Camp Meeting thoughts

love this disc!

there are absolutely overtones of some classic Hornsby (and not so Hornsby) riffs throughout.

2 immediate things i picked up on. He’s playing the corrina (yes the grateful dead/bobby weir song) riff which is the same riff he has thrown in at the end of some live versions of Some Changes Made in the song Celia. Although sprinkled throughout the song , it comes through very noticeably at arounf the 6:35 mark

the other is camp meeting – this has got a spirit trail “sad moon” chorus to it.

i haven’t made it to the show reviews section but am excited how these play out live

Interesting! I’d have never figured it out. Do you have a Blackberry Blossom dose for comparison, Si?

Oh, yeah … showing my ignorance again. I’m not a huge fan of “Jacob’s Ladder,” especially bluegrass style. I usually skip it!

I’ve had the CD for two days now and I can’t stop listeneing to it! Here are my impressions so far:

Charlie,Woody And You-love the interaction between Bruce and Chrustian McBride here.

Camp Meeting-it REALLY grabbed my attention around the 3:40 mark.

Questions And Answers and Giant Steps-“jumpers” (to borrow a “Bruce-ism”) is the word that comes to mind.

We’ll Be Together Again-I was expecting the slow,mellow version of the song and was pleasantly surprised. The sampling of stride piano is a nice touch too.

My favorites so far are “Solar” and “Celia.” Celia reminds me of Spider Fingers (or does Spider Fingers remind me of Bud Powell tunes?)

That’s all for now. If you all will kindly excuse me,I have to go back to the Camp Meeting….

Jackie

OK, first impressions time…

Admitting that I haven’t really paid much attention to jazz in over 20 years, and have so little familiarity with the non-originals that were done on this CD that I wouldn’t recognize them by name, I decided to take in the CD “as a whole.” In short, it meant that the bulk of my listening was done in the car going to and from work, or at work while occupying myself with the pressing needs of the school district that helps me to pay my bills.

By the way, for those of you who think summertime is “easy livin'” for school district employees, especially us IS geeks, you must only be thinking of teachers. The rest of us have to jam into 3 months about a year’s worth of work because the teachers just expect it’ll all be there and waiting for them when they get back a few weeks before school starts. OK, there’s my rant-du-jour!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… I was struck with how familiar it all felt and sounded, and yet how different it was. There’s no mistaking that it is Bruce Hornsby playing the piano. Even when shifting genres, he manages to have a signature sound that is all his own. I’m sure that Bruce could probably play a note-perfect Rhapsody In Blue with a full orchestra, or an album of J. S. Bach etudes, and we’d still be able to instantly identify it as him. I think that’s part of what the fascination with his music is – he doesn’t just chunk out versions of tunes and go through the motions. He makes them his own and this makes it a much fresher, more personal listening experience. He did with Ornette Coleman and the others what he has done in the past with the music of The Grafteful Dead, Elton John, and even Rick James.

I won’t go song-by-song on this, because I thought it was wiser to concentrate on traffic than to read the disc jacket to see what song it was. I did, however, hear some very familiar licks and thought, “wow, that’s pretty cool the way he slipped that in.” But then, we who have discovered the treat that is a live Bruce concert have been exposed to his musical thinking for decades, and it’s not all that surprising.

My general impresison was that it was a very tight album by a trio of musicians who were very comfortable with each other and quite confident in their own respective powers. You could hear the communicative interaction all over the place, and it sounded like the generally had a gas jamming with each other. It had a lot of the feel that I remember from my college days at the clubs in Richmond that featured a lot of “dark basement jazz” playing, except that it had a much stronger spark and these guys are sooooo much better than the Richmond crowd. Of course, I was the odd duck back then, being the rock and roll guy who hung out with the wanna-be jazzers, so who knows what I was really listening to at that time in my life. It was all kinda new to me then.

