Archives for November 10, 2008

Jazz isn’t dead or dying. It’s just waiting to be heard. The photograph shows an eleven-foot line of CDs on the floor of my music room. There are 352 of them. They are some of the review copies that have arrived in the past couple of months. Boxes and shelves in my office hold at least three times that many more.  A stack of DVDs on the credenza behind where I am writing reaches to within a few inches of the ceiling. None of these recordings is yet in the permanent collection. They are languishing, hoping to be reviewed.

 

I estimate that there are 1,050 CDs and thirty-five DVDs on hold. Let’s assume that each is an hour long, a low average. If I were to spend eight hours a day, including weekends, listening and watching, it would be–appropriately–April 1^st, 2009, before I finished. But I would not finish because long before then I would have been taken to the loony bin. In the meantime, at the current rate, a couple of thousand more recordings will have arrived. Did I mention the storage problem?

 

All a reviewer can do is hope that experience, knowledge, instinct and luck will guide him toward what to pull from that long line. If the next Armstrong, Young, Parker, Evans, Coleman or Coltrane is there and I miss him (or her), I’ll be sorry, but listening is a linear proposition, and there’s only so much time.

 

Below is the next installment in my attempt to keep up with the endless flow of recordings.

Kenny Wheeler, Other People (Cam Jazz). Perenially adventurous, always on the leading edge of music, Wheeler was seventy-five when this was recorded in 2005. His

playing on trumpet and flugelhorn is brilliant, with little of the lassitude that has sometimes crept in as he aged. The even more striking aspect of this CD is Wheeler’s writing. He applies his distinctive style to strings, a medium new to him as a composer.

Lacing his horn lines through and around the Hugo Wolf String Quartet, Wheeler brings to string writing the tart voicings, subsurface rhythms and plaintive melodies that have long characterized his compositions and orchestrations for combinations of horns. The Wolf Quartet’s interpretations of the sections with long, keening lines emphasize the pungency and poignancy that is central to Wheeler’s work. On some 

pieces, Wheeler’s frequent piano companion John Taylor solos with his customary incisiveness and lyricism. The most stunning achievement in the recording, however, has neither horn, piano nor improvisation. It is Wheeler’s “String Quartet n. 1,” a through-composed concert work with riveting thematic development and gently insistent rhythmic pulses. This is the belated debut of a composer of concert chamber music to be taken seriously.

 

Don Thompson Quartet, For Kenny Wheeler (Sackville). Thompson is one who takes Wheeler seriously, indeed. In his CD notes about Wheeler, the composer, bassist, pianist and vibraharpist writes of his fellow Canadian:

I can’t think of anyone else in jazz with his gift of melody and understanding of harmony and counterpoint. It’s my opinion (and that of many others) that Kenny is the most important composer in jazz today. To me he is today’s Duke Ellington.

All of the compositions are by Thompson. Only “For Kenny Wheeler” and “K.T.T.” (Kenny

Type Tune) overtly refer to Wheeler in their titles. Throughout, Thompson’s compositional methods reflect Wheeler’s. Because of the skill and assurance of the quartet, this complex music flows as naturally as if was standards and ordinary blues. Thompson’s sidemen are his longtime colleague Terry Clarke on drums (they were together in Paul Desmond’s last band), saxophonist Phil Dwyer and bassist Jim Vivian, three of Canada’s most distinguished musicians.

Thompson plays piano on six of the tracks, vibes on two with Dwyer supporting him and soloing on piano. Dwyer tends toward dreaminess on soprano and gutsiness on tenor, as in the decidedly unordinary “The Peregrine Blues,” with its eccentric intervals and glancing counterpoint with Thompson’s piano. Vivian and Clarke are splendid throughout. Clarke’s brush and cymbal commentary behind Dwyer’s tenor on “Another Time, Another Place” is a highlight, Vivian’s solo on “For Scott LaFaro” another. The recordings I return to for frequent play over the years are those in which I keep hearing new facets. This seems destined to be one of those albums.