– Eddie Harris – live at Four Queens Hotel – February 4, 1985 – First set –
The Electrifying Eddie Harris in Las Vegas this weekend. Recorded at the Four Queens Hotel on February 4, 1985. This is the first set which was not broadcast.
Steve Huey from AllMusic put together a great bio on Eddie Harris – a bit of it is here:
Long underrated in the pantheon of jazz greats, Eddie Harris was an eclectic and imaginative saxophonist whose career was marked by a hearty appetite for experimentation. For quite some time, he was far more popular with audiences than with critics, many of whom denigrated him for his more commercially successful ventures. Harris’ tastes ranged across the spectrum of black music, not all of which was deemed acceptable by jazz purists. He had the chops to handle technically demanding bop, and the restraint to play in the cool-toned West Coast style, but Eddie Harris also delved into crossover-friendly jazz-pop, rock- and funk-influenced fusion, outside improvisations, bizarre electronic effects, new crossbreedings of traditional instruments, blues crooning, and even comedy. Much of this fell outside the bounds of what critics considered legitimate, serious jazz, and so they dismissed him out of hand as too mainstream or too gimmicky. To be fair, Eddie Harris’ large catalog is certainly uneven; not everything he tried worked. Yet with the passage of time, the excellence of his best work has become abundantly clear. Eddie Harris’ accomplishments are many: he was the first jazz artist to release a gold-selling record, thanks to 1961’s hit adaptation of the “Exodus” movie theme; he was universally acknowledged as the best player of the electric Varitone sax, as heard on his hit 1967 album The Electrifying Eddie Harris; he was an underrated composer whose “Freedom Jazz Dance” was turned into a standard by Miles Davis; he even invented his own instruments by switching brass and reed mouthpieces. Plus, the 1969 set between Eddie Harris and Les McCann at the Montreux Jazz Festival was released as Swiss Movement, and became one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time.
Dive in and enjoy.
Thanks to Steve Huey for the amazing words.
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