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August 17, 2005
CD
Denise Donatelli: In The Company Of Friends(Jazzed Media). Donatelli’s first album has liner notes by Phil Woods. He praises her for the musical gifts she has honed despite her lack of formal training. Woods has never been accused of indiscriminate praise, particularly of vocalists. Donatelli justifies every claim he makes for her. Her “A Sleepin' Bee” is in a class with Mel Tormé’s. Her “Dream Dancing” is a dream. The friends in whose company she sings include trombonist Andy Martin, saxophonists Bob Sheppard and Tom Peterson, trumpeter Clay Jenkins, pianist Tom Garvin, bassist Tom Warrington and drummer Steve Houghton. This woman is a find.Posted by mclennan at August 17, 2005 01:04 AM
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CD CD William Schuman: Violin Concerto (Naxos). As more of this great American composer’s music emerges on Naxos, I’ll do all I can to persuade you to listen to it. You haven’t heard of the violinist Philip Quint? You haven’t followed the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and José Serebrier? I have a hunch you’ll want to keep track of them after you hear their intepretations of this Schuman masterpiece and his “New England Triptych,” not to mention his orchestration of Charles Ives’ “Variations on ‘America.’” DVD Book Article Food
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This blog is founded on Doug’s conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but it reaches past...
Doug lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism...
Doug’s most recent book is Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? His next book is a novel that has almost nothing to do with music.
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Doug's Picks
Denise Donatelli: In The Company Of Friends(Jazzed Media). Donatelli’s first album has liner notes by Phil Woods. He praises her for the musical gifts she has honed despite her lack of formal training. Woods has never been accused of indiscriminate praise, particularly of vocalists. Donatelli justifies every claim he makes for her. Her “A Sleepin' Bee” is in a class with Mel Tormé’s. Her “Dream Dancing” is a dream. The friends in whose company she sings include trombonist Andy Martin, saxophonists Bob Sheppard and Tom Peterson, trumpeter Clay Jenkins, pianist Tom Garvin, bassist Tom Warrington and drummer Steve Houghton. This woman is a find.
Phil Woods: A Life In E Flat (Jazzed Media). All right, so Jazzed Media gets two picks this time around. This little independent label battling the giants—and turning out quality—deserves a boost, even the small one that Rifftides can provide. The DVD is a crafty documentary about the making of Woods’ CD This Is How I Feel About Quincy, but it’s more. It’s Woods telling about his life, his music and his beliefs. He is as good a verbal story teller as he is a musical one. Pianist Bill Charlap’s exclamation—“Phil Woods!”—at the end of a perfect alto sax solo symbolizes how his colleagues and legions of listeners feel about this remarkable man.
A.B. Guthrie, Jr: A Field Guide To Writing Fiction (Harper Collins). If you are a writer of fiction, or anything else, this little book will help you be a better one. If you are a consumer of fiction, it will provide standards against which you may judge the quality of what you read. The author of The Big Sky and The Way West was one of our greatest novelists. Here, he’s one of our greatest teachers. If only every writer would live by this Guthrie maxim: “The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.”
"50 LPs From 35 Years": Jazz Times, September 2005. The magazine formerly known as Radio Free Jazz long ago moved out of Ira Sabin’s Washington, DC, record shop into glossy pages and the major leagues of jazz journalism. For this anniversary piece, each of fifty jazz writers (surprise; there are fifty jazz writers) reviews a favorite or overlooked long-playing record made since 1970. Some of the albums are famous, some obscure. I chose Jill McManus’s Symbols of Hopi. Sorry, no link to the article. It is not on line. Buy the magazine.
The food department hasn’t been getting much attention during two-and-a-half weeks on the road. Airport sandwiches, anyone? Airline pretzels? Almond Joys? Clif Bars? Travel tip: stuff as many Clif Bars as possible into your carry-on bag. They’re a great substitute for airline pretzels. On one leg of the trip, American Airlines gave us pretzels for lunch in first class, a reliable economic indicator of the health of the airline industry. Well, I did have magnificent crab cakes in Maryland. That’s this week’s recommendation; go to Maryland and eat crab cakes.
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