Archives for 2007

If you are holding on to your turntable and LPs, you may be encouraged by what Katie Allen reports in The Guardian, especially if you are in the United Kingdom.

The format was supposed to have been badly wounded by the introduction of CDs and killed off completely by the ipod-generation that bought music online.
But in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels, the latest phenomenon in a notoriously fickle industry is one nobody dared predict: a vinyl revival. Latest figures show a big jump in vinyl sales in the first half of this year, confirming the anecdotal evidence from specialist shops throughout the UK.

To read the whole thing, go here. Then follow up with Mr.On An Overgrown Path.
National Public Radio says it’s happening in the US, too–with a kind of reverse spin.

Sue Raney, Heart’s Desire: A Tribute To Doris Day (Fresh Sound).
Sue Raney is hardly without a following, but it is a puzzle why a singer of her gifts never achieved widespread fame. For far too long, general audiences have been unaware of Raney’s sublime work. Happily, EMI recently reissued All By Myself, one of her early Capitol albums. She seldom makes new recordings, and most of her reissued albums are on CDs that are hard to find except as imports. Since the death of Albert Marx and the end of his Discovery label, American companies have missed the boat on this exemplary artist. Raney’s new Doris Day tribute is one of the best albums of her career. The Spanish label Fresh Sound recorded it last fall in Los Angeles with a full orchestra arranged and conducted by Alan Broadbent.
Day was in the last wave of quality popular singers blessed with good material, and Raney makes the most of “Secret Love,” “Love Me Or Leave Me” and twelve other songs. A singer who has achieved technical perfection that encompasses tonal accuracy and range into the stratosphere, she provides a moment of thrilling vocalese when she parallels the lead trumpet in an interlude on “Sentimental Journey.” For the most part, however, she just sings the songs, and sings them superlatively. Her treatment of “Shanghai” (“I’m just around the corner in a phone booth….”) is a joy. But then, so is the entire CD. Broadbent’s arrangements perfectly complement Raney. There are succinct solos by Broadbent at the piano, Carmen Fanzone (Raney’s husband) on fluegelhorn and saxophonists Bob Sheppard and Gary Foster. Doris Day did not record Broadbent’s and Dave Frishberg’s “Heart’s Desire,” a modern ballad that equals the best of the great American song book, but Raney’s version dedicated to Ms. Day is likely to steal your heart.
To hear and see Raney as guest vocalist with a latterday Stan Kenton band, go here for “Let There Be Love” and “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good.” There is nothing wrong with your computer; the clip is black and white.

There are undoubtedly pairs of CDs farther apart in spirit than these; say, New Orleans Rhythm Kings 1922-1925 and The Art of Mabel Mercer. Well, I like both of those together under my roof. Weber and Salim are welcome to join them.
Eberhard Weber, Stages Of A Long Journey (ECM). In 2005 Weber’s home town, Stuttgart, Germany, threw him a 65th birthday celebration. Weber has staked out territory that borders the jazz avant garde, modern classical minimalism and Bill Evans romanticism, with a hint of Charles Mingus rambunctiousness. The concert in the acoustically blessed Theaterhaus included several of the composer and virtuoso bassist’s most popular pieces. The SWR Southwest Radio Orchestra Stuttgart provided support in passionate performances of Weber orchestrations, with their contrasting textures and arresting silences. Longtime Weber colleagues vibraharpist Gary Burton, saxophonist Jan Gabarek and pianist Wolfgang Dauner joined in the festivities, which ECM recorded with its customary clarity and fullness. Burton is as lyrical as ever. Gabarek plays with force that may surprise devotees of his work on ECM albums that verge on easy listening. The title composition features all hands, to dramatic effect.
Weber plays his electric upright bass, save on one piece, but it is the exception that steals the album. In a duo performance of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” with his old friend Dauner, the natural tone, sensitivity and concentrated power of Weber’s work on double bass made me wish that he had reversed the CD’s eleven-to-one track ratio of electric to acoustic.
A.K. Salim, Pretty For The People (Savoy). Salim, whose surname was originally Atkinson, was a Chicago contemporary of trombonist Bennie Green and tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons. A composer and arranger who wrote for Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, among others, he left music for a time, then reappeared in the late 1950s to write for Tito Puente and lead a few record dates for Savoy. Salim’s writing reflects a bit of his admiration for Tadd Dameron, but has harmonic undercurrents and a sauciness all his own. What makes Pretty For The People so satisfying is the platform it provides for eight musicians who in a large sense epitomize the state of jazz in 1957, when it was recorded. They were:

