Archives for November 2012

Word from Canada is that the CBC program honoring Ed Bickert is online and available for listening. Bickert celebrates his 80th birthday today. The venerable guitarist is a veteran of decades with Rob McConnell, Moe Kauffman, Phil Nimmons, Paul Desmond and hundreds of studio hours. For details about his career—and videos, see this Rifftides post.

Here’s a paragraph from the page that contains the link to the broadcast:

Bickert could “combine in his solos the logic of a mathematician and the grace of an angel,” as Jack Batten said in the Globe and Mail in 1976. And according to bassist Steve Wallace, who frequently played with Bickert, he served as the “aesthetic compass and edit button on the Canadian jazz scene, a kind of jazz bullshit antidote.”

Bickert retired a few years ago and no longer plays. Many of his admiring fellow musicians assembled to pay tribute to him.To hear the concert, go here and click on “Listen to Ed Bickert At 80: A Jazz Celebration.” Thanks again to Ted O’Reilly for keeping us up to date on this important occasion.

Nearly four years ago, Rifftides reminded you of the bassist Ron Crotty, whose brief season of renown came in the early 1950s. Andrew Gilbert, a free lance writer and critic in the San Francisco Bay area, sought out Crotty recently and published an update in The Monthly, an East Bay magazine. Here’s an early paragraph from Andy’s article.

Crotty’s autumnal creative resurgence would be heartening in any context, reminding us that it’s never too late to make a mark, but his lion-in-winter renaissance feels particularly inspiring given his precocious rise and numerous stumbles. In 1949, before turning 20, he had already seized a piece of musical immortality as a founding member of the Dave Brubeck Trio, a group that also featured drummer Cal Tjader. (Tjader, who died on the road in 1982, earned fame several years after leaving Brubeck as a vibraphonist and pioneering Latin jazz bandleader).

To read all of the piece, click here.

For the April, 2009, Rifftides post on Crotty and associates, with video of a performance, go here.

The veteran Bay Area pianist Dick Vartanian sent the following illustrated note:

From 2006 to 2009 Ron and Harold Jones were in my trio. I never worked with any bassist (or drummer) whom I enjoyed more, or was more relaxed with, than those two. I sure miss our gigs.

If you missed last night’s BBC concert commemorating the late composer, arranger and bandleader Graham Collier, you can still hear it online. The concert at the BBC studios in London featured the British premiere of The Blue Suite, one of Collier’s final works. His partner John Gill describes the program as containing “a selection of his and the musicians’ personal favourties from the Collier canon.” The 90-minute broadcast has Collier stalwart Geoff Warren conducting the BBC Radio Big Band with Roger Dean, John Marshall, Ed Speight, Art Themen and a number of former Collier collaborators including Roy Babbinton, Graeme Blevins and Andy Grappy.

BBC Radio 3 will keep the concert online for six more days. To hear it, click here.

For a Rifftides piece on Collier’s passing in 2011, a few thoughts about his importance and links to further information about him and his work, go here. The post contains a 15-minute video of Collier rehearsing a band and talking about his work.

Among those who shared November 25 as a birthday was Nat Adderley. The cornetist was born in 1931 in Tampa, Florida. His distinguished career included two extended periods in his brother Cannonball’s quintet. He also played in the big bands of Woody Herman and Lionel Hampton and in trombonist J.J. Johnson’s combo. Adderley formed his own quintet after Cannonball died in 1975.

For the 1987 Bern Jazz Festival in Switzerland, He led an all-star sextet. His former boss, Johnson, joined Adderley, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Roy McCurdy. Here are three of the pieces they played in Bern, “What is This Thing Called Love,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Bud’s Blues.”

To see two more segments of the Adderley sextet’s Bern performance, go here and here. Nat died in early 2000.

Paul Desmond was born on this date in 1924. As I was contemplating how to observe his 88th birthday without repeating material from the previous seven Rifftides observances of the occasion, a reader came to the rescue. Frank Roellinger sent a link and the following message.

There is an ever-so-slight chance that you may not have heard this track before. I first became aware of its existence in 1963 when I saw that it was on a 2-LP set called “Playboy Jazz All-Stars”, or something like that. If you are familiar with it, perhaps you will listen anyway to marvel once again at Paul’s limitless imagination as he plays a solo unlike any other of his. Perhaps not among his best, but certainly something to marvel at anyway. Dave does quite well, too, and the recording quality is very high.

The track is called “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It is from Stratford, Ontario, Canada, in 1956, with Desmond, Brubeck, Norman Bates and Joe Dodge. The solos, whatever the tune has been called over the years, are based on the blues progression Desmond and Dave Brubeck perfected in the 1950s, when it was known as “Balcony Rock” and “Audrey.”

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Roellinger for unearthing a rare peformance. The picture at the upper left shows Paul happy on the stone veranda of El Rancho Ramsey in Bronxville, New York, circa 1974. We miss him.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States. The staff is thankful for all Rifftides readers, wherever they live.

