Archives for 2007

Having read many articles and liner notes you have written as well as Take Five, your marvelous book on the life of Paul Desmond, I had no doubt that I would enjoy your first novel, Poodie James. This was confirmed to me the day that Bill and Judy Mays, Matt Wilson, Martin Wind, Alisa Horn, and I attended your book signing in Yakima, where you read excerpts from the book. All of us bought copies of Poodie James that afternoon.
But though I knew I would enjoy the book, I was unprepared for the depth of feeling that your writing would evoke from me. I was truly touched. Your writing style is very personal, as if you are telling the story directly to me; and each character in the book immediately comes to life, possessing all the very human traits we experience in dealing with people every day. They have both the good qualities and human failings of us all.
Your book is filled with the warmth of people who feel deeply the sensitivities of others; other people who interminably sit on the fence, having difficulty deciding whether to do the right thing; and then those who have such a abiding prejudice against anyone who is different that they are blinded to any of the good things that life offers. Your description of life from that period of time in which the book is set truly calls to my mind the memories and feelings of that period of my own childhood.
Poodie James is a wonderfully compelling and touching book. I “felt it” as much as I enjoyed it – as my wife is now experiencing as I write this. Thank you for this gift. As I do anything that you write, I very much look forward to reading and enjoying your next endeavor.
Marvin Stamm
New York

Marvin Stamm, the master trumpet and fluegelhornist, lives in Westchester County, New York.

Rifftides Washington DC correspondent John Birchard writes:

Thanks for the heads-up on the program about Willis. I’ll make sure to listen to it. I also alerted several of my VOA colleagues as to its existence.

And thanks, too, for your continued attention to the systematic dismantling of VOA’s English programming on radio. Every voice helps.

Management has announced the closure of the big Delano, California, transmitting facility… and in March, one of our biggest, the short-wave site at Tangier, Morocco, built during the Reagan administration and featuring ten 500,000-watt transmitters, will be history as well. Last fall, it was the facility at Rhodes, Greece. In the past three years, we have lost 55% of our transmitting capacity, even as such “friends” as China, Russia and France have ramped up their English programming. The Board of Broadcasting Governors’ (BBG) intent is clear: if Congress won’t pass a budget that gives them the license to shut us down, they’ll do it by chipping away at our ability to be heard. By the time, our representatives wake up to the situation, it will be too late to reverse these moves. Short-wave frequencies given away are lost forever, snapped up by those who understand their value.

In an era when the leadership of the United States all but ignores culture as a diplomatic tool and downgrades the Voice Of America, an hour with Willis Conover has a sharp poignancy. Conover, the VOA’s great jazz broadcaster for more than four decades, is the subject of a program airing tonight (November 17) at 11:05 EST on WFIU, 103.7 FM, in Bloomington, Indiana and tomorrow night at 10:00 EST on Michigan’s Blue Lake Public Radio. More important to Rifftides readers around the world, the program is permanently archived for online streaming.
Host and producer David Brent Johnson has been at work on the show for months. His meticulous research, knowledgeable music selection, canny interviewing and smooth production result in a valuable document of a man who for decades was the United States’ most valuable cultural diplomat.

Willis Conover
You can hear Conover’s Coming Over: Willis Conover and Jazz at the Voice of America by going here. The page carrying the streaming player also links to several Rifftides pieces about Conover.

Sometimes comments come along considerably after the appearance of the item that inspires them. Rifftides reader Ian Russell sent a note concerning this January 28, 2006 piece about Jackie Cain.

I had a 12″ LP of Jackie and Roy performing with Charlie Ventura & his big band. What a treasure ! I listened to it many times over the years, and then somehow lost it. What I would give to have it back. One of the numbers was “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” I’ve yet to hear anyone even come close to that great arrangement.

Mr. Russell is in luck. So is anyone else who lacks the classic 1948-49 Jackie Cain-Roy Kral recordings with Charlie Ventura and his Bop For The People band, which also included Shelly Manne, Conte Candoli and Bennie Green, among other rising stars. The music is available on CD, still exciting, still fresh.

The late pianist Jack Brownlow will be honored today on the radio. Bruno died on October 27 at the age of 84.
Jim Wilke will devote his Jazz Northwest program on KPLU-FM to Bruno and his music. That’s at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, 4:00 Eastern. To listen live in the Seattle-Tacoma area go to 88.5 FM. To hear the program on the internet click here.