Kenny Dorham, trumpet

Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone

Buster Cooper, trombone

Pepper Adams, baritone saxophone

Wynton Kelly, piano

Paul Chamber, bass

Max Roach, drums

Chino Pozo, congas
Any reasonably hip jazz listener will see that list, consider the year and conjure up an approximation of the style. It was bebop, of course, going through a change wrought in part by the so-called hard bop movement that included groups led by Roach, Horace Silver, Art Blakey and–of increasing importance–Miles Davis. The most important thing about this recording, however, is not its watershed nature, but the music.
When the drummer Kenny Washington was in town with Bill Charlap’s trio a few weeks ago, he mentioned the album and, when I drew a blank, strongly recommended it. It took a week or so to acquire it. I have listened to it most days since, and–in the immortal words of James Brown–I feel good. The playing is unselfconscious and swinging. As extensively as I have heard them, Dorham, Adams and Griffin have never given me more enjoyment. Buster Cooper is a revelation. Even the era’s mandatory conga drums can’t derail the perfect rhythm section.
As a bonus, you get period liner notes of the exclamation point school, with passages like this:

Kenny Dorham floored me! Without the hustle-bustle of the whirring, buzzing, frantic backgrounds and tempi fans are coming to associate with him of late, he emerges sensitively and surely in the most perfect sequence of solo and ensemble statements heard from his corner in quite a spell!

An ex-Kentonite who has returned to the fold (Pepper Adams’s) statements are direct and skillful on the unwieldy instrument, yet not without bite!

!
Apparently, the album has never been out of print since its LP days. I’m not sure how it managed to escape me all these years, but I’m glad that I have it now. Thank you, Kenny Washington. I owe you one.

In response to the John Frigo item in the next exhibit, Rifftides reader Jim Brown writes:

In later years, I heard Johnny say of “Detour” that “it was all mine, words and music.” He explained that The Soft Winds was a co-op group, and they had an agreement that all of their names would go on anything they wrote while they were together. On his self-produced CD Rennnaissance Man (recorded 1985, released 1999), “Detour Ahead” is credited as “words and music by Johnny Frigo, with thanks to Lou Carter and Herb Ellis.”
Johnny was also a superb country and western fiddle player, and held a long time gig (decades) on the WLS Barn Dance. On one track of Rennaissance Man (Back Home Again in Indiana), the band breaks into a kicking C&W bag for a half chorus. The band is Larry Novak (p), Larry Gray (bs), Kenny Soderblom (ts), Pat Ferreri (g), Howard Levy (harm), and Rick Frigo (d).
Johnny continued to write music throughout his life, from jingles to jazz tunes. Rennaissance Man includes two of his later compositions, “Apogee” and “Bow Jest.” “Hey, Hey, Holy Mackerel” (the Cubs are on their way) (1969) was played on WGN, Chicago, for several decades as the opening theme for Cubs broadcasts. The title was an amalgam of lines used by Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse. Chicagoan Scott Simon chose it to close his remembrance on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
Thanks for the YouTube links. They are typical of Johnny’s writing and style. He would read several things like this during an evening in a club.

Mr. Brown, long a Chicagoan, now lives in northern California.

If John Frigo’s only contribution to good music had been his co-authorship of “Detour Ahead” and “I Told You I Loved You, Now Get Out,” he would have deserved admiration and gratitude. He wrote those songs in the late 1940s with Herb Ellis and Lou Carter, his partners in the elegant Soft Winds trio. Frigo played bass in the trio. The other members were guitarst Herb Ellis and pianist Lou Carter, buddies from his stint in the Jimmy Dorsey band. However, when he died last week in Chicago at the age of ninety, Frigo left a larger legacy than his compositions and the moderate success of The Soft Winds. In his last three decades, he established himself as a virtuoso jazz violinist.

