Yesterday was pretty damn dux, to borrow an expression favored by one of the Australian characters in a novel I’m partial to, Volte-Face in Paris in its English language version. A French version of a previous substack article you can read here, a date set for the rendez-vous to sort out my legal situation in France – I stared at the screen after filling in the form for the 269th time, mumbling, You say what ?!? – and an invitation from an American agent to read a few things of mine. I nearly fell over when that one came in.
And then came Catalina’s birthday party, which meant braving the rain and the metro for a long haul to the other side of town. You don’t know the parties at the party so I’ll spare you the details, minus one : I raced from Paris South to République but didn’t bring a present, so here it is, belated, for the kid from Chile : one week’s worth of music from yours truly. Different little episodes. Albums, maybe. Sounds, yes. Scenes Today’s entry is the first. I’ll get seven in in however many days, with an accent on… I’m not telling.
Making it easy on myself, here’s the full disc mentioned in that earlier article, Blues and The Abstract Truth. It’s a curious record: on the one hand, its chromatic sound was so coöpted by television as to make it feel a little too familiar in spots, on the other, solos from Hubbard, Dolphy and Oliver Nelson are so fine as to lift the listener into the clouds.
(Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dolphy make an interesting pair. Adventurous listeners can find them in the orchestra on Ornette Coleman’s epochal Free Jazz.)
Nelson was born in Saint Louis to a musical family, two immediate pluses for anyone aspiring to anything artistic. His education reveals an instinctive curiosity : he played with Ellington and Basie, wrote charts for Louis Jordan and Quincy Jones and studied with Elliott Carter, one of America’s most erudite classical composers. Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye and Hindemith’s Symphone in E Flat were on the menu at his first classical concert.
But enough bio. Ears up !