Archives for 2007

One of the finest jazz pianists in the world is barely known in the United States. His many CDs are on Japanese, Spanish and Scandinavian labels that sometimes show up in US stores despite their limited distribution in this country. Jan Lundgren visits the US infrequently, usually to record for foreign companies. His most recent tour was last month’s series of concerts in Japanese cities. When I mention Lundgren to musicians and canny jazz listeners who keep up with developments in music, I often get blank looks. After I persuade them to seek out Lundgren’s work, they respond with enthusiasm.

Jan Lundgren
My first encounter with Lundgren’s playing was in the mid-1990s when I was preparing to write notes for Bill Perkins’ Perk Plays Prez. Perkins and producer Dick Bank wanted a pianist who could play Count Basie and Teddy Wilson to Perkins’ tenor saxophone evocation of Lester Young–without apeing Basie or Wilson. Bank brought in Lundgren. The young pianist more than filled the bill. He had already earned the enthusiasm of Lou Levy, always tough in his evaluations of other pianists, and of another exacting old pro, alto saxophonist Herb Geller. Bank recruited Lundgren for Geller’s You’re Looking at Me.
Some of Lundgren’s Fresh Sound (Spain) and Marshmallow (Japan) CDs are available at this address. His most recent trio collection is sold in the US by Eastwind, a distributor with an internet retail operation. Swinging Rendezvous (Marshmallow) includes Lundgren’s long-time bassist Jesper Lundgaard and drummer Alex Riel, Scandinavian veterans who have played with a cross-section of the best European and American musicians. It is a trio of rare swing and cohesion. Their workout on Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” is a masterpiece of common intent, interaction and reaction. Lundgren supports his improvisational wizardry with speed, precision, dynamic mastery and a sense of romance. He is a modern bebop pianist at the highest level. If you think that “modern” and “bebop” constitute an oxymoron, listen to Lundgren.
All but one of the CD’s 11 pieces were written by major jazzmen, among them Monk, J.J. Johnson, Mal Waldron and Oscar Pettiford. The exception, the folk ditty “Billy Boy,” is so closely associated with Red Garland that many people no doubt think Garland wrote it. Lundgren tackles two pieces by Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers’ ebullient “Whims of Chambers” and “Third World” by Herbie Nichols. He and Lundgaard interpret the elusive harmonic nuances of Nichols’ music so effectively that he makes me wish the trio would take on more of Nichols’ eccentric compositions. Indeed, interpretation, not imitation, is what Lundgren practices. Waldron, Nichols, Kelly, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Bengt Hallberg, Oscar Peterson and other predecessors inspired Lundgren, but he has absorbed and melded their elements into a style that Japanese and Scandinavian listeners have taken to their hearts. It may be that now is Lundgren’s time in the United States.
Go here and here for Rifftides reviews of previous Lundgren CDs.

Veteran journalist Ed Stover reviews Poodie James in today’s Yakima Herald-Republic.

Ramsey’s journalistic writing style carries the story along. It’s a good story, too, a page-turner that offers up romance, attempted murder, a Snidely Whiplash rascal of a mayor, a Dudley Do-Right police chief, a noble bum, a nosy reporter and a whorehouse. Set in the late 1940s, there is even a visit by President Truman.
Finally, there is Poodie, the loveable little junk collector who becomes the target of the wrathful mayor. Put it all together and you have a book that has become a best-seller for Libros Libertad, the Surrey, British Columbia-based literary small press that published the novel in early August.

To read all of Stover’s article, click here.
I’ll be doing a signing and reading tomorrow, Saturday, at 2 pm at Inklings Bookshop in Yakima. If you’re in the neighborhood, please drop by and say hello.

Last evening, fortunate listeners at The Seasons Fall Side-By-Side Music Festival heard the world premiere of a work that has everything it takes to become a staple in the classical piano trio literature. It was composer Daron Hagen’s Angel Band Trio #4, played by the Finisterra Trio. Based on humble themes in the Appalachian gospel song “Angel Band,” through its six movements the trio blooms into a big chamber piece graced with a melding of peculiarly American melodic strains, dissonant conflict and satisfying resolution. It is a modern statement rooted in tradition, soaring on rhythm, shot through with gripping harmonic patterns and saturated in emotion.
Hagen (pronounced like the first name of the ice cream), found his inspiration for the work in the story of Joyce Strosahl, a former concert violinist and the matriarch of the family that founded The Seasons. The trio was commissioned by three of her sons. The Finisterra Trio–pianist Tanya Stambuk, violinist Kwan Bin Park and cellist Kevin Krentz–poured themselves into the piece with a passion that left the audience in a state of mild shock at the end of the volatile rondo movement and brought them to their feet when the final notes faded.

