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Kenny Brooks, one of my oldest friends and most significant musical co-conspirator, came through town today with Rat Dog, a Grateful Dead spin-off band. The band was playing a one night show in Portland on their way up the west coast. I met KB on the band's tour bus in the afternoon and we talked shop for a while. He showed me his latest mint Balanced Action tenor and I let him play my new Mark VI acquisition. The usual gear geek stuff. He told me that he was now playing a Japanese brand of saxophone reeds that uses Rigotti cane (we both agree that Rigotti cane is the best on the market right now). The name of these reeds escapes me at the moment but Kenny thinks they're even better than standard Rigotti reeds. He had a friend who speaks Japanese call and order him 100 reeds, totalling $270.
Kenny told me he had brought a present for me and we went up to his hotel room to get it. After rummaging around in his bags a while Kenny pulled out a bound book that looked like a small fake book. I was in shock as I leafed through the perfectly notated manuscript paper. It was the Live at the Lighthouse Omnibook. "You're kidding", I gasped. "Oh, yes", said KB with nodding his head with eyebrows raised. It was the entire Live at the Lighthouse album transcribed in beautiful clear computer notation. "This is insane", I whispered. Kenny explained how a Spanish bass player living in San Francisco had contacted him on his MySpace page and gave him a copy. The transcriptions were done a Petter Wettre, a Norwegian saxophonist and includes all the heads, changes, harmony parts and Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman's solos . There are ten tunes and the book is over 110 pages long. Anyone who is a serious Liebman or Grossman fan has by now shit their pants in excitement while reading this. Petter even has plans for a Play-a-long to go with the book and there is now a DVD available that features Petter playing some of the solos while the transcription scrolls by. This is an epic accomplishment.
Main Lighthouse Omnibook web page
WHY?
LIEB'S NOTES
SAMPLE
BUY NOW
9 comments:
And I was lucky enough to hear KB play the stuff recently along with saxophonist Kasey Knudsen at Jupiter in Berkeley, CA. Fans of this blog should check Kasey out at www.mypace.com/kaseyknudsengroups
KB mentioned her, said she was really good.
Last year, the author, Dave Liebman, and Gene Perla came to the Manhattan School to advertise the book. They talked about the concepts they were all shedding at the time (late Trane stuff, of course) and then played a few examples from the book. Wettre and another saxophonist played the transcriptions and Lieb took an improvised solo if I remember correctly. It was pretty interesting to hear Lieb talk about that period of playing - how into these pentatonic eighth-note and three-tonic lines they were.
I remember when Paul Contos gave me a tape of that legendary album. That was a central motivating force for that whole post-Coltrane pentatonic/fourths/chromatics thing that Kenny and Donny McCaslin do so well.
It took me a while to find that album on vinyl - I think I had to ebay it. The day Elvin Jones died I took it down to KPFA to Jim Bennett's show and he played some of it live. Its one of the greatest jazz albums of the 70s.
Amen!
Well, jeez. I listened to some of the live stuff that our fearless Norwegian transcriber had up, and really got the urge to hear the original. So, after failing to find it anywhere, I figured I'd just blow my cover that I did find like 40 releases by Elvin Jones at www.pricegrabber.com, so there's a little secret for everybody.
I inadvertently found out that if you look at www.pricegrabber.com, they have like 40 different Elvin albums, even though I couldn't locate this one.
cheers
The reeds are Ishimori! Thanks Tim Price.
Here is the phone number for Ishimori in Japan: 03-3360-4970
Get a Japanese speaking friend to order for you.
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