Violin was Frigo’s first instrument when he was a child in Chicago. He turned to bass because it brought him more work. Late in his career he began concentrating again on violin, with harmonic resourcefulness, passion, swing and warmth of tone to rival Stuff Smith and Joe Venuti. Don Heckman of The Los Angeles Times reflected the opinion of other serious critics and listeners when he wrote that Frigo “made a convincing case for himself as the premier violinist in contemporary jazz.” A couple of Frigo’s latterday recordings support that case. Released on Hank O’Neal’s Chiaroscuro label, they have him in old and new settings.
In The Soft Winds Then and Now, one CD is devoted to reissues of the trio’s original recordings from 1947 and ’48, with Frigo playing bass. A second disc reunites Frigo, Carter and Ellis, with Frigo on violin and a guest, Keter Betts, on bass. The happiness of the occasion is reflected in the performances and in a long bonus track of Frigo, Carter and Ellis reminiscing. If anything, The Johnny Frigo Quartet Live at the 1997 Floating Jazz Festival represents with even greater clarity Frigo’s ability to generate excitement without sacrificing tone and lyricism. He demonstrates his power in a series of standards, ending in an incandescent “Lester Leaps In.”
Frigo was a poet and raconteur as well as a musician. There is little of his playing on internet videos, but several YouTube clips of decidedly unprofessional picture and sound quality capture something of his personality. They were made on the occasion of his 88th birthday celebration at the equally venerable Green Mill club in Chicago.

Vladimir Godar, Mater (ECM).
In the course of writing the notes for George Mraz’s forthcoming CD Moravian Gems, I made the aural acquaintance of the Czech singer, violinist and actress Iva Bittová and was enchanted by her. Mraz informed me that the composer Vladimír Godár, inspired by Bittová’s talent, wrote a mass for her. I acquired the CD of the work and have been listening to it over several weeks.

Bittová’s singing and Godár’s writing not only held up through all of those playings, but with repeated hearings the music took on greater depth and profundity. Bittová, the small string ensemble and DuÅ¡an Bill’s Bratislava Conservatory Choir under conductor Marek Å tryncl are moving in the pieces that precede the “Stabat Mater,” their serenity interrupted only by expressionist instrumental stabs in the “Magnificat.” Godár’s “Ecce Puer,” based on the James Joyce poem (Of the dark past/A child was born;/With joy and grief/My heart is torn), has Bittová floating ethereally between string passages.

In an ECM news release, Godár says, “Only when I got to know Iva, her musical intuition, energy and discipline, did I feel able to write a Stabat Mater for her. Her singing is pure and full of emotion and her articulation is just perfect.” A prominent figure in Czech culture, Bittová is best known as a singer of Moravian folk music, Janáček, and popular songs. Once you have heard her, you will not confuse her with what pop singing has come to mean in the United States. Her voice is deceptively light and the articulation that Godár admires is virtually free of vibrato, but when Bittová does apply it in the “Stabat Mater,” her notes bloom with color an operatic soprano would be pleased to achieve. The joy of her expression in the “Regina Coeli,” with its rhythmic displacement of “alleluia,” is priceless. She is exquisite in passages teaming her with solo violinist MiloÅ¡ Valent.

To people primarily interested in jazz, all of this may seem far afield. I can only refer you to the standard observed by Duke Ellington, who said, “There are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” Mater is good, and Bittová is addictive.
For video of Bittová performing two Janáček songs with the Stampa Quartet, go here.

Remember our series of Rifftides riffs and exchanges about applause? It started like this.
Then it went here
and here
In the past year and a half, the issue has not gone away. San Diego Union-Tribune classical music critic Valerie Scher’s Sunday, July 8 column bore the headline, “Think Before You Stand Up.” It began,

There’s a malady sweeping the nation that’s highly contagious to concertgoers. It doesn’t have a name yet, so let’s call it Excessive Ovation Syndrome (EOS for short). Those suffering from it stand and applaud at performances that aren’t good enough to deserve such enthusiasm. In extreme cases, they shout “Bravo!” during events that are best forgotten.

