he strikes rarely, but with great force and precision

Jack Reilly strikes again. After boldly tackling Jason Moran under an assumed name, he takes on the whole of the European continent, and is naming names, in an open letter to DownBeat. It starts out great...

"you missed a great opportunity to educate those 'other' cats accross the pond on what real Jazz playing is and what styles/players should be mandatory to absorb and study."

...and only gets better. "Permit [him]."

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Rifftides on Kenny Dorham, reminding us that even the greats from the "golden days" sometimes held totally unrelated day jobs.

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It's only as I read this that I realised where the inspiration for the dénouement to Garth Ennis's intensely funny and decadent Preacher comic b... sorry, graphic novel, came from.

"'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,' a nonfiction work published in 1982 that spins an elaborate theory about how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and how their descendants still live in southern France."

Let me tell you, the result of 2000 years of inbree... sorry, preservation of the holy bloodline, ain't pretty.

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Eppy poses a common fan-boy quandary: what to do when you unexpectedly stumble across one of your idols? I'd suggest tentatively approaching them, asking "Excuse me, do I know you from somewhere?" and seeing how long it takes them to say "Well, I'm the Fiery Furnaces [for example]." In this particular case, Eppy also raises the negative-last-impression problem. Personally, I tend not to talk to musicians whose music I don't like. You could call it cowardice, I call it a pre-emptive non-strike.

I'll try it out and report findings in the next be.sightings (1, 2, 3, 4).

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Pretty gruesome jazz historian murder story.

links

Yvinek, who's in New York finshing up his album, observes the American in his natural environment. Well, in Starbucks.

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Think Denk (no stranger to Starbucks) on phone sex of a different kind. It all ends in tears.

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Finally, an opera about Muammar Gadafy, written by Asian Dub Foundation and bringing together the English National Opera, North African musicians and poet-rappers. Sounds good.

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"Holliday [sic] would impose the same way of singing on songs for which it was inappropriate. 'The End of a Love Affair' comes to mind. She delivered 'If I talk...a little too fast,' in the same slow style as a torch song. It's 'fast,' Lady!"
- Nicholas Stix betrays a shocking misunderstanding of Holiday's interpretation of the song.

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Foreign labour sucks: this Pearl Jam concert review seemed oddly stilted until I saw the author's name. And are PJ really the future of rock?

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If Finnish metal is making Eurovision worth watching, its moment of hipness must be over, right? [via ThinkSong]

liberating music trio

[Moved out of the overly-long post it was originally in]

Musicians Moments has some interesting info (in French) on the role of music in the 1975 overthrow of Portugal's Salazar dictatorship. In short, the military strategist who led the revolt carefully thought out the broadcasting of two songs: "E depois do adeus" on April 24 1975 at 10:55 PM and "Grândola vila morena" at 12:30 AM. The latter became a symbol of the revolution, with the notable lyrics "O povo é quem mais ordena, dentro de ti ó cidade" ("It is the people who rule, inside you O city").

"Grândola vila morena" was written by Jose Afonso. Jazz fans may want to check out bassist Zé Eduardo's A Jazzar no Zeca – A Música de José Afonso (Clean Feed). It's fairly mainstream post-Rollins/Coltrane that's been opened up by 30 years of free jazz.Listening to it, I have little idea of what Afonso's music sounds like: I can often only guess at what the original melodies and other elements were. I'm sure the Portuguese audience this was aimed at (the liner notes are in Portuguese, even though Clean Feed liners tend to be in English, even for Portuguese musicians) knows the original songs well enough for the changes to make sense. The popular music base gives the trio an enjoyable everyman and real (in a Mingusian sense) feel and there's just enough arrangement (whether in the rhythms - fast swing to calyspo and a touch of reggae - or in the sax/bass and full-trio unisons) to balance out the freedom. Saxophonist Jesus Santandreu is resourceful, but Eduardo and drummer Bruno Pedroso are near-equal partners.

the simple things can hang you up the most

Rifftides republishes an essay by Paul Paolicelli that inadvertently slots right into the "No pop please, we're composers" discussion evoked earlier.

First, I don't know why simple pleasures are so strongly resisted and treated as suspicious, maybe even indicative of a weakness of character. Larry Kart raised the issue in the comments to the Bill Evans debate on Bagatellen:

"Thus in 1964 , after acknowledging that the brilliant, lucid, and 'completely unpremeditated' two-piano improvisation that [Bill Evans] and Paul Bley played on George Russell’s 1960 album Jazz In The Space Age 'was fun to do,' Evans says: '[But to] do something that hadn’t been rehearsed successfully, just like that, almost shows the lack of challenge involved in that kind of freedom.'"

