Art Farmer, Live in ’64 (Jazz Icons). Farmer’s quartet with guitarist Jim Hall was one of the greatest small groups in jazz history. For this television appearance, he featured pieces never released in the quartet’s recordings. Among them are an exhilarating “Bilbao Song,” Sonny Rollins’s “Valse Hot” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love.” Steve Swallow is the bassist, Pete LaRoca the drummer. Deeply experienced together by this time, the four were breathtaking in their individual and collective performance. The BBC-TV video is crisp, the audio clear. This is a jewel in Jazz Icons’ eagerly anticipated fourth release.
DVD: Art Farmer
October 23, 2009 by
The nonagenarian pianist presented de Barros with every biographer’s hope, unrestricted access to his subject’s personal papers and nearly unrestricted access to her private thoughts. He made the most of it, turning exhaustive research and hundreds of hours of interviews into a true story with the sweep of a novel. From the early discovery of McPartland’s musical gift through her wartime service, her ecstatic and stormy marriage to Jimmy McPartland, her growth as a pianist, her deep affair with Joe Morello, and the radio show that made her a national figure, she has had a fascinating life. It makes a splendid read.
Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band had three fewer musicians than most big jazz outfits. Its size permitted precision, flexibility and subtlety, yet the band had the power of sprung steel. In this concert from a half century ago, the CJB is as fresh as yesterday. Arrangements by Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn and Johnny Mandel set standards to which big band writers still aspire. Bassist Buddy Clark and drummer Mel Lewis inspired Mulligan, Brookmeyer, Conte Candoli, Gene Quill and Zoot Sims to some of the best soloing of their careers. This beautifully produced issue of the complete concert is a basic repertoire item.
I just received the new Jazz Icons set and have been enjoying them, but I am VERY troubled by what I heard (or did not hear) on the Art Farmer set. The sound track suffers from VERY bad post production work that causes us to miss much of the rhythm section’s work behind solos. What I’m hearing is wildly excessive noise reduction, intended to kill tape hiss, but having the unintended result of also killing much of what Pete was playing. This is most annoying on the ballads.
There are two possible causes. 1) The original recording had noise reduction (Dolby or dbx) and the playback system didn’t decode it properly. 2) The post production engineer decided that there was too much tape hiss, so he applied after-the-fact noise reduction in the editing software. Both of these are post-production errors, not the fault of the original recording.
As you probably know, I’m no purist with respect to sound and jazz recordings, but am concerned with the musicality of what I hear, and the result really degrades that. It’s so bad that I’d like to send the DVD back as defective, have them recall it, and remaster it. As your review notes, the music is great, and demands far better treatment.
A purist would complain about the rather high level of distortion on this DVD, but that would be wrong — the audio track on videotape (and some film systems) in those days didn’t have a lot of dynamic range, so recordings usually hit the tape pretty hard to avoid hiss. Also, video studios often had poor audio monitoring — as late as the mid-70s, the CBS O&O WBBM-TV was producing the Mike Douglas show with the audio guy listening to a cheap 8-inch ceiling speaker mounted over the mix console (all rotary pots, no EQ) — so they couldn’t hear the distortion they were putting on the tape.
There are other disturbing lapses in audio quality in what I’ve heard so far, but this is the only thing I can blame on the Jazz Icons producers. For example, the mic used for trombone solos and Woody’s vocal on the Woody Herman set was badly distorted. This, combined with the relatively high levels of distortion on the Farmer set, suggest to me that the BBC engineers either weren’t very good listeners or didn’t have good monitoring.