Straight and not Straight

[Canard]

This post got me thinking about the diversity of what is labelled Jazz:

Just discovered - Blue Rondo a la Turk

I am joyfully tearing up listening to this stuff and overwhelmed by how many of us here feel the same.

www.letstalkguild.com

I love Dave Brubek greatly but for me he is a kind of cool Chamber Jazz, very straight, very academic. At the peak of his popularity a lot of people dumped on him, saying he didn't swing.

As pointed out in the thread above, Charles Mingus, in some ways a polar opposite of Brubek, defended him.

So lets look at the polarity. Straight and not straight. Tight and loose. Rigid and elastic.

Again, I like both these artists and both these 1962 records.

Brubek - tight and straight - a play list




Mingus - loose and not straight. - a play list

Rough and elemental and elastic. There is a pulse. And everybody is where they need to be when then need to be there but at the points in between ... well ... Dannie Richmond, Mingus's longest serving drummer, had a very elastic sense of time.

I played the Oh Yeah! album for a very good Jazz pianist friend one evening when we sitting around and sipping single malt. A couple of bars into Hog Calling Blues, the lead-off track, he almost choked on his scotch and said, "#%@*! They play so loose. They must be [redacted]! [Editorial insertion: They must have partaken of substantial quantities of some experiential monosodium glutamate.]