From somewhere in vacationland (seen below)…

I’m on vacation, but my mind seems not to be. It summoned up Bill Holman’s arrangement of “Just Friends” and wondered if Holman has ever recorded it on video. So, my mind and I went to the web. Sure enough, there was Willis with the WDR Big Band in 2000. We get not only his celebrated chart including the solo that he imagined and orchestrated, but also James Moody playing a solo of his own, Jeff Hamilton on drums, John Goldsby on bass and Frank Chastenier on piano. The video includes full band credits.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The flurry of comments, reminiscences and stories stimulated by the Konitz And Kenton post in the previous exhibit leads me to suspect that there may be considerable interest in Konitz’s current work. Jim Brown’s comment about that item described the effect on him of Konitz’s new quartet with a rhythm section of young European musicians who, in Jim’s words, spur Konitz to “new heights of creativity.”

Since the Rifftides staff is on the eve of a vacation of at least several days and blogging will be infrequent, if at all, we’re going to leave you with an hour-long video of Konitz and a band of colleagues who are decades younger—chronologically. He turned 85 on October 13. The pianist is Florian Weber, the bassist Jeff Denson, the drummer Ziv Ravitz. Someone who identifies himself as doriangrey27 uploaded the video to YouTube. He (or, who knows? she) has our gratitude.

The concert was at the Internationale Jazzwoche in Burghausen, Wackerhalle, Germany, on March 15th of this year. Konitz has played the pieces in this program for years, always managing to find in them ways to surprise his audiences and himself. At the beginning, we are treated to his style as MC and raconteur.

doriangrey 27’s YouTube channel has several hundred interesting concert videos.

Through the 1950s, touring jazz package concerts filled huge auditoriums. This picture from Jet Magazine’s September 4, 1952, issue shows three stars of a Stan Kenton package that combined Kenton’s band and an array of guest artists.

If Gillespie, Christy and Parker recorded together on that tour or at any other time, I’d be glad to know about it. Until such a recording surfaces, we’ll have to settle for Gillespie and Parker with Thelonious Monk, Curly Russell and Buddy Rich playing “Bloomdido.”

That is from the Bird and Diz album recorded in June, 1950. It has been reissued many times. No wonder.

Thanks to blogger and frequent Rifftides commenter Bruno Leicht for alerting us to the photo from Jet.

When Rifftides launched in the dark ages of jazz blogging, 2005, a handful of us, if that many, pursued this hybrid form of communication. Now, jazz blogs have proliferated to the point where it is probably impossible to keep tabs on the expansion. This evening, Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalists Association, conducted a webinar (web seminar) with four young bloggers. Howard’s selection of his guests indicates his regard for their work or, at least, for their potential.

All relatively new to web logging, they discussed the attractions, possibilities, values and obligations of this hybrid form of communication. They did not agree on everything, but at the end they uniformly rejected the argument that jazz is dead or dying. That prognostication raises its head about once a year, most recently in a piece by Benjamin Schwarz in the November issue of The Atlantic. Dressed as a review of Ted Gioia’s new book, Schwarz’s tolling of the bell is called “The End of Jazz.”

The JJA webinar bloggers emphasized that they would not have taken up the craft if they thought it had no future. When the discussion ended, I visited each of their blogs and read them with interest. I’m adding them to the Rifftides blogroll at the end of the right-hand column. (Yeah, I know the list needs tending.) The guests (with links) were:

Alex Rodriguez of Lubricity

Veronica Grandison of Roots, Rhythm and Rhyme

Angelika Beener of Alternate Takes

and Jonathan Wertheim, who calls himself, with cause, The Disgruntled Jazz Critic.

Pay them a visit, see what you think, and comment to them on their blog pages or to Rifftides.

As he was about to leave for three weeks of gigs in Japan, to be followed by a week in Prague, peripatetic trumpeter Bobby Shew forwarded a succinct message and a video link from Cal Haines:

Here is “Salt Peanuts” on tube. The band was swinging and solos were very good.

There are accomplished jazz players almost everywhere, including Albuquerque. In that city in the American southwest there is a band called SuperSax New Mexico. It specializes in arrangements of Charlie Parker solos recorded by the original Supersax, a Parker tribute band founded in Los Angeles 40 years ago by alto saxophonist Med Flory and bassist Buddy Clark. Supersax had several of L.A.’s leading saxophonists, a rhythm section often made up of Clark or Monty Budwig on bass, pianist Lou Levy, and Jake Hanna or Larance Marable on drums. Trumpeter Conte Candoli and trombonists Frank Rosolino or Carl Fontana frequently soloed.

Shew transplanted himself from L.A. back to his Albuquerque home area several years ago. Recently, he has been SSNM’s featured trumpet soloist, as he is here. The alto sax solo is by Sam Reid. Full band credits run at the end of piece.

For the story of SuperSax New Mexico, go here, and to leader Cal Haines’s website for photographs and an essay.

Why? Because it’s been too long since you’ve heard it.

What, you’ve never heard it? Good. I envy your coming to it for the first time. Here’s Count Basie from The Complete Decca Recordings. February 4, 1939. Harry Edison wrote the tune. He has the trumpet solo. Jack Washington is the baritone saxophonist. We get Lester Young (pictured) twice. His eight bars following Edison’s solo launched a thousand tenor saxophonists.

Now, you’re bound to have a happy weekend.

Memo, or tweet, to Ben Ratliff:

I am a radical, having a nature that leads me to perpetual revolt.

Elliott Carter went his own way writing music that was often difficult to play and, for many audiences, difficult to hear. Eventually, he captured listeners and became one of the most honored American composers. Carter died yesterday in New York at 103 in the Greenwich Village apartment where he had lived since the 1940s. In an interview a few years ago, he said: