Anything For Jazz: A Jaki Byard Documentary

Anything for Jazz: A Jaki Byard Documentary

Jaki Byard was a phenomenon. He had a complete knowledge of the history of jazz piano and could play all of it within the course of single tune. His imagination was limitless (check out his haunting, dirge-like reading of Mingus’s Fables Of Faubus) and his contributions to the music of Charles Mingus, Booker Ervin, Eric Dolphy, Sam Rivers and others is breathtaking. This 1980 documentary by Dan Algrant is a 22-minute gem. Once in the early ‘80s. while I was recording Jaki at a defunct Greenwich Village club, I was asking him what a ‘Boston’ was because I’d read a Herbie Nichols review of Monk in the ‘40s where he mentions this rhythm. Two hours later as I walked by the piano, Jaki who was in the middle of a solo breaks into another rhythm, looks up at me and says, “That’s a Boston!”

-Michael Cuscuna

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