To read all of Ms. Scher’s case for restraining misplaced enthusiasm, go here.
Comments, as always, are welcome. If yours is for Valerie Scher, I’ll be happy to pass it along.

If you enjoyed the video montage of women in painting a few weeks ago, click here for act two; women in film. The cello accompanist is the same. I wonder who it is.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.–Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.–Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often–in fact, mostly–at the expense of everything else in my life.–Stan Getz

Readers of Safford Chamberlain’s An Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh–indeed, anyone interested in that staunch individualist among saxophonists–will want to investigate The Warne Marsh Site. The web pages developed by Rifftides reader Jack Goodwin include a thorough discography, a news section, photographs and a page called Global Warne-ing in which afficionados around the world exchange Marsh anecdotes and listening experiences.
The discography begins with a trio recording Marsh made at age fifteen with thirteen-year-old André Previn playing piano. It ends with a session three days before he died in 1987.
To sample Marsh’s latterday playing, see him in this video clip with Sal Mosca, Eddie Gomez and Kenny Clarke.

Terry Teachout, our favorite polymath arts blogger, has cleaned out and reorganized his clearinghouse of cultural blogs and websites, to my knowledge the most extensive such guide on the internet. It’s worth a look. For TT’s preamble to the revision, go here.
When you see the extent of his choices, it will be tempting to spend the rest of your life with Terry, but please come back.

Rifftides reader Don Emanuel alerted us to video of Supersax nineteen years ago at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. The band organized by Med Flory was devoted to Charlie Parker solos transcribed and harmonized for a saxophone section. It played them with accuracy and feeling that gave their treatment of Bird’s inventions a sense of improvised sponaneity. Often, a guest trumpeter was aboard to create new solos and provide contrast. Conte Candoli was on several Supersax recordings. In this case, the trumpet soloist is Steve Hufstetter.
The saxophonists, from screen left to right, are Jay Migliori, Ray Reed, Med Flory and Lanny Morgan. Baritone saxophonist Jack Nimitz is missing. The rhythm section is Lou Levy, piano; Monty Budwig, bass; and Larance Marable, drums. Supersax has had many imitators, but the original was best, and this is a rare opportunity to see them in performance. The song is “Just Friends.”

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.–Charlie Parker

If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.–Charles Mingus

In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I told of having heard Desmond’s “Take Five” on a music box in a Prague gift shop and in a number of other unlikely places including the Mexico City subway and my neighborhood gas station.

There are sheet music arrangements of “Take Five” for solo piano, brass band, chorus, accordian, guitar, flute choir, string orchestra, drum and percussion and–I swear–hand bells.

To the list of unusual performances of “Take Five” you may now add the 12 Girls Band live at Budokan. The short solo beginning a minute and four seconds into the performance seems truly improvised. As I watched this, I imagined Desmond’s grin if he could see it.
Thanks to Iola Brubeck for pointing out this treasure.

A message from Bill Crow:

Here’s a YouTube video I found, of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in Rome, 1959,
playing my tune.

Bill Crow

The composer is featured on bass. The trumpeter is Art Farmer, the drummer Dave Bailey. The Chinese Shadow Show effect is interesting. Just try to disregard the venetian-blind video and enjoy one of Mulligan’s greatest quartets playing Mr. Crow’s intriguing blues waltz.
While you’re in YouTube territory, why not listen to the same group on the same occasion playing Mulligan’s “Spring is Sprung,” a blues of another color.

