8 Comments

This is so cool....it even has an Ornette-Don Cherry vibe at the beginning, then it goes to another place that's traditional yet somehow avant garde at the same time. Doc has the most gorgeous sound.

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Fun story and sweet track of Doc

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Really dug this! Piazolla is a North Star, playing a guitar quartet arrangement of Libertango in college was very influential for me.

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Years ago, Marian McPartland hosted Cecil Taylor on her NPR show "Piano Jazz." Nobody has posted a video on YouTube, but it has to be in NPR's archive. I can't honestly say I remember what it sounded like when they duetted, but I do remember being pleasantly surprised, though I shouldn't have been.

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Love this "generational/cross-stylistic thing." My final map of the world will be a glorious web of outward radiating circles cross-hatched with innumerable finely complicated intersections. No way in hell will it follow a straight line, point to point.

Wonderful: "Doc played beautifully, handling this unfamiliar form with ease. He had a beautiful tone, and here was the kicker: I told him his sound remind me of Booker Little and he said, “hey, you know, I used to substitute for him in Latin bands in New York.”"

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I've been meaning to ask you if you knew Al and Liz Hall at all. She was a painter and art teacher who lived in New Haven and was a family friend. Al was a bass player with Doc Cheatham and with the Duke Ellington orchestra. Sadly I only met him a few times but she was dear to me.

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Elizabeth was a neighbor, and we spent some time hanging out in the year before I moved away (1996). We had a few mutual musician friends, like Dick Katz. I never met Al; I also knew Barbara Bishop, Elizabeth's daughter, but I lost track of her and don't know where she is.

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And of course the other big question a New Havener has to ask- Pepe's, Sally's, or Modern?

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