Ne plus ultra
| Ne plus ultra | ||||
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| Studio album by Warne Marsh | ||||
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Publication |
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| Label (s) | Revelation / HatOlogy | |||
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Format (s) |
LP / CD |
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Title (number) |
6th |
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running time |
45:25 |
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| occupation | ||||
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Studio (s) |
Herrick Chapel Lounge, Occidental College, Los Angeles |
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Ne Plus Ultra is a jazz album by Warne Marsh , which was recorded on September 14 and October 25, 1969 in Los Angeles by John William Hardy and Pete Welding and published by the jazz label Revelation in 1970. It's his first album as a leader since 1960.
The album
Around 1966/67 Warne Marsh began to play with the alto saxophonist Gary Foster , mostly in private sessions. At the same time he played in Clare Fischer's band . The quartet line-up with two saxophones was based on Marsh's admiration for the way Lennie Tristano worked , to which he refers in two titles on the album. Marsh had worked with Lee Konitz in the late 1940s with his teacher Tristano; Konitz is one of the compositions on the album, "Subconscious-Lee", which is based on the chord progressions of Now's the Time . At the beginning of 1969 the intention was to record the music of the Marsh Quartet. A first recording session was held on September 11, 1969, but the result was thin and formal; the interaction was not right, says John William Hardy, the unit manager at the time, in his memoirs. Three days later, the group's interaction went better; they recorded the jazz standard "You Stepped Out of a Dream". After listening to the tapes and rehearsing again, the group met again on October 25, 1969 to record the rest of the material for "Ne Plus Ultra"; Without a break, Tristanos “Lennie's Pennies” and “Smog Eyes” (actually “317 E 32nd”), the Konitz title and finally the freely laid out, quarter-hour “Touch and Go”, in which the four group members in contrast to the previous ones well-rehearsed rather well-composed titles develop into forms of collective improvisation. Art Lange writes in the liner notes for the 1990 edition that the title is inspired by the freely laid-out pieces "Intuition" and "Disgression" by the Tristano sextet in 1949. The end is formed by a short duo of saxophonists playing contrapuntal jazz, the is based on one of the inventions by Johann Sebastian Bach (and was created during the first recording session).
Track list
- You Stepped Out of a Dream ( Nacio Herb Brown / Gus Kahn ) - 9:05
- Lennie's Pennies (Tristano) - 4:23
- 317 E 32nd (Tristano) - 8:17
- Subconscious-Lee (Lee Konitz) - 4:17
- Touch and Go (Marsh / Foster / Parlato / Tirabasso) - 15:24
- Two-Part Invention No. 13 (Bach) - 0:59
Impact history
Richard Cook and Brian Morton gave the album the highest rating of four stars in the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD and describe it as one of his best (available) works.
Edition history
After the album was long out of print and only available in bootleg form , it was reissued on HatHut Records by Peter Pfister and Werner X. Uehlinger in the 1990s and released in 2006 as a CD in the “HatOlogy” series.
Literature / sources
- Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .
- John William Hardy: Liner Notes (1970)
- Art Lange: Liner Notes (1990)
Web links
References and comments
- ↑ Scott Yanow Jazz on the Record San Francisco 2003, p. 768
- ↑ Clare Fischer also wrote the liner notes for the 1970 LP edition on Revelation Records .
- ↑ Liner Notes for "Ne Plus Ultra"
- ↑ The piece, written in 1941, was the last work of the songwriter Gus Kahn, who died that same year.
- ↑ cf. Blanden, allaboutjazz