Deep in the Stacks: Your Daily Jazz LP Podcast
Every day, Danny from Kissa Kissa -- the Japanese-style jazz vinyl bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn -- pulls one album from the stacks and tells you who made it, why it matters, and what to listen for. Three minutes, one record you need to hear. Calendar-driven picks tied to recording dates and artist birthdays, plus deep cuts from the Kissa Kissa collection.
Deep in the Stacks: Your Daily Jazz LP Podcast
Here's Jaki — Jaki Byard (New Jazz, 1961)
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More from Sticky Note Podcasts:
The Why of Words (daily etymology) | Required Drinking (cocktail history) | Photography Knowledge (daily photo tips)
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Most pianists pick a lane, stride or bebop, free jazz or standards. Jackie Biard played all of them, sometimes inside the same solo, and his trio debut cycles through so many styles it almost feels like a dare. Calypso in odd time. Coltrane's hardest chord sequence, a ten minute Gershwin medley, all on one record, cut in a single session. This is Deep in the Stacks, today's album, Here's Jackie by Jackie Byard. The session took place on March 14th, 1961, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, and came out on the new jazz label. The trio is Byard on piano and alto saxophone, Ron Carter on bass, and Roy Haines on drums. Carter was barely twenty four. Haines was already a veteran. He'd played with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and his restless style keeps every track on edge. The two of them don't just accompany Byard. They react, redirect, challenge him outright. Cinco Equatro is a calypso in five four time. Garner in a bit tips its hat to Errol Garner. There's a Gershwin medley, Bess, you is my woman now, into It Ain't Necessarily So that runs close to ten minutes and shifts from lush balladry into something rhythmically unpredictable. And then there's giant steps. Byard covers it in under two and a half minutes, almost casually. Most pianists were still figuring out Coltrane's chord changes. Byard treats them like a problem he solved last week. D DLJ is named after the initials of Byard, his wife Louise, and their two children, Denise and Diane. A personal touch tucked into an album that could otherwise feel like a clinic. Start with the Gershwin Medley. At close to ten minutes, it's the fullest picture of what this trio could do. Then go to giant steps, two minutes and twenty two seconds. Bayer doesn't belabor it, Carter and Haynes lock in tight underneath, and the whole thing moves with a kind of easy confidence. After that, try Cinco Equatro. The 5-4 Calypso feel gives Haynes room to play with the rhythm in ways the rest of the record doesn't allow. Here's Jackie by Jackie Bayard on New Jazz, a trio album that covers more ground in seven tracks than most artists manage in a career, with Ron Carter and Roy Haynes keeping up every step. I'm Danny from Kissakissa in Brooklyn. Go put on a record. We'll see you tomorrow.