Second, here's the first of two "My One And Only Love" quotes:

"The very thought of you makes my heart sing
like an April breeze on the wings of spring.
And you appear in all your splendor,
My one and only love."

I find this, on the printed page, totally corny - teenage romanticism, rather than deep and sophisticated lyricism. Granted, the second quote of the song's lyrics is much better, but I think the lyrics to GAS songs tend to be overrated. Some are great, many aren't. Take "Laura," for example. Great music, the lyrics make me cringe (except, perhaps, when sung by Jeanne Lee, accompanied by Ran Blake, but that's a subject for another post). The lyrics to Frankie Valli's "Sherry" (the essay hinges on a comparaison of "Sherry" to "My One And Only Love") are plain, direct and efficient. Can't begrudge them that.

just another brick in the wall

Armen Nalbandian responds to the Charlie Parker/Jazz education debate and gives some personal background that illuminates his point of view:

"When I was in high school and the beginnings of my college career, as I sought out to learn Jazz directly from the masters like Horace Silver, many things that I encountered that now seem horribly bizarre to me now, I’m sure is consistent to the norm in Jazz “education” circles now. In my time, never did any big band I played in play a composition by a black musician. NEVER! Never did any of my band directors suggest listening to jazz recordings as a way to learn jazz. Never did any of my Jazz instructors encourage me to seek out live performances. Never were any of the following names even mentioned in any Jazz class I attended, “Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman.” I am not kidding. Almost every song played by all of the big bands I was in was written by Jazz educators, the exception were written by Pat Metheny."

Ouch. Goes against everything I've ever heard or read about learning about jazz (as a musician or listener) and, not to mention, common sense. I've only attended low-level, neighbourhood music schools and piano teachers, but I assumed the total disconnect between what's taught there and the "real music world" isn't as strong at higher levels.

Stanley Crouch's Jackie Mclean obituary contains some Mclean quotes that relate to this issue. They can be related to Belinda Reynolds's discussion of the difference between training and teaching:

"From these definitions, "training" seems to be an action directed towards having a student master a certain action. Whereas "teaching" is creating an environment that enables a student to not only learn certain skills but which also allows a student to learn how to actively explore and master ideas and skills on his or her own."

Charlie Parker didn't train McLean in anything, but certainly taught him a lot.

snap, classical and pop

Darcy weighs in on the current "is pop good or bad for the contemporary composer?" debate over at NewMusicBox. The Seth Gordon reply in the comments section of the second post titled "incest, peppermints, color of time..." is absolutely hilarious. Mark Nowakowski's comment (currently at the bottom of the page) is more serious in tone, but also interesting.

Interestingly, both Darcy and Colin Holter highlight the influence of peer pressure on musical choices. I wonder if now, as fans of less-mainstream music can easily congregate online, the burden of being a musical loner has lightened. Jonah Weiner touches on this in his article "Tila Tequila, the first star of MySpace:"

"[David Hadju's] dismissal [which is no longer available online for free, but its first page is in Google's cache] of the site's word-of-mouth musical recommendations—he says they reflect 'social expectations as much as, perhaps more than, musical passions'—is an impossible fantasy: When is 'musical passion' ever so pure that it exists in a vacuum, sealed off from 'social expectation'?"

lost of links

Scratch My Brain on listening to free jazz. I've had much the same approach to "focusing the ears" on different musical levels, but most probably do it at a less refined level than Jeff.

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Fred Kaplan discusses Monk's Pulitzer citation.

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A hidden face of the music industry: the music publisher. Isn't Martin N. Bandier the very portrait of what you expect a pre-hip hop industry shark to look like? [via SF/J]

jazz in the mornin' #5: Mingus, Parker, Fitzgerald, Peterson

Not much to say at the moment on the Mingus (that bass-vamp-instead-of-changes "Summertime" with Hampton Hawes must have been pretty startling in 1957) and Parker volumes.


Ella Fitzgerald: is there a more perfect, more I-wrote-the-textbook way of singing than Ella's? It seems to me that she's often cast as the facile, light-hearted virtuoso. Certainly, there's that: "Oh Lady Be Good!" with the JATP in 1949 and "How High The Moon" in 1960 are something of circus acts, but also manages to make scat not sound ridiculous, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" has comic Armstrong and Rose Murphy (who Joanna Newsom fans should check out) imitations. There are the unassailably self-assured performances, such as "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)" or "The Lady Is A Tramp" (and its biting humour) and "Lover Come Back To Me" (both fronting big bands) than can give an impression of workman-like perfection. But there's a whole other side too, and it's not unconnected.

