Archives for July 2006

I had just sat down to write a tribute to Hank Jones on his 88th birthday when I was alerted to a column about Hank by Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. I may flatter myself that I know and understand a great deal about the elegant Mr. Jones, but on my best day I could not improve on what Stryker wrote. I wish Hank a happy birthday and enthusiastically recommend that you read Stryker’s article. Here’s a sample:

Jones’ marriage of grace and guts created the template for a school of modern jazz pianists from Detroit — he was later followed by Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Roland Hanna — and his often overlooked influence has seeped into the bloodstream of jazz.
“His style is as profound and defined as any of the major masters,” says (Bill) Charlap. “It’s equal to Teddy Wilson, equal to Bill Evans, equal to Thelonious Monk, equal to Tommy Flanagan. It’s as much a unique musical utterance and just as balanced in terms of intellectualism and feeling.
“With Hank Jones you hear the past, present and the future of jazz piano.”

To read the whole thing, go here.
All I will add to Mark’s list of recommended Jones albums is a suggestion that you also listen to Second Nature if you can find it on, say, eBay. It is a double-LP Savoy package that contains the 1956 quintet session vibraharpist Milt Jackson made with Jones, tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson, bassist Wendell Marshall and drummer Kenny Clarke. Jackson and Jones created magic together, and this was a glorious example of it. Short of Second Nature, a fair sampling of the session’s tracks are on the Jackson CD called Jackson’s Ville.

The right hand column sports new CD recommendations under Doug’s Picks. DVD and book picks will follow in a few days.

The Rifftides staff received the following e-mail message from Portugal:

I’d visit your blog. I hope you visit my blog: http://www.jazzseen.blogspot.com./. If you don’t understand Portuguese, don’t worry, you can listen jazz.
Luiz

Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that I was able to make out some of the Jazzseen text in the reviews to which Luiz’s blog is primarily devoted. But they are not why I suggest you pay it a visit. At the top of the page is a video of the classic “Manah Manah” routine from the Muppets Show. Click on the nose of the pink fuzzy bovine on the right to start it. Judging by the subtitles at the end, it was borrowed from German television. It’s good for a smile in any language.
Have a nice weekend.

One of the new Tulane University students reading Tom Sancton’s Song For My Fathers sent this comment about the book and the Rifftides report on it:

As an entering freshman at Tulane, I can only give the highest praise for Sancton’s book. My first visit to New Orleans, in March of 2004, is forever marked in my memory by the night I spent at Preservation Hall. I don’t know if words can adequately desribe the kinship I feel with Sancton after learning that, nearly 40 years ago, he had the same experience, and had the fortune to learn from the musical masters of the Hall. thank you for highlighting this book.
Hannah Trostle

Slow Drag Dead
hallelulia
four black Cadillac
high black hearse
and all
the people come
to hear the trom
bone bawl
look at Slow
Drag picture on
the Wall
He call again
Sweet Emma come
Big Jim come when He call
then honkie play
and honkie plunk
in Preservation
Hall
–Miller Williams, “Alcide Pavageau,” from The Only World There Is

That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,
Building for some a legendary Quarter
Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,
Everyone making love and going shares–
Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced
Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manqués nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,
And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.
–Philip Larkin, “For Sidney Bechet,” from The Whitsun Weddings

The Bix Beiderbecke Festival opens today in Beiderbecke’s home town, Davenport, Iowa. It features Randy Sandke and, in a nice stroke of timing, so does The Wall Street Journal. My piece called “The Best Trumpeter You Never Heard Of” is in the Journal’s Leisure and Arts section. Here are samples:

The trumpeter and sometime guitarist Randy Sandke receives neither the critical nor the popular attention that goes to fellow trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas — to pick a couple of names out of the air — but everything about his music says that he should. He is a technical and creative virtuoso. Regardless of the styles and eras of music he chooses for his projects, he seems unrestricted in interpretive power. He arranges and composes for large and small groups with a canny understanding of dynamics, instrumental textures, relative harmonic densities and the importance of space.
In seven fairly recent albums by Mr. Sandke, there is scarcely a routine moment. The settings range from a trumpet-piano duo to a 16-piece band. “Subway Ballet” finds Mr. Sandke at a peak of complexity in concept, instrumentation and daring. The CD’s accessibility is partly because it portrays an aspect of something familiar, New York, the nation’s second hometown even to those who have never been there. Not yet choreographed, the ballet music is so graphic that anyone capable of connecting sounds with images (all of us) can listen with eyes closed and supply the action.