Seattle, Washington, November 10
Preoccupied with death and its aftermath for two weeks, I decided to seek out life, so I went to Serafina.
Serafina is not a girl friend. It’s a restaurant. Arriving at 7:15, I asked the hostess for a table for one. Her eyes sparkled with amusement, but she refrained from saying, “In your dreams.”
“Maybe by 9:30,” she said, “but if you’d like to wait for something to open up at the bar, you can eat there. Full menu.” It was like being back in New York, even unto the fashionably hip, mostly young, crowd.
The bar has maybe ten stools. They were all occupied, and there was a phalanx three deep trying to find enough elbow room to hoist their aperitifs. Fat chance, I thought, but I ordered a glass of wine and stood chatting with a woman who lives in the neighborhood. She asked what I do. I told her. She asked what I’d written lately. “Ah,” she politely responded, and asked me to spell Poodie. “I read a lot,” she said. “Mysteries. Can’t get enough of them. Lately, it’s been James Lee Burke. I knew I should have come earlier. It’s like this on Saturdays.” She disappeared into the Eastlake Avenue night.
A man yielded his stool. The heftier bartender with the grey beard waved me forward. I indicated the rest of the waiting crowd. He shrugged. We shook hands and exchanged names. He was Matthew. His colleague, tall and lean, was Matthias. “Matt and Matt,” he said. There is little more satisfying than the pleasure of watching people do what they do well and enjoying it. These guys were craftsmen. Matthew’s creation of a chocolate martini, something I can’t imagine drinking, was bartender ballet.
I ordered the Trota al Tortufo, roasted trout stuffed with artichokes and truffles finished with a black truffle-butter sauce, served with sautéed spinach. Matthias suggested an Italian white wine, Vermentino Sardegna Pala Crabilis. It was an inspired pairing. For dessert, he recommended a pumpkin something or other, but I had a double espresso and the chocolate tort, or Torta di Cioccolata e Mandorla, as such things are called when they cost a lot.
“The pastry chef shows up every afternoon and does these incredible things,” Matthew said, “then she disappears. Her name is Mei.” With Mei’s tort and the espresso, I hit my second daily double of the meal.
Serafina was beyond crowded, pulsing with life, noise and happiness. Just what I needed.
This is quite likely the only restaurant review I will ever write. Grazie, Serafina.

Nearly every waking hour is consumed by the task at hand–the settlement of a friend’s estate–but I manage to grab a few minutes here and there in an attempt not to fall too far behind events and ideas. In August, I wrote at some length about Maria Schneider’s CD Sky Blue. Today, I caught up with Francis Davis’s October 30 commentary in The Village Voice about Schneider’s relative importance as a composer. It is a thoughtful piece full of insights that, it seems to me, put her in proper perspective. Here is a key section that follows a keenly observed background paragraph preparing us to consider Schneider as a successor to Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans.

Though some might deem it premature to advance Maria Schneider to the pantheon just yet, at 47 she seems to me to have all the qualifications, right down to a core of steadfast orchestra members: “Those guys play her music like they’d take a bullet for her,” another composer remarked enviously following a recent performance. Schneider’s new Sky Blue makes it easy to hear why.

To read all of Davis’s essay, go here.
Rifftides will be back in full swing as soon as possible. Among other things, I plan to watch and report on the rest of the new Jazz Icons DVD series. In the meantime, please stay in touch, either by comments (link at the end of items) or by way of the e-mail address in the right-hand column.

At Seattle’s Jazz Alley, Luciana Souza began and ended her long single set with the Brazilian music that is her birthright and her glory. She also sang several pop-cum-bossa nova songs from her album The New Bossa Nova, but it was the old bossa nova that lifted her performance and lit up the audience. She opened with João Gilberto’s “Adeus América,” rubbing softly on the head of a tambourine as she sang, Keith Ganz strumming quiet harmonies on his green guitar.
Souza described the nature of the bossa nova. “It is about reverence for the music and the words,” she said. “More is less.” With Ganz’s guitar, Matt Aranoff’s bass and occasionally her wire brushes on a red cardboard box top, she spent an hour-and-a-half demonstrating the esthetic. Following the vivacity and sense of discovery in her Brazilian Duos and Brazilian Duos II, Souza seemed subdued in covers of somber songs by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Brian Wilson and others. Still, the perfection of her voice, her impeccable time and the radiance of her personality proscribe dullness.