"Someone To Watch Over Me," a 1950 duet with Ellis Larkin is deeply moving, with Ella lingering on each word, dosing each attack and timbre. "Azure" is just Ella and Barney Kessel in 1956, and floats along with divine serenity. "Whisper Not" is less intimate, but is as well-arranged by Marty Paich as it is sung. If anyone is under-valued, surely Benny Golson is. What's amazing in these performances, is that there is absolutely no excess: she knows what these songs are saying and lets them say it.

There are a few duds too: "A-Tisket A-Tasket" is pretty much obligatory for any Ella comp, but I find it to be little more than a youthful novelty tune, and an annoying one at that. Is "By Strauss"'s pontificating to be taken seriously? A number of the songbook GAS interpretations are middling: great voice, of course, but not much magic ("She Didn't Say 'Yes'," "What Will I Tell My Heart" despite Stan Getz's surprisingly compatible contributions, "Midnight Sun").



The Oscar Peterson volume was one of the ones I was initially most anticipating, because I don't have a single one of his albums. The Peterson-Granz relationship may very well, by length and historical importance, be unique in all of jazz.

Of course, there are plenty of finger-busters and a few things I find barely listenable, but I'd like to point out the magnificently tender "I Got It Bad" and the rather poppish/faux classical "You Look Good To Me" (cool arrangement, on which Ray Brown makes a beautiful, bouncy statement after a wistful piano intro) as subdued moments of uncommon grace (emotional for the former, in the way Peterson twirls around the melody in the latter). "It Never Entered My Mind" could have contended for this category, but goes overboard in overindulging overblown flourishes that overwhelm the song. I probably won't be rushing out to get more Peterson, but since he's on half of the Verve catalogue anyway...

Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to Ed Thigpen's hi-hat pattern behind Milt Jackson on "A Wonderful Guy": three hits spread over two waltz-time bars, each hit making different use of the sock cymbal.

geographically positioned to score

In a bar-where-you-can-dance context, is there any more depressing sequence of songs than "I Will Survive"/"YMCA"? Then came "Daddy Cool" and things, believe it or not, started looking up. This Guardian article on non-anglophone pop reminds me of how fantastic Shakira's "La Tortura" is. Thank you, reggaetón!

The article also led me to this awesome Glukoza cartoon video. Corrupt-regime-as-pigs, Russian-pop-star-as-rebel-leader, all-out warfare in a mish-mashed retro-sci-fi setting, oink-oinks and an oompah beat: what more could you want?

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Nothing really new, but some interesting info in Dan Ouellette's "Digital sales boost indie jazz labels". A philosophical point by Thirsty Ear honcho Peter Gordon sums it up: "What a major label calls marginal, we call a hit. That's the cost of freedom."

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Another philosophical point from a totally different source, former model Inès de la Fressange on Belgian TV: "Tradition is interesting, what is certainly not interesting is convention." Rang true as, later, I listened to Eric Dolphy, but certainly all the greats performed this balancing/re-imagining act.

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TBP discover GPS. Does it not exist in the USA?

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"One of the great misconceptions of the arts is that an artist has to have a "tortured soul" to produce great work. If they haven't experienced suffering and hardship there's no point in listening to what they record, reading what they write, or looking at what they paint. The thing is that most artists could have done without the agony thank you very much.

"You see its not the artist's suffering that produces the great art. It's their sensitivity to the world around them that allows them to produce great art, which also causes their suffering. They feel too much in a society where to feel is to be shunned, end up being taken advantage of, and live a life of quiet desperation looking for some sort of relief."
- Richard Marcus reviewing a Billie Holiday album

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I bloglined myself and saw that I had 23 subscribers. Awesome! I've been using Bloglines for some months now, it has immeasurably improved my online life.

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The lastest Secret Society show is up at Darcy's. It wasn't until I read Steve Smith's Time Out NY pre-concert announcement that I realised that the then-4-now-5 concerts on the blog represented the DJA SS's entire performance history. The band was born in New York and worldwide almost simultaneously. Already, the staggered spires/spirals that open "Ritual" feel like old friends (and Sebastian Noelle's guitar solo on that tune is crazy. Is that Björk?) and newcomer "Induction Effect" is a welcome, quietly whirling, addition.

