On Salt Peanuts, I imagine them as a street duo, drummer and trumpeter, working the crowds outside a train station somewhere (I like the Paris Metro, Denfert-Rochereau stop) and sounding too good to be doing it because they aren't really there for the spare change, rather for the amusement, two old pals just messing around (and messing with the heads of the people passing by).
Could have happened. Dizzy Gillespie was a noted joker after all, although Max Roach strikes me as having been a tad too serious for it. Still, he seems to be having a lot of fun on Max + Dizzy Paris 1989, a duet set with two guys who obviously had no problem playing together.
Salt Peanuts always gets my attention in particular when I listen to this because Dizzy takes it almost as an avant-garde piece and Max, not a youngster even in 1989, is amazing in the number of things he can accomplish on his kit at the same time, which I guess gets to the center of why everybody is writing about him today as a guy who made the drums a frontline instrument. One interlude where he's creating thunderous complexity on the drums and maintaining the pulse with the hi-hat, too, is especially nifty. On The Underground, they're basically symbiotic, creating a two-man improvisation that more or less unfolds simultaneously. They either read minds or knew each other, and their business, very well.
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