Category / Music

by Andrew

A French jazz discovery

If I started a sentence with “The great French jazz saxophonist…” how would you finish it? Yeah, me neither. Until this year, when I discovered the great French jazz saxophonist Barney Wilen. This happened more or less randomly – I picked up a recent box set of the French label Vogue on a whim because it was cheap and had lots of CDs in it. One of them was Wilen’s 1957 debut as a leader, Tilt, which is out of print and not easily available elsewhere. And what a debut – a huge tone, brawny confidence, great melodicism. He’s as good as, and somewhat reminiscent of, Sonny Rollins from the same period – for instance, they both handle Monk tunes superbly. Since that initial discovery I’ve slowly digging out other items in his discography. Probably his most famous other appearance is Miles Davis’ soundtrack, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, though that’s really a showcase for Davis. But Tilt itself easily qualifies for true lost classic status.

barney_tilt_12

by Andrew

Jazz genius reincarnated as Chinese electric bicycle

XinRi_logo

The ways that Chinese companies use the English language are, well, unpredictable, but many years of living in Beijing and deciphering Chinglish signs did not prepare me for this. The products of a Chinese maker of electric cycles, Xinri Group, use the English brand Sun Ra. This is a surprisingly creative and appropriate rendering of the Chinese, which literally means “New Sun” (it’s pronounced sheen-ruh in the original, which doesn’t really roll off the tongue for English speakers). It also of course is the name adopted by one of the twentieth century’s greatest jazz musicians, a personal favorite of mine for many years now.

XinRi_vehicle

Sun Ra himself had a sense of humor and a sense of the absurd, so who knows, he probably would enjoy the whole thing.