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Steve Smith's review of the above-recommended concert (as well as his ongoing, indefatigable classical coverage) made me wonder what the Ratliffs, Chinens and Davises of the world were waiting for (if any French/European jazz journalists blog, let me know). Some questions need to be answered: do the NY Times guys ever see anything other than first sets? Don't they feel like escaping the cookie-cutter feel of their newspaper's day-to-day coverage? It even seems to be dragging Kelefa Sanneh down: his old spark seems to have gone out, lately (addendum: he does bring the passion in this N.O. rap piece, even it's a compilation of things he's been saying for nearly a year). Mssrs. Smith, Ross, Reynolds, Gann, Ramsey, Wilson and many others have proven how complementary the two forms can be.

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"Odd" meters are so common. Do they still merit mention?

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"Women over 50 now buy almost twice as many albums as teenage girls and the charts are now reflecting their tastes."
- The BBC brings this big story. Mum-rock: thank you Tesco's!

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Tyshawn Sorey: it's cool that today, you can be 26, have a big afro, be known as a jazz drummer but also play Afro-American 12-tone piano improv. Unrelated, but see also Gabriel Kahane for some quietly harmonically daring piano/voice music. [via The Rest Is Noise]. I have yet to really delve into MySpace, perhaps principally because I find the format horrendous (but the media player is fantastic, as I prefer streaming over downloading). I kind of feel like I'm not seeing the elephant in the other room, though.

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"'You don’t want people to think you’re homeless,' [Jason Stuart] instructs. 'Though how could they, when I’m carrying around a $4,000 piece of wood? But they will. People are strange. They’re more inclined to tip you if they think you don’t need the money.'"
- In a nutshell, the basis for much of contemporary society. Howard Mandel on busking. [via Arts Journal]

no hold back

I was nosing around the Jazz on 3 site while listening to Dave Douglas's "Blue Latitudes" and discovered that Brad Mehldau is covering Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun." I haven't heard this song in years, but it seems to me to be stretching the logical connection between Thom Yorke and Nick Drake to breaking point. Although I guess there's a kind of anguish to the song. Anyone heard him play it?

a message for flonkus/scippylisp

(Everyone else avert their eyes)

Send me an e-mail, I have something that will interest you.

blue note festival 2006

The near-full Blue Note Festival programme has been determined. I've never been, but I'm going to try to make it this year. It takes place from the 13th to the 23rd of July. The combined friday-saturday-sunday ticket for the "real jazz" part of the festival is extremely appealing:

Friday: Robert Glasper Trio, Kris Defoort Sound Plaza, Andrew Hill Quintet, Masada
Saturday: Washington / Vann / Galland, Eric Legnini Trio, Jason Moran & The Bandwagon, Wayne Shorter Quartet
Sunday: Paolo Fresu Quintet, Nathalie Loriers, Romano-Sclavis-Texier, Charles Lloyd ‘Sangam’

As usual, the "All That Jazz?" part is less interesting, but friday's triple-bill of Tony Allen, Chucho Valdés and Cesaria Evora stands out.

That would make for a combined bill of 83 euros. Value for money (just over 5 euros per concert), sure, but I've become increasingly anti-festival over the years. At least there aren't any overlapping sets at the BNF, but even then, I don't really feel like listening to four concerts in a row, especially when every single one of them could provide a substantial evening's worth of music on its own. I don't even feel like asking for an accreditation: I'd rather pay and just write about it informally here. I can never get motivated for festival write-ups, oddly.

I think Jacques has been to the BNF before, what do you think of it? Does it take place under a tent or in a hall? Is a 45 minute break enough to digest Andrew Hill and prepare for Masada? To recover from the Bandwagon and open your mind for Wayne Shorter?

above a blue attitude

Dave Douglas chat transcript. I haven't listened to the "Blue Latitudes" radio broadcast yet, but will do so soon (haven't got much of a choice, since it's only up until friday...).

Douglas admits a scandalous hole in his musical knowledge, proving that there is still hope for 18 year olds who still haven't fully studied their Charlie Parker:
"I also made a decision to lead fewer projects after I turned forty... Also, I made a decision to go back and study several areas of music I thought I had missed. Counterpoint and by parallel process, Bach and before."

Something to look forward to:

"Higgins (Cleveland)
I'm mesmerized by Miles Davis Box Set Live at The Celler Door. Have you heard it? What are your impressions?

