Like Brahms and Bartók late in their careers, Bob Brookmeyer has achieved increased profundity by clarifying his musical palette. The tensions and conflicts that continued to roil his compositions as he emerged from a period of electronics and experimentation in the first half of the 1990s may not be gone, but if they linger they do not dominate. Spirit Music, Brookmeyer's new recording with his New Art Orchestra, includes moments that recall his advanced mainstream writing in the 1960s for … [Read more...]

GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The pig pen smelled like pigs. --William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury … [Read more...]

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.--Maurice Ravel I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.--Igor Stravinsky It's the way you play that makes it . . . Play like you play. Play like you think, and then you got it, if you're going to get it. And whatever you get, that's you, so that's your story.--Count Basie … [Read more...]

Phil Woods responds to John Birchard's review of his recent Washington, DC, concert: Hey Doug, Upon reflection, I think the reviewer missed the point of emphysema - it is Nature's way of saying - "Stop playing all those 16ths and find a whole note that means something." Phil … [Read more...]

It's not too late to put a reminder on your listening calendar. Bob Brookmeyer is the subject on Bill Kirchner's Jazz From The Archives tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST on WBGO radio, which you will find at 88.3 on your FM dial if you're in the Newark-New York area and at … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader John Birchard, a Voice of America newscaster, has been attending the Jazz Heritage series of concerts in Washington, DC, and sharing his impressions with us. Here is his latest report. The Rifftides staff has added links to Woods' recorded performances of some of the pieces John mentions. Once upon a time, Phil Woods was the hottest alto player on the planet. Bird was dead. Benny Carter had disappeared into the Hollywood studios. Cannonball Adderley was biding his time with … [Read more...]

Gerry Mulligan became famous well beyond jazz circles for his 1950s quartet that included Chet Baker on trumpet, succeeded by Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. Mulligan achieved universal admiration among musicians and a large following of listeners with his Concert Jazz Band, which flourished in the early 1960s. He frequently said, though, that his greatest musical satisfaction came from the sextet he headed from 1955 through 1958. The sextet made a brief preview appearance in December of 1954 … [Read more...]

Referring to the WKCR Lennie Tristano Festival and, on the other hand, the general white bread-with-mayonnaise quality of most radio today, particularly in regard to jazz, DevraDoWrite, observes: I know a lot of dee-jays who are nearly in tears because their bosses, not wanting them to break the musical spell with any talk, won't even allow them to tell us listeners who's playing on a particular track let alone mention that the artist might be appearing in town. Amen. Maybe it's time to again … [Read more...]

As I write this, I'm hearing Lennie Tristano talk about his admiration for Charlie Parker. The archived 1973 interview with Tristano, who died in 1978, is a part of a four-day celebration of his music by WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University. WKCR is billing it as a Tristano festival. It will run through noon EST on Saturday, November 11. Tristano just said: I had the best possible opportunity of anybody in the forties and fifties, because I was the only one who wasn't doing what Bird … [Read more...]

A recurring theme of this blog is the universality and remarkably consistent quality of jazz in nearly every precinct of the globe. Jay Thomas has done his part to not only stimulate the growth of that quality abroad, but also to see that those of us in the music's homeland get to hear the new generation of players from abroad. The trumpeter-saxophonist-flutist-leader and international sojourner spends a good deal of time in Japan and frequently imports his Japanese colleagues to work with him … [Read more...]

Thanks to Bob Young of Jazz Boston for adding Rifftides to the links from the site, which chronicles jazz people and events in the Boston area and includes Carol Sloane, Joe Lovano, Danilo Perez, Terri Lynn Carrington and Charlie Kohlhase on its board of artistic advisers. They must be giving good advice; it is a web site with good design, sensible organization, extensive information and hip background music . Thanks to Mr. Young, also, for including among Jazz Boston's links one to a … [Read more...]

In the recent Rifftides piece about Freedom and Josef Skvorecky, I named several jazz musicians from former Communist countries who have risen to the top of their profession. One of them was the Czech pianist Emil Viklický. The world is small and tightly interconnected. A day or two after the piece appeared, I got a message from Viklický informing me that he knows Skvorecky "quite well" and that he contributed an important element to a masterly--and very funny--Skvorecky novel. Emil … [Read more...]

When they played The Seasons the other night, it had been nine months since I heard alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón's quartet. I was impressed with the band at the Portland Jazz Festival and with Zenón's Jíbaro CD. In Feburary, the leader's fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cole had recently replaced the formidable Antonio Sánchez on drums and was working into the group. Cole's working-in is long past. The band has the cohesion, mutuality of direction and sense of purpose that come when performance … [Read more...]