CDs, A DVD, A Book

A few of the things that are keeping my ears and eyes busy:

Bud Shank and Bill Mays: Beyond The Red Door (Jazzed Media). Old friends and co-conspirators in alto saxophone/piano duets at the highest level. Their melding of Russ Freeman's "The Wind" and Jimmy Rowles' "The Peacocks" is exquisite.

Sam Yahel: Truth And Beauty (Origin). Yahel's Hammond B-3 Organ, Joshua Redman's tenor sax and Brian Blade's drums. They were good when they were known as Ya Ya. They're better now.

Miles Davis Quintet Live At The 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF). Davis, George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams when Davis's new sidemen kept him on his toes and Williams liked to throw Miles off-balance to test his reflexes. That was good for Miles. You can hear the exhiliration and feel the tension.

Vern Sielert Dektet: From Here To There (Pony Boy). I heard Sielert the other night as the trumpet soloist with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra in his piece "Matranga's Tonk." He knocked me out. That piece is here, along with ten other examples of his high-level writing and playing. I'd love this CD if all it had was Tom Varner's French horn, Rich Coles' tenor sax and Sielert's solos on "Matranga's." Sielert is an academic who can.

Gigi Gryce: Nica's Tempo (Savoy). Gryce's writing for a Birth-of-the-Cool size ensemble in this 1955 album is just cool enough for Art Farmer, Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Cleveland, Eddie Bert, Horace Silver, Julius Watkins and Cecil Payne, among others. The four quartet sides feature Thelonious Monk as Gryce's sideman in the title tune and Monk's wonderful "Gallop's Gallop."

Charles Mingus Live in '64 (Jazz Icons). This is one of the new batch of DVDs in the invaluable Jazz Icons series. It captures the Mingus sextet with Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Coles and Dannie Richmond in three stops on their European tour. It is absorbing to witness the relationships among this extraordinary band while hearing everyone play so beautifully. More later on this series.

Stories of Anton Chekhov. If you haven't read Chekhov in a while, you may have forgotten how depressing he can be in his subject matter while lifting you to the skies with the beauty of his writing and his ability to delineate character in the sparest brush strokes of prose.