Archives for May 2006

Coincidentally, on the heels of yesterday's Rifftides piece about the Legends Of Jazz television series, an e-mail message alerted me to a video performance that demonstrates the visual restraint, taste and directorial discretion that is missing in the Legends series. It is a solo piano performance … [Read more...]

Doug: I watched the Legends of Jazz episode that featured Jim Hall and Pat Metheny and found it disappointing. Jim and Pat and associates played fine--as expected, of course. But the overall "happy talk" tone was rather shallow and not very enlightening; for that, the producers and writers are … [Read more...]

Last July, Rifftides examined the pilot program for the Public Broadcasting System series Legends of Jazz. Here is part of that posting. It was a charming and engaging program. It lacked the intensity, focus and video artistry of the immortal 1957 The Sound of Jazz on CBS-TV, Ralph Gleason’s Jazz … [Read more...]

Django Reinhardt died on this date in 1953. He was forty-three years old. Reinhardt melded jazz and the wild élan of the gypsy music he grew up with in Belgium and France. He began to be noticed in 1930 when he was twenty. By the mid-1930s he, violinist Stephane Grappellii and the Quintet of the … [Read more...]

The May issue of Allegro, the monthly publication of the New York local of the American Federation of Musicians, has reviews by Bill Crow of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, the reissue of Gene Lees’ superb biography The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, and the first volume of … [Read more...]

The You Tube website has put up a seven-minute video of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Brubeck's "London Flat London Sharp" at the North Sea Jazz Festival. Sound, production qualiy, camera work and direction—except for one brief asleep-at-the-switch moment—are excellent. Bobby Militello's alto … [Read more...]

While you're there, don't miss Elis Regina singing Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Aguas de Marco." This is the irreplaceable Elis in solo, apparently a predecessor to the video of her doing the song with Jobim. … [Read more...]

Bob Brookmeyer is as forthright, and often unorthodox, in his conversation as he is in his music. Here's some of what Brookmeyer told The New York Times's Ben Ratliff about how jazz soloists often relate to the music he writes: If you give a soloist an open solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he's … [Read more...]

Love your blog... Got it from Kenny Harris* here in Bermuda. I am a tenor and soprano sax player living in Bermuda as Kenny is. Trying to keep flame alive. Damn, there are so many steel pan players here, but I guess that's what the tourists want. The real reason I emailed you is response to the … [Read more...]

John Birchard, a firmly committed Washington, DC, jazz listener who moonlights as a Voice of America correspondent, sent this report. The Rifftides staff added links. I attended a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center's "K-C Jazz Club" venue - the Baritone Saxophone Band in a Gerry Mulligan tribute. I … [Read more...]

It seems to me that most people are impressed with just three things: how fast you can play, how high you can play, and how loud you can play. I find this a little exasperating, but I'm a lot more experienced now, and understand that probably less than two percent of the public can really hear. I … [Read more...]

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been awarded second place in the performing arts category for an IPPY, a 2006 Independent Book Publishers Award. Here are the finishers: Winner: Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University … [Read more...]

Rifftides reader Bob Walsh writes: What ever happened to guitarist Mundell Lowe? I saw him often in the studio band of Merv Griffin in New York. I met him at Monterey when he was a fixture in backup groups. He later took over after Monterey impresario Jimmy Lyons' s forced retirement. I recall that … [Read more...]

You've had nearly a month to memorize those old picks, so they're gone. You'll find the new Doug's Picks in the right-hand column. … [Read more...]

In jazz histories, as in all histories of human activity, small errors are repeated and become the standard version of events. Don Payne, the bassist on Ornette Coleman's first album, sent the following addendum to the Rifftides piece on Johnny Mandel's contribution to a Coleman compositon and the … [Read more...]

Bill Crow did not stop collecting jazz anecdotes when he published Jazz Anecdotes and From Birdland to Broadway. He has a column of anecdotes every month in Allegro, the newspaper of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. With Bill’s permission, here is one that deserves … [Read more...]

The Trumpet As Metaphor You must stir it and stump it, And blow your own trumpet, Or trust me, you haven’t a chance.—W.S. Gilbert With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. —Norman Mailer The very essence of … [Read more...]

Reading, hearing and seeing stories this week about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival triggers memories of the festival’s beginnings and of the years I lived in the Crescent City (please, not The Big Easy). JazzFest, as it was christened at its birth in the late 1960s, began as the purest … [Read more...]

Today, favorite blogette DevraDoWrite is celebrating the first anniversary of her web log. Many happy returns. If you'd like to learn how Devra likes to horse around, go here. … [Read more...]