2012 July 22

Uncle Lionel Goes Out In Style

July 22, 2012 by Doug Ramsey

Of the many places where I’ve lived, from Choteau, Montana, to Iwakuni, Japan, to San Francisco and New York (mentioning a few), New Orleans is the most unusual, the one most often on my mind. “This is really a banana republic, you know,” my friend Bill Corrington once told me. He loved the city as much as I do, and he wasn’t the only one to invoke that metaphor. Most people know about above-ground cemeteries, jazz funerals, streetcars, beignets and the madness of Mardi Gras, to mention obvious … [Read more...]

Commenting Restored

July 22, 2012 by Doug Ramsey

Well, actually, we were never gone. However, for several hours, the Rifftides comment mechanism was broken. If you tried to use the "Speak Your Mind" box at the end of an item, or found that it had disappeared, we would like you to know that the feedback function is back in business. Provided that they are pertinent and civil, reader comments are always welcome. They give us some of our best stuff. Thanks to the artsjournal.com technical team for the restoration work. LATER: No sooner had … [Read more...]

jack reilly on Monday Recommendation: Pullman On Powell
Why does this book cost so much?
Posted Mar 06, 2015
Doug Ramsey on Still Thinking Of CT
For a personal memory of Granz, see this Rifftides post
Posted Mar 06, 2015
Curtis on Still Thinking Of CT
Pretty nice band you got there. Thank you.
Posted Mar 06, 2015
F. Norman Vickers on Still Thinking Of CT
Wonderful video of Clark Terry at the '77 Montreaux Festival including outstanding jazz stars. I have sent comment and link to your blog and video...
Posted Mar 06, 2015
Tony Burrell, II on Just Because: Dizzy Gillespie, 1987
Thanks for sharing the link of the entire concert. I ended watching the complete concert, completely enthralled by the high level of musicianship all over...
Posted Mar 06, 2015

Monday Recommendation: Terry, Keepnews & Monk

Clark Terry, In Orbit (Riverside)

The coincidence of trumpeter Clark Terry and producer Orrin Keepnews passing within a few days of one another brings to mind a timeless album on Keepnews’s Riverside label. Terry’s 1958 In Orbit featured a special sideman. He asked for Thelonious Monk on piano. For a reissue of the album the producer wrote that, to his surprise, “…Monk agreed without hesitation, did not ask for a heavy fee (I believe he was paid no more than twice the union-scale maximum) and turned in the most relaxed, happiest and funkiest Monk performances I have ever witnessed. One reason may have been that Clark made no special fuss over him–and included only one Monk tune on the album.” The result remains an essential item in both Terry’s and Monk’s discographies, and a feather in Keepnews’s cap.

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.

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