I’m sure I’ll come up with single-track impressions later, probably as soon as I listen to this in an environment where I can tune the world out, throw on the headphones, and read the liner notes. The one thing about what liner notes I saw was this reference to some web site (bruuuce.com, I believe) and the subsequent thanking of some mysterious figure named Si Twining. Who is this man? Is he some newfangled jazz impressario who seeks to use his superpowers for good (and not evil, as is the comic-book hero credo) to promote this music and bring it out of the dark, dirty basements and bring on the dawn of a new day with this music as its’ centerpiece? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. Who knows? He might be the guy in the shadows at those depraved rock concerts who selects which girls get with the band, which get with the sound crew, and which end up being ritually defiled by the roadies or the bus driver.

Rich

PS I read a lot of the reviews that Dana posted links to (thanks!). Wow… those jazz folks are pretty snobby about their niche! Well, in the truest rock and roll spirit, they can stuff it!

rdiakun wrote:

The one thing about what liner notes I saw was this reference to some web site (bruuuce.com, I believe) and the subsequent thanking of some mysterious figure named Si Twining. Who is this man? Is he some newfangled jazz impressario who seeks to use his superpowers for good (and not evil, as is the comic-book hero credo) to promote this music and bring it out of the dark, dirty basements and bring on the dawn of a new day with this music as its’ centerpiece? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. Who knows? He might be the guy in the shadows at those depraved rock concerts who selects which girls get with the band, which get with the sound crew, and which end up being ritually defiled by the roadies or the bus driver.

That’s what I’m talking about! It’s all over the place!

You like Bruce at shows because he is all over the place! You never know what is coming next!

That’s what’s jazz is all about! It’s all over the place! Camp Meeting does that well! Bruce is all over the place and that is what you like with Bruce!

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! 😆

David Day
Lake Lanier, GA

Here’s a nice Q&A from The Associated Press:

