Jazz Icons DVD Box Set

When Tom told me that they were thinking about the 1965 Antibes concerts by the John Coltrane Quartet that included the only public performances of "Ascension" and "A Love Supreme" and a little known 1969 color program of Thelonious Monk alone and free-associating in a Paris TV studio, I said sign us up!

Two major masterworks were a nice start and Tom and I began a trial-and-error process of filling out four more titles that would fill out the 6-DVD set for Jazz Icons Series 5. I suppose it’s not accidental that we landed on artists whom I knew and loved as musicians and friends but jazz has always been a personal experience for me. Art Blakey, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Johnny Griffin and Freddie Hubbard flesh out this extraordinary release.

Over the course of 50 years of hearing plenty of live music, nothing I’ve experienced has surpassed the many occasions on which I was lucky enough to hear the John Coltrane Quartet at Birdland or The Half Note. Often Coltrane would start off playing the brief melody of one of the triple-meter pieces he favored and leave the stage as McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones built the intensity gradually with chorus after chorus until Elvin’s thunderous quarter note triplets on the bass drum would announce Coltrane’s soaring return. For the next hour or more, these men would take us to a place that was as deep in spirituality as it was charged with sexual energy. For me, nothing has come close to what they achieved nightly. The Antibes performances are no exception.

The Thelonious Monk performance is astounding. Just Monk, a grand piano and two cameras – no audience, no sidemen, no emcee, no clock-watching stage manager, no set list, no distractions. The result was an astonishingly intimate and revealing portrait of a man and his music. Monk sits at the piano and plays whatever occurs to him.

Art Blakey was a wonder to behold live. He shaped and colored each tune from the drum stool and when he hit fifth gear in the final chorus of each solo, it was as organically exciting as music can be. I saw dozens of incarnations of the Messengers over the decades. And Art’s power, dynamics and thunderous swing were as exciting in 1989 as they were in 1963.

When I was about 14 years old, I wrote Roland Kirk a fan latter. After a return letter from Roland’s wife, I began going down to see him at the Five Spot on St. Marks Place and spend afternoons in his Central Park West apartment. As much as I treasured those afternoon tutorials with his impressive record collection, it was the nights at The Five Spot that are burned into my mind. Every set he played was an adventure for him as well as the audience.

And then there are masters Freddie Hubbard and Johnny Griffin at the top of their game…..I could go on. - Michael Cuscuna