Archives for July 2006

I had just sat down to write a tribute to Hank Jones on his 88th birthday when I was alerted to a column about Hank by Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. I may flatter myself that I know and understand a great deal about the elegant Mr. Jones, but on my best day I could not improve on what Stryker wrote. I wish Hank a happy birthday and enthusiastically recommend that you read Stryker's article. Here's a sample: Jones' marriage of grace and guts created the template for a school of modern … [Read more...]

The right hand column sports new CD recommendations under Doug's Picks. DVD and book picks will follow in a few days. … [Read more...]

The Rifftides staff received the following e-mail message from Portugal: I'd visit your blog. I hope you visit my blog: http://www.jazzseen.blogspot.com./. If you don't understand Portuguese, don't worry, you can listen jazz. Luiz Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that I was able to make out some of the Jazzseen text in the reviews to which Luiz's blog is primarily devoted. But they are not why I suggest you pay it a visit. At the top of the page is a video of the classic "Manah Manah" … [Read more...]

One of the new Tulane University students reading Tom Sancton's Song For My Fathers sent this comment about the book and the Rifftides report on it: As an entering freshman at Tulane, I can only give the highest praise for Sancton's book. My first visit to New Orleans, in March of 2004, is forever marked in my memory by the night I spent at Preservation Hall. I don't know if words can adequately desribe the kinship I feel with Sancton after learning that, nearly 40 years ago, he had the same … [Read more...]

Slow Drag Dead hallelulia four black Cadillac high black hearse and all the people come to hear the trom bone bawl look at Slow Drag picture on the Wall He call again Sweet Emma come Big Jim come when He call then honkie play and honkie plunk in Preservation Hall --Miller Williams, "Alcide Pavageau," from The Only World There Is That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes Like New Orleans reflected on the water, And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes, Building for some a legendary … [Read more...]

The Bix Beiderbecke Festival opens today in Beiderbecke's home town, Davenport, Iowa. It features Randy Sandke and, in a nice stroke of timing, so does The Wall Street Journal. My piece called "The Best Trumpeter You Never Heard Of" is in the Journal's Leisure and Arts section. Here are samples: The trumpeter and sometime guitarist Randy Sandke receives neither the critical nor the popular attention that goes to fellow trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas -- to pick a couple of names out … [Read more...]

It turns out that many listeners are concerned with the issues covered in our Means of Delivery discussion. Here are comments from three Rifftides readers. Like you, I'm pondering today's post re: means of delivery. We really must adjust to new realities, but I'm having a hard time believing that I will LIKE them. Downloading is fine -- IF I get uncompressed WAV files of the music. But NOT if what I get is compressed MP3 that sounds OK with rock music, or for listening in a noisy car, but not … [Read more...]

Yesterday's post … [Read more...]

Mention of Chubby Jackson's album Chubby's Back as a digital download brought this account of the session that produced it. Doug: I was at the session in 1957 when this album was recorded. I was editor of Down Beat at the time, and a close friend of Chubby's, and I had been asked to write the liner notes. Bill Harris and Don Lamond, ex-Hermanites along with Jackson, had been flown in from Florida to do the date--the rest of the musicians were Chicagoans, all of whom were determined to prove that … [Read more...]

Rifftides Reader Marc Myers writes from New York City: Some jazz tidbits... 1. Desmond's Bridge Over Troubled Water is an iTunes download for $9.90. This is an absolute gem (thanks so much for turning me onto it). Wow. 2. The rare and expensive import, Chubby's Back (Chubby Jackson, about whom not enough has been written or re-released) is a $6.90 iTunes download. Chubby's Back is a fun album--but I did have to do a Google search for the personnel, which turned up at a Tiny Kahn site.* DR: It is … [Read more...]

Each summer, Tulane University in New Orleans sends the coming autumn's entering students a book to read. Tulane's goal in its reading project is "to provide new students with a shared intellectual experience through the reading and discussion of a common book and a campus-wide intellectual dialogue that begins during orientation and continues throughout the fall semester." This year, Tulane's book is Song For My Fathers, Tom Sancton's moving account of growing up white and middle class in New … [Read more...]