Daron Hagen
The evening began with a discussion among the composer and the members of Finisterra, shepherded with his usual skill, knowledge and good humor by composer and conductor Bill McGlaughlin, the host of public radio’s St. Paul Sunday. During the conversation, Krentz, who was headed for a career as a singer before he ended up as a cellist, accompanied himself by strumming his instrument and sang “Wayfaring Stranger,” the inspiration for a previous Hagen work, Wayfaring Stranger, Piano Trio #3. He, Park and Stambuk then played the evocative second movement of that piece, setting up the performance, of the new work, which was a triumph for the composer and Finisterra.
For a description of Angel Band Trio #4, go to this page of Hagen’s web site. To see the schedule for The Seasons Fall Festival, which runs through Saturday, October 6, click here.
Saturday night at the Capitol Theater, McGlaughlin conducted the Yakima Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of his Béla’s Bounce. That’s a whimsical name for a serious work that reflects on what might have happened if Béla Bartok and Charlie Parker had met when they were living in New York in the early 1940s. The references to Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce” are subtle and integral to the piece. McGlaughlin incorporates Bartokian uses of strings and percussion with deep understanding of Bartok’s methods, but not in imitation. It’s a delightful work. Béla’s Bounce and Angel Band Trio #4 deserve to be on CD, and soon.

Karrin Allyson
The other guest artists for the YSO concert were McGlaughlin’s wife Karrin Allyson and her quintet. 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. Bassist Jeff Johnson, guitarist Dan Balmer and drummer Todd Strait frequently beamed as they luxuriated in the surroundings of the full orchestra playing McGlaughlin’s arrangements. Allyson included several Brazilian pieces, mainly by Antonio Carlos Jobim. She has an affinity for samba and announced that she has a Brazilian project in the works. Let us hope that it includes a recording. Allyson and her band perform again tonight, sans symphony orchestra, at The Seasons.
Between Allyson sets, McGlaughlin conducted the YSO in three movements of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. First, in his Philadelphia Scots accent, he regaled the audience with a summary of the legend on which Stravinskly based the work. “Apparently the firebird had a voice just like a bassoon,” he said. Ninety-eight years after its premiere, The Firebird still sounds revolutionary. McGlaughlin was obviously pleased with the performance the musicians gave him. At a gathering later, I overheard him tell Brooke Creswell, the orchestra’s music director and regular conductor, “Who’d have thought to find such a band in Yakima, Washington.”

Pardon my pride, but less than a month after seeing the light of day, Poodie James has gone into a second printing. Thank you.

For further information (how to order, for instance), click here.

Those of you who have become addicted to Carol Sloane’s blog, SloaneView, may have been concerned — as was I — that she had posted nothing for more than a month. I just spoke with her and learned that she is fine and that her husband is recovering. It was a near thing. Here is one line from Sloane’s new posting:

Labor Day, 6 AM: My husband Buck wakens me to complain of chest pain.

To read the whole story, go to SloaneView.
Get well, soon, Buck.

Rifftides reader Don Emanuel writes from Gillingham, Kent, in England:

There is a fascinating six-part thing on YouTube (obviously from a British TV programme) by Dick Hyman on a brief history of jazz piano, which I managed to miss when it was originally broadcast.

