Joel Miller, Tantramar (ArtistShare). The Canadian saxophonist and composer, summoning up scenes from his New Brunswick boyhood, pulls off the neat trick of creating pleasant sketches that have depth. The swagger of Miller's tenor sax soloing and the complexity of the intertwining sextet lines he wrote make "Syriana" one of many highlights, the clever writing and allusion to Miles Davis in "Anonymity" another. The CD includes atmospheric vocal touches by Miller and Amelia MacMahon and an … [Read more...]

Dennis Irwin, the stalwart bassist of The Vanguard Orchestra and hundreds of recordings, has cancer and no medical insurance. Irwin is fifty-six years old. Friends and admirers are organizing a series of benefits for him, beginning next Sunday following the Super Bowl. It will begin at 10 pm at the Lower Manhattan jazz club called Smalls, 10th Street and Seventh Avenue, just down the street from the Village Vanguard. Musicians are encouraged to sit in. For information, go to this page at the … [Read more...]

The Rifftides discussion earlier this month about jazz and poetry brought this response from Angela J. Elliott in England. Jazz poetry is not dead and it doesn't smell funny either. Well, at least it seems that way in the USA. There appears to still be an interest in it beyond the hip hop and rap idiom. Over here in Blighty I play to jazz audiences who seem to think that the spoken word at a jazz venue means you can't sing. Only at a literary bash can you expect an honest and fair reception. I … [Read more...]

A favorite story about Al Cohn: A friend who hadn't seen him for a long time ran into Cohn on the street in New York and said, "Hey, Al, where are you living these days?" "Oh," Al said, "I'm living in the past." I've been having a couple of Al Cohn days. As executor of the estate of Jack Brownlow, last week I was going through things in his house. I came across two thick three-ring binders labeled "Letters" and was surprised to discover that Bruno had saved every letter I wrote him over several … [Read more...]

More than a month following his death, tributes to Oscar Peterson continue to materialize. The writer Rick Seifert, who blogs from Portland, Oregon, adds to them with his memories of Peterson. This one is from Seifert's youth in the midwest. I'd venture into Chicago on nasty winter nights to listen to "The Trio," as it was aptly called. No other jazz trio rivaled it. The Windy City venue was the up-scale London House along Michigan Avenue. As the snow gusted and swirled off the lake, pianist … [Read more...]

In Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, I wrote this about the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster: In the beginning his playing was modeled closely on the dramatic, sweeping, even grandiose, style of (Coleman) Hawkins. But over time, Webster pared away embellishments and rococo elements, while maintaining warmth and a big tone, and created a style that with force and clarity appeals directly to the emotions. Or, as the critic Martin Williams put it, Webster became a great … [Read more...]

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have stayed together as the Standards Trio for a quarter of a century. How? Why? Associated Press writer Charles J. Gans wondered, and spoke with the three. Here's a little of what Jarrett told him: If you meet the perfect other two people for your needs in a musical jazz situation, why would you force yourself to go around the corner and find two other people to play with? Gans discloses the surprising information that except for one date when … [Read more...]

Marc Myers is devoting three days of his excellent Jazz Wax blog to a discussion of the Paul Desmond Quartet with Jim Hall. I have the honor of being his guest discusser. We talk about the RCA Victor recordings and the earlier Warner Bros album of the Desmond quartet. This is a link to the first installment. I was surprised in searching the internet to see that although the individual RCA albums and single-CD compilations are generally available, the box set of the complete recordings is … [Read more...]

Terry Teachout is making progress on his biography of Louis Armstrong. He just wrote a chapter in three days Take it from a writer; that's blazing progress. He gives a sample on his blog. Among other things, it deals with Armstrong's life on the road and with Henry "Red" Allen, recently a Rifftides subject. To read the excerpt on TT's About Last Night, go here. I am looking forward to that book. … [Read more...]

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. --Martin Luther King, Jr. … [Read more...]

