Jazz for aficionados

RVG was the man alright, I used to just buy an album on his name alone .
But more i listen a lot of his work is too "in your face" for my current taste .

I understand what you mean about RVG’s sound. It’s excellence is undeniable, but it definitely had a signature. I suppose the ultimate goal for a recording engineer recording acoustic instruments is for the music to not sound "recorded". The "in your face" quality you refer to is there; the mic is very (too?) close to the horn. Still, his technique managed to capture the soul of the performance. If I may take a small liberty here, I would say that the reason that you don’t like that kind of sound may be due to your frequent attendance at classical music performances. In general, classical music performance values and recording techniques tend to give the listener a more distant perspective than other genres. This is very important since ensemble playing benefits from a certain distance to the listener. Musical interplay, tonal and rhythmic, by the players requires that distance for the harmonic envelopes of each instrument to fully develop on their way to the listener’s ears. This gives more meaning to things like ensemble blend and interplay. When things are recorded up close some of that information gets lost, in jazz as well as classical.

Btw, no yacht on Lake George here. My idea of chillin is to dig in the dirt at my upstate NY little piece of heaven where I can be around more "unknowns, and as it should be" (like someone very wise wrote in some other thread) than in the city.

I never thought of that but I think you are right frogman.
The reason I listen to Jazz is I grew up listening to swing, and
start of bop, all day, every day on the radio .
Still pissed from when rock came along and murdered it .
And as is well known , when one gets close to departing this vale
of tears one is comforted by things from your childhood .
Few seem to realize how great the composers of the best "standards" were,
to include word-smiths like the Great Johnny Mercer .
I didn’t know great they were myself till I heard a first class Symphony
Orch., Berlin R.I.A.S., play "Stardust", Sleeply Time Girl" and many others few times a week.
In Classical I listen like a hawk for all elements which is uplifting but not relaxing .
Listening to Jazz 88.5 station here, I don’t know about the audience side of things , but on student and young player side , there is an tsunami of great young jazz talent out there .
Few days ago I heard some cuts from North Texas State Lab Band 1, they
reminded me of Artie Shaw or Charlie Barnett at their best, swinging and having a ball !
P.S . I don’t say Upstate NY is most beautiful place in the world because I was born in Syracuse, but because it is just the plain truth .

I first heard "Blue Trane" in the Winter of 59 on a jukebox in a bar. It was selected often, that gave the music a certain amount of "validity".

Today is 05/30/2017, that was 58 years ago when I first heard it, the fact that we are still talking about this tune is not a coincident, it's a "testament"; a testament to the quality of the music, and the musicians, a testament to the quality of the aficionados who selected it for discussion.

Do you see how all these things; "Blue Trane", the musicians who made it, the Aficionados who are discussing it, the 58 years that have past since it's creation, are a testament as being of the highest order in the jazz world?

Orpheus - certainly agree with your "appreciation" of Blue Train, as you have written here and elsewhere on A’gon. That title track alone packs an album’s worth of musical intensity into less than 11 minutes. In some ways it strikes me as, "everything you need to know about John Coltrane" - though the variety of his life long output puts the lie to that.

If I might digress a little (noting that Quartet 2 Part 2 is dedicated to JC and a very Coltran-esqe run by Michael Brecker in Quartet 1)...

Just received Three Quartets by Chick Corea. Purchased it in vinyl and CD from "importcds" on Amazon". I don’t normally buy at one time a recording in two formats - and little new vinyl these days. At any rate, the vinyl (a 2016 re-issue on Stretch Records: SLP9002) is very nice. Flat and quiet with good sonics; full sounding with plenty of bass info; good detail and separation around all the instruments. The SHM CD is a July 2012 Japan mftd. import (Stretch Records Collector Series distributed by Universal Music Co. UCCU-6220). It’s also sounding very good. If you are looking to "refresh" your current copy, vinyl or CD, these are worth considering.

A quick PS - Neither of the Corea recording/formats have the air or depth of the RVG edition CD remaster of Blue Train that’s playing right now.