Luciana Souza
Crediting Frank Sinatra as a primary influence for “his diction, delivery, maturity,” she sang a slow “You Go To My Head” incorporating rhythmically daring repeated phrases that would have crashed on the shoals of lesser musicianship. Accompanying herself on a thumb piano, she recited Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet # 49” from her Neruda CD. Souza developed “Sometimes I’m Happy” as an architectonic progression, with only bass accompaniment for the first chorus, bringing in guitar under her voice and introducing melodic variations and wonderfully flexible phrasing in the second, scatting the third, giving Ganz the freedom to play a solo marinated in rich chord substitutions, and ending the final vocal chorus in unison with her accompanists on a tag from Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.”
When she returned to the Brazilian repertoire, she energized the club with “So Danco Samba,” including a scat chorus of vocalise, and with “Aguas de Marco.” As an encore, she all but reinvented “Corcovado” with a slow rubato first chorus leading into melodic variations over adventurous reharmonizing by Ganz and Aranoff. She sang it in Portuguese, except for one line of Gene Lees’ famous English lyrics.

Quiet nights of quiet stars,

quiet chords from my guitar

floating on the silence that surrounds us.

A bewitching ending to the evening.

Noticing that I am on temporary or intermittent leave, Rifftides Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard leaps into the breach with a review.

JOHN PATITUCCI

By
John Birchard
Like Jimmy Blanton, Scott LaFaro died ‘way too young. But, in their brief times on earth, both men had an immediate and profound effect on the way jazz is played on the bass. It’s hard to overestimate their influence on succeeding generations.
One of the worthy successors to Blanton and LaFaro played the K.C. Jazz Club at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC on November 2nd. John Patitucci brought two friends – the guitarist Larry Koonse and the drummer Brian Blade. We caught the first of two sets.
The trio attracted a number of Washington-based musicians, including bassist Tom Baldwin. We sat next to Baldwin and his 8-year-old son Benjamin, a piano student. The program began with some bop for the people, Charlie Parker’s “Visa,” Patitucci digging in strong from the beginning on the acoustic bass and Brian Blade especially crisp and imaginative with his fills.
Though we tend to think of Patitucci as among the younger crop of jazz musicians, he has been on the national stage since the mid-1980s, establishing himself with Chick Corea over a ten-year period. His playing combines the strong time sense of the Blanton-Ray Brown school with the fleet-fingered dexterity of LaFaro. He has recorded extensively with everyone from Wayne Shorter to Queen Latifah and has more than a dozen recordings as a leader.

John Patitucci
The Kennedy Center program included a number of attractive Patitucci originals. “Agitato” found Brian Blade setting the tempo with a Latin rhythm with the leader then stepping in and finally guitarist Koonse contributing a well-conceived solo made of up alternating single-note lines and interesting chords on the minor-keyed melody. Patitucci was again the muscular underpinning for the piece. He puts lots of body English into his playing and his expressive face shows the passion he pours into his performances.
Patitucci described his “Tone Poem” as sounding as “if Sibelius played 6-string bass.” He picked up the electric instrument and showed the chops of a guitarist (which he was as a youngster) on the unaccompanied, out-of-tempo performance. A quiet, lovely moment.
Next came “The Root”, another original by the bassist who stayed with the six-string. He smilingly sub-titled the piece “Bach Goes to Africa.” It’s a gentle melody with a feeling of ¾ time. Blade distinguished himself here with some sensitive dynamics in accompaniment.
Patitucci switched back to the acoustic instrument for the title tune from his latest CD, “Line By Line” and again laid down some firm, earthy lines for the others to build on.
On an adaptation of Manuel de Falla’s lullaby “Nana,” Blade laid out while the leader demonstrated his arco abilities. He produces a sweet, singing tone with the bow, a pleasure to hear. Koonse’s role on the nylon-string acoustic guitar was mostly in sensitive accompaniment.
It was back to the electric bass as the trio picked up the tempo with an unusual approach to Monk’s “Evidence.” We had never heard the tune done as a calypso sort of samba, but it sure worked. In the midst of Patitucci’s solo, he busted the high C string on his instrument, but he never missed a beat, continuing to play with the broken string flailing around as he moved. The capacity audience cheered both the tune and the bassist’s unflappable demeanor.
The set closed with an encore – the original “Folk Lore,” which Patitucci calls his “Irish tune.” It’s a slow and expressive waltz with a plaintive melody. Blade was effective again in accompaniment, using a combination of brushes and mallets.
The trio produced a varied and interesting set that was recorded for later broadcast on NPR’s Jazz Set with DeeDee Bridgewater. Koonse and Blade make valuable contributions and the leader is quick to credit them. John Patitucci combines a friendly, outgoing personality as a leader with his well-earned reputation as a first-class bass player.
Tom Baldwin and son Benjamin, the budding pianist, pronounced themselves pleased with the performances — and your fthful crspndnt couldn’t agree more.

