• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Archives for June 20, 2005

Catching Up

During the more than two years I was mostly closeted writing Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, CDs kept materializing in my mailbox. There wasn’t much I could do about them but write an occasional review. When I emerged from isolation, I sampled many and paid close attention to a few. In the next few days, I’ll share with you my imprssions of some of them.
Now that any eighteen-year-old tenor player is likely to be a record company, the CDs come pouring in. Some weeks, self-produced albums by fledgling musicians outnumber those by players with track records (so to speak). More often than not, these maiden voyages are launched on waves of compositions by the leader, but I have encountered no new jazz composer with Herbie Hancock’s ability to sustain an album of original material. When I see on the back of an album a list of tunes written by someone six months out of Berklee, my inclination is to consign the CD to the box reserved for things I may get around to some day. I’m with Alan Broadbent, who spoke years ago about the importance to performer and listener alike of improvisation based on recognizable music.

“There’s a joy, an intellectual bliss that derives from being able to discern the form of something and to hear how somebody is playing on it,” Alan told me years ago when I was preparing the notes for his Pacific Standard Time. “A lot of listeners who know a tune sense its form and feel that they’re a part of it. They can feel the tension. They can hear how the tune is being reharmonized. That’s part of the joy of the art of it, for listeners to be able to use their minds, so it’s not just mood music.”

Still, once in a while something intrigues me into hearing a collection of originals by a young musician. In the case of Alex Heitlinger’s Green Light, the hook was the presence in Heitlinger’s sextet of the remarkable trumpeter Greg Gisbert. Heitlinger is a 24-year-old Colorado trombonist who played in symphony orchestras in the Rocky Mountain region and around the Southwest. He recently moved to Jersey City to be close to the New York scene. His jazz playing has elements of whimsy that remind me of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd. His flights of fancy extend into his writing on “Crazy Jake,” which sounds like George Russell visiting a 1920s Berlin cabaret, and “Pondering,” with a melody perfectly suited to the title. “Missing You” is a waltz with a bittersweet cast and nicely harmonized horn parts behind Art Lande’s piano solo. “The Foot,” whose line is more a series of impressions than a melody, opens up space around a vamp for the horns to sputter and splatter at will, which they do entertainingly and not to excess. Lande, Heitlinger, saxophonist Peter Sommer and Gisbert solo lustily, with bassist Dwight Kilian and drummer Jill Fredericksen strong in support. This one was a pleasant surprise.
More tomorrow on recent (well, relatively recent) CDs.

Someone To Crow About

Don’t miss DevraDoWrite’s update on Bill Crow, bassist, anecdotist, musicians’ champion and good guy. Excerpt:

Bill Crow was a musical chameleon in his youth, playing trumpet, baritone horn, alto sax drums, and valve trombone. He didn’t take up the bass until he was in his early 20s. Within a few years he was playing bass with Stan Getz, Marian McPartland, and Gerry Mulligan, to name just three, and he never looked back.

Read the whole thing, and see a great recent picture of Bill, here.

Czeching In

The Czech Frantisek UhliÅ™ is one of the greatest bassists in the world. He works frequently in the trio of his countryman pianist Emil Viklicky, another great European player about whom most Americans know little. I just ran across a brief note I made when I was in Prague twelve years ago, helping American economists teach market economics to Czech journalists newly released from communism.

June 10, 1993: Went to Agartha last night to hear Frantisek Uhlir, the wonderful bassist. Earlier in the day one of his fans told me he is better than George Mraz. Maybe, maybe not, but he is superb, world class. Uhlir is a short, powerful, chubby man with a pleasant round face. His tone is round, too, and centered, and he is fast, agile and swinging.

Vicklicky’s trio with Uhlir and the Slovakian drummer Laco Tropp backs the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson on Robinson’s lovely Summertime CD released last year on the Czech label Cube Metier. In my Jazz Times review of the album and one by Robinson of Louis Armstrong compositions, I wrote:

One of the best contemporary pianists, Viklicky’s soloing and comping, his touch, voicings and intervals have a good deal in common with fleet, tasteful pianists like Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles and Bill Charlap. His individuality is deeply informed by the music of his native land, and particularly by that of Moravia.

To read the review of both albums, go here.

Other Matters

This may be a subject better suited to Nancy Levinson’s Pixel Points than to Rifftides, but here goes: what has happened to house design? I don’t mean high-end design by top-rung architects working with wealthy clients, but design of houses for ordinary folks. Not far from where I live, a small orchard has disappeared—almost overnight, it seems—and been replaced by a half-dozen houses that will probably sell for a couple of hundred thousand dollars each. They are builder houses, not so much designed as extruded; featureless, bland, sited cheek-by-jowl on their lots with their backs to views, their fronts looking at each other across a cul de sac, two of the four walls devoid of windows except for tiny ones looking out of bathrooms. The forbidding doors of two-car garages dominate the house fronts. Variations on this depressing theme characterize a high percentage of new housing built in the United States.
In contrast, a mile or so away, is a three-acre former farm also now populated with houses. Those houses were bought by an entrepeneur and moved there when a hospital expanded and forced them out. They appear to have been built in the late 1930s and forties, with light, openess and welcoming characteristics in mind. None of them is grand, but each is an individual. Some are on a new curving short street, others face a busy thoroughfare. Together, they have the friendly aspect of a village. The houses on the old orchard land have all the charm of a clump of prefab classrooms on the back lot of an overcrowded high school.
In their book A Pattern Language (Oxford), Christopher Alexander and his fellow architects of the Center for Environmental Structure long ago set out principles not only for design of houses but also of neighborhoods, towns and regions. A few headings from the book hint at what they suggest for dwellings:
Light on Two Sides of Every Room
Opening to the Street
Connection to the Earth
Garden Seat
Sitting Circle
Alcoves
Natural Doors and Windows
Low Sill
Pools of Light
Front Door Bench
Windows Which Open Wide
Small Panes
Flow Through Rooms
Little in A Pattern Language is technical. Most of it is based in taste and common sense. Driving around new subdivisions, I can’t help wondering about the supply of both among many of today’s home homebuilders—and why buyers settle for lousy design.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, … [MORE]

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside