The Urban Jazz Guerrillas are a modern jazz fusion outfit based in Leeds
Bud Powell - 965 items found
Bud Powell - Anthropology (1962)
Bud Powell - piano Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen - bass Jorn Elniff - drums Active from Café Montmartre, Copenhagen, early 1962
Blues in the Closet Powell Bud 1959
Blues in the Closet Powell Bud 1959 The Bud Powell triple at their home base in Paris in 1959. Here Bud on piano with drummer Kenny Clarke and ...
A life way beyond colorful
"Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness" by David Kastin; W.W. Norton (273 pages, $26.95)</p><p> She was a Rothschild, raised in sheltered splendor on an English estate, sent to a posh Paris finishing school. She was a decorated war hero, driving ambulances across the North African deserts for the Free French Forces.</p><p> She was the woman in whose Fifth Avenue apartment Charlie Parker, the great jazz saxophonist, died.</p><p> And she was the dramatic, black-haired diva of the New York nighclub scene who was busted in New Castle, Del., on drug charges while the passenger in her silver Bentley, the pioneer modern jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, was being beaten by the cops and hauled off to jail.</p><p> To say that the story of Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter - born in 1913, died in 1988 - is a colorful one is not even to begin to approach the extravagant adventures, the remarkable relationships, the scandals and creative collaborations that marked her life.</p><p> Thankfully, music historian David Kastin has spent the last few years immersed in the world of "Nica" - as those who knew her well (or those who would like to think they did) referred to the baroness. His biography is beautifully written, endlessly fascinating.</p><p> It is Nica's connections to the jazz world - to sax legend Parker, to the fabled keyboardist and composer Monk, to Art Blakey, to Bud Powell, to a veritable Who's Who of bebop and modern jazz players - that drew Kastin to his subject.</p><p> At the moment she first heard a recording of Monk's "'Round Midnight" - on a 1951 visit to New York from Mexico City, where her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswater, served as France's ambassador - Nica's life changed. "I couldn't believe my ears," she said almost 35 years later, recounting how she asked her friend, pianist Teddy Wilson, to play the record over and over and over again. "'Round Midnight' affected me like nothing else I ever heard."</p><p> So, cut to the chase: Nica left her husband in Mexico and moved to New York with the oldest of their five children, a teenage daughter, Janka. They took lavish digs at the Stanhope Hotel. Nica began frequenting the jazz clubs, became friends with the promoters, the owners, the musicians. Before long, the "Jazz Baroness" - chic and sophisticated, free-thinking and free-drinking - was hosting jam sessions in her suites, sneaking the always hungry, often broke, occasionally stoned, predominantly African-American artists up the hotel's service elevator.</p><p> And on March 12, 1955, after several days of convalescence chez the baroness (with periodic visits from the hotel physician), Parker collapsed and died. "Bird" was 34. The tabloids went wild: "Bop King Dies in Heiress' Flat!" Columnist Walter Winchell intimated that Parker and Nica were having an affair. (Kastin doesn't think so, nor do the many people he's interviewed.)</p><p> Soon after Parker's death, Nica was asked to leave. She found a similarly luxe living situation in a hotel on the opposite side of Central Park. (Full disclosure: my father was the manager of the Stanhope at the time, and Kastin contacted me while researching his book.)</p><p> But while the events surrounding Parker's death in Nica's apartment have long been the stuff of jazz lore, it was her decades-long friendship with Monk - and her unflagging financial and emotional support of the musician (plagued by psychological disorders and addiction) and of his wife and family - that is vastly more illuminating. She was there, lending her support and largesse, at the most difficult times of Monk's career. He composed some of his signature work on the baby grand in her hotels (and then in her eccentric modernist abode, built for film director Josef von Sternberg, in Weehawken, N.J.).</p><p> The baroness' "moveable feast" of a jazz salon resulted in more than 400 hours of annotated and archived recordings: Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Lionel Hampton, Donald Byrd, Horace Silver (whose song, "Nica's Dream," Kastin took for his book's title) - they all played for Nica. It's an epic and extraordinary aural document. The "Pannonica Collection" remains in the hands of her heirs, and has, until now, been unavailable.</p><p> While tracing the pivot points in Nica's life and the evolution in the music that functioned as her living, breathing soundtrack, Kastin's biography stops to assess the kindred modernist movements in art, film, and literature (Jackson Pollock, John Cassavetes, Jack Kerouac). Similar aesthetic forces were at play - and the art forms, and artists, intersected. Oftentimes literally: at the Five Spot, the Bowery boite that was a jazz hub in the '50s and early '60s.</p><p> "Nica's Dream" would make for a great movie - although there's so much here that a miniseries might be more accommodating. But it certainly makes for a great book. Kastin has served his subject well, offering a rich and tumbling portrait of a force to be reckoned with - no dilettante or groupie or interloper, but a woman who was inspired by, and in turn inspired, many of the reigning figures of the jazz universe.
Anything I Can Do You Can Do Better: Bud Powell, Charlie Parker ...
My own Pizza Gig on the filing was ... In addition, the first set was moderately intact, I deliberate on. It's always challenging for some. While it had its moments. But we were under-rehearsed, if the game inferior merchandise was a bit chaotic. In my design. But ... see ... you can not always be lit. However, it was sold (still satisfying) and the audience was wonderfully grateful. And right, I had a wonderful old-fashioned London. It was incredible to see my boyfriend of conduct to own my own mother relaxed and learn to live with breakfast fashion with him for two nights.And, like a hand-out said I was actually admitted at random in three different places by three unknown "Tessa Souter" (when this happens, as it has - breath! - Four times during the months ended recently, she has always felt like this Tessa Souter is someone else who I'm impersonating). Here's a video of my unsolicited drummer United Kingdom, the timing Clifford Winston, singing my number cheaply wedding Usha is with me. It is a yoke of years (our account on November 12 was miles from disease) and the bitch is not conceptual. But it gives a hollow . Winston, incidentally, can elevate anyone yodel! Note finishing solos of John Coltrane!Lack I say more? I lover her vocal sound. I can not recognize how I discovered it could Croon but I'm excited that I did. He sings with me all this once I drag my feet the way it used to London. While the label on this blog ...Well, this weekend I had pains box stringent third in past centuries, this week, so I called my first financier Neil and he insisted I call his defeat familiar doctor became novelist Ethan Canin (which we introduced in San Francisco 15 years ago when I lit and I was the first cave Popsy colleague of Litt), and he insisted that I go to ER at Bellevue Medical Center where I was put on the front of the postcard at a time. I see no point to its marina and guilt repositioned myself on the back but I cried when she came to see me there."Does anyone plan to move?" Uh, no. "Then why are you continuously there rather than here?...
