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Tal played with incredibly low action at 27 min + you clearly see his strings are flat on the deck. the song at that point is My romance
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05-04-2020 05:23 PM
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just realize tal had 2 distinct careers...his early hard boppin era and his post retirement days..he quit to raise a family and became a sign painter..when he returned he no longer had the same youthful fire
was just listening to early tal with og bopper trumpeter howard mcghee (played with bird)...and tal was burnin...wes said tal was like jimmy raney in early days...(albeit a little sloppier!! haha)...but older tal was more sedate..a more delicate touch is intertwined with lighter strings. lower action and amp power! hah
cheers
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Tal's work in the 50s was still the greatest AFAIC. Even today, we hear a lot of great players, but none of them have the rhythmic fire, melodic invention, and harmonic taste that Tal had back then.
Why his 'return' in the late 60s and onward was not up to his playing in the 50s is still a mystery. Nothing written about him explains it, and most barely acknowledge it.
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Tal was a sign painter before he was a musician. He "dropped out" of the New York jazz scene when he married his first wife and they moved to New Jersey. In the published biographies, Tal was noted to have indicated he did not care for urban life or touring very much and liked living along the Shrewsbury River in NJ. He maintained his friendships with musicians, gigged locally and had students. He never actually retired from playing music but he did stop engaging in the New York scene. Tal was able to support himself with his other profession of signpainting when he needed to do so. Even for a player of his prodigious talent, making a living at jazz even during its heyday was very difficult. His move out of NYC may also have been a bit of an economic thing, as well; around the same time Tal disappeared from the New York scene so did Johnny Smith move to Colorado; in interviews and his biography JS noted that around the time he left New York was also when the vibrant jazz scene in New York took a turn for the economically non-viable for a variety of reasons (studio orchestras went away, clubs folded up, record sales slumped as rock and roll and the folk movement happened, etc.).
As for the change in his playing, that may have just been a change in what Tal wanted to do. His technique was never really pristine although his albums as a leader in the 50s were pretty tight and clean. I think in many ways he got more harmonically adventurous as he got older. Some of the biographies allude to alcohol having been a significant problem and it's possible that this was a contributor to some change in his technical abilities. He did eventually stop drinking, perhaps by the time he married his second wife.
Tal was very clearly highly regarded by his peers both during his 1950s heyday and his later multiple "comebacks."
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I'd give my right hand to be able to do a thumb over like Tal.
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I find The Swinging Guitar of Tal Farlow to be one of the top 5 jazz guitar albums of the 50s.
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Ah, that ES-350 with the neck P90 replaced with a CC pickup... what a classic sound! That right there is da thunk!
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of course theres the great film of lenny breau visiting tal at his home...
when they meet, lenny tells tal "i had all your albums"
two greats!
cheers
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As far as his single-line improvisation, I was shocked to see him live with Jim Hall in the early 70s at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York at a Central Park concert, that also featured Roy Buchanan. My only thoughts were,"what happened to Tal?"
Originally Posted by Cunamara
His timing was completely off, he couldn't complete his lines, and he lost that tremendous drive that he used to play with.
The only explanation I've heard from someone who knew him was that he totally lost it when his first wife, Tina, divorced him, and used alcohol to self-medicate.
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I saw Tal about 10 times in various setting and some were fine and other he was a little 'off'. Maybe it depended who he was with? E.g. I saw him with Red Norvo at Donte's in North Hollywood; that was like stepping back in time! But when he was with other guitar players he was off; was he trying to keep-up with these younger cats? I have no idea. Originally Posted by sgcim
I always assumed it was that he just wasn't practicing and playing 'enough' to keep his chops at a top level. Note that Artie Shaw retired at the age of 40 and his reason was that to keep his chops up he was practicing many hours per day. He didn't wish to continue this but also didn't wish to not be at-his-best which for him, he was only able to maintain due to hours of practicing. Thus he gave up making any more recordings or giving live shows. Here is Artie and Tal in one of Artie's last recordings:
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Huh. One of my regrets in life is that I never had a chance to see Tal play in person. Although perhaps, if I had caught him on one of those off gigs, I would've been disappointed so maybe that's just as well. Originally Posted by sgcim
I had thought that his first wife had developed dementia and died in a nursing home.
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Caught him several times in the 80s and he was a shell of himself, never got it back either.
The last time was when he took Barney Kessels place in the Great Guitars after Barney's stroke.
That was an awful gig, he could barely play at this point, the only tune he was coherent on was a solo rendition of Imagination. Ellis wasn't much better, he looked old and worn out and made a beeline for the bar in between sets. Charlie Byrd was by far the strongest player, that should tell you what kind of night it was.
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IMO, FWIW, Charlie Byrd was always the strongest player in that group. I really, really liked his playing.