A fine report. Thanks, John.

Today’s Seattle Times has a substantial obituary of Jack Brownlow. It begins:

Jack Brownlow learned to play the piano by ear at age 12. By his late teens, he was an accomplished professional. Although he never sought a national stage, he made a stir here as a musician’s musician, a quiet pianist known best for his harmonic sophistication and his encyclopedic knowledge of songs.
When he first heard Mr. Brownlow play, Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist and lead soloist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet, reportedly remarked: “If I played piano, that’s how I’d want to play it.”

To read the whole thing, go here.
Rifftides will resume normal operation eventually. This executorship business is going to be full time for at least a few days. I hope to find time for a report on Luciana Souza’s perfomance at Jazz Alley. Please check in now and then.

Thanks to all of you who have sent condolences. Some of you were friends of Jack Brownlow (see the next item). Others knew him only by his music. A few have asked if his CDs are available. This web site says it has them.
I’m doing the things an executor does. It will take full attention. Blogging will be intermittent, if at all, for a few days.

Rifftides will be in suspension for a while. I don’t know for how long. Two years ago, I wrote this about a great pianist:

Jack Brownlow, at 81, has doggedly refused to let a round of health problems put him out of commission. He is gigging less, but a stream of colleagues comes to his house to play music with him and learn from him. He is an inspiration to them, as he has been to me since I was sixteen.

This evening, the health problems won. I’ve lost my best friend, a wise teacher, the older brother I never had, a musician who from the time I was a child moved me with the profound beauty of his playing.

Jack Brownlow
When Paul Desmond heard Jack for the first time, he said, “If I played piano, that’s how I’d want to play it.”
There is a lot to sort out. I’ll check back in as soon as possible.

We continue the Rifftides survey of the second release of Jazz Icons DVDs. For earlier reviews of the Mingus and Ellington discs, go here.
In addition to their first-rate musical material and high production values, the Jazz Icons discs–unlike far too many DVDS–provide background about the music and the artists. Each includes a booklet with discographical information, photographs, and program notes by knowledgable experts. Patricia Willard wrote essays for the Ellington disc and for the Sarah Vaughan.
Sarah Vaughan Live In ’58 & ’64 (Jazz Icons)
In her 1958 appearances in Sweden and Holland, the singer was in her mid-thirties, a seasoned performer but still shy before audiences and cameras. The girlish reticence that was part of her persona and her charm is on the film that went into this DVD, and so is bewitching singing from an extraordinary time in her career. Vaughan’s discography of the late fifties is rich with gems, including the first recording of “Misty,” her live date at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago and her initial dates with Quincy Jones and members of the Count Basie band. Much of the cream of that repertoire is represented here, including “Lover Man,” “Sometimes I’m Happy,” “Mean To Me” a sublime “Over The Rainbow” and a supremely relaxed up-tempo “Cherokee.” She was in perfect voice–she was nearly always in perfect voice–with few of the mannerisms that crept in later. With perfect time, intonation and taste, she is hand-in-glove with her trio, pianist Ronell Bright, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Art Morgan.
By 1964 in Sweden, there were hints of grand operatic tendencies, but not to the extent that sometimes took the edge off Vaughan’s later work. She was more elaborately gowned and coifed and had developed a polished stage presence. Vaughan had updated her repertoire with Bernstein’s “I Feel Pretty” and “Maria” from West Side Story and with “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” but the highlights of the set are a joyous “I Got Rhythm” with finger-snap accompaniment, and a definitive slow performance of “The More I See You.” Her trio is pianist Kirk Stuart, drummer George Hughes and the young Buster Williams on bass.
Dave Brubeck Live In ’64 & ’66 (Jazz Icons). Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to Darius Brubeck’s notes for this DVD of a pair of European concerts by the classic Brubeck Quartet. Here is the first part:

