Tag Archives: milesdavis
New John McLaughlin book: your feedback
Soundsofsurprise.com wants YOU! My new book on master musician John McLaughlin will be published worldwide by Rowman & Littlefield in September. The design department have put together a few draft covers, and I’d like to know which one YOU most like the look of. It would be good to get your feedback, and you’ll get […]
Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 1982-1985
The heart always beats a little faster when there’s news of a ‘previously unreleased’ Miles project. And if it’s from the 1980s, even better. The era is still one the least understood/lauded periods of Miles’s work, despite the stellar efforts of George Cole. It also has not been served well posthumously, particularly by his final […]
Bennie Maupin Does…’Baker Street’?
The streaming revolution has seen the major labels dredging up the damndest ‘extra tracks’ for inclusions on catalogue albums. One of the weirdest is Bennie Maupin’s ‘Baker Street’, which has appeared at the end of his 1978 Moonscapes record. Of all the great 1960s and 1970s jazzmen you wouldn’t expect to go ‘disco’ – or, […]
Ben Sidran: Talking Jazz (An Oral History)
They say that if you want to understand why an instrumentalist plays the way he or she plays, listen to them speak. That makes total sense when hearing Wayne Shorter or Ornette Coleman being interviewed. And now, courtesy of Ben Sidran, there’s never been a better chance to hear other examples of this. Sidran is […]
Book Review: The Ballad Of Tommy LiPuma by Ben Sidran
What exactly does a record producer do? Of course the role covers a multitude of aspects but generally falls into two categories – the techie or the psychoanalyst. Tommy LiPuma was definitely in the latter camp, a five-time Grammy winner, label boss (courtesy of his cult imprint Blue Thumb) and bona fide music fan who […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Terje Rypdal’s Waves
Terje Rypdal has enjoyed a very long and varied career with ECM Records. His guitar style is an in-your-face mixture of Hank Marvin-influenced wang-bar melodicism and jagged, dramatic lines that would seem more likely to come from a cello or violin. And whilst probably too much of a mysterious presence to be described as a […]
When Miles Davis Met James Baldwin
‘I Am Not Your Negro’ is a fascinating recent documentary about the writer and activist James Baldwin. In 1979, Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent outlining his next project, ‘Remember This House’, a personal account of the lives and assassinations of three close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. At […]
Book Review: Pressed For All Time by Michael Jarrett
It’s a conundrum: how to preserve for all time something as quintessentially ephemeral and improvisatory as a jazz performance. So-called ‘red-light fever’ – the terror of preserving a take for eternity when the ‘record’ button goes on – has haunted the careers of a fair few jazz masters. And yet the music is littered with […]
Larry Coryell 1943-2017
On 8th November 2016, the day after America voted to make Donald Trump the next president of the US, guitar legend Larry Coryell – who has died of heart failure – told Downbeat magazine’s Bill Milkowski: ‘Now that Trump is in, we’re going to make good on our promise to move to either Germany or […]
The New Miles Movie: First Impressions
So we finally get a sneak preview of the new Miles Davis movie ‘Miles Ahead’, which wrapped in August 2014 and gets a worldwide release in January. It has also just closed the New York Film Festival and the reviews are in. First, the positives – Don Cheadle, who also directed, co-wrote and co-produced, has […]
Sounds Of Surprise 