The ever eclectic Bruce Hornsby talks about his first jazz CD and life after pop stardom
By CHARLES J. GANS
Associated Press Writer
NEWPORT, R.I. — Drummer Jack DeJohnette had some fun with his jazz musician friends by asking them to guess who’s playing piano with him on a fast-paced version of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”
“I had people saying Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron. … They would keep trying to guess and I’d say ‘No,”’ DeJohnette laughed backstage at the recent Newport Jazz Festival. “They were quite surprised when I told them — Bruce Hornsby.”
But anyone who has closely followed the 52-year-old Hornsby’s career wouldn’t be too surprised to find he has finally released his first full-length jazz instrumental album. “Camp Meeting,” a trio recording with DeJohnette and bassist Christian McBride, offers new versions of jazz standards by Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk as well as several Hornsby originals.
Hornsby graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in jazz before deciding songwriting was more to his liking. His 1980s pop hits “The Way It Is” and “The Valley Road” had jazz-influenced piano solos. He later collaborated on recordings with such jazz stars as guitarist Pat Metheny (“Harbor Lights”) and saxophonist Wayne Shorter (“The End of the Innocence,” written with Don Henley).
Hornsby sat down for an interview with the AP after performing on the main stage at the Newport festival.
AP: Earlier this year you released a bluegrass album with Ricky Skaggs and now you’ve got your first jazz CD. What’s the connection?
Hornsby: I’ve always had a lot of interest in jazz and bluegrass. Most people would say, “Wow, they don’t have anything in common!” But to me … they’re both about virtuosity on the instrument. If you’ve heard Ricky Skaggs’ band, they’re incredible players. I’m interested in writing songs and singing them well, but I’m also interested in the instrument.
AP: What encouraged you to record “Camp Meeting”?
Hornsby: Pat Metheny really prodded me to do it. He was playing a concert with the University of Virginia jazz orchestra about five years ago. I went up there because we’re good friends and he asked me to sit in. We did (Miles Davis’) “Solar,” and he said, “You have your own way of doing this, you should make this record.” Then I ran into Jack in 2005 at the Keith Jarrett trio date at Carnegie Hall. He said what he always says to me: “Hey, when are we doing to do something?” And Christian has always said that through the years.
AP: What did you do to get ready to record the CD?
Hornsby: What’s become my standard analogy is imagine you took six years of French … and you could speak it pretty well. But then you didn’t speak it for years, so you lose it. And then you get hired to be the French translator at the U.N. … You’re going to have to hit the woodshed pretty hard and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
AP: What was it like playing alongside two jazz heavyweights?
Hornsby: It was very stressful because these guys are giants of the music and together they’ve played with most every great jazz musician that you’ve heard of. That’s a daunting situation. You have to prove yourself every step along the way and if you can’t stand that heat get the hell out of the boiler room. I think they started being more impressed with what I was doing playing-wise and liked the conception of the different tunes.
AP: How did you choose jazz standards like Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” or Bud Powell’s “Celia” for the CD?
Hornsby: I only recorded something that I thought I could find an interesting take on that was my own. … that gave it a reason for being played again. I remember Jack and Christian saying, “Do we really have to play ‘Straight, No Chaser’?” I understand why they said that — it’s sort of a club date jazz tune, so overdone, it’s sort of like the “Proud Mary” of the jazz canon. But I said, “Look, I have an odd way of playing it. If you like it we’ll play it, if you don’t we won’t.” I played it for them. … it was sort of a pointillistic version, and they went, “Oh, very fresh.”
AP: Could you talk about some of the compositions you wrote for the session?
Hornsby: The first tune I did today (at Newport) was “Charlie, Woody and You.” Dave Brubeck loved it. He came up to me and said, “What was that Charles Ives thing — that’s right up my alley. It’s the most out blues I’ve ever heard.” There’s this Ives piece that I’ve played called “Study No. 22” and there’s this real thorny, knotty, chromatic dissonant bit that I love. I used the harmonic language of the Ives bit as my musical material to solo with. Part of the melody of “Stacked Mary Possum” is from an old fiddle tune “Black Berry Blossom.”
AP: How do you feel about the reaction to “Camp Meeting”?
Hornsby: Overall … the reaction has been shock and surprise on lots of levels. I would think that anybody who hears this would know that … that I’ve certainly spent some time with this music on a deep level. I’ve had a couple of writers liken this to when Rod Stewart made his standards records. That’s a very clueless statement because this is the opposite of that. That’s a commercial ploy a lot of people have used in the past several years. … It’s sort of modern day Muzak that goes down real easy for the old yuppie audience. I start off with an (Ornette Coleman) tune that’s so angular. “Death and the Flower” is a pretty obscure Keith Jarrett tune. … Why would they liken that to someone’s pop standards record?
AP: Do you miss pop stardom at all?
Hornsby: I was always a pretty bad celebrity. My thing is personally pretty boring. I’ve been married to the same woman for almost 24 years and I have twin boys. I’m just an old family guy. The best part about those pop stardom years was the respect that I got and all the subsequent calls I got from all these great musicians because they were fans of what I did. It opened me up and broadened my horizons and to this day it continues.

Purists are rarely anywhere near as cool as the people performing whatever it is that those people are purists of. Jazz purists, baseball purists, bluegrass purists, etc. Same deal. “I love this, and I don’t ever want it to change. It must always be as it once was.” Right. A lovely recipe for stagation and death of whatever it is.

Rich

PS David, here’s your challenge du jour… try to come up with a socially acceptable ending for a sentence that starts with “Jazz purists can…..”

finally got my copy

Had to wait for it as it was a birthday prezzie from my wife.

Apart from the tunes, which are great, – i have to say the engineering on this cd is excellent, I love the sound of it – I dunno whether bruce did it all himself or what, but it’s a great job!

dave rich.

Are you down in the dumps? 😆 Maybe even depressed? 😆 Are you in need of a Bruce fix? 😆

Have you had your “daily dose” of “Stacked Mary Possum” today? 😆

If not, just maybe you need some “Stacked Mary Possum”!

Check it out! Listen to it and let me know how you now feel!

David Day
Lake Lanier, GA

Naah…. I changed my mind. I could really get myself in trouble with what I was thinking of posting.

Rich

Is your mind in the gutter? 👿 Having difficulty controling your thoughts? 😆 Do you need a Bruce fix? 😆
Have you had your “daily dose” of “Stacked Mary Possum” today? 😆
Maybe, just maybe, you need some “Stacked Mary Possum”!
Check it out! Listen to it! Now, how do you feel? 😆

David Day
Lake Lanier, GA