To read the whole thing, go here, but hurry; the article is free to non-subscribers to the Journal Online for only seven days.

It turns out that many listeners are concerned with the issues covered in our Means of Delivery discussion. Here are comments from three Rifftides readers.

Like you, I’m pondering today’s post re: means of delivery. We really must adjust to new realities, but I’m having a hard time believing that I will LIKE them. Downloading is fine — IF I get uncompressed WAV files of the music. But NOT if what I get is compressed MP3 that sounds OK with rock music, or for listening in
a noisy car, but not at home.
Jim Brown

Mr. Brown is an audio imaging expert with long recording experience.

To me the whole downloading thing seems like just a tease – except for iPod users, who are happily blasting these sounds into their earbuds. It’s such a different experience of music, & each to his own, but what about printed matter, documentation, & all that? What about high-quality equipment, high-quality nondeafening sound, filling a room with music? The iPod/download audio experience is like AM radio at the beach – it has its place, & its merits, but it’s a far cry from hearing live music or reclining on one’s couch awash in beautiful sounds emitting from those speakers you paid a lot of money for.
Terri Hinte

Ms. Hinte is a free lance publicist and jazz archivist.

I understand that people still want to have a disc to hold and cover art to fondle. I do too. But, if the choice was between no physical disc, and no music, which would you take? It costs practically zero to keep lots of catalogue in digital print, and there are real costs to keeping things in physical print. If a company is making back catalogue available in any format, I count that as a plus.
I sell my music at my own download store. All of the offerings have pdf liner notes that can be downloaded, and the last two additions have pdfs of the full album art, so the listener could print the book and traycard if she so desired. The liner notes are free downloads separate from the purchased music, so one could even read the liners before deciding to buy, like the good old days of vinyl in the store.
Jeff Albert

I took a look and was impressed. Mr. Albert’s graphic downloads are a right step in the direction of information about the music, but Jim Brown’s caution about sound quality is a crucial point. Will listeners accustomed to CD clarity will settle for less?

Yesterday’s post on the unavailabity of certain music in CD form brought the following thoughtful and informative response from a veteran of the jazz record business.

With due respect, I’m unconvinced that there is enough consumer demand for most deep jazz catalog to justify continued CD manufacturing and retailing in conventional stores. When I was running Verve/Polygram in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a good deal more stability in the jazz reissue and catalog market than there is now, and we still had to work hard to convince retailers to hold more titles of slow sellers. You’d be surprised at who some of those slow sellers were: Dizzy, Sarah, Mulligan, Konitz—just to name a quick handful of giants who were a tough sell to all but the Towers and the Virgins of those days. Still, there was enough aggregate activity so that we didn’t see a lot of returns.

That began to change in 1996-7, as stores became saturated with product of all kinds, and we started to see a radical escalation in returns. Things kept getting worse from there. The record industry would have you believe it’s all about downloading, but many other factors have brought the CD business to where it is now, beginning with outrageous pricing in an attempt to rescue a bad-margin business. The simple fact is that most catalog titles don’t turn over fast enough to justify the retailers’ cost of doing business, starting with real estate and shipping costs. You may want that Chubby Jackson CD, but you’ll have to give me the math that says it’s “absurd” for the label not to release the CD “at standard prices” (whatever they may be.) The economics of brick and mortar retail and consumer demand aren’t quite as simple as they used to be, and if it was tough to sell Dizzy a decade ago, how does it make sense to try to get Chubby into whatever stores are left today?

Which makes the “long tail” of digital distribution the only hope for the continued existence of the highways and the back roads of the riches of our recorded musical archives. All of the costs associated with hard goods manufacturing and distribution of CDs disappear in the digital world. Both the casual consumer and hard core fan have not only a deeper selection and immediate availability to attract them, but the recommendation and filtering systems potentially available to everyone are much more interactive and rich. The old “read about it, hear it on the radio, buy it” paradigm is being embellished in all sorts of creative ways, blogs such as Rifftides among them.

Big problems and hurdles exist. It’s proving to be a nightmare for the huge recording conglomerates to shift from a hard goods business model to a digital one. The financial projection of download sales is an unsettled and slippery task for CFOs of labels large and small. And speaking of bad margins, it’s impossible at present to predict if or how a standard economic system will develop. It’s easier to predict that the bigger companies will continue to attempt to deprive the creators of music of their fair share of these tiny pies called downloads. But the upside for the new creators of jazz is that digital economics are in their favor. The big conglomerates simply aren’t necessary any more to get their music out and spread the word.