Aside from its music, which is among the best I have heard in hundreds of hours of listening to the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet, this DVD explains an essential element of the band’s huge success. Concert audiences made the Brubeck group a phenomenon, at first on college campuses, then in the world at large. Listeners in concert halls and clubs could see the esteem and fondness Brubeck, Desmond, Wright and Morello had for one another.
Without a trace of artifice or overt showmanship, the four displayed the enjoyment they got from playing together. It was infectious. People who may not have known a quarter note from a mouthpiece were captivated as they shared in the quartet’s naturalness with the creative process.

The concerts in Belgium and Germany capture that naturalness, with the quartet at or near a peak of performance. In “St. Louis Blues,” which they must have played a thousand times, Joe Morello and Gene Wright lock up in a way justifying Wright’s claim that their togetherness was “like Jo Jones and Walter Page with Count Basie.” In a delicious video moment, the alert director switches to a shot that captures the camaraderie of the bassist and drummer who called one another, “Section.” There are two versions of “Koto Song.” Both have remarkable minor blues solos by Paul Desmond. Brubeck is at his most ethereal and impressionistic in the one before a German audience.
The two “Take Fives,” are relaxed and flowing. Morello, who introduced 5/4 time to the quartet in the late fifties, creates a structurally perfect piece of musical architecture in the ’64 performance in Belgium. The concerts also include “Three to Get Ready,” “I’m In A Dancing Mood,” “In Your Own Sweet Way,” “Forty Days” and “Take The ‘A’ Train.” In both cases, the simplicity of the stage settings and the direction imparts a timeless quality to the look of the video. Sound quality is more than acceptable. This is the best Brubeck on DVD.
Coming up: The Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane Jazz Icons DVDs.

Miles Davis: You know you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played.
Dizzy Gillespie: No him, no me.

A few weeks ago, writing at length about a new CD of music by the Charles Mingus Sextet, I referred to a forthcoming DVD of that remarkable band on its ’64 European tour. The disc is one of a set of eight in the second release of Jazz Icons DVDs. I am viewing and reporting to you about them as time allows.
Charles Mingus Live in ’64 (Jazz Icons). It is a revelation to see this edition of the Mingus sextet at work during one of his happiest periods. Explosive temperament under wraps, the bassist is downright avuncular in three concerts with Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Dannie Richmond. Dolphy the incredible flutist (and saxophonist and bass clarinetist) was a primary source of Mingus’s satisfaction, but far from the only one. This was a unit attuned and interlocked, every soloist in his creative prime, the band’s power and responsiveness at a peak. Video (black and white) and audio quality are excellent. Direction and camera work provide plenty of intimate looks into the working relationships among the musicians, particularly the bond between Mingus and Richmond. All that we need to know about the depth of his admiration is expressed in Coles’ gaze on Dolphy as the saxophonist solos.
The Brussels “Meditations On Integration” is a milestone performance. The one in Stockholm a few days earlier is not far behind. All eleven pieces on the DVD are at the highest level. “Take The ‘A’ Train” in Oslo nearly equals the intensity of that Belgium “Meditations.” We witness a touching moment during a rehearsal. Mingus tells Dolphy that he will miss him when the band returns to the US and Dolphy remains in Europe. Mingus asks how Dolphy long he will stay. Probably a year or so, Dolphy says. Within weeks, he was dead in Germany following an episode of diabetic shock. Mingus went into depression. He recovered, and his career had further periods of distinction through the sixties and seventies, but he never again had a band, large or small, that reached the heights of this sextet.
Duke Ellington Live in ’58 (Jazz Icons). This concert in Holland is typical of the Ellington band in the late fifties. Old hands like Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney and Ray Nance combine comfortably with relative newcomers — Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves, John Sanders. The repertoire is a survey of Ellingtonia. The exception is “My Funny Valentine,” in which clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton and trombonist Quentin Jackson play the melody so beautifully that variations would be redundant. We get a romp through “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” an extended Sam Woodyard drum solo, Hodges sliding with implacability and the essence of swing in “All of Me” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” Ozzie Bailey’s heartfelt vocals, a ten-minute medley of ten Ellington hits, and the amazing Nance singing, dancing, and playing cornet and violin with gusto. The capper is “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue,” with Gonsalves featured in the tenor sax interval that made him famous at Newport two years earlier. He is just as bluesy, although this time at not quite the same length or intensity.
Conducting from the piano or in front of the band, announcing or digging the soloists, Ellington is coolness itself, leaving the audience in no doubt that he does love them madly. The band members, as they usually did, alternate between looking bored (but hip) and amused. Sound is good. The director is occasionally asleep at the switch when shot changes would be appropriate, but, generally, we see what we’re hearing. What we’re hearing is the Ellington band on a very good night.
Next installment: The Sarah Vaughan and Dave Brubeck Jazz Icons DVDs.

No longer being in New York has disadvantages–not being able to attend a concert of Benny Carter’s music, for instance. Carter died in 2003. He would be 100 years old now. The concert over the weekend was the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra’s season opener. Ben Ratliff’s account in The New York Times makes me sorry to have missed it.

If there was a star, it was a whole bloc within a band: the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s saxophone section, playing the tightly harmonized passages that were among Carter’s signatures.
Carter’s arrangement of “All of Me,” from 1940, is a good example. After an introduction, it began with the four saxophonists playing two choruses of harmonized lockstep, running a rewritten version of the melody through the chords, and it had everything an individual solo can have: melodic shape, hesitation, easy swing, double-timing, open space.

To read all of Ratliff’s review, go here. Links to some of Carter’s best recordings are in this Rifftides piece.

Mateusz Kolakowski, Ad Libitum, 1st Warsaw Jazz Concert (Zaiks). When I first heard Kolakowski, he and two of his Polish contemporaries were touring the United States with their mentor, the clarinetist Brad Terry. That was in 1998. At thirteen, the boy was an impressive jazz pianist. He has continued to develop his jazz sensibility as a student at the Music Academy of Katowice while winning international awards for his performances of Chopin.

Mateusz Kolakowski
Now twenty-one, Kolakowski is formidable in this solo concert recorded last year. He uses his classical technique to soar through wild improvisations without orbiting away from the jazz values that were apparent when he was barely into his teens. There are moments here when he seems headed toward Cecil Taylor country, but in Miles Davis’s “Nardis,” Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” and Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” he creates freely while observing the composers’ outlines. His own “14th Spring” has evolved into a rhapsody melding Chopin references into the fabric of a movingly personal piece of music. If Kolakowski’s development continues at the pace and depth of the past few years, he is on his way to becoming a major pianist.
Finisterra Trio (Seasons Audio). The first CD by this young classical piano trio is a big program: the Lalo and Shostakovich trios for piano, violin and cello. More than a year ago, I wrote that a Finisterra concert performance of the Lalo was the best version I’d ever heard. This recording sustains that opinion. Their treatment of the demanding Shostakovich work, with its beauty, dissonance and pathos, is on the same level. A few weeks ago, Finisterra premiered Angel Band Trio, a new piece by Daron Hagen. To read about it, go here. Let us hope that they also record the Hagen.
Claus Ogermann, Works For Violin and Piano: Yue Deng and Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca). Ogermann’s involvement with jazz and pop music attracts more attention than the concert work on which he has concentrated since the 1970s, but he is a contemporary composer of substance and ingenuity, as “Sarabande Fantasie,” “Duo lirico,” “Prelude and Chant” and “Nightwings” attest. These chamber pieces add to Ogermann’s achievement as a creator of classical music that manages to incorporate modern harmonic advancements while maintaining the imperative of melody. Thibaudet, one of the most acclaimed concert pianists alive, beautifully realizes Ogermann’s subtlety and dynamic shadings and supports the violin in a sensitive partnership, but it is Deng’s brilliance and purity that ring in the mind when the music has ended. It is puzzling that in the CD booklet, Decca provides no information about a young woman who is clearly a rising star of her instrument. That seems a missed opportunity for the company to promote an asset.
For more information about Yue Deng, her collaboration with pianist Roger Kellaway and her adaptation to jazz, go to this page of Kellaway’s web site.
Next time: The new Jazz Icons DVDs.

