Things do not get any better than discoveries like this for my search for excellence in jazz during the last fifty years.Thank you for bringing this performance here for me to see and hear these people as members of a group that should have been nominated to win the Nobel Prize in Jazz at least once and see them display a level of musical creativity not seen for many years here. International renown!
We began collecting their recordings fifty years ago or more. For reasons still not easy to explain today we liked their music and the personnel who performed it so well. Yes their international fame added up to much more than a collection of recording in my house can suggest about their importance to me.We became attached to their talent that we recognized as so often missing in popular music We remained attached to their talents and did not stop our devotion to their personnel and their musical talent. We graduated with a degree that contained enough time dedicated to the MJQ that we finished our young adulthood with knowledge about the group. We loved it.
We imagine today that the audience members then were falling out of their chairs with total astonishment at seeing this talent.This range of superb talent does not come around every one or two years. We had been watching and listening to them play for forty years. Excellence is packaged in various bundles of quality not to be carelessly dismissed without showing respect for their achievements.
For us this Oslo performance was so special and different and better than what we had been used to hearing here at home. Few things can be bette than this level of artistry in a total performance to solidify our devotion to the MJQ than performances such as this one.
Look at audience members. Their facial expressions might spell out more than what the music conveys. We heard this group as a birthday gift from my wife many years ago. People in the audience that evening did not travel to the large cities to hear this talent. For them and me before being in attendance for that same recital it had been like collecting baseball cards without ever seeing the game played before their eyes. That night it was much different for me and them in more ways than you can imagine now. We saw the game in person and it went into extra innings with the score tied. We came out as the winners. Hero worshipping had not limits then. Gershwin melodies were more than than frosting on the cake. They were the seven layer cake that we consumed in its entirety.
Plenty of things filmed in 1970 are in black in white...many American homes - not to mention homes around the world - were still watching black and white TV sets.
