? What Jazz Music Selection are you Listening to in the Now? | Analog, Digital ??????

[alexatpos]

Dodo Marmarosa, fine but troubled pianist from bop era, luckily made few nice recordings in 60's as well (one with Gene Ammons that is worth listening too), before he disappeared from the scene. Again, more of his life story could be found online. Album recorded in 1961. called 'Dodo's back' should deserve more listening

 

[hopkins]

Dodo Marmarosa, fine but troubled pianist from bop era, luckily made few nice recordings in 60's as well (one with Gene Ammons that is worth listening too), before he disappeared from the scene. Again, more of his life story could be found online. Album recorded in 1961. called 'Dodo's back' should deserve more listening

Great choice! Here is a good set to get (available on Qobuz) that includes the tracks you mentioned and the trio recordings from the same time as the Ammons recordings (62):

Complete Trio Studio Recordings

www.jazzmessengers.com

I could listen to this on repeat all day:

 

[No Regrets]

Dodo Marmarosa, fine but troubled pianist from bop era, luckily made few nice recordings in 60's as well (one with Gene Ammons that is worth listening too), before he disappeared from the scene. Again, more of his life story could be found online. Album recorded in 1961. called 'Dodo's back' should deserve more listening

Hi,
For some reason, it says this video is not available... I was hoping to listen to it.
Best wishes,
Don

 

[MarkusBarkus]

Here are a couple from US links, Don. Cheers...

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

m.youtube.com

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

m.youtube.com

 

[No Regrets]

Here are a couple from US links, Don. Cheers...

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

m.youtube.com

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

m.youtube.com

Thank you, Markus

Best wishes to you,
Don

 

[hopkins]

Here is an excerpt of Leonard Feather's liner notes from the "Jug & Dodo" album (https://archive.org/details/cd_jug-dodo_gene-ammons-dodo-marmarosa_0):

"Dodo Marmarosa," said Charlie Parker one night as we stood sipping at the White Rose Bar on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street, "is a bitch."

Bird knew what and whom he was talking about. Though the name of Michael Marmarosa is now almost as dead as the proverbial dodo bird, he occupies a small but significant place in the evolution of a music once quaintly characterized as bebop, later as bop.

Charles Mingus’ recent book bore the apt title Beneath the Underdog. Marmarosa, like many of his generation, belonged to a musical culture that was beneath the underground. The boppers had problems. Whether their personal difficulties (many of them were disturbed, unhappy men) were cause or effect of the manner in which their innovations were stigmatized is anyone’s guess. Whatever the answer, most of the men who came up in the shadow of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and their contemporaries were faced with a gigantic hurdle. They had created a new music, a new avenue to jazz improvisation and composition, that was ignored by the public, scorned by most critics and appreciated only by a minority of the younger and more open-eared jazzmen.

Born in Pittsburgh December 12th, 1925 Marmarosa was a schoolmate of Erroll Garner. Often they would sneak out of classes to hold keyboard sessions. There was a big difference: Garner, without learning to read music, went on to develop a maverick style that was never quite a part of bop. Dodo, while acquiring the necessary technical and reading skills that enabled him to hold down chairs in name bands, became an early participant in the bop movement.

He was barely 15 when he joined the band of Johnny “Scat” Davis, one of the first of several orchestras in which he and c'arinetist Buddy De Franco worked together. (Others were, chronologically, Gene Krupa, Ted Fio Rito, Charlie Barnet and Tommy Dorsey.)

By the end of his formative years Dodo had developed a style that had much in common with that of Bud Powell: a horn-like insistence, expressed most effectively in straight-ahead linear terms, but capable of surprising harmonic complexity.

Barney Kessel, the guitarist on many of Dodo’s early combo dates, recalls him with nostalgic pleasure tinged by regret that the career of the young Turk never quite became airborne. “He was one of the most brilliant musicians I met during that entire period,” he recalls.

Unlike most of the early boppers, Dodo brought a classical discipline to his music. In fact, the first thing he ever played for me was the Revolutionary Etude. When he was through and I expressed my appreciation, he said, ‘Well, if you like the way I did it, I have a 13-year-old sister at home who can play it much better’.

