I've realized recently one of the underlying characteristics that has drawn me to quite a bit of the music I like, especially improvised music: I'll call it flow. It's pretty easy to make a composed studio track flow (though a hilariously large number of artists, established or otherwise, fail miserably), but a lot harder for improvised music to really embody that same quality. The flow I speak of is not merely the ability to rip some gnarly bebop licks, but the ability to make whole song into a cohesive narrative, including but not limited to the solos, or to play every moment with the whole song in mind, to play every phrase in the context of the whole musical narrative. This doesn't happen all that often, because A. it's not an improvisational quality sought (or at least not accomplished) by all jazzers. B. It takes mutual understanding, restraint, and cohesion far beyond that found in most modern jazz groups I've heard. No bassist-in-7thposition, pianist-planing-quartal-stacks, or incessant snare chatter need apply, please. Anyway, there are some artists who really embody this (others of whom I will post in the near future), and Jimmie Rivers is one of them. He was a western swing guitarist who could play lines that both sizzled and made long-term sense. His foil in this group is Vance Terry, one of the hottest hands ever to play pedal steel. These are recordings from the 23 Club, a western dance hall in Brisbane, CA.