Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2014 December 12 • Friday

For years, back in the '90s, I always had a Jim Hall discography in my back pocket. I had written it out by hand and limited it mostly to recordings from early in Hall's career. It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that Jim Hall's playing in the early 1960s is and always will be among the greatest guitar playing of all time. Anytime I was near a record store—they were still quite common twenty years ago—I would get out my folded up piece of paper and search the jazz section.

Since I am an extremely fortunate fellow, this morning I received in the mail, from my mother, a CD with two of these early '60s recordings on them. Billy Taylor's Impromptu is a piano quartet record with Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins, while Paul Bryant's Burnin' is an organ quartet with Jimmy Bond and Jimmy Miller. I remember the names from my list but I never came across these records in my travels.