I missed it, too. As far as I know, it did not run in the US. Hyman long ago established himself as a wizard at replicating other pianists’ styles. He could easily have done the program alone, but the writer and musician Russell Davies serves as the low-key host and interlocutor. In what was an hour program, Hyman and Davies take us in eight- to ten-minute segments from Louis Moreau Gottschalk in 1855 to Cecil Taylor six minutes ago. Along the way, Hyman demonstrates the innovations of at least a baker’s dozen of the players who formed the jazz piano tradition.
Don’t be put off by the cornball title of the program, The Honky Tonk Professor. The show is serious and seriously entertaining. To save you the trouble of roaming around the YouTube site, rounding up the segments, the Rifftides staff has assembled links to the six parts. Just click on them, one at a time.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Near the end, Davies asks Hyman to play in his own style, “if you can remember who you are, after all that.” Hyman remembers, and plays brilliantly, as always. I’m sorry not to be able to see the hour as a continuum, but YouTube‘s digital load limits dictate breaking it into segments. If it is available on DVD, I haven’t been able to discover where. Mat Domber, the major domo of Arbors Records, reports, “We are working with Dick on a 5 CD History of Jazz piano along the same lines as the broadcast, only expanded.”
To hear Hyman as Hyman, rather than as a team of Doppelgängers, I recommend this trio CD with guitarist Howard Alden and the late bassist Bob Haggart.
I am grateful to Don Emanuel for calling the Hyman program to our attention. Rifftides could function without help from its readers, but not nearly as well. Your comments and tips are always welcome.

The Seasons Performance Hall opens its Fall Festival tonight with Miguel Zenon’s quartet. The nine days of music-making include James Moody, Bill Mays and Marvin Stamm with Alisa Horn, Matt Wilson, Martin Wind, Karrin Allyson, David Friesen, the world premiere of a new classical work by Daron Hagen played by the Finisterra Trio and, as the promoters say, much more. For full information, go here. If you are in or near Yakima, Washington — or can get there — you’re in for an exciting week in a world-class concert hall.

Jessica Williams is in love with Glenn Gould and doesn’t care who knows it. Here’s an excerpt from the latest entry in her blog, The Zone:

One night I was on a popular video sharing site (YouTube) and decided to watch and listen to Glenn Gould. I was dumbstruck. His music entered me and stayed there. It wasn’t what he was playing, it was the way he was playing it. I had never heard Bach played with such fullness and passion and gentleness. He caressed Bach, where most pianists play Bach like robots. They make it sound so mechanical. I know it was the way I was taught. To play the two and three part Inventions, one had to sit up perfectly straight, force your hands to emulate little claws, and play tic-toc tic-toc like a metronome. Like a machine. Hating math as I did, I certainly didn’t take to Bach. It wasn’t MUSIC to me.
I found Miles and Trane shortly after that, and spent the next fifty years believing that I hated Bach and all those “dead guys”.

There’s more to the affair than that. From passion for Gould, Williams builds an essay that challenges what she sees as a massive general fault in the cultural establishment, including many listeners.

When one improvises within the style of the early masters (read “dead” to detractors) one is also improvising within a style. The style, the rules, the framework are different. But it’s no less real, and, if done by one knowing the vocabulary, it is VALID. It is true art, true music.
There is a disease afflicting art and music, and it is not new. It is becoming more common, though. It is the need to put every single creation into a box, have a pre-made label handy for any contribution, and to dismiss, out of turn, anything that falls outside of one’s “tastes”… this is the elitist and critical view of our age, and it is destructive to children, to educators, to parents, to everyone.
It shows itself in our politics, our medicine, our science, and, most notably, in our ART (or lack thereof).

Regardless of whether you agree, it is a stimulating and provocative essay. To read the whole thing, go here.
YouTube has many videos of Gould. This one of the young Gould practicing a Bach partita is a good way to start.
Williams follows her essay with the transcript of a long interview; Jessica questioning Jessica. Here’s how it begins:

Q. What pianists do you like to listen to?
A. I like pianists who are musicians first. One of my favorites is Charles Mingus. His album Mingus Plays Piano on Impulse! is one of my favorite piano albums, period. And when I lived in Oakland, CA, I’d go down and hear Buddy Montgomery play piano. He was a vibist, but I loved his piano playing too. He played music. He didn’t just play piano.

It is difficult to say with certainty that Tatum’s Ultimatum is Williams’s most recent CD; she issues CDs the way the MacArthur Foundation issues “genius” grants (one of which she deserves). But it is new, and it is stunning. Despite its title, the solo album is not so much a tribute to Art Tatum or an evocation of his style as an exposition of the “fullness and passion and gentleness” that she admires in Gould, executed in some passages at supersonic speed with timing and accuracy that do recall Tatum.
One of her admirers who is also a world-class jazz pianist told me recently, “I think Jessica is the cleanest fast pianist I’ve ever heard.” She may also be one of the wryest. Humor is an essential component of her work. If you don’t believe it, listen to her romp through — of all things — Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur.” Even the dour Bechet would have smiled at her flourishes, her swing, the role reversal of her hands, her rhythmic displacments and reharmonizations. And Artie Shaw, who grew to hate “Begin The Beguine,” could not have resisted William’s version, if only for the joy of its suspended ending. Except for her “Ballade for A.T.” all of the pieces in the CD are standards, including a “trio” version of “Ain’t She Sweet” with Williams providing the synthesizer bass and drums, which seem anything but synthesized.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. — Samuel Johnson

That’s what I’m doing, with reasonable doggedness. I’ll be back soon, continuing a survey of recent CDs.

