Jun 13 2019
Jazz Gumbo - Set OneSevenTwo - 18 March 2019
Artist - Tune - Album
Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage - Maiden Voyage
Donald Byrd - Flight Time - Black Byrd
Pat Martino - Pyramidal Vision - Joyous Lake
Nancy Wilson - In The Dark - Nancy–Naturally!
Wynton Marsalis - You Don’t Know What Love Is - Standard Time Vol.2 Intimacy Calling
Carlos Santana - Shere Khan, The Tiger - The Swing Of Delight
George Duke - Ómi (Fresh Water) - Reach For It
George Duke - Searchin’ My Mind - Reach For It
Duke Ellington - Cotton Tail - Giants Of Jazz
Sly & The Family Stone - Family Affair - There’s A Riot Goin’ On
Dexter Gordon - Devilette - The Monmartre Collection Vol. 1
Billy Bang - New York After Dark - Rainbow Gladiator
Stan Getz - Morning Star - Stan Getz Gold
Gato Barbieri - Ruby - Ruby, Ruby
Al Di Meola - Short Tales Of The Black Forest - Land Of The Midnight Sun
Tom Waits - Strange Weather - Big Time
Playlists and featured album covers for all previous Sets of Jazz Gumbo can be found at:
https://jazzgumbo.blogspot.com/
You know how a piece of music can just grab you? You’ve heard it before, even really dug it before, but suddenly you’re hearing it for the first time. It pierces something deeper, gets down into your gut at a whole different level. It’s expressing some of YOU, so you want to listen to it over and over again, like to an affirmation, underscoring and emphasizing everything you’re feeling, hungering for, dreaming about, even the stuff you wrestle and struggle with all your life. A piece of music that, were someone to make a film of your life, would have to be the soundtrack, blaring out who you are and who you want to be all at once.
You know that feeling?
That’s what I felt when I listened to Dexter Gordon blowing out “Devilette”. And I felt it again when I edited the set, finally, two months later. Ain’t this exactly what jazz is supposed to sound like? Ain’t it what life is supposed to taste and smell like – with your mom your dad and all you came from rolled up inside it? Your kin and your neighborhood, all those streets you walked, the courts you played and danced on, places you went to work and sat over sweaty lunches with your buddies made from doing that work, women you loved, and women who loved you and those you wanted to love but never got to, the roads you travelled and those you only dreamt about, all that and a slice of hot cornbread.
That’s what this sounds like to me, here today, and that day I played it for the set, and the day I edited it for all of you.
And listening to it now, as I write this, I wonder about who Dexter was. He’d up and pulled up stakes, and settled in Europe for a good, long while – a place a black american could feel he was human, and have his music and his self appreciated and loved. I wonder if he played this to remember home, or to bring a chunk of home to Paris, or just to marry up a piece of the world with a piece of heaven.
Whatever he was aiming to do, he made a piece of real music right here. A piece of perfection that feeds the soul. I hope it feeds yours like it does mine.
Thrive!
Kirby Obsidian
