This two-CD set combines Kirk’s The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color, recorded in 1975, and Lateef’s Part of the Search, recorded in ’71 and ’73. The premise is that in the early ’70s producer Joel Dorn wanted to get the two saxophonists and flutists together for an album, but it never happened. Lateef’s album, with several swinging big band performances, is the more satisfying effort. Kirk’s album is inconsistent. The best tracks are an amusing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” (in which he plays both Miles-like trumpet and Coltrane-like tenor) and a slow, bluesy “The Entertainer.” Each album contains short but distracting dream-like sequences between the main musical tracks. Too bad the Kirk-Lateef collaboration didn’t materialize 25 years ago. We might have had more for our money than this contrived marketing scheme.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro