Jazz Icons: Art Farmer Live In '64 (2009)

Jazz Icons: Art Farmer highlights an amazing one hour Art Farmer concert from 1964 featuring the great flugelhornist in his prime. Farmer’s top-notch band includes legendary guitarist Jim Hall (fresh from Sonny Rollins’ band), drummer Pete LaRoca and Steve Swallow on bass. This legendary ensemble plays both standards and originals with ease and finesse and highlights why Farmer was considered one of the most innovative horn players in all of jazz.

The opportunity to see the “Father” of the tenor sax, Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969), on video is a rare one. During Hawkins’ prime – in the 30s to 50s – there is very little video archived of viewable quality, so it is a special treat to have 140 minutes of the master playing at the end of his career. Hawkins had begun to deteriorate rapidly at the end of his career beginning in 1967, when he largely stopped eating and began to drink even more heavily. He was a wisp of his formerly robust stature in 1969 when he passed away. The jazz world had changed, as free jazz had begun to creep onto the jazz scene, and although Hawkins had survived and even mastered the bop idiom of the late 40s and early 50s, he had a hard time accepting some of the directions that jazz was heading.