Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday April 10th, 2013 with Bernard Stepien
Saxophonist Georges Adams with Charles Mingus alumni

Tenor saxophonist Georges Adams is mostly known as being the last saxophonist of Charles Mingus band (1973) until its end when Mingus Health started failing. But this didn’t mean the end of his career. Quite the contrary in deed, since that end marked the start of a new era as band leader of a band mostly composed of Mingus alumni except for the bass player of course. This includes Danny Richmond on drums, Don Pullen on piano but also a then younger guitarist named John Scofield that Mingus introduced in his band too. However, Adams band went both in a different but sometimes conceptually similar direction as Mingus, i.e. get down to the roots. Adams and Scofield had at least one thing in common: they did not participate in the Free Jazz movement of the `60s. Adams was into RB and Scofield into pure Rock and got into Jazz only in 1970 when he started studying at Berkley College. Ironically, all of this resulted in sometimes some of the fiercest Free Jazz but all wrapped into various kinds of grooves that some called hyperblues. In any case, this Adams-Scofield association is remarkable from many points of view, especially since Scofield that also was hired by Miles Davis in his acid bands, was making a good living as a band leader. His frolicking into Free Jazz certainly confirmed that Free Jazz was after all a respectable music and probably that something could be learned from it. The rest of course is history… Tonight, we will survey the Live At Montmartre 1985 recording.