Frances Lynne, Remember (SSJ).
Often discussed but seldom heard, Ms. Lynne is a charming singer. She worked with Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond and Norman Bates in 1948. Recalling their time with her at the Geary Cellar and the Band Box, all of them told me that they were moved by her clarity, phrasing, feeling and interpretation of lyrics. She went on to sing, but not record, with the Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa bands and kept on singing after she married trumpeter John Coppola, a veteran of the Barnet, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands. Finally, in 1991, she recorded for their private label, Lark, with Coppola’s medium-sized orchestra, which included strings and French horn. The album had virtually no distribution when it was released in 1999 and still has little, but it has been nicely repackaged by the Japanese label SSJ and is available from at least one web site (click on the link in the title above).
Ms. Lynne includes the seldom-heard verses of several songs. In his liner note message, Brubeck tells her that at the Band Box “there were many times you gave me goosebumps.” It may have been singing like her treatment of the verses of Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and the Oscar Hammerstein’s-Jerome Kern song “Can I Forget You?” that affected him. The CD is all the more precious for the presence of a pair of rarities, Kern’s “The Touch of Your Hand” and Harry Warren’s “Spring Isn’t Everything,” beautifully sung by Ms. Lynne. The superb arrangements of a dozen classic songs are by Mike Abene, who also conducts. The classy bass and drums are by Bill Douglass and Eddie Marshall. Soloists are Abene on piano, trumpeters Coppola and Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist John Handy and–on alto sax and clarinet–Herbie Steward, one of the original Four Brothers of the Woody Herman Second Herd. Their vigor complements Ms. Lynne’s restraint and mature wistfulness. For most of us, Frances Lynne’s singing was mythical. This CD brings it happily to life.
For an account of the Geary Cellar-Band Box milieu long before there was a Dave Brubeck Quartet, see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

Rifftides reader Peter Luce has a question:

I’m wondering if someone in Rifftides’ knowledgeable readership can help clarify some conflicting information I’ve read about Ellington’s used of trumpet, trombone and clarinet in the original recording of “Mood Indigo.” John Edward Hasse, in The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, writes:
“Ellington turned on their heads the usual roles of trombone, trumpet and clarinet, assigning the trombone the high notes and the clarinet the low.”
Alyn Shipton in A New History of Jazz writes:
“Whereas in the traditional order of things, the clarinet would take the upper part, the trombone the lower, with the trumpet in the middle, [Ellington] assigned the highest notes to the muted trumpet, the central part to a muted high-register trombone, and the lowest notes to a clarinet in its deep chalumeau register.”
Both of these jazz historians agree that the clarinet was assigned the low parts, but clearly disagree on the trumpet and trombone. Can any of your readers shed any light?

We have in the audience arrangers, composers, musicologists and other listeners with big ears. Click the link above, listen, send your answers to Mr. Luce’s query and we will post them.

Graham Collier, Hoarded Dreams (Cuneiform). Here we have further, but not recent , adventures of the pioneering British composer, arranger and leader. Hoarded Dreams is a seven-part suite commissioned by the Bracknell Jazz Festival in 1983. Following its one performance by a band of European stars plus trumpeters Kenny Wheeler (Canadian) and Ted Curson (American), the music has languished in a tape archive for twenty-four years. Collier is in a league with George Russell and Charles Mingus in the demanding discipline of writing for large ensembles populated by musicians whose improvisation goes beyond the fringe of standard harmony.

Graham Collier
The looseness and cogency in Collier’s arrangements are in ideal balance to contain the wildness, daring and–it must be emphasized–good humor of the soloists. There is no trace of the anger and willfull distortion that marred so much avant garde playing in the final decades of the twentieth century. The quality of solos and interchanges by familiar players like Curson, Wheeler, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and the baritone sax powerhouse John Surman is equaled by musicians who deserve to be better known outside the British Isles. Among them are guitarist Ed Speight, drummer Ashley Brown, tenor saxophonist Art Themen and trombonist Conny Bauer. Bauer manages to combine elements of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd, to startling effect. There is so much happening in this music, I suggest that you give it two or three hearings to begin to absorb its dynamics, complexity and subtlety and to sort out which parts are written and which improvised. It’s worth your time. For thoughts on a previous release by Collier, go here.

(An annual Rifftides reminder)
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.–Benjamin Franklin
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.–Abraham Lincoln