Dodo's early experience did not logically equip him for bop. After the classical training he went into the world of dance bands, and he came to bop as a dance band pianist. I always felt that he didn’t have a chance to evolve fully in the new jazz. But he had fire and imagination, not to mention complete unpredictability both as a person and a musician.

"At one time, when we were both in Artie Shaw’s orchestra, we doubled on a trio gig here in L.A. playing after the job with Artie. All the tunes we’d played as ballads with the band, he’d start tearing into at Cherokee tempo; and the numbers that were up tempo with Shaw, like maybe After You’ve Gone, he would play as ballads. He kept you on your toes, believe me."

After settling on the West Coast in 1945, Dodo played for a while with the orchestra of Boyd Raeburn, an arranger and saxophonist who was so far ahead of his time that Duke Ellington offered him encouragement and, reportedly, financial support. If he had to work within the framework of a large orchestra, Raeburn’s was the best setting; but Dodo’s brightest moments, as I recall them, came with the opportunities to express himself on a combo record date. Unfortunately most of these were made for short-lived labels and only a few were ever transferred to LPs. There were sessions with Lem Davis, Slim Gaillard, Dizzy, Bird, Howard McGhee, Lester Young (he was on a memorable Prez date that produced D.B. Blues and Lester Blows Again), and a combo date I put together under Lucky Thompson’s name for RCA, a couple of tracks from which have been preserved in an Esquire Poll Winners LP (Dodo won his first and last poll as the New Star in the experts’ 1947 tally.)

What happened to Dodo Marmarosa? Did the creative fire go out, was it extinguished by the attrition of new aesthetic values, or was a wall built around it so that we could no longer see it burning? In a sense this last conclusion seems to be the most viable, but it was Dodo himself who built the wall. Always a remote personality, seemingly he withdrew more and more into himself. He was back with the Artie Shaw orchestra again in 1949-50; then began the slow slide into obscurity (spelled P-l-T-T-S-B-U-R-G-H). During the early 1960s he made the Chicago sessions represented by these live recordings; surfaced again for an LP produced by a long time admirer, Jack Tracy, then sank back into limbo. Now he is the definitive forgotten man.

The brilliance of Marmarosa’s luminous days, close to the forefront of jazz, is illustrative of a broader point: there are, at every stage in the evolution of an art form, those who achieve long-term recognition and continue to evolve through the years (a classic example is Mary Lou Williams); there are those who make their contribution to a particular era, stop short, and later die tragically, as was Bud Powell’s lot; and there are the others, who might best be described as the great Might Have Beens. This album shows not only what Dodo might have been, but more relevantly, just what he was, at a point in time when too few were interested enough to listen.

What happened to Dodo Marmarosa? asks Feather. His Wikipedia page gives some answers:

Dodo Marmarosa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here is a good article about Marmarosa:

Dodo Marmarosa - Jazz Research

The jazz world thought that Dodo Marmarosa was dead until Bob Dietsche visiosted Dodo in 1990 and wrote this article.

jazzresearch.com

And here an interview:

The Mysterious Michael Marmarosa - [aka] Dodo Marmarosa

Dodo Marmarosa

jazzprofiles.blogspot.com

 

[alexatpos]

@No Regrets , try this version, I hope it will work. The other stuff posted is quite dated and this is the album I posted previously

 

[alexatpos]

I live near the sea and manage to swim every month in it, there are always few sunny days to do so. But, today we have some snow in the outskirts of the town. Not exactly cold like in Sweden, but here is some music that is in tune with the weather. Perhaps you ( two or three guys that are folowing this thread, anyway) might appreciate these following tunes as well. The album is called 'Jazz pa svenska' from 1962. by Jan Johansson.It is and album of jazz interpretations of Swedish folk songs. Johansson died prematurely in 1968. 'Although not well known in the U.S., Jan Johansson was among Sweden's top jazz pianists of the 1950s and '60s and commanded tremendous respect in Scandinavian jazz circles.'

 

[alexatpos]

Quiet Sunday. Perhaps a gospel album is appropriate. Mahalia Jackson's album, 'In Concert, Easter Sunday' from 1967. might suit the mood.

