Oh, how I love to get some authentic live hard bop! Even better if this happens on a tuesday, the day of the week on which I spent almost twelve hours in the office usually coming home tired and beaten. But last tuesday was different, as Jazzclub Moods, which is just around the corner from my office, presented a concert with legendary trombonist Curtis Fuller (born 1934) and his sextet. Fuller is of course mostly known for his work on several sessions with John Coltrane (e.g. “Blue Train”) and for his work in the Curtis Fuller / Benny Golson Jazztet. I think that Fullers 1950s and early 1960 sessions for Blue Note and Savoy belong to the best hard bop sessions of their time.
Besides Fuller the band consisted of young(er) men. The other horns were german tenor saxophonist Ralph Reichert and trumpeter Joshua Bruneau from Vermont. Read more »
During all of the 1980s, one of my favorite musicians was guitarist James Blood Ulmer. At that time he was playing with his band Phalanx (with tenor saxophonist George Adams) as well as with his “Odyssey” Band, featuring violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow. I managed to see Phalanx live several times then, but I never got to see the Odyssey band.
I lost my interest in Ulmer a little after his 1990 release “Blues All Night” which in my ears was totally overproduced and sounded much too clean. Although I bought the Music Revelation Ensemble’s 1994 CD “In The Name Of” when it appeared (a great album by the way), I never came to see Ulmer live again since 1989 or so. So it really was a nice surprise when I opened up the morning paper last wednesday and noticed that James Blood Ulmer’s “Black Rock Experience” was to play at the Moods Jazz Club in my town that night. The band as announced was to be Ulmer with bassist Mark Peterson and drummer Grant Calvin Weston and singer Queen Esther. I somehow had the feeling that the music might be in the vein of the “Blues All Night”, which I relistened just before going to the gig only to find out that I still do not like it too much.
Much too my surprise the personnel for this evening turned out to be Ulmer with the old Odyssey band: Charles Burnham and Warren Benbow. And featuring Queen Esther. And it turned out to be a great evening of deep Blues from earthy to abstract, splashed with dots of free funk, and salted with harmolodic spices.
I made some nice photos during the concert, which was started off by Ulmer doing a slow and melancholy – nearly painful – solo rendition of the U.S. National Anthem.
I would have loved to hear more of Queen Esther who really has a great voice. One of the evening’s highlights was her acapella rendition of “We’ll be Together Again”.
While drummer Warren Benbow had an indifferent look on his face during the whole evening and never even had a faint smile on his face (absolutely no indifference in his playing though), violinist Charles Burnham got really involved:
Although I originally did not plan to – else i would have taken a small tripod – I filmed parts of the concert. I had a very unconvenient standing position so you might get seasick when watching the three tracks I have edited down from the footage. I would say that the nauseating shakiness takes any commercial potential out of this clip, but if someone with the right to object objects against this video being on youtube, I’ll be taking it down in a hurry.
I managed to come a little closer and take some nice shots of Ulmer after the concert when he was selling and signing CDs from the stage.