One year ago, the pianist George Cables gave his listeners a moment of music so vivid that I was moved to write of it, ...he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive. You may go here to read about that concert. Cables' playing that night was extraordinary, but it was plain to everyone in the audience that he was unwell--drastically underweight, moving to the piano with difficulty. On dialysis for years, he had undergone it that … [Read more...]

Even if I am fighting my way out of a thicket of deadlines, as I am at the moment, when a Jim Ferguson CD arrives, I stop what I'm doing and listen to it. Fortunately for the viability of the exchequer, that doesn't happen often. The most recent Ferguson album came the day before yesterday. The previous one arrived seven years ago. The new CD is Mundell Lowe & Jim Ferguson, Haunted Heart (Lily's Dad's Music). The record company, if that's not too grand a term, is Ferguson's. He is Lily's dad. … [Read more...]

Pete Candoli was an iron man in an iron-man calling. He played lead trumpet in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton, Les Brown, Count Basie, Freddy Slack, Tex Beneke, Jerry Gray, Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman...among others. He became famous as Superman With A Horn in Woody Herman's First Herd of 1945 and '46. Later, he co-led a group with his younger brother Conte. He was a mainstay in the recording studios and on the sound stages of Hollywood. News of Pete Candoli's death … [Read more...]

Rifftides Readers sometimes send useful tips. Here are three: Pianist Emil Viklický called our attention to this YouTube clip of him and two other Czech musicians sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie's band in a 1990 concert. In a moment of geographic confusion, Diz introduces them as our "Yugoslav brothers." The other Czechs are saxophonist Jiri Stivin, who plays a startling solo on pennywhistle, and trumpeter Juraj Bartos. Paquito D'Rivera is also aboard, on clarinet and alto. The bassist is John … [Read more...]

It was a piano weekend in apple, wine and snow country in the shadow of the Cascade mountains. Two of the premier jazz pianists of the twenty-first century played here. Fresh from Los Angeles, Jan Lundgren had just recorded for Fresh Sound Records a trio CD of the music of Ralph Rainger. Bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe LaBarbera, who were on the record session, did not make the trip north. The Swedish pianist had one rehearsal Saturday afternoon with Seattle bassist Jon Hamar and Don … [Read more...]

Through our Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard, Rifftides has updated you from time to time on the fight against the Bush administration's attempt to dismantle or downgrade the English language broadcasts of the Voice Of America. Birchard reports that there has been, if not an all-out victory, significant progress. Concerning the battle to keep the English language news division at VOA alive: we won! A two-year battle with our own management ended when Bush signed a budget bill that … [Read more...]

In the 1950s and early sixties, there was a vogue for combining jazz and poetry. It wasn't new. Poets as far back as Langston Hughes in the 1920s read their work in collaboration with jazz musicians, usually in the privacy of homes, rarely in public. Thirty years later the idea sprang up again in beatnik pads in San Francisco and New York's East Village, then spread to coffee houses, night clubs, recordings and on at least one occasion, a Los Angeles concert hall. For David Amram's recollection … [Read more...]

As far as I know, Pete Winslow never recorded his poetry, with or without a jazz group, but I played once while he read. Pete and I were in journalism school together at the University of Washington. He edited the campus humor magazine and sometimes wrote poetry for it under the pseudonym Eleanor H. Browning. He was a tall, skinny guy with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He often seemed to be smiling, even when he wasn't. This badly reproduced picture from the yearbook will give you an idea … [Read more...]

Here is part of a Rifftides piece from last March: When I listen to the two-track analog stereo recordings Roy DuNann made for the Contemporary label shortly after the perfection of stereo in the 1950s, I curse the boneheads who, because they could, introduced multi-track, multi-microphone recording. Digital capability then came along with 587-channel mixing boards and made post production a sci-fi adventure that compounded all of the engineering wizards' sins. Red Mitchell was right; simple … [Read more...]