Max Roach - It's Time

Max Roach
It's Time

I want to like this album. I know, that Roach is a good jazz musician, arranger, composer, etc. We Insist is brilliant. I think I understand and appreciate what he was trying to do here. But as hard as I tried, I just couldn't enjoy listening to this thing.

It has its moments - Mal Waldron can play piano, he is an under-appreciated jazz musician. Clifford Jordan has several moments of brilliiance, as does Richard Williams. Roach is much more reasonable than he is on Percussion Bitter Sweet, playing as though he does actually remember there is an ensemble which is made of talented musicians who need not be covered up by the maniacal drum-pounding of an angry, angry man.

But that damn choir. Listen, I am a firm believer (at least in its application to music) of Hunter S. Thompson's dictum, "It never got weird enough for me." I own 58 Sun Ra albums. That choir is weird and distracting like, well, all I've got here is that choir is as weird and distracting as a choir on a jazz album. That is pretty much what the allmusic.com reviewer said about it, too. You really do just want to see what the instrumentalists would have done without those vocalists.

A controversial statement for your consideration: Abbey Lincoln is not good. I will once again give you We Insist as a superior musical performance. I don't even want to write anything about her, to be honest. Her voice is grating and irritating in a way that makes me think of bitter, old-maid elementary school teachers who bemoan the disappearance of penmanship skills and Murder, She Wrote. I don't like her.

Overall, you are not missing anything if you don't have this album.

I do have to say that after 20 or so listenings of It's Time I am absolutely looking forward to the next album in the catalog - Jackie Paris' The Song is Paris. For two reasons - the first is that it is a mellow album, no hard-edged, politically-motivated vocals chapping my ears. The second is that this is one that I actually own on vinyl.

Count Basie and the Kansas City 7

Count Basie and the Kansas City 7

Here is how this review is going to go: I am going to tell what is bad about this album. Then I am going to tell you what is average. I am going to finish by telling you what is good.

The bad: flute. The worse: alto flute. I repeat what I have said frequently and loudly: Eric Dolphy is the only musician who should be allowed to play the flute in jazz. Anything else with flute in it should be legally prevented from calling itself jazz. That means, since Dolphy is dead, that no new jazz should have flute in it. (On a related tangent, I am starting to get there with the organ as well. I am pretty sure that the program director at my local jazz radion station is taking kickbacks from Hammond based on how much of the playlist has an organ in it.) There is a certain something that a musician needs to play jazz flute, and unless you died of diabetic complications in Europe, you don't have it.

The average: Everything else, with one exception. The rhythm section doesn't do anything a competent high school jazz band couldn't pull off (and I include Basie in that). Jones' trumpet tone is borderline saccharine, which in combination with the afore-malinged flute is painful, if you can consider it separately, you can tolerate it.

The good, in fact the excellent, at least when considered on its merits: Foster's tenor saxophone. Great tone and interesting stuff.

My conclusion is that you shouldn't go out of your way to hear this album.

I have to finish this review by stating that while I don't actively hate this album, I am still quite frustrated by it. I am frustrated because there just isn't anything in this album to react to. Bad recordings give your something to criticize. Good albums give you something to praise. This one just sort of sits, its only defining characteristic its abundance of flute.