 

[No Regrets]

@No Regrets , try this version, I hope it will work. The other stuff posted is quite dated and this is the album I posted previously

Ahh, thank you for sharing this with me and the other forum members

Best wishes,
don

 

[hopkins]

Quiet Sunday. Perhaps a gospel album is appropriate. Mahalia Jackson's album, 'In Concert, Easter Sunday' from 1967. might suit the mood.

Nice track. I only have one Mahalia Jackson album in my collection - At Newport. Here’s a track I particularly like:

I do not relate to religious songs (irrespective of religion) but this one was supposedly also a song of the Underground Railroad: “I’m on my way, to Canaan land” meaning Canada!

 

[alexatpos]

@hopkins I thought to buy that album as well, but remember reading somewhere that its sound quality is somewhat 'bad' . How does it sounds? The 'Easter Sunday' I can recommend, as it is a great record and it sounds good. As for religious songs, its beautiful music and its enough for me. Everyone relates with it (or not) in the way it pleases him.

Here is another, perhaps interesting album. 'This set was pianist Hampton Hawes' last before he started what would be five years in prison on drug charges. He had been arrested 11 days before and ironically chose to record a set of spirituals (plus a blues) as he awaited trial. Not released until 1987, the music (played with bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Stan Levey) is full of intense emotion, strong melodies and a little more variety than one might expect. Hawes' treatments of such tunes as "Down By the Riverside," "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" and "Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho" are quite haunting.'

The Sermon, from 1958.

 

[alexatpos]

@No Regrets You are welcome, or should I say, no problem (x 2) ?

 

[hopkins]

@hopkins I thought to buy that album as well, but remember reading somewhere that its sound quality is somewhat 'bad' . How does it sounds? The 'Easter Sunday' I can recommend, as it is a great record and it sounds good. As for religious songs, its beautiful music and its enough for me. Everyone relates with it (or not) in the way it pleases him.

Here is another, perhaps interesting album. 'This set was pianist Hampton Hawes' last before he started what would be five years in prison on drug charges. He had been arrested 11 days before and ironically chose to record a set of spirituals (plus a blues) as he awaited trial. Not released until 1987, the music (played with bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Stan Levey) is full of intense emotion, strong melodies and a little more variety than one might expect. Hawes' treatments of such tunes as "Down By the Riverside," "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" and "Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho" are quite haunting.'

The Sermon, from 1958.

Thanks for the Hawes album - I had missed that one and will listen to it!

 

[alexatpos]

@hopkins You are welcome, I suggested it because you gave me association after mentioning 'religious' music. More often than not, first its music, than everything else...or even better, all good music is spiritual, imho

 

[alexatpos]

Phil Upchurch's album 'Feelin Blue' from 1967.

 

[No Regrets]

The album is called 'Jazz pa svenska' from 1962. by Jan Johansson.It is and album of jazz interpretations of Swedish folk songs.

Thanks for posting this video.... I loved it so much that I ordered it on vinyl. It's coming from Switzerland to the US so it might take a few weeks, but I'm looking forward to receiving it and hearing in play in my system

It's always fun discovering new music

Here's a video of my system playing "Blue & Boogie" from side one on Dizzy Gillesspie with the Mitchell/Ruff Duo vinyl record.
Put on some headphones and crank 'er up

Best wishes to you all,
Don

 

[alexatpos]

@No Regrets You are welcome. Its interesting that on this site there is not much talk about music, or perhaps people are not interested in jazz.
Great sounding system, even without headphones, the trumpet sounds very much alive.

Here is another album of Dizzy that I like, perhaps you do not have it.
'Bahiana' from 1975.

 

[No Regrets]

Great sounding system, even without headphones, the trumpet sounds very much alive.

Thank you for the very kind words! Yes, this album is very well done indeed with all of the instruments sounding very alive.... it can give you goose bumps when listening to it in my room

I highly recommend this lp for any one who loves jazz

Best wishes,
Don

 

[No Regrets]

Phil Upchurch's album 'Feelin Blue' from 1967.

Sounds great.... he sure knows his way around those frets

Best wishes,
Don