Rifftides has readers today in Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, the UK, Brazil, South Korea, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Sweden, Mexico, Australia, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, Iceland, and across the United States from Federal Way, Washington, to Swoope, Pennsylvania and Hollywood, Florida. Thank you all for joining us.

Gail Pettis, May I Come In? (Origin). In her recording debut, the Seattle singer chooses a mixture of familiar standards and less-well-known songs, delivering them with warmth and intelligent interpretation. Pettis concentrates on serving songwriters’ intentions, but her delighted treatment of Jimmy McHugh’s “I Just Found Out About Love” includes one of two scatting episodes in the collection. She scats with musicianly understanding of harmony. There is not a lot of that going around among singers. Pettis gives “Black Coffee” its bluesy due but avoids the affected emotion with which many singers are tempted to smother the song.
In “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face,” bassist Jeff Johnson, with his customary strength and sensitivity, is the singer’s sole accompanist. “We’ve Met Before” is a duet between Pettis and pianist Randy Halberstadt. With this lovely song, Halberstadt may have composed a new standard. He and Johnson are on half of the tracks. On the other half, Darin Clendenin is the pianist, Clipper Anderson the bassist, Pacific Northwest stalwarts in good form, as is Mark Ivester, who plays drums throughout. Pettis keeps her considerable vocal power in reserve, using it with restraint and taste. In the burgeoning population of new singers, she is a standout.
Dave Brubeck, Indian Summer (Telarc). Brubeck’s solo piano excursion through the autumn of his life has Brahmsian gravity, dignity and reflection. It also has moments of playfulness and no lack of harmonic audacity, as in his polytonal opening bars of “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You.” He includes “Sweet Lorraine,” “Memories of You” and “Indian Summer” along with other standards and a few of his own tunes, among them “Summer Song” and his tribute to Chopin, “Thank You.” He reaches back to his youth for the anthem of his college, reharmonized and movingly expressed. Brubeck has taken a lot of knocks for the vigor of his playing. Here, he reminds us that at the lower end of his dynamic range he has one of the softest touches of any pianist–and those harmonies, still daring after all these years. This is one for quiet evenings in front of the fire.
Joe Chindamo, Smokingun (Newmarket Music). A couple of weeks ago, in reviewing Karrin Allyson’s performance with the Yakima Symphony Orchestra, I wrote:

Allyson sang with her customary charm, musicianship and irrepressible energy, occasionally spelling pianist Joe Chindamo at the keyboard while he played accordian. Chindamo, an Australian new to me, was impressive as an accompanist and in solo. His piano chorus on Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” alluding to Bill Evans, was a highlight of the evening.

Later that week, I heard Chindamo (pronounced Kin-dámo) at greater length when Allyson and her quartet played The Seasons, and was thoroughly taken with his playing. From there, they went to New York for a week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. His tour with Allyson ended, Chindamo is back in Melbourne where he is a mainstay of Australian jazz and of movie sound stages. Listening to his trio’s CD Smokingun, with alto saxophonist Graeme Lyall as guest artist, I understand why. He assembles a potpourri of tunes that would seem unlikely album mates and makes sense of them individually and as a collection, even while giving them unconventional treatments. Slow versions of “Take Five” (Chindamo on accordian) and “The Entertainer” (Chindamo on piano, Lyall slinky on soprano sax), “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and Dvorak’s “Going Home” theme succeed in deliciously different ways. Joni Mitchell’s “God Must Be a Boogie Man” becomes an adventure in pointilism and rhythm shifts. Chindamo and Lyall liberate the improvisational possibilities in two unlikely movie themes, “The Magnificent Seven” and “Goldfinger.”
Lyall manages to refer to Paul Desmond’s style without imitating Desmond except for what seems to be an affectionate outright tribute in “Look For the Silver Lining.” He and the trio work together with the kind of reactive empathy that Desmond and Brubeck often achieved, although the resemblance of this group to the Brubeck quartet doesn’t go much beyond the instrumentation. Bassist Phil Rex and drummer David Beck, also little known outside Australia, are world class.
This video of Chindamo playing “But Not For Me” at Italy’s Umbria festival in 2005 will acquaint you with his solo style. At the end of another clip, with his trio, he delivers to his fellow Australians a confidence-building speech about their cultural uniqueness. It would seem inevitable that we non-Aussies will be hearing more from Joe Chindamo.