Lift to the Scaffold - Miles Davis.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses/ Des Femmes Disparaissent - Art Blakey.
Breathless - Martial Solal./ Un Témoin dans la ville - Barney Wilen.
Eva - Michel Legrand.
(Review by Lance)
Wow! any one of these 5 CD's would be in the running for Jazz Reissue of the Year. To get them all in one boxed set means game over - no contest.
How can I begin to relate the delights within? My only regret is that I haven't got the DVDs to play as I listen. But, and it's a big but (not you darling!) the music stands up on its own.
Marcel Romano captures the whole mood with his comment "Jazz was an integral part of the artistic scene that centred around Saint-Germaine-Des-Pré. So it was only logical that the young, new wave directors made films by day using the same music they heard in the clubs at night".
The MJQ's role in No Sun In Venice (1957) was groundbreaking inasmuch it was the first ever film score written by "A serious jazz composer": the pianist John Lewis. (Ellington's Anatomy of a Murder came a couple of years later.)
Gunther Schuller related it to "Third Stream Music" and maybe it was but it did the biz for the film and stands on its own 8 feet.
Lift To The Scaffold (1958) is well known both in small cinemas and on record. The disc is probably better from a jazz point of view as it seems the music was used more sparsely in the actual film. Apart from Davis, Barney Wilen blows some evocative tenor and crops up elsewhere on this set.
Blakey and the Jazz Messengers have two shots for the Jazz Oscars and, if such a coveted trophy existed, they wouldn't have walked away empty handed!
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1960) and Des Femmes Disparaissent (1959) were classic sessions with or without the cinematograph. Blakey was drumming at his best - those distinctive press rolls could have sent the Dagenham Girl Pipers on a knicker flashing trip down the high street - on this occasion they launched Lee Morgan and Benny Golson (who wrote the score to the latter piece) into the history of the future. Wilen blows again on the former film soundtrack. If you're confused, so am I ! I've never been so excited, upon receiving these discs, since my eleventh birthday when Santa brought me a Stanley Gibbon's Stamp catalogue and the Boy's Book of Soccer! - Wonder who's got them now?
Probably not Martial Solal. Breathless (1961) is another classic disc! There are no half measures with zee French. They either do it brilliantly (Solal etc,) or they don't (Claude Luter et co.) The ubiquitous Wilen pops up again, this time as leader, on Un Témoin dans la ville (1959) in a quintet that includes Kenny Dorham and Duke Jordan.
And Michel Legrand - et tu! He may have wrote so many popular themes yet it must not be forgotten that he has le jazz hachette (Jazz chops?) and the big band soundtrack to Eva (1962) proves it - Gil Evans and Michelle? they're from the same mould.
Tres Magnifique are the only two words from my French vocabulary to describe this album apart from C'est S' Bon.
That it comes with a superb booklet with photos and text describing both musicians and film is an added bonus.
French New Wave - Original remastered jazz on film recordings 1957-1962 is now available on
Jazz on Film Records Vol. 3 Catalogue number JOF 001. Further details at
www.jazzonfilmrecords.com
That it comes with a superb booklet with photos and text describing both musicians and film is an added bonus.
French New Wave - Original remastered jazz on film recordings 1957-1962 is now available on
Jazz on Film Records Vol. 3 Catalogue number JOF 001. Further details at
www.jazzonfilmrecords.com
Lance.
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