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Different strokes I guess, I always thought he was an ok classical player and an ok jazz player, not great at either, though he gave the GGs some contrast. But I do like his early lp that he plays electric in C. Christian style, and another Sugarloaf Suite on Concord where he's playing Brazilian and bossa material.
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I thought he swung harder than any other guitar player I ever heard. He became known as a bossa player, but he could play jazz and swing his butt off. But he was not everyone's favorite, no doubt.
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Charlie Byrd gets kind of a bad rap among jazz guitarists, I think. He was early in the Bossa Nova curve, seeking out the music at the source and the driving force and arranger behind the Jazz Samba LP with Getz that made Getz a pop-jazz star who incidentally, was sued by Byrd for reaping the Lion's share of the profits. I agree that he could swing his butt off. I think perhaps he played too often in comfortable and familiar settings with the same group and maybe could have challenged himself more? On the other hand, he created and developed his niche and had a good career.
I saw Tal in the early 80s on a rainy night in Boston when he had a raging head cold and should have been in bed. Overall, his playing was a shadow of his 1950s work except for a many minute solo on Body and Soul played entirely in artificial harmonics. It was an astounding, hair raising tour de force performance of technical skill and great beauty. If you live long enough, life takes a toll and as Mick Goodrick said, "Music is like life on a small scale. Life is like music on a large scale." Some players maintain the fire of their youth in their playing and others slide into a more Autumnal type of playing. Tal seemed to increasingly move to harmony and chords rather than the driving single note swing of his youth.
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I saw Tal Farlowe in a small function room behind a pub in NW London with an audience of about 30 people, probably in the 1980s. The same night George Benson was playing down the road at Wembley arena to an audience of a few thousand. I did wonder whether GB would have preferred to have been in the small pub watching one of his idols that night instead of playing (probably more singing) himself.
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One of'em was me....I had the same thought at the time... Originally Posted by bleakanddivine
I remember him saying to the obvious gtr players in the front row don't copy my technique - I had no one to correct my 'mistakes'....
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Tal played a gig near me around 1988, a strange gig in a big lecture classroom at a small college in the middle of nowhere (in Tal's home state of N.C.), with Bud Shank and Lonnie Plaxico as I recall. I was too new to jazz to be thinking critically about whether he was in decline as a player. He just seemed like this legend from the past appearing in the most unlikely place imaginable.
Maybe more mysterious than why he went into decline is how he scaled the mountain so quickly--that a shy working-class southerner with presumably no connection to the bebop social scene took up guitar at 21 and quickly became something like the Bud Powell of the instrument. There were other similar stories of small-town white guys from rural America getting into bop (like Chet Baker, for instance), but Tal didn't join the army and come into contact with all kinds of people with different backgrounds and musical tastes...he was just down in North Carolina painting signs and listening to swing bands on the radio. Then after five years of playing, he's moving to New York to conquer the jazz world.
Tal claimed he was nothing special in 1947-49 when playing cocktail music with the pianist Dardanelle Hadley, and that he only got his chops together to keep up with Red Norvo. Maybe that's true, or maybe there's more to it than that. I wonder if he and Mingus had interesting things to say to each other when they were in Norvo's trio.
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The Rayners Hotel? Can you remember more acurately when it might have been? Originally Posted by dot75
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Originally Posted by bleakanddivine
what was it like? was this 1988 ish Tal & Louis Steward play in Scotland, sadly abroad then did not not see any of this,
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Damn this makes me so sad, reading all the above stuff. i was not aware he had declined so much, as i never saw many videos of him playing, dismissing the Youtube . bits i saw as crappy sound quality. Not wanting to believe it was Tal. ( funny how this happens) Originally Posted by sgcim
I do differ slightly re 60s and onward was not up to his playing in the 50s. ,I have The Return Of Tal Farlow 69 i think his playing is pretty darn good, maybe my head is tricking me.
He certainly was something else early on,but they all were Tal Barney Wes Herb Raney etc etc
How Louis Steward got thro that 1988 Scotland gig, i can only imagine how sad it must have been for Louis also monster, you can see when Louis sits down how Tal just watches him,
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I remember it was only a 2 minute walk from the tube & had a 1930's (?) black & white timbered front, bar & 'concert room' in the back... Originally Posted by bleakanddivine
don't remember much else other than him saying 'you're going to hear some familiar sounds but see some unusual ways to finger them, don't copy me.'
& then barring the E & A strings at the 5th fret with his thumb, hitting a high d with his pinky & playing an arpeggio...not even sure how he played.
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Yes, that's it. The Rayners Hotel. Left out of Rayners Lane Met line tube station and a few hundred yards down the hill along the main road on the next corner. Function room round the back to the right. 1930's listed building, but been boarded up for many years now. Originally Posted by dot75
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