Archives for September 2006

Gillespiana In The Berkshires

On vacation this week, in Connecticut to visit friends. Looking for musical diversion, I stumbled across the Tanglewood Jazz Festival at the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, MA.
Due to time constraints, I was able to attend only one concert – so I chose the Dizzy Gillespie All Star big band. For me, a great choice. Led by veteran trombonist Slide Hampton, the band was legitimately “all star”… a killer trumpet section: Roy Hargrove, Claudio Roditi, Lou Hunt (phenomenal chops, stratospheric high notes) and Frank Greene (ditto). Trombones: Steve Davis (several good solos), Jason Jackson, Jonathan Boltzock, Douglas Purviance (bass trb). Saxes: Gary Smulyan, Andres Boiarsky (new to me and very good), Mark Gross and Antonio Hart (altos) and Jimmy Heath (looking old and somewhat frail but playing well). Rhythm section: Cyrus Chestnut, piano; John Lee, bass; Dennis Mackrel, drums; and Duke Lee on congas.
Hargrove was heavily featured and worth it. He shone especially on Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” on fluegelhorn and on several other tunes. Roditi was lyrical and thoughtful, playing his rotary-valve horn.
Cyrus Chestnut was showcased on the Dennis Mackrel arrangement of Monk’s “I Mean You” and was alternately Monkish and funkish to the delight of the sold-out audience of 1200 in Meiji Ozawa Hall. Other highlights: Jimmy Heath’s tribute to Dizzy, “Without You, No Me”… “Con Alma”… “Manteca”… Quincy Jones’ “Jessica’s Day”.
Roberta Gambarini came on for a couple of tunes in each half of the concert. She’s good, especially effective in a dramatic reading of “Stardust”. Her singing of “Samba de Orfeu”, arranged by Slide Hampton, was an adventure in Portuguese and English, with changes in tempo and excellent vocal work. She scatted to advantage on “Blue-n-Boogie” which also included some Roy Hargrove scatting. He continues in the trumpeter/scat vocalist tradition of Louis Armstrong and Clark Terry. Electric bassist John Lee pleased the crowd with his work on “One Bass Hit”. Mackrel is a fine big band drummer and his arrangements are fresh and interesting.
Hampton is a congenial leader, mixing humor, enthusiasm and information to engage the audience. The obvious pleasure the band got from the music and their colleagues’ solos was infectious, further bringing the audience into the moment.
So – if you get a chance to hear/see the DG All Stars in your town, by all means do it. They’re still carrying the big band bebop banner. Long may it wave.
Your traveling Washington correspondent,
John Birchard

We continue to get comments on the news that pianist Steve Kuhn will record for Blue Note. This one is from drummer Steve Grover in Farmingdale, Maine.

I enjoy Rifftides and I was pleased to see that some attention is being directed toward Steve Kuhn. I think he is one of the most intelligent jazz pianists of our time (or any time). Steve occasionally comes through New England, and I caught him a couple of times. One trio performance with George Mraz and Al Foster stands out. The club was about half full, but the subtle, witty and quote-laden interplay between the three musicians was sublime. I hesitate to bring up the quoting, which is a gratuitous practice in most hands, but Steve unfolds his improvisations with such wit, melody and musicality that quotes are a seemless part of the web. His time is impeccable and he is always engaged with the tendencies of his musicians. The term ‘musical conversation’ is a common phrase, but rarely have I heard such probing music that clearly defined that expression.
Yet I heard him with Kenny Washington a few years later at The Knickerbocker one night and he was playing deep in the pocket, swinging hard. This kind of sympatico is natural to Mr. Kuhn, and it is never obvious, yet apparent. I love his deep-in-the-keys sound; it is a beautiful, singing sound, and it permeates everything he plays.
Steve Kuhn is a major figure and I hope he gets more than a one-off with Blue Note, but I’ll take that happily when it comes out.

With video clips proliferating on the internet, you never know what you’ll run across. Roaming around YouTube, I happened on one called Trumpet Summit ’04. The lead-in box showed a still frame of Jon Faddis. Something clicked. When I punched up the clip, sure enough, it was part of the Vienne, France, twentieth anniversary festival that I covered, not in 2004, but in 2000. YouTube’s accuracy of information is at the mercy of its contributors. The piece is “Honeysuckle Rose.” To hear and see it, click here. Below is my account of the entire concert, as it ran in a long report in the February, 2001, issue of Gene Lees JazzLetter.

