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July 24, 2003
Listening room
Four years ago, I wrote a piece for the New York Times about great jazz LPs that hadn't yet been tranferred to CD. Rarely have I managed to combine altruism and selfishness so indissolubly. I wrote the piece because I wanted those albums on CD, but I also wanted to share the wealth. Since then, several of the records in question (Jim Hall Live!, Pee Wee Russell's New Groove) have crossed the great divide, but others remain in limbo, most notably Ahmad Jamal's Chamber Music of the New Jazz. Arrgh!Anyway, I'm still keeping score, and it is with altruistically selfish delight that I inform you that the good guys just knocked another runner in. Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges, originallly released on Verve in 1959, is an uncomplicatedly wonderful album featuring Mulligan, the master of cool jazz, and Hodges, the premier soloist of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, accompanied by what in 1959 was just about the best of all possible West Coast rhythm sections, Claude Williamson on piano, Buddy Clark on bass, and Mel Lewis on drums. Nothing tricky or fussy, just a bunch of riff tunes by the two saxophonists, but the results are bluesy and super-sly, and you can hear on every track that Mulligan was having the time of his life.
Moral: Good things come to those who wait--but not in silence.
Posted July 24, 2003 12:03 PM
