Archives for 2007

Former Down Beat editor Jack Tracy has always had an ear for fresh young talent. He sent this link to video of a blues-singing bird – the avian variety.
Could it be the reincarnation of Rob McCroby (1934-2002)? McCroby’s recordings for Concord, something of a sensation in the 1980s, have never been reissued on CD. To see a compilation of his television appearances, go to this web site. You may not want to sit through all twenty minutes, but there’s no denying that McCroby could blow.

Piano. n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled. — George Bernard Shaw
Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.– Jelly Roll Morton

Bill Evans redeems the piano from Bierce’s and Shaw’s disdain in this video clip, made in Norway in August of 1980 when Evans was mortally ill and undoubtedly knew it. Thanks to Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages for finding it. The bassist and drummer are Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera.

In his blog, About Last Night, Terry Teachout quotes Whitney Balliett’s incomparable tribute to the ability of most jazz musicians to maintain their unbreakable spirit despite being cold-shouldered by the culture.

Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos.

To read the whole thing go here. It reminded me of the story about a conversation between a musician and a person from the ranks of what Woody Herman called civilians.
Civilian: What made you decide to become a jazz musician?
Musician: I dislike crowds.

Harry Whitaker, Thoughts (Past And Present) [Smalls]. Whitaker has been a working pianist since he was fourteen, but for much of his career he has concentrated on producing, arranging and serving as musical director for others, including singer Roberta Flack and vibraphonist Roy Ayers. In nine of his compositions, Whitaker’s firm touch, careful chording and absence of pyrotechnics add up to what musicians often call arranger’s piano. In that category he is in good company with people like Gerry Mulligan, Tadd Dameron, Bob Brookmeyer and Gil Evans. The bassist Omer Avital is, as usual, impressive. Another young Israeli, drummer Dan Aran, is particularly effective in his feathery work with brushes. Whitaker’s tunes tend toward modal construction, giving the collection an air of contemplative mystery, which may account for the relief I felt when the record ended with a sunlit F blues called “Blues For The Piano Players.”
Zaid Nasser, Escape From New York (Smalls). At times Nasser’s playing resembles that of Paul Gonsalves, notably on “Warm Valley” and “Sophisticated Lady,” the two Ellington compositions here. However, this alto saxophonist with a fat tenor sax sound and a post-post-bop ethos goes beyond slippery Gonsalves chromaticism. He edges into avant garde territory without surrendering to licentiousness. As producer Luke Kaven points out in his notes, the spirits of such players as Junior Cook and Clarence “C.” Sharpe inhabit Nasser. His speedy “Junior’s Soul,” a frolic through the changes of “Body and Soul,” is a hoot. I admire the chutzpah and humor of a young man who can have fun with a 97-year-old chestnut like “Chinatown, My Chinatown” without poking fun at it, a trait reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. Nasser’s rhythm section players are perfectly attuned to him. They are Sacha Perry, piano; Ari Roland, bass; and Phil Stewart, drums. Zaid is the son of Jamil Nasser, the formidable bassist formerly known as George Joyner. I didn’t know that Nasser the younger existed until this CD materialized. I’m glad that he does.
Ari Roland, And so I lived in Old New York (Smalls). Roland’s own album includes Perry and Stewart, along with tenor saxophonist Chris Byars, the group with which he toured in Russia this year. Their experience together is apparent in relaxed performances of seven original compositions, all by Roland with collaboration by Perry on one and Byars on another. It’s his CD, so Roland takes a fair number of solos, but the bass doesn’t overwhelm the proceedings. His time and note choices in the ensemble are solid. When he uses the bow in solo, he swings and has a full tone and good inflection; none of the sagging notes with which jazz bassists often do themselves in when they go arco. Pianist Perry and saxophonist Byars construct solo lines that have continuity and flow, with Perry under the spell of Bud Powell. Good brush work from Stewart. Nice album.
Fabio Morgera, Need For Peace (Smalls). Pleasant generic playing–and sometimes better than that–from Morgera, an Italian trumpeter in the US for twenty years. On several tracks his work, evidently inspired by Miles Davis, alternates with vocals by guest singers. His best moments come when he ditches the singers and the synthesizer and plays with just the rhythm section on Jobim’s “Portrait in Black and White” and his own “All Alone.” Between irritating vocal passages by Miles Griffith, Morgera constructs a lovely solo on Thelonious Monk’s “Friday The 13th.”