Dave Douglas
OK. That does it. I've been working on an essay about the Miles Davis Cellar Door box set. Now I'll have to finish it. And I will post it in the next few days."

be.sightings #4

...on monday, the great trumpeter/composer/arranger Bert Joris going for a bike ride with his family, in Mortsel (an Antwerpen satellite)...

I found out a few months ago that Joris lived just down the street from IVN's family, but it was the first time I spotted him there. Of his discography I give my highest recommendation to the Brussels Jazz Orchestra's "The Music of Bert Joris." His Quartet's "Live" is a good way to hear the Italian pianist Dado Moroni. If you ever have the chance to see them as a duo, drop everything and attend. A couple of years ago, I sat almost within arm's reach of Joris's trumpet in Flagey's Studio 4, as Moroni's right foot thumped the wooden floor a few metres away. It was a magical concert.

what's in a name?

After the great discussion of Miles's electric music stirred up by his HOF induction, I think Herbie Hancock's quite different, but no less energising, efforts merit some attention, too. I remember that when I bought Herbie Hancock's "Mwandishi," it was with some anxiety: if it sucked, I'd be forced to take it personally, seeing how close the band's name was to mine. Of course, it didn't (and still doesn't) suck, in fact it's very good. The later "Sextant" is mind-blowing.

"Mwandishi" could be seen as a post-"Bitches Brew" recasting of "Filles de Kilimandjaro"/"Waterbabies"-era Second Quintet. Billy Hart's drumming draws a bit from funk, but even more from Tony Williams's sense of space and fractured rhythm. Thus, there's a fruitful tension between openess and steady groove.

"Sextant," though, is the true killer. From the first moments of "Rain Dance," when Eddie Henderson's backward-looking trumpet is injected into a watery jungle of synthetic blips and bleeps, the realms of possibility suddenly expand and these new territories are explored. For example, the idea of the soloist as being in the foreground is radically abandoned - arguably more so even than in collectivist free jazz. Rather, he becomes another element of texture, which is now the key ingredient keeping repetition from tipping over into monotony. Hancock wisely varies keyboard sounds, even breaking out a bit of old-fashioned piano, and even hints at Stevie Wonder when a clavinet riff interlocks with another keyboard. I wonder if this was recorded before or after "Superstition." The old idea of the heroic soloist even seems to be mocked in "Hornets," with a kazoo-like solo evoking the titular flying insects. Indeed, this is one reason why I prefer the Mwandishi band to the Headhunters: great as that "Chameleon" riff is, I don't need to hear 7 minutes of bombastic synth soloing on top of it.

"Hidden Shadows" sounds like proto-Wu Tang: blaxpoitation soundtrack with a touch of kung-fu thrown in. Even the title is Wu Tang-y.

The music's flow is more organised than Miles's brand of "fusion" was: beyond the brief motifs that serve as rallying points and the bass-riff-as-melody, the continuous morphing and contrasting seem indicative of a more composerly hand at the till. Most important of all, though, is the pervasive feeling of wide open possibilities, of old things being remade and new ones being uncovered. The labels that are now used to hastily discuss this music - jazz-rock, jazz-funk, fusion - obscure its revolutionary reality and tend to play up the commercial sell-out put-down. Tell me where the facile rock or funk appropriations are: there's a thoroughly avant-garde spirit here. It's jazz continuing to bend "pop" to its own will and needs.

Finally, a mention of Benny Maupin. He's rarely cited, but his bass clarinet work is a central sound, especially for its textural possibilities, in the Mwandishi and Headhunters bands, on "Bitches Brew," but also in very different contexts such as Andrew Hill's "Lift Every Voice," where he also plays some good tenor.

hand-delivered to the crypt

After Miles being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Thelonious Monk is getting a Pulitzer for "a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz."

And he only had to wait 24 years!

not everybody digs

Fascinating, in-depth Bill Evans discussion over at Bagatellen. Is the I-don't-like-Bill camp taking over? Make sure to also read the essay Larry Kart has posted in the comments section, it's taken from his book "Jazz In Search Of Itself." My own experience of Evans is limited: after years of "Waltz For Debby" consistently failing to grab me (texture, as dissected by Djll, is the probable culprit), I was very agreeably surprised by "Everybody Digs Bill Evans."

