Welcome to the weekly Sup Forums jazz Blindfold Test thread. Every Friday and Saturday. If you're new, the point of these threads is to have fun and encourage critical listening, discussion, and general enjoyment of jazz. All critical music listeners are welcome. The more participation we have, the more fun and successful these threads will be. In the interest of keeping the thread alive and bumped, any general jazz discussion is welcomed here as well.
For more information about how the threads work and listening suggestions, please refer to the pastebin: pastebin.com/5cjEr3A6
THIS WEEK'S THEME: Connecting Links COMPILED BY: Jazzpossu
NEXT WEEK: Big Band COMPILED BY: JTG
If you missed last week's thread, DON'T WORRY. It's not too late. Here are the links for the mystery tracklist. Download the tracks, record your thoughts/guesses/evaluations for each one, and then come back and post them in the thread. Remember, people will be posting guesses and thoughts in this thread so don't read the thread until you have listened to the music and collected your thoughts in order to avoid spoilers. Track info for this week's tracks will be posted on Saturday, so if you see the thread is close to dying before then, give it a bump.
there's an additional joke to be made about skeletons and organs, but I'll leave that for you to discover
Christian Fisher
>Track 1 Sounds like Glasper. Well not so much once the horns come in maybe. It sounds fairly modern. I don’t understand the mixing- why would you want your recording to sound like this? The drumming is irritating; it’s sloppy. I also don’t really care for the chord progression- something about it feels very unnatural. Towards the middle there’s some good stuff going on but still the drumming is getting in the way of things rather than adding positively. I think the guitarist has a better idea of how to really lead the group during a solo than the sax player. Piano solo was not very good and thankfully short. He was just doing a lot of short, choppy amelodic phrases. So overall there were a lot of things about this I didn’t really like- confusing mixing, unclear drumming, and disappointing piano solo. No guesses.
>Track 2 The drumming is much better here, and the mix is quite a bit better too. Although I’d say the drums are up too high in the mix this time. Is this an EWI I’m hearing? Or two? Or maybe it was just the combination of soprano and guitar? This must be the drummer’s date with the drums up this high in the mix. So I think it’s guitar with a heavy synth effect that I was thinking was EWI. Well this was an odd one. I think what I enjoyed most was the drumming but the drums were so up front in the mix that of course its what your attention will be drawn to. None of the solos really had much shape or drama to them.
Dylan Nelson
>Track 3 Right off the bat I recognize the tone as Chris Potter. Sounds like a fairly early recording of him. Well I’m loving the drumming, but I don’t really like the piano comping. I think it might be Kevin Hays on piano. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to comp along with Chris Potter solos that don’t have any chordal accompaniment and it can be really hard. This might have been a better solo for the pianist to just lay out and let Chris go for it. David Kikoski does the best job comping behind Chris. Anyway I was thinking the drummer is probably either Billy Drummond or Billy Hart, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Billy Hart was the drummer on the last track so I think he might be the connecting link here (plus Jazzpossu said something about including Billy Hart on future /blindfold/ playlists). He, on the other hand, sounds great playing with Chris. I’ve been listening to Billy Hart a lot lately and I think he plays with the energy and force of Blakey but with the creativity and spontaneity of Tony Williams. The piano solo has some good moments in it but some sloppy moments too. Drum solo was ok. I could have done without it but it definitely sounds like Billy Hart. So- I like the tune, it’s funky and it has a memorable melody. Potter’s playing was fantastic and so was the drummer’s. Everything the pianist did just made me think about how Dave Kikoski could have done it better.
Michael Young
>Track 4 Well this sounds quite a bit like Billy Hart again so maybe I was wrong about him being on track 2. Or maybe not. Drummers are pretty hard for me to place. The tune took me a second to place but then that dissonant chord sparked my memory. It’s Eye of the Hurricane. I always think that chord sounds like Monk’s “Little Rootie Tootie chord” but it’s a little bit different.This stays pretty true to the original. Funny that I talked so much about Dave Kikoski on the last track because this pianist reminds me a little of him. Very clean playing and nice flow of ideas at high speeds. The saxophonist reminds me of JD Allen. Or maybe Mark Turner at times. I like that husky tone. I enjoyed this drum solo a little more than on the last track. Overall this was a pretty good track. The piano playing was the highlight. This sounds like it could be the last track on a Criss Cross record.
>Track 5 I like this tune a lot but I think it would sound much better on alto sax. It’s the kind of thing David Binney or Ruderesh does. I like the trading and the pianist is great. The sax player’s thing works well on this kind of style but the pianist is doing much more interesting things. He reminds me of John Escreet. The drumming is great all the way through this too. It was short and very sweet. I think this was the most consistent track so far this week. I don’t know who this could be but I like it a lot.
Lucas Hernandez
>Track 6 The sound of this reminds me a lot of Joe Henderson’s album “Multiple,” which, coincidentally, I included on my Connecting Links playlist a couple months ago. It’s the combination of the electric bass, rock drums, and rhodes. I don’t really care for the singing too much though. It’s not bad when the flute and vocals harmonize on the melody. This second groove that they go into is pretty nice. They’re doing a phrase of 14 beats which is kind of cool. I guess the soprano player might be the connecting link here? Luckily during the soprano solo the rhythm section did what I was hoping for which was to move a little more outside of their patterns they’d been keeping up. So this had some pretty good moments. I’m a sucker for that 70’s sound so really the only thing I didn’t like here was the singing.
>Track 7 The bassline sounds similar to the last track- maybe the bassist is the connecting link? A lot of the time this feels like a rock group “jamming.” It reminds me of Gateway but not as good as most of their stuff. Mostly the guitar player seems like he’s playing just to fill up space and what he’s doing feels very random. The bass player and drummer are sticking pretty closely to their preset groove. The guitar solo got better as it went on though and really the rhythm section does too, but the first few minutes were pretty dull. The bass solo had some decent moments and it does sound quite a bit like Dave Holland so maybe this is Gateway after all. If that’s the case then I bet it was Holland on the last track also on something from around ’72-’74. Or DeJohnette could have been the link to the last track.
Mason Scott
1: I've seen your rating for this album, so you've heard it before. I don't know why, but this track as a whole has a lot of appeal to me - all the soloing analyzed individually is pretty lackluster, but that almost desperate overall feeling has made this a track I've personally listened to over and over.
2: yeah, it's synth guitar instead of EWI. With that info should be easy to guess who is responsible. Not the drummers date though.
3: indeed Potter and it is Hart on drums - gold star for remembering my earlier comments. I like the pianist much more on his other work - he is the kind of annoying paint-by-numbers post-bop slacker here for me.
