Dizzy Gillespie Meets The Phil Woods Quintet
Vinyl rip in 24-bit/96kHz | 300 dpi Artwork
844MB (24/96) + 279 MB (16/44) + 114 M B (320 mp3) | Genre: jazz | 1987
Timeless Records~SJP 250 ~ Netherlands
01 Oon-Ga-Wa (Dizzy Gillespie) 6:17
02 Loose Change (Hal Galper) 8:03
03 Whasdishean (Dizzy Gillespie) 5:58
04 Round Midnight (Thelonious Monk) 12:36
05 Love For Sale (Cole Porter) 8:48
Alto Saxophone – Phil Woods
Bass – Steve Gilmore
Drums – Bill Goodwin
Flugelhorn, trumpet – Tom Harrell
Piano – Hal Galper
Trumpet – Dizzy Gillespie
Recorded at Studio 44 Monster Holland, December, 14, 1986.
Executive Producer – Wim Wigt
Cover – Don Diesveld
Photography By – Hans Harzheim
Producer – Bill Goodwin, Peter Huijts
Recorded By – Max Bolleman
Printed at HPC Bv Arnheim Holland.
Thanks To Jerome and Patrick Selmer.
Ripping process: Vinyl; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica AT440-MLa cartridge; Speedbox power supply; Creek Audio OBH-15; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 96khz; clicks and pops removed with Click Repair, manually auditioned, and individually removed with Adobe Audition 3.0; resampled using iZotope RX 2 Advanced SRC and dithered with MBIT+ for 16-bit. Converted to FLAC in either Trader’s Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.
The first few bars of the opening cut here, penned by Dizzy Gillespie, have a piano line strongly reminiscent of Ary Barroso’s “Brasil” (or as Michael Kamen described it to Terry Gilliam, “that awful song.”). But then it veers off in a totally different direction. It is one of a handful of adventurous moments in a set of songs that otherwise plays it safe. The risk-taking days of both Gillespie and Phil Woods were well in the past by the time of this 1987 recording, which followed a brief but critically-lauded tour of Europe undertaken by the pair. The listener can’t help but wonder if genuine live recordings from those dates might have served up a little more fire than this rather docile but competent collection. I’m posting it here today mostly because I had gone through the trouble to digitize it for one track while putting together the second of two podcasts commemorating the many stiffs who left us unlucky souls behind in 2016, a cohort which included Mr. Woods. The track chosen for that mix, Whadishean, is an aggressively funky tune also penned by Dizzy on which he barely plays more than a few riffs. That leaves plenty of room for Woods to honk and squonk his way through many bars of soloing that resembles late-80’s Branford Marsalis more than it does his life’s role model, Charlie Parker. It’s a refreshing bit of excitement that lingers in the memory, as the second half of the LP seems intent on demonstrating their reverence for tradition. A pretty straight reading of “Round Midnight” is concluded with a weirdly midtempo quasi-bossa-nova coda, and then they walk us out with a lively version of Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale,” which sees Dizzy dueling with Tom Harrell on the flugelhorn. What saves this from being boilerplate dinner jazz are the strong personalities exuded by Dizzy and Woods even when they were being restrained. The other musicians are no slouches either, especially Wood’s longtime partners in rhythm Steve Gilmore (bass) and Bill Goodwin (drums), the latter of which incidentally played on João Donato’s 1965 “New Sound of Brazil” album produced by Claus Ogerman, where he shared drum duties with Dom Um Romão. The audio fidelity is very detailed on this record, and although it’s a guess, it bears all the hallmarks of early digital recordings using top-shelf analog mic preamps and outboard gear, with an almost non-existent noise floor besides what was produced by my own system in the transfer. I hope you enjoy this pleasant, if non-essential, jazz from the masters.
password: vibes