Some passages of Tom Djll's text are of relevance to an ongoing dicussion of young musicians and Charlie Parker. Djll relates his feeling in regards to his brief stay at Berklee in 1974:

"The irony is that Berklee’s blinkered approach to the jazz tradition – concentrating on the years 1955 to 1965 – was soon taken up with a vengeance by the neocon revolutionaries of the Eighties. But at least Marsalis and his allies looked farther back in time, and now it’s expected that any real piano player be able to pull some Walleresque stride out of the pocket – just for fun, mind you"

Berklee remains incredibly central to jazz education, but perhaps the overall viewpoint has changed in the 30 years since?

doing the splits

Settled In Shipping discusses Canada's linguistically-divided music scene and aks if similar things happen elsewhere. They certainly do! There are two aspects: Belgian and European.

First, within Belgium, there are the French-speakers and the Flemish-speakers (and the Germanophones, but noone really cares about them... sorry, guys). I go to jazz concerts on both sides of the "linguistic border" regularly and audiences tend to be mono-lingual. I speak both languages, but Walloons tend not to speak Flemish. Historically, Flems have spoken pretty good French (perhaps a legacy of French having been the language of the aristocracy), but that's slipping in favour of English. Brussels, even though it's 80% francophone, is slightly more mixed, in places such as the Beursschouwburg or the Ancienne Belgique (both of which are Flemish-leaning in terms of administration), for example. The biggest summer festivals (and there are a lot per capita) attract mixed crowds, I think. My impression is that the pop/rock audiences don't cross over that much, but I don't know too much about it. I remember Hooverphonic, who are Flemish, extremely well-known, international stars and sing in English, drawing blanks at a multi-act open-air show in Brussels a few years ago. That might have been because it was mainly a hip hop crowd, though. In jazz the division is less pronounced, thankfully, though still sometimes felt, in terms of getting gigs in the part of the country you're not from. Finally, Flanders seems to have a stronger network of subsidised cultural centers and organisations.

Second, on the European level, national scenes are fairly hermetic. It's very difficult for non-French (or non-American non-stars) to get gigs in France. It's somewhat easier if there's a French musician in the band. There is relatively little in the French press about musicians from other European countries, unless they're based in France (eg. Aldo Romano, Stefano Di Battista) or are huge (eg. Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stanko). The UK and German scenes are pretty isolated, apart from a few totemic (generally free jazz/improv, or the WDR Radio Orchestra) figures and I don't expect to hear or read about any Portuguese musicians, no matter how many great records Clean Feed puts out. It's all kind of fragmented, but perhaps not more so than the various regional scenes in the US, relatively speaking, if you factor in the various language barriers. The situation may actually be similar to that of movies: the French go to see French and American movies, and the occasional Hugh Grant film.

Well, those are my impressions, but I stopped reading the jazz magazines some years ago.

how does he do it?

I am forced to once again bow down and issue an "I am not worthy" in Jazzques's direction. His day-to-day be.jazz.scene coverage (in this case, the Sounds' 20th birthday bash) deserves a Pulitzer. Or something. And for those wondering: he has a job, kids... AFAIK, it's a race between him, Jempi and that elderly couple at the Hopper for the "most dedicated" title.

unknown...underrated...undervalued

JazzWord follows up on recent debate by making a distinction:

"But it's one thing to be underrated, but another to be underrated and unknown."

Indeed. This sentence made me think of the 3 U's of this post's title. The difficulty in applying them to the jazz world is that of context: it's such a minority interest that very few jazz musicians register on any radar beyond specialised circles. Still, there are some egregious cases.

In the unknown category: Frank Hewitt, dead at 66 before his first record was released and could show what a great, intense and maverick player he was; Herbie Nichols, dead almost literally from neglect, stuck in dixieland bands despite his advanced bop ideas. Both were known by very few in their time. Ironically, it's almost ontologically impossible to know how widespread this phenomenon is.

Underrated: Armen and JazzPortraits claim that Parker and Gillespie are vastly underrated and even looked down upon among certain circles. Not having frequented jazz schools, I don't know if this is true, but as Darcy points out in the comments to my first post on this topic, great players, avant or not, will have accumulated extensive historical knowledge. That certainly entails going back to Parker, Gillespie, Powell, Armstrong and others of later avant-gardes (from the AEC and Weather Report to Ellery Eskelin and Ben Allison, according to your sensibilities), especially if you want to hear people on the cutting edge, before everything had been theorised.

JazzWord puts Booker Ervin in both the underrated and unkown categories, but I find the two to be contradictory. So I have a third category.

Undervalued, a local example: guitarist Pierre Van Dormael. I was shocked when he told me that "Vivaces," an incredible masterpiece, sold 250 copies. Even in Belgium, that's nothing. Granted, Pierre isn't the best self-marketer, but neither is he unknown. There might be a better term than undervalued, because it is rather synonymous with underrated...).