Archives for March 2006

Larry Kart writes from Chicago about the David "Fathead" Newman review in the next exhibit: A wise, lovely, loving piece of writing. A "customized time value" -- yes. I had a similar thought the other day listening to Lou Donaldson on the reissue of his Blue Note album The Natural Soul. The way he … [Read more...]

One minute and twenty-six seconds into a blues called “Bu Bop Bass” on his new CD, Cityscape, the tenor saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman begins his solo with a phrase that consists of two quarter-note Fs, a quarter-note A and a half-note A—an interval of a major third in the key of F … [Read more...]

Speak low, if you speak love —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 1599 Speak low, when you speak love—Ogden Nash, Kurt Weill, “Speak Low,” One Touch of Venus, 1943 … [Read more...]

A copy of every jazz album released does not show up at my house. It only seems that way when I look at, maneuver around or trip over stacks of CDs. The stream of review copies arriving by mail, UPS, FedEx and DHL makes it possible for a music writer to keep up with the work of established artists, … [Read more...]

In the quarter of a century during which Marian McPartland has presented Piano Jazz on National Public Radio, her guests have included most of the idiom’s important pianists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ranging in style from Jay McShann to Chick Corea. One of the most … [Read more...]

If conventional wisdom and the Nielsen SoundScan survey are right, jazz titles constitute three-to-four percent of CDs. That means that jazz CDs account for about two-million-480-thousand of the 619-million total CD sales Nielsen reports for 2005. Putting aside such value-laden considerations as … [Read more...]

Bill Crow, bassist, author and occasional Rifftides correspondent, has taken to the air or the ether, or whatever you call the medium that contains the internet. His new website is a work in progress, as all good websites should be. He writes, I keep polishing it as I learn the software. Some of … [Read more...]

The Charlie Parker posting has elicited a number of interesting responses, including this one from Rifftides reader Dave Lull. The late Esther Bubley took photographs of Charlie Parker and others at a jam session. There are a few of them posted at a web site devoted to Ms Bubley, and more posted … [Read more...]

Good news for radio listeners in Cincinnati, Ohio, or anywhere on the internet: The veteran broadcaster Oscar Treadwell (legendary would not be a hyperbolic term in this case) is back on the air. In his early career, Treadwell was so highly regarded by musicians that Wardell Gray named one of his … [Read more...]

Several interesting comments came in regarding the Charlie Parker posting. Many of them included information about the DVD that was the source of the footage on the Dailymotion web site. Here are some of the reader responses. The Parker/Hawkins footage is on "The Greatest Jazz Films Ever,” … [Read more...]

One of the pleasures of living in the Washington, D.C. area (there ARE some), is that the three main military jazz bands make their homes here. One of the better concerts I attended this past year was at George Washington University, where the Airmen of Note, the U-S Air Force's jazz group, played … [Read more...]

Rifftides is extending its reach in southern regions. Welcome to new Rifftides readers in Mexico, Peru and Djibouti. … [Read more...]

For years, I have thought that the only film showing Charlie Parker at work was a well-known 1952 clip of Parker with Dizzy Gillespie when they appeared on a television program to receive a magazine award and played “Hot House.” It turns out, happily, that I was wrong. A website called … [Read more...]

With all the back-and-forth about Maynard Ferguson's band and outreach, music ed and so on, I wonder why the military bands are never mentioned? These ensembles are comprised of some of the best players and composers/arrangers on the planet and probably do more to keep students interested in jazz … [Read more...]

From Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary (1980): Hip Mod. Slang (and prob. becoming passé). Aware, knowing, up on, in the know. [Earlier hep with the same senses, perhaps modified from the military usage for counting cadence, itself a modification of “left” as in hep-ri'-hep (because … [Read more...]

"Good Morning," he said, "this is John Ciardi prowling around your breakfast table and peering into your cereal bowl to find a whole cluster of words there." It was his introduction to one of the pieces he did on National Public Radio's Morning Edition in the 1980s. To hear the whole thing, go here … [Read more...]

He published 38 books, 12 of them for children, one a translation of Dante. He was a fine poet. Measurements I've zeroed an altimeter on the floor then raised it to a table and read three feet. Nothing but music knows what air is more precisely than this. I read on its face Sensitive Altimeter and … [Read more...]

Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of fifty-eight musicians in front of and on the steps of a Harlem brownstone ran in Esquire magazine, which called it A Great Day In Harlem. It became one of the best known snapshots in the world, already famous for decades when Jean Bach made a film about it in 1994. … [Read more...]

“Jazz is where you find it.” That is the opening sentence in the first paragraph of an essay in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. Here is the rest of the paragraph. The Polish novelist and essayist Leopold Tyrmand, who spent much of World War Two as a forced laborer … [Read more...]