Uploaded March 2013 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders (tenor sax) McCoy Tyner (piano) Jimmy Garrison, Donald Rafael Garrett (bass) Elvin Jones (drums). Penthouse, Seattle, WA, September 30, 1965.
Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders (tenor sax) McCoy Tyner (piano) Jimmy Garrison, Donald Rafael Garrett (bass) Elvin Jones (drums). Penthouse, Seattle, WA, September 30, 1965.









![Alan Bush - Piano Concerto (First Movement)
Alan Bush: Piano Concerto, Op 18
First Movement: Con moto moderato ma deciso
Rolf Hind, piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin, conductor
BBC Broadcast, December 2000
Alternative recording of the BBC live broadcast uploaded in full here (this is the same performance): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cZGdF-DYDA. The work has never been officially recorded.
Completed while staying next to Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, in Denmark, Bush called the Piano Concerto, completed in late 1937, his first political work. (At the premiere in Broadcasting House, London, 1938, conductor Adrian Boult cut short applause by playing the National Anthem.)
Playing on this occasion for just under 55 minutes, the scale of Bushs concerto is exceeded only by the Busoni (and no doubt those, all awaiting performance, by Sorabji). Yet while the latter is an apotheosis of musical romanticism before the onset of Busonis often rarified mature idiom, the Bush is recognisably an extension of the powerfully focused approach that had already yielded the superb Dialectic for string quartet, amongst other chamber and vocal works. Like Busoni, Bush marries a strongly wrought formal architecture to a final vocal section which makes explicit the works aesthetic: here, the need for communist equity in a divided and unequal world [...] The substantial opening movement evolves as an elaborate march fantasy, with virtuoso piano writing.
(Richard Whitehouse)
The first movement is marked Con moto moderato ma deciso and begins with the moto perpetuo idea which constitutes the first subject introduced by the piano at the outset, accompanied by pizzicato chords from the strings. This theme is then taken up by the upper strings. One of the major characteristics of Bushs works of this period (i.e. before the 1950s) is their tightly constructed nature - the initial motifs presented at the outset are subsequently worked out throughout the rest of the piece. Such is the case with Dialectic for String Quartet (1929) and the first movement of the First Symphony of 1940. Even the more restrained cantabile sections of the first movement of the Piano Concerto which provide the necessary relief from the whirring first subject are clearly derived from the opening material and there is scarcely a page which is not concerned with the working out of the initial theme.
Alan Bushs Piano Concerto is conceived on the grandest of scales and in a determinedly virtuosic style (the massive five-movement, seventy-minute Busoni Piano Concerto with Choral Finale (1904) acted as an inspiration, the composer telling his friend Michael Tippett in the mid-1930s that he wanted to write a work on the scale of the Busoni work, complete with choral Finale). The tremendous sweep of the writing should not make us lose sight of the careful working out of the thematic material evident in each of the four movements. The writing for orchestra throughout the work is telling and restrained whilst tuttis are employed sparingly and with taste. The pianist has a Herculean task to perform but the many testing passages are not mere hollow pyrotechnics but grow naturally out of the musical narrative. All four movements have tremendous sweep and style, generating nervous, pulsating rhythms which drive the Concerto ever onward.
(Paul Conway) Alan Bush - Piano Concerto (First Movement)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/B8IqXjpzKZM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Ornette Coleman - Buddha Blues
This appears to be Colemans only recorded use of the suona, a kind of wooden oboe with a distinctive loud and high-pitched sound. An important folk instrument in northern China, it is occasionally still used to accompany weddings and funerals, as part of wind-and-percussion ensembles known as chuida or guchui. In Taiwan, it forms an essential element of the ritual music that accompanies Daoist performances of both auspicious and inauspicious rites, i.e., those for both the living and the dead. The suona has a conical wooden body, similar to that of the European oboe, but uses a tubular brass or copper bocal to which a small double reed is affixed, and possesses a detachable metal bell at its end. The instrument is made in several sizes. Since the mid-20th century, modernized versions of the suona have been developed in China; such instruments have keys similar to those of the European oboe, to allow for the playing of chromatic notes and equal tempered tuning (both of which are difficult to execute on the traditional suona).
The suona doesnt appear on any of Colemans official releases, and thus we have to turn to a single track from a bootleg collection of live performances, recorded in Italy in 1968, initially released on LP as The Unprecedented Music of Ornette Coleman (with sleeve design by Japanese free saxophonist Kaoru Abe), and subsequently on CD as The Love Revolution. Given that Coleman had started to employ trumpet and violin alongside his more familiar alto sax during the mid-60s , it seems that his use of the suona came from a similar spirit: the desire to achieve a freshness in his playing, to utilise an instrument on which his fingers would not automatically go to familiar patterns and licks, and on which he could create new sounds and textures. Its interesting to note too that, around this time, Don Cherry was beginning his world music explorations, and perhaps Ornettes use of a Chinese instrument was part of the same spirit . (There is a photograph of Albert Ayler playing a similar double-reed instrument during the late 60s, though he seems not to have recorded on it.)
On the bootleg, the instrument is credited as a shanai (the latter due to its similarity to the Indian shehnai, another double-(in fact, quadruple-)reed instrument which had been played by Yusef Lateef, and had also made an appearance on the Rolling Stones Street Fighting Man); Coleman apparently bought it in a shop in Chinatown. He also, reportedly, gave one to Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), and its distinctive nasal twang can be heard on Vliets Mirror Man sessions, as well as on a number of records by Coleman collaborator Dewey Redman, where it is described as a musette (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZce4IgXcRw).
Coleman is accompanied on the 13-minute-long performance of Buddha Blues by the bassists Charlie Haden (who provides a more up-front, supporting role) and David Izenzon (who takes on a more free-floating, unpredictable, colouristic function); on drums is Ed Blackwell, digging into his New Orleans heritage to provide a funky backdrop for the leaders slurring stream-of-consciousness. Its a fine performance, and an provides an intriguing glimpse of another facet to Colemans artistry.
[Information about the suona taken from Wikipedia; Colour Photo of Ornette & Deonardo Coleman by Elliott Landy, Taken in Central Park, NYC, 1969; B&W Photos of Ornette Coleman by Roberto Polillo] Ornette Coleman - Buddha Blues](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BJePdnU_bwc/mqdefault.jpg)