The night’s theme was Louis Armstrong. The Trumpet Summit Band had the formidable rhythm section of Cedar Walton on piano, Doug Weiss on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums supporting trumpeters Terell Stafford, Randy Brecker, Lou Soloff, Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard and Jon Faddis. Backstage, as they milled around getting ready to go on, Brecker told me, “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” They figured it out on the first number, “Indiana”. The solos were brief, at the most a couple of choruses apiece, encouraging self-editing. Stafford began with a straightforward bebop solo. Brecker dug into the chords. Hargrove did a nice adaptation of Dizzy Gillespie and observed Clifford Brown’s rule of contrasting phrases. Soloff quoted Armstrong’s “West End Blues” introduction. Faddis and Stafford sidled up close on opposite sides and stared at him. Soloff ignored them. Blanchard played cleanly, high, and without the slurs and half-valve notes that so often dominate his improvising. Muted, Faddis combined traces of Gillespie and Sweets Edison and reduced the others to head shaking and laughter with his impossibly high and humorous playing. Walton played the first of his eight perfect solos in the set. Everyone avoided the temptation to quote “Donna Lee.”

Faddis and Stafford shared “Blueberry Hill”, Faddis muted and growling, Stafford using a plunger and making rich harmonic choices. On “Sunny Side of the Street,” Soloff showed the mature wisdom of using pauses as notes. Brecker went deep inside the changes and found material to make a beautiful new melody.

Hargrove’s tone, phrasing, sense of harmonic changes and control of time on “Sleepy Time Down South” combined in a solo that brought sustained applause from the audience and his colleagues. Later, he told me, “Man, that’s a hell of a way to learn a tune.” He said he had never before played it. Blanchard used his slurs and half-valve effects in Sleepy Time and worked them into a climax worthy of Roy Eldridge. Everyone played on Honeysuckle Rose. The big surprise was Stafford, with his aggressive and imaginative use of swing and bop elements. He has recorded with Tim Warfield, Stephen Scott, Bobby Watson, the Clayton Brothers, and others, but he was new to most of this audience and they let him know that they were impressed.

Soloff and Faddis played the “West End Blues” intro in unison, leading into a long, slow blues. Iraklì de Davrichewy materialized onstage for the first solo, unintimidated by this high powered company, and did well. So did they all, but Brecker is one of the few trumpeters alive who seems to have truly heard what Fats Navarro discovered about changes. His solo proved it. Faddis roamed around in the altissimosphere, then dropped down into the range of mere high Cs for some pure Louis. Walton incorporated “After Hours” without making it a corny trick.

The encore was “Get Happy,” played fast. Not until near its end, in a series of four-bar, two-bar and one-bar exchanges did the ad hoc gathering deteriorate into the messy jam session it might have been in lesser hands.

I hope that more videos from the 2000 Vienne festival turn up. It was a remarkable festival.

Last night I dropped into The Seasons to catch the last half of a concert by the Finisterra Trio, the hall’s artists in residence. They are violinist Kwan Bin Park, cellist Keven Krentz and pianist Tanya Stambuck. In previous posts, I have mentioned this Seattle piano trio’s finesse and enthusiasm. One of their other strong points is an eagerness to range through music in search of pieces outside of the usual repertoire. They played Edouard Lalo’s trio in a-minor. In his role as introducer and staff musicologist, Krentz described Lalo as a “B composer,” but in this piece–new to me and most of the audience–Lalo produced “A” material.
As Krentz explained, Lalo, a Frenchman of Spanish extraction, was a sort of precursor to the French impressionists, but he is often described as having the stolid characteristics of his late nineteenth century German contemporaries. Not in the a-minor trio. It has the passion of Lalo’s Iberian forebears, highlighted by a highly charged second movement laced with fun, a slow third movement to make your heart ache and a finale to make it race. Park, Krentz and Stambuck poured energy and ardor into the piece. In return, they got applause after each movement, and a standing ovation at the end. They deserved warm appreciation, but the obligatory Standing O is becoming as common among classical audiences as is automatic applause for jazz solos, no matter how dumb or boring. If you’d like to review the Rifftides applause discussion of a few months ago, you can go here and trace it back through the links.
On their website, Finesterra has MP3 samples of the Lalo a-minor. Unfortunately, they have yet to record the entire work. Until they do, there are choices. Still high on the aftereffects of the Finesterra performance, this morning I sampled other options. I found the Gryphon Trio‘s approach a bit soggy. The Parnassus Trio edged out the Salomon for second place to what I heard last night. They both have fine versions, but they don’t achieve quite the vigor of the Finisterrans. It’s good to see chamber music alive and well in the hands, minds and hearts of a hip young group like the Finisterra Trio.