2008 January 30

CDs: Recent Listening

January 30, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

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 Needs Help

January 30, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

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...]

Wayne Tucker on Orrin Keepnews, RIP
Keepnews seemed as much a fan as a record business man. His books, of which I have at least one, and liner notes show a...
Posted Mar 01, 2015
Colin Wood on Orrin Keepnews, RIP
Sad news. Thank you for your blog, & keep'em coming, cheers, Colin Wood, pianist with Mr Acker Bilk's Paramount Jazz Band for 36 years &...
Posted Mar 01, 2015
Mark Mohr on Orrin Keepnews, RIP
Sad news about a true jazz legend.
Posted Mar 01, 2015
W. Royal Stokes on Services For Clark Terry
I caught Clark Terry here and abroad in many different contexts over the decades and occasionally was able to chat with him. The last time...
Posted Mar 01, 2015
Mike Davis on Services For Clark Terry
Jim Ferguson's comment is a simply beautiful tribute. As a musician Clark Terry had it all. As a human being he had it all and...
Posted Mar 01, 2015

Monday Recommendation: Pullman On Powell

Peter Pullman, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell (Pullman)

Pullman’s research, detail and zeal override flaws of style in this indispensible study of the architect and spirit of modern jazz piano. The author is illuminating in his treatment of Powell’s early years as a child prodigy. He is chilling in his documentation of the mature pianist’s tribulations in the hands of police, mental institutions, lawyers, the courts, and some of his women companions. He paints a bleaker picture than the conventional wisdom that Powell’s European exile was a happy period. Concocted racial euphemisms like “afram” and “euram” are distractions, as is banishment of “the” in the names of things. Descriptions of Powell’s music making are likely to send the reader to the CD shelves or YouTube to hear the brilliance of the pianist’s inventions. Pullman delivers invaluable information about a great artist. Flaws, eccentricities and all, this is an essential book.

Monday Recommendation: Vijay Iyer Trio

Vijay Iyer, Break Stuff (ECM)

It would be safe to say that the pianist Vijay Iyer is the only jazz musician who constructs his music on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers introduced by the Medieval Italian mathematician. Safe that is, if Iyer didn’t credit saxophonist Steve Coleman with giving him the idea years ago. Maybe Coleman got it from Bartók (e.g., “Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta”). Whether Iyer’s ascendency in jazz can be credited to his mathematical expertise and intellectual romance with numbers is beside the point. What counts is the effectiveness of the music. On some of the pieces here, Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore avoid the boredom of repetition by overlaying sheer lyricism. In Thelonious Monk’s “Work,” Coltrane’s “Countdown,” Iyer’s own “Wrens” and “Break Stuff,” and his langorous unaccompanied solo on Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” boredom is unlikely.

Monday Recommendation: Lisa Parrott

Lisa Parrott, Round Tripper (Serious Niceness Records)

There is muscle and grit in the sound of Ms. Parrott’s baritone saxophone on Ornette Coleman’s “Round Trip.” Playing alto, she comes closer to essence of Coleman in “Rosa Takes a Stand” and “D. Day.” Her work on both horns is inflected with a kind of Coleman chanciness, but it would be a mistake to categorize this Australian who moved to New York in the 1990s. In a song written with her bassist sister Nikki, “Do You Think That I Do Not Know,” and a moody adaptation of “Waltzing Matilda,” her lyricism can be reminiscent of mainstream saxophonists like Harry Carney and Willie Smith. She turns Brazilian in Pixinguinha’s classic “Um a Zero.” Ms. Parrott has exquisite dialogues with fellow Australians Nadje Noordhuis, trumpet, and Carl Dewhurst, guitar. Drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Chris Lightcap complete a flawless rhythm section

Monday Recommendation: Bley, Sheppard, Swallow

Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow, CBTrios (ECM)

Trios concentrates the essence of understanding that Bley, Sheppard and Swallow have developed over two decades of collaboration. She recorded the album’s five pieces in various configurations on earlier albums, but the spare instrumentation of her piano, Sheppard’s saxophones and Swallow’s bass creates space for leisurely exploration of the deep harmonic possibilities in her compositions. Most of all, though, melody is what dominates these performances—intriguing melodies like those of “Utviklingssang,” “Vashkar” and others written by Bley—but also those invented by Sheppard, a great tenor saxophonist. Swallow long since, in effect, remade the electric bass. He solos with the facility of a guitarist and, as in the first movement of “Les Trois Lagons (d’après Henri Matisse),” can create walking bass lines that make you want to dance. This album has become a habit around here.

Monday Recommendation: Art Tatum

Art Tatum, God Is In The House (High Note)

The title comes from what Fats Waller said when he saw Art Tatum walk into a club where Waller was playing. Dan Morgenstern tells the story in his notes for this essential collection, “…he stopped the music and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.’” Tatum was Waller’s primary inspiration. The master had no hesitation about paying obeisance to the student. Using a disc recorder, Jerry Newman captured the incredible pianist in Harlem clubs in 1940 and ‘41. The music on this album is not a recent discovery. Don Schlitten released it as an LP on his Onyx label in 1973. The High Note CD has been available since 1998. I’m recommending it now it out of concern that some of you may have deprived yourselves of these indispensible snapshots of Tatum’s genius.

Monday Recommendation: Jimmy Greene

Jimmy Greene, Beautiful Life (Mack Avenue)

The album opens with saxophonist Jimmy Greene’s 6-year-old daughter Ana angelically singing “Come Thou Almighty King” at a 2011 family Christmas celebration. A year later Ana was one of the 26 pupils and teachers murdered in the assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In his notes, Mr. Greene stresses that the album is in memory not of how she died, but of “how she lived, lovingly, faithfully and joyfully.” Joining him in the tribute to Ana are pianists Renee Rosnes, Kenny Barron and Cyrus Chestnut; guitarist Pat Metheny; vocalists Kurt Elling, Latanya Farrell and Javier Colon; bassist Christian McBride; drummer Lewis Nash; strings of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra; voice actress Anika Noni Rose; and a children’s choir of Ana’s classmates from the period when the Greenes lived in Winnipeg, Canada. This memorial is indescribably moving and, yes, joyful.

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