greatest album ever made - Skies of America, Dancing In Your Head, Tone Dialing - the latter of which may be the most radical thing he has ever done).

And why oh WHY (Points of View tribute) do Impulse not reissue the incandescent "Crisis" '69 live album? The version of Song For Che almost cuts that on Liberation Music Orchestra. Cherry, Haden, Redman and Denardo all in attendance.

I'm also weirdly fond of _The Empty Foxhole_, though clearly that's one of the more screwed-up records of his career (featuring his 11-year-old son on drums).

*covet*

Anyone else going to see Ornette at the South Bank next week then and/or Cecil T the night before?