Rifftides reader Sam Stephenson writes from North Carolina:

I’m excited to hear this new Gil Coggins record. Thank you for the tip.
I only wish it could have been released before he passed.
In 2002 I interviewed Gil as part of my loft project. He was a veteran of the 6th Ave. loft I’m researching and is recorded on a few of W. Eugene Smith’s tapes circa 1960-61.
I went to hear Gil at his regular gig in the East Village, where he played beautifully the night I heard him, and a few days later we met for the interview. He met me on the sidewalk outside his apartment, also in the East Village, where I think he’d lived for several decades, and he was
dressed impeccably in a suit, vest, and tie, topped off with a fedora.
His gigantic car – I think it was a late 1970’s Cadillac – was parked out front and he needed to move it, so we got in his car and drove around lower Manhattan for more than an hour. We were talking and listening intermittently to Freddy Cole on a cassette he had in the car. Gil wanted to stop at a McDonalds somewhere down below Canal St. and I watched him parallel park his car in a spot where I was sure the car wouldn’t fit. He did it without even turning his head, using only the mirrors. I couldn’t believe it. Then, we drove back to his place and he did it again in a new spot. He was definitely the best parallel parker I’ve ever seen, especially among folks who used only their mirrors to do it.
We talked more and afterward he drove over to Smalls to meet Jimmy Wormworth and some others. I was sick to have another appointment that night and miss that gig. When I listen to this record you write about I’m going to pretend that it was the gig I missed.

Gil Coggins, Better Late Than Never (Smalls). The first phase of pianist Coggins’ career tapered off in the mid-1950s after he recorded with Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Jackie McLean. Although his work was distinct from his contemporary John Lewis, he shared with Lewis a spare approach to soloing, and chords in his accompaniments that often formed complementary melodies. Coggins went into real estate in 1954, continuing to work in jazz occasionally and recording with McLean as late as 1957.

Gil Coggins ca. 1954
Over the next four decades he moonlighted in lounges around New York, in 1999 returning to recording with a Japanese import CD now out of circulation. Shortly after the turn of the century, he made Better Late Than Never. Coggins never recovered from an auto crash in 2003 and died of his injuries in 2004 at the age of 79. The CD was released this year by Smalls, the label of a lower Manhattan club that tends to feature adventurous music.
Coggins’ playing on this album is neither cutting-edge nor a throwback to the fifties. There is a timelessness to it, dark harmonic beauty and a deliberate, almost hesitant, rhythmic quality suggesting that he was contemplating every phrase. He unrolls the Charles Mingus tune “Smooch” with exquisite slowness, so that every chord and run seems to exist in its own space. At faster tempos, he takes similar ruminative approaches in pieces including Tadd Dameron’s “The Scene Is Clean,” Neal Hefti’s “Repetition” and the standards “I’m Old Fashioned” and “Isn’t It Romantic?” The cumulative effect is curiously relaxing, nearly mesmerizing. Drum duties are shared by the veterans Louis Hayes and Jimmy Wormworth, with Mike Fitzbenjamin on bass. This is a fine remembrance of an artist who had the talent and individuality to be an influential figure but chose to make music his secondary occupation.
Next time: Impressions of a few other CDs on the Smalls label.

Sunday, we harvested the last of the blackberries, cut back the spent canes from the arches and tied down the canes that will produce next year’s crop. That pleasant task out of the way, my Italian friend and I went for a thirty-mile ride through farm and orchard country. The route had early autumn scenery of a kind that might have inspired Ralph Burns and Johnny Mercer. I looked down on a little valley below the road into a field bordered by a perfect white fence. On two adjoining sides, rows of maple trees in their red and gold glory stood watch over a small herd of cattle so impressive in their sleekness, beauty and rich chocolate color highlighted by the slanting sunlight that they must have come from cow central casting.

Following the August Rifftides piece about Hal McKusick, Marc Myers, aka Mr. JazzWax, sought out McKusick and is running a multi-part interview with the veteran reed man. The 83-year-old McKusick reminisces about a life in music from his debut as a teenager in the big bands to his teaching today. The gifted saxophonist, composer and arranger Al Cohn was among his colleagues.

