[Dixielandjazz] Mercury Records Art Hodes

[Marek Boym]

I have most of the Hodes Blue Notes, and they are so lovely!  The greatest
trombone solo I've ever heard is Sandy Williams' on "Low Down Blues," which
is not to say that I consider Williams the greatest trombone player.
Art Hodes happens to be my friend Donna's favourite pianist.
I have some numbers from the Mercury duets with Truck Parham and, good as
they are, they are not in the same class as the Blue Notes or the sides
reissued by Jazology.
Cheers


On 21 April 2014 23:49, ROBERT R. CALDER <serapion at btinternet.com> wrote:

> I remember Art Hodes on stage moaning about how the biggest-selling of all
> his recordings was the series of duets with Truck Parham on bass on the
> Mercury label, so many thousands or tens of thousands of copies sold.
> Then it went out of print, and any time he got a reply from Mercury to his
> queries about the LP aka Album, it said that reissue wouldn't be warranted
> by demand. He breathed hotly about pirating the recording, something
> considerably -- very considerably -- more difficult then than now... All
> the music was his and he could let people hear it only if he risked
> bootlegging the recording.
>
>
> He could have been excused for not taking in what I told him later, that
> the only example from the LP a lot of people had heard was a single track
> playfully but very respectfully put on his BBC turntable by the late
> Charles Fox, who commemorated the impending visit to London of the Ganelan
> (?) Trio, Russian and avant-garde, by letting listeners hear it.  The
> programme/ show Charles Fox prepared and presented was called something
> like JAZZ TODAY and the focus was nothing if not contemporary (Fox
> presented the edition immediately after J*hn C*ltr*ne's death deeply
> stricken with grief). While Hodes was of course born in the Ukraine, his
> family as Jewish most likely thought of themselves as Russian, rather in
> relation to the Tsar than the more local forces whose nastier ways
> compelled a lot of people to head west.
>
>
> I wonder whether it's findable these days, that Mercury LP, not to be
> confused with the much later one on the Muse label, with a sleevenote
> peculiar for speculating about how close Art Hodes and the bassist on that
> disc, Milt Hinton, MIGHT have been to each other at a certain time...
> Dammit, they were both involved in the Hull House project as young men in
> Chicago.  And of course after the concert where I heard Art he was recorded
> a lot more, by Bob Koester for Delmark.  And even bloody BlueNote once the
> old management was bust and new management installed, started to issue some
> recordings by him from the wealth of stuff shamefully buried in their
> vaults.
>
> Hodes observed in vinegary style, "I had no work and so I wrote a blues."
> Bravo!
>
>
> Robert
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