Certainly for jazz fans, the issues of booklet annotation, personnel listings, recording information, etc. must be addressed better than iTunes or the other services are doing it now. Like everyone else, I’d like to see some better digital “packages” created. And I have no doubt there will be in time.

While I treasure my thousands of vinyl LPs and CDs just as much as any collector, I’m much more concerned about the ongoing health of the global library of recorded music, and its continued availability to our culture. If Paul Desmond’s, Chubby Jackson’s, or Miles Davis’s music is to survive—and it must—it will do so online. Get used to it.
Thanks again for Rifftides.
Chuck Mitchell

I am encouraged by Mr. Mitchell’s optimism that useable packaging and notes will become available in digital downloads. Why not now? The technology exists.
The standard price I had in mind for the nonexistent Verve Chubby Jackson CD was $15.00 or $16.00, not the $30.49, plus shipping, that Amazon is asking for the Japanese import edition.

Mention of Chubby Jackson’s album Chubby’s Back as a digital download brought this account of the session that produced it.

Doug:
I was at the session in 1957 when this album was recorded. I was editor of Down Beat at the time, and a close friend of Chubby’s, and I had been asked to write the liner notes.
Bill Harris and Don Lamond, ex-Hermanites along with Jackson, had been flown in from Florida to do the date–the rest of the musicians were Chicagoans, all of whom were determined to prove that New York and Los Angeles were not the sole sources of top players.
The band, except for Harris and Lamond, had rehearsed the charts and were raring to go–Chubby had them ready.
The entire album was cut one night (a Sunday if I recall) in just two three-hour sessions that ended at about 1 a.m. The engineer was the legendary Bill Putnam, a true innovator of modern recording techniques.
Enthusiasm in the studio was contagious, with trumpeter Don Jacoby and Chubby being the most vociferous. Bill Harris, quiet and professorial as always, played beautifully. Lamond was inspirational, and the band responded blazingly to his drive. A couple of the studio playbacks that were unmistakably master takes brought cheers from the band as they ended.
I have attended a great many recording sessions in subsequent years, both as observer and as a producer, but I can’t recall another that had this sort of atmosphere. When it finished, nobody wanted to go home.
I’d love to hear it on CD, carefully mastered and transferred to digital. I think it would be great listening.
Jack Tracy

You will find a biography of Jackson here.

Rifftides Reader Marc Myers writes from New York City:

Some jazz tidbits…
1. Desmond’s Bridge Over Troubled Water is an iTunes download for $9.90. This is an absolute gem (thanks so much for turning me onto it). Wow.
2. The rare and expensive import, Chubby’s Back (Chubby Jackson, about whom not enough has been written or re-released) is a $6.90 iTunes download. Chubby’s Back is a fun album–but I did have to do a Google search for the personnel, which turned up at a Tiny Kahn site.*

DR: It is absurd that Verve won’t reissue Bridge Over Troubled Water on CD. As for Chubby’s Back, originally on the Argo label, Verve owns the master to that, too, and they could easily put it on CD for domestic consumption at standard prices. People still want to own albums with packaging and liner notes. I don’t consider myself a technological troglodyte, but I do not welcome a future in which I have to buy an iPod or a computer with a CD burner in order to hear music that becomes available only through digital downloads. I’ve written about this recently in connection with the disappearance of other important CDs. It brought a fair amount of comment.

MM: I know. My absolute joy after a hard week of reporting and writing is spending two hours in Tower in NYC (Lincoln Center). The place is slowly and steadily becoming a dump. The racks aren’t managed, new stuff isn’t in stock, headphones are busted. Hence, the iPod add-on, since “shopping” around the iTunes site allows you to listen to clips and find stuff that isn’t available on CD. Part of the problem is that CDs are terribly overpriced, and many people are running out of room in their homes. I’m at the point where I’ll buy CDs only if it’s a wonderfully produced classic. Otherwise, I’ll download it. I had a choice–spend $70 on Desmond and Jackson CDs from Japan or spend $18 for both via iTunes download. The download won–and the sound is great.

MM: 3. I watched an odd, colorful 1966 film the other night, Made in Paris, with Ann-Margaret and Louis Jourdan. The big surprise was that Count Basie and Mongo Santamaria are in it (swinging nightclub cameos). We should start a list of films in which jazz artists appear (i.e. Young Man with a Horn, etc.). Best part of Made In Paris was seeing Lockjaw Davis take a solo, though way too brief. Wish they’d release the entire footage v. chopped song for flick. Be fun to see entire filmed appearance. Lockjaw–talk about Mr. Cool!