Al and I worked in Elliot Lawrence’s band in the early 1950s. Al was the most unbelievable arranger. He could write anything and it would swing. He was tireless. He would play all day and write all night. I used to copy for Al. Working with him taught me so much about arranging and copying, which helped when I was copying for Johnny Mandel and Gil Evans.
We’d go all night at Al’s apartment in Brooklyn. You can’t believe what a thrill it was to write an arrangement, copy the band parts from the score, bring them into rehearsal the next day and hear great musicians play it perfectly on virtually the first run-through. That’s what kept you motivated–knowing what you were hearing in your head would be heard by many soon after you finished writing it up.

To read all five parts of Myers’ interview with McKusick, go here.

I did not attend Sonny Rollins’ Carnegie Hall concert last month and had not heard or read much about it until a review by Francis Davis in the current issue of The Village Voice. Davis calls it “this year’s be-there-or-be-square event” and gives it a thorough going-over, reporting the good and the better; unsurprisingly, there seems to have been no bad. Rollins, who is seventy-seven, performed with his current band. He also played with a pianoless trio, as he did at Carnegie Hall fifty years ago. The bassist this time around was Christian McBride, four decades younger than Rollins, the drummer Roy Haynes, five years older. Here is a section of Davis’s review.

For me, the mock-aria from South Pacific–an unlikely vehicle for anyone but Rollins–was the evening’s glory. He and Haynes didn’t exactly trade fours on it for 10 minutes running, and they didn’t exactly not; their exchanges followed the rules of conversation, not metrics. Analytical rather than discursive or ecstatic, Rollins treated the melody to an endless series of variations, slowing down his vibrato and dropping into a subtone to summon up the ghosts of both Enzio Pinza and Coleman Hawkins, all the while moving in and out of tempo within phrases shaped to Haynes’s elegant brushstrokes. Even those who might have wished for conventional improvised choruses had to agree that it was magic.

Davis reports that Rollins has a new CD in the works incorporating recently-discovered trio tracks recorded at the 1957 Carnegie concert with new trio performances. To read all of his Voice review, go here.

The Rifftides staff directs your attention to the right-hand column, where you will find a new batch of Doug’s Picks.

Here is a bit of Terry Teachout’s review of Poodie James in Contentions, his CommentaryMagazine.com column.

I’ll cut to the chase: Poodie James is a very good book. Not only is it handsomely and lyrically written, but Ramsey’s snapshots of small-town life circa 1948 are altogether convincing, and he has even brought off the immensely difficult trick of worming his way into the consciousness of a deaf person without betraying the slightest sense of strain. I especially like the scene in which he tells us how it feels for the title character to “listen” to Woody Herman’s big band at a local dance:

A man with a big smile walked out holding a clarinet. The musicians sat up and brought their horns to their mouths. The man raised his hand and brought it down. The force of the sound hit Poodie and traveled through his chest as a tingle…. Poodie wondered if the dancers got the same sensation from hearing the music that he did from feeling it, radiance in the belly, warmth around the heart.

I wish I’d written that.

Well, I am flattered that Teachout wrote that. To read all of his review, go here.

The Seasons Fall Festival wrapped up over the weekend in Yakima, Washington, with concerts that featured two Bill Mays trios. James Moody also starred, performing at eighty-two with the wisdom of age and the energy of a teenager.
Friday night, it was Mays, piano; Marvin Stamm, trumpet and fluegelhorn; and Alisa Horn, cello – the Inventions Trio. Their recently released CD is superb, but their collaboration has taken on profundity and polish since they made the recording two years ago. Their reworkings of Rachmaninoff, Borodin and other classical composers, their treatment of standards and new pieces by Mays and Stamm, had the audience enthralled. Mays’ six-part suite inspired by the Delaware River’s run from the mountains to the sea was a journey encompassing grandeur, nostalgia, folksy humor including a hoedown, and avant garde audacity. It also incorporated spoken segments of regional reminiscing that disclosed the musicians’ unsuspected talents as vocal actors.

Inventions Trio
For years, Stamm and Mays have performed as a duo exploring the possibilities in classical themes. The addition of Horn, the young cellist, has resulted in a group capable of a remarkable store of textures. She has extensive classical training and rich technique, but is relatively new to jazz. Under Mays’ and Stamm’s tutelage, she has learned to swing when she’s bowing, and to play pizzicato a la Oscar Pettiford, Percy Heath and Ron Carter. It was a joy to witness the passion she brought to the performance. Mays and Stamm are jazz and studio veterans whose discipline and versatility make possible this group’s demanding chamber music. They achieve complexity without sacrificing swing or zeal. They are a pleasure to watch as well as to hear. Few groups have as much fun making music as this trio.