Il Bello Del Jazz The Italian pianist Roberto Magris, who operates a band called Europlane, is out with a new CD featuring a distinguished guest. In his mid-forties, Magris is one of those European artists so steeped in jazz that in a blindfold test a listener--no matter how perceptive--would be unlikely to conclude that he was hearing somone not from the United States. In Il Bello Del Jazz, Magris adds to his quartet Herb Geller, the American alto saxophonist who for decades has made Hamburg, … [Read more...]

Malachi Thompson, the sparkling, exploratory, Chicago jazz trumpeter who died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of fifty-six, recorded a flurry of CDs in his last decade. Many of Thompson's albums for his hometown label Delmark pulled off the demanding trick of looking simultaneously forward and back. Following an initial seige of cancer, his renaissance began in 1992 with Lift Every Voice and included Buddy Bolden's Rag, 47th Street and one of the last and most effective with his Africa Brass … [Read more...]

Thank you so much for the great service you did for all serious jazz lovers regarding Concord's discontinuing so many important titles. This is infuriating and exasperating news. Key titles by Miles, Trane, and so many others will soon be axed. It's disgusting. I was already p____d off when they canned Terre Hinte. This is too much. Jan Stevens Jan Stevens is the proprietor of the The Bill Evans Web Pages. Thanks for the heads-up on Concord Records' Summer Blowout--and subsequent unavailability … [Read more...]

It was over in three seconds. I had broken out my moderately refurbished road bike early in the morning and taken it for its first real ride in a couple of years, a break from my recent steady routine of mountain biking. Along the trail near where the Naches River flows into the Yakima, I came up behind a short, stocky, shirtless runner sticking to the right side of the path. To be safe, I drifted way to the left. Just as I was nearly even with him, he leaped--still running--directly in front of … [Read more...]

Recordings are a commodity. Companies sell them to make money. When a CD stops selling briskly, only a label willing to make money slowly over a period of years, or one that feels a cultural obligation, keeps it in the catalog. For decades, the Fantasy complex of labels took the long view. Its Original Jazz Classics program maintained supplies of LPs, then CDs, that sold slowly but steadily. The collection preserved a wide slice of music essential to American culture. Companies that make … [Read more...]

In the final installment of … [Read more...]

Welcome to the final installment of messages from Rifftides readers sharing with all of us what you have been listening to. ·I enjoy reading your blog. The following is what have been listening to recently. Dave Holland Quintet, Prime Directive. I have been listening to this album for the last few weeks. It makes me smile. Tom Jobim & Elis Regina, Elis and Tom. I got this after I saw your link to the YouTube video of them singing "Waters of March". Thank you for introducing me to this … [Read more...]

Ah, well, over the weekend so many more of you responded to the request for your current listening choices that we can't wrap it up today after all. If you wish to understand the genesis of these listings, go here. But--I am sorry--it's too late to contribute. At some point, we have to get back to business as usual, whatever that is, so the arbitrary cutoff is hereby imposed. The final batch will appear in tomorrow's Rifftides edition, or whatever you call a blog installment. ·The most recent … [Read more...]

Here is the third report on the survey of what Rifftides readers are listening to these days. ·Today I have two CDs in my car player: A lovely duo recording by Randy Sandke and Dick Hyman, and a CD reissue of one of my favorite LPs, Boss of the Blues, with Joe Turner and a dynamite studio band arranged by Ernie Wilkins. Bill Crow New City, New York, USA ·I'm currently knocked out by a net recording from website Dimeadozen from Vienna's Opera House in June 2006 of Sergio Mendes current band. How … [Read more...]

Entries are still arriving in the worldwide Rifftides listeners' sweepstakes (no losers, no prizes). It is not too late to join. All civil responses will be published. Simply send an e-mail message telling us your current listening choice. Please include your name and where you live. Here is the second installment. ·Jimmy Witherspoon featuring Ben Webster. And for the past week, it was Charlie Byrd/Herb Ellis. Must have played that record twenty times. Sean Cannon Glenshaw, Pennsylvania, … [Read more...]