Dragonwych Italian Roast Coffee Live Jazz Poetry Books

Jass was always about the struggle, and hard love-making

While there were more than a hundred notable bands out there, recording and playing live gigs, this page will focus on Jazz musicians who directly or indirectly connected at one time to the Dragonwycke - starting with Charles Lloyd, Gabor Szabo, Albert Stinson and Pete LaRoca, and the Time 2011 recording as another example, with Booker Little, Wynton Kelly, Tommy Flanagan, Scott LaFaro, and Roy Haynes, where the Jazz that started with Bird and Diz and Monk and Miles finally wound up at as a result of the Miles Davis Kind of Blue nuclei exploding into recorded Jazz history by heading up their own bands.

See (hear) John Coltrans, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, and Bill Evans, and Charles Lloyd and Gabor Szabo.

Also see (hear) McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Yusef Lateef, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Stan Getz.

And see (hear) the drummers' bands: Art Blakey. Max Roach (in LA).

The kind of American Jazz Story we're telling starts in a time between the be-bopper and Gil Evans-rooted Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue, just after Lester Young, and all of that which became the crescendo we learned Jazz was ever to become - both as an ever evolving dynamic live in clubs; new solo and group sounds from within the spiritual-like logic of Be-bop, and as a legitimate means of paying the rent - as ending when musicians died of old age, even at 23, and the British Beatles, sensually-engineered mindless pap of (Phil) "specterized" sounds, and Luis Bonfa, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Orfeu Negro and Black Orpheus coincidentally permeated the scene.

Edgard Varèse, with his airplane motor and half of a propeller, and Bela Bartok, Dmitry Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and Claude Debussy enhanced, aye, brought inspiration to the Jazz process. I mention this now because Shostakovich, for example, composed his "1960s" under Stalin, no different than what we heard from the bandstand compositions and playing under the assassins in our own 1960s. From these times, Marvin Gaye. Louis Armstrong and Max Roach come to mind in a classic vein.

As opposites go, while many Jazz musicians succumbed to every variation of pop there was, John Coltrane, as though on a dare, brought pop into Jazz, gave it life, and made it his own. See (hear) My Favorite Things and Ole Coltrane!

In One Who has Chosen Goodness, and John Coltrane, the thirty-something self-described American-Muslim feminist cow-girl Asma Hasan is quoted as saying, "John Coltrane's My Favorite Things was in response to some negative remarks The Sound of Music composer made about Jazz. He really showed him!"

The Jazz Crusaders, with Joe Sample, Stix Hooper, Wilton Felder and Wayne Henderson of Lookin' Ahead fame for example, was among the outstanding and unique bands, right up there with Kind of Blue and "The Amazing" Chico Hamilton Quintet. It should be noted that the Jazz Crusaders, while cranking out dozens of albums over the years, technically they only lasted for three albums on this side of The Matrix, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, or The Manergrie before they crossed-over into the Elevator of Muzak: Freedom Sound, Lookin' Ahead, and the Live recording at the Lighthouse.

For the Jazz Crusaders (later changing their name to "Crusaders"), it was an almost accidental slide, in that when "Tough Talk" was recorded, they utilized a harpsichord and wound up with a Number One hit on the Top 40 pop charts and never looked back, and we never saw or heard them seriously again 'til they showed up in When We Were Kings.

In terms of sheer luck and being in at of the right place at the right time, Charles Lloyd (tenor) discovered Albert Stinson (bass). Both wound up with the Chico Hamilton (drums) Quintet, with George Bohanan (trombone), and Gabor Szabo (guitar). This band was (nearly) the last of the Kind of Blue-type bands; from where individual members would break from the perceived "leaders" (Miles and Chico), and make really new and fresh music within the Jazz Bird and Diz and Monk and Miles started, artistically, intellectually, and spiritually, if you follow Trane's career from beginning to end.

In addition to the Time 2011 band, the Dexter Gordon and Horace Silver band(s) held the integrity of The Music together in that same way as we heard under the batons of the aforementioned Miles Davis (with and without Gil Evans) and Chico Hamilton - although technically, Charles Lloyd, as musical director for Chico, dropped the cello so Chico's music would never be the same again, while taking nothing away from where west coast Jazz came from, or with whom.

Sandwiched in-between our arbitrary starting point at Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue, were the Gil Evans and Miles Davis collaborations that include Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, and Quiet Nights. The latter, technically, falls outside the bounds of and fails to meet the criteria of the aforementioned "spiritual-like logic" that attracts, assassins (hashish smokers of the Sheikh al Jebal variety), musicians, mathematicians, poets, painters, sculptors, and chess players to the Passin' Thru niche and exedras of Jazz.

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And see (hear) Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, Bud Powell, Jaki Byard, Paul Desmond, Tal Farlow, Dave Brubeck, Booker Ervin, Lennie Tristano, Slam Stewart, John Handy, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Kenny Clarke, Coleman Hawkins, George Braith, Terry Gibbs, Billy Higgins, Art Blakey, Zoot Sims, Frank Rosolino, Bud Shank, Chet Baker, Jim Hall, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Roland Kirk, Charlie Haden, Kai Winding, J.J. Johnson, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Charlie Mingus, Philly Joe Jones, Dannie Richmond, Hank Mobley, George Coleman, Victor Feldman, Ron Carter, Frank Butler, Clare Fischer, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, Colin Baily, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes and Bobby Hutcherson.