Wilson, Mays, Wind
One that does is Mays’ trio with bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson. Two years ago they inaugurated the former Christian Science church as a performance hall. Their appearance at The Seasons has become an autumn event, and they were as astonishing as ever. One of the great piano trios of the day more than lived up to their reputation. With Wilson aboard, there is always bound to be a surprise. In 2005, it was his action-theater piece having to do with free range chickens and the chant, “Set them free.” Last year, he crafted a musical setting for Carl Sandburg’s poem Choose and conscripted the audience as a Greek chorus. This time around, Wilson debuted a composition inspired by a swimming party the night before in his hotel pool, possibly involving minimal clothing. He called it “Yakimaquatics” and introduced it with a drum solo that incorporated the breast stroke, the backstroke, the butterfly and the crawl, all executed with rhythmic exactitude and leading into a melody with a harmonic pattern possibly influenced by Pat Metheny. Fun and games out of the way, Mays, Wind and Wilson dug in. It was a fine first half.
Following intermission, the Mays trio became the rhythm section of the James Moody quartet. Moody had his famous flute along, but it never left the case. He stayed on tenor saxophone through the set, except when he was singing or telling uproarious stories. In a pre-performance discussion, he spoke about the harmonic education he received early in his career from Dizzy Gillespie and Tom McIntosh. In concert, he demonstrated the extent to which that harmonic sense has progressed in the past sixty years or so. Applying chord extensions on top of chord extensions, he danced through “Woody’n You” and “Giant Steps” with dazzling mastery. If the audience had Coleman Hawkins in mind when Moody began “Body and Soul,” his ingenious creation of new melodies and his audacious expansion of the chord pattern brought them thoroughly up to date.
Mays, Wind and Wilson were in swinging lock step with Moody throughout the concert, but their participation went far beyond accompaniment. They gave the old master nudges that inspired him to explore beyond what in more routine settings is often a polished bag of phrases and devices. Clearly, he was pleased with the collaboration. When Mays was soloing, Moody stationed himself in the curve of the piano, listening intently. When Wind was bowing one of his virtuosic arco solos, Moody edged nearer. When Wilson soloed, Moody stood beaming at him.

James Moody
Of course, he did “Moody’s Mood For Love,” singing his own famous solo and, in split throat-tones, the piano solo from the original 1949 recording. Earlier, he said that audiences never let him get away without doing it, so he builds it into his every appearance. The Moody concert was a rousing and entertaining conclusion to more than a week of stimulating music.
I once wrote (in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers):

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who play it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources, and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together.

The Moody concert was a demonstration of that truth. I overheard the rehearsal. It went more or less like this:

Moody: Do you know “Woody’n You?”
Mays: Yeah, we know that.
Moody: “Giant Steps?”
Mays: Sure.
Moody: How about “Invitation?”
Mays. Yep
Moody: Okay. We’ll be cool.

And they were.

While a bunch of us were standing around waiting to be seated at a restaurant following Saturday night’s concert at The Seasons (see the previous item), the conversation turned to singers. Jo Stafford came in for prominent and enthusiastic mention. The next morning, I was checking out Marc Myers’ Jazz Wax blog and found this link to a wonderful Stafford performance from 1947. The band is identified as that of her husband, Paul Weston, but it doesn’t look like Weston conducting. The only player I recognize is the phenomenal guitarist George van Eps.
The singing is perfection. But then, it’s Jo Stafford.

The British Columbia newspaper Peace Arch News has a report about the success of Libros Libertad, the publisher of Poodie James.

With five books released so far – and as many on the way by year’s end, the imprint is rapidly gaining stature and credibility with its up-market style paperbacks.
Poodie James, a novel by veteran U.S. broadcaster Doug Ramsey has already become a break-out hit, selling out its first printing. The Passage of Sono Nis is a definitive collection of works by internationally respected author J. Michael Yates – who is also senior editor for the company. And well-known jazz writer/lyricist Gene Lees (“Yesterday I Heard The Rain,” “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”) is readying a novel, Song Lake Summer, for release by Libros Libertad.

To read the whole thing, go here and click on the “entertainment” tab.