DR: Made in Paris sounds intriguing. I looked for it on Netflix and Amazon and did a general web search. It seems not to be available on either DVD or VHS.

MM: I caught it on Turner Classic Movies

DR: Young Man With a Horn is a cliched but powerful film with Kirk Douglas as Rick Martin, who is, more or less, Bix Beiderbecke. The only real musicians who appear in it are Hoagy Carmichael in a character role and Louis Armstrong, uncredited, as himself.
*Date: March 31, 1957
Location: Chicago
Chubby Jackson (ldr), Don Geraci, John Howell, Don Jacoby, Joe Silva (t), Cy Touff (btp), Bill Harris, Tom Shepard (tb), Howard Davis (as), Sandy Mosse, Vito Price (ts), Bill Calkins (bar), Remo Biondi, Jimmy Gourley (g), Marty Rubenstein (p), Chubby Jackson (b), Don Lamond (d), Tiny Kahn (a)

Each summer, Tulane University in New Orleans sends the coming autumn’s entering students a book to read. Tulane’s goal in its reading project is “to provide new students with a shared intellectual experience through the reading and discussion of a common book and a campus-wide intellectual dialogue that begins during orientation and continues throughout the fall semester.”
This year, Tulane’s book is Song For My Fathers, Tom Sancton’s moving account of growing up white and middle class in New Orleans and learning about life from his own father and from the old black men who played at Preservation Hall. Sancton’s insights into what makes the city tick, the characters of the last generation of original New Orleans jazz musicians and the varieties of human relationships, are bound to enrich the development of Tulane’s new students. It will certainly help them understand some of the reasons why so many Orleanians are emotionally committed to the revival of a city where the environment, meteorology and common sense say it should never have been built.
Traditional New Orleans jazz is not at the top of the listening lists of many people under the age of seventy. And yet, such hip modern musicians as Steven Bernstein, Randy Sandke and Don Byron take a genuine interest in jazz from the 1920s and thirties not because of its quaintness but because of its content and passion. Anyone who pays serious attention to the musical heroes of Sancton’s book–George Lewis, George Guesnon, Joe Watkins, Papa Celestin, Punch Miller, Narvin Kimball and the rest–will get the bonus of deeper knowledge and appreciation of all the jazz that followed
If you wish to hear how well Sancton learned from George Lewis to play the clarinet, try this album. He is a world-class journalist who ran TIME’s Paris bureau for two decades, and he lives in Paris now, but Song For My Fathers and his playing leave no doubt about where his heart is.

Il Bello Del Jazz
The Italian pianist Roberto Magris, who operates a band called Europlane, is out with a new CD featuring a distinguished guest. In his mid-forties, Magris is one of those European artists so steeped in jazz that in a blindfold test a listener–no matter how perceptive–would be unlikely to conclude that he was hearing somone not from the United States. In Il Bello Del Jazz, Magris adds to his quartet Herb Geller, the American alto saxophonist who for decades has made Hamburg, Germany his headquarters. At seventy-seven, Geller retains the fire of his youth as a no-holds-barred bebopper and brings to his ballad playing a distillation of the creamy sound and conception that Benny Carter inspired in him when Geller was a boy.
I have heard no more ravishing instrumental version of the Billie Holiday standby “Some Other Spring” than the duo treatment it gets from Magris and Geller. Both of them explore the bop sides of their natures in Magris’s “Parker’s Pen,” which also has an impressive solo from the Croatian guitarist Darko Jurkovic. The repertoire is nicely balanced between established but not over-performed songs (“Key Largo,” “A New Town is a Blue Town,” “Here I’ll Stay”) and stimulating new pieces by Magris and Geller. Geller’s “Stray Form,” alluding in the title and the melodic content to Billy Strayhorn, and Magris’s title tune are highlights. Bassist Rudi Engel, a German, and Magris’s fellow Italian, drummer Gabriele Centis, round out an international group that erases boundaries.
Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet
What attracted me to Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet, once Rifftides reader Ted Allen called our attention to it in the recent roundup of listeners’ choices, was Hans Teuber. Teuber is the talented Seattle reed and woodwind player whose jazz work, particularly on alto saxophone, captivated me years ago. There is plenty of Teuber to appreciate here, and although it took me a couple of hearings to get past, or accommodate myself to, the funk and hip-hop aspects of the music, the CD has boogied its way onto my current play list. Skerik, who goes by only that name, is the tenor saxophonist and leader. The instrumentation also includes trumpet, trombone, drums and organ.
Boy, does it ever include organ. When Joe Doria’s Hammond B-3 and Craig Flory’s baritone sax are in full voice, with the other horns laying down Mingus-like unison commentary, you may as well invite your neighbors to the party because they’re not going to get any sleep. For all the rambunctiousness, Skerik manages to avoid what makes so many funk bands boring–a continuous undifferentiated dynamic level. Much of the writing here is subtle and, occasionally, flat-out funny. As on the raucous concerto grosso called “Fry His Ass,” Skerik’s gutbucket tenor solos approach but never quite go over the edge. Flory does a convincing Gerry Mulligan on “Song for Bad.” This is good-time music with more depth than at first meets the ear.
The name of the band rang a bell. A little research suggests that it was inspired by a phrase that came from Harry J. Anslinger, the mission-driven first chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a job he held from 1930 to 1962. “Syncopated Taint” is how he characterized what he said jazz and marijuana were doing to the nation in the 1930s. To learn more about Anslinger, who, oddly, is not in the pantheon of the current anti-drug warriors, go here.

Malachi Thompson, the sparkling, exploratory, Chicago jazz trumpeter who died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of fifty-six, recorded a flurry of CDs in his last decade. Many of Thompson’s albums for his hometown label Delmark pulled off the demanding trick of looking simultaneously forward and back. Following an initial seige of cancer, his renaissance began in 1992 with Lift Every Voice and included Buddy Bolden’s Rag, 47th Street and one of the last and most effective with his Africa Brass ensemble, Blue Jazz. Critic Howard Reich has an appreciation of Thompson and a review of his career in the Chicago Tribune. You’ll have to register to read it online. Registration is free.

Thank you so much for the great service you did for all serious jazz lovers regarding Concord’s discontinuing so many important titles. This is infuriating and exasperating news. Key titles by Miles, Trane, and so many others will soon be axed. It’s disgusting. I was already p____d off when they canned Terre Hinte. This is too much.
Jan Stevens

Jan Stevens is the proprietor of the The Bill Evans Web Pages.

Thanks for the heads-up on Concord Records’ Summer Blowout–and subsequent unavailability of a lot of great recordings. Having read your piece EARLY this morning, I immediately went to the Concord website and ordered the Bill Evans Riverside collection. My Evans LPs are getting pretty scratchy and I wouldn’t want to be without those in future.
John Birchard

I’m sure this means the end of the availability of these titles as CDs (and I bought a pantload of them at the beginning of the week, since once you hit 30 they are an astonishing $2.98 each)–but that may not mean that they disappear. For some time, Verve has been making portions of its catalogue available on a download-only basis (viz., Herb and Lorraine Geller’s early recordings), and if Concord has any sense, it will do the same. Many independent labels–like New York City’s wonderful Sunnyside–are decreasing their CD runs and relying on downloads. Here’s hoping Concord is just switching formats, so that the only unpleasant side effect will be the need for some of us to do the same.
Peter Levin

Two thoughts on today’s post about Concord and OJC:
I suspect Concord is going with the times and temper of the brick-and-mortar retail business and preparing to move much of its catalog to online retailers, much as Verve has done in the past couple of years.
The slow turnover of jazz CDs at retail, combined with unreasonable pricing in the entire industry, is changing the market for recorded jazz irrevocably. Two of the largest jazz (and classical) catalog accounts, Barnes & Noble and Borders, have recently declared their intentions to reduce floor space devoted to CDs in favor of DVDs and other items. What we call “deep catalog” is bound to take a big hit; but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that much of this music will be “out of print” forever. One will just have to find it online.
In fact, jazz and classical music are just the leading edge of this trend. A staggering percentage of the staggering number of CDs still released annually have a limited to bleak future in the chain stores.
Which leads me to my second thought, actually a recommendation: Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, a new book that provides some clearly expressed theory about digital age retail economics. It only takes an evening to read, and I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are about the book as it relates to the jazz “marketplace.”
Chuck Mitchell

If the download is the future medium for music, I hope that Mr. Levin’s and Mr. Mitchell’s forecast for Concord is accurate. One place younger buyers are not going for music, in addition to the chain book stores Mr. Mitchell mentions, is your friendly corner CD shop. Here is some of what Alex Williams wrote in Sunday’s New York Times.

In the era of iTunes and MySpace, the customer base that still thinks of recorded music as a physical commodity (that is, a CD), as opposed to a digital file to be downloaded, is shrinking and aging, further imperiling record stores already under pressure from mass-market discounters like Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

To read the whole thing, go here.