If you are interested in jazz and journalism (isn’t everyone?), I suggest that you check in once in a while with John Stoehr at Flyover: Art In The American Outback, since June part of the artsjournal.com bloggerhood. Some days Stoehr writes about music, some days about the news business, many days about both. Here’s a recent sample:

The first time I interviewed one of the organizers of the Savannah Jazz Festival, I was told to shut up and listen — you write what I tell you to write, son.
I was looking into why the city’s most respected jazz musician, bassist Ben Tucker, had not been invited to perform at the festival with a group called the Hall of Fame All-Stars…

To read all of the piece, go here.
Stoehr describes himself as, in effect, a self-made journalist who had a few things to learn about objectivity.

For me, unlike, I suppose, those reared in journalism schools, objectivity wasn’t an ethos or mode of thinking as much as it was a genre of writing. As someone who closely studied storytelling as practiced in the Western tradition, objectivity clearly had its own set of conventions, tropes and cliches, just as Restoration comedies, miracle plays, epic verse and horror movies had theirs.
In learning how to write in the genre of objectivity, just as I learned to write an academic paper (or a limerick or doggerel), I discovered something interesting and frustrating: that the rules of objective writing — he said, she said, officials say this, critics say this — were very limiting. Ironically, as I strove to tell the truth to the best of my ability, the writing conventions I used were sometimes keeping me from telling the truth.

Welcome to the club, John. Any writer who doesn’t worry about that is kidding himself and his readers. For the whole piece, go here.
I might wish that Stoehr were a little more scrupulous in proof-reading himself, but his content and his digests of other journalism thinkers are valuable, and I’m glad that he’s part of the blogosphere.

The Rifftides piece on Monk In North Carolina brought this response from the painter Norman Sasowsky.

I lived in NYC in the 50s and 60s and went to the Five Spot to hear Monk and others. Jazz music had a great influence on my painting and I did a few paintings influenced by my experiences. Visit my web site, if you are interested in seeing them.

I went to his site, was intrigued by Sasowsky’s paintings, then did a web search to learn more about him. Among the items I found was a piece of video with Sasowsky talking about and showing his work. If the expressive development he describes and illustrates seems to parallel the process of creative growth in jazz improvisers, perhaps it is no coincidence. Sasowsky’s choice of the Poulenc clarinet sonata as background music hooked me at the start. To see the video, click here.

Matthew Shipp, Piano Vortex (Thirsty Ear). Nearly twenty years ago, Shipp chose the jazz avant garde over the classical career he had prepared for at the New England Conservatory. For the most part, he has applied his formal technique to music that observes few traditional boundaries and guidelines. Keeping company with such intrepid explorers as David S. Ware, Roscoe Mitchell, Daniel Carter and Joe Morris, he has left the impression with some listeners that he is a Cecil Taylor disciple. I have not heard his playing that way and hear it even less so in Piano Vortex. Shipp hews closer to the jazz piano trio tradition than in anything else I have heard from him. That is hardly to say that you will mistake him for Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson or Bill Evans. His work here is closer to the stylistic center of jazz than much of his recent recording, certainly closer than his electronic ventures, but he is still wild, unpredictable and often startling.
Pieces titled “Sliding Through Space,” “Quivering With Speed” and “Slips Through The Fingers” proceed with wild bursts, salvos of repetition, explosions in the lower regions of the piano and plenty of dissonance. Yet, in “Sliding Through Space,” he ends with a passage that has the delicacy of Delius or a French impressionist. “Keyswing,” urged along by Morris’s walking bass and the drumming of Whit Dickey — on this track as locked into bebop as Philly Joe Jones or Shelly Manne — becomes a free jazz riff, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Much the same can be said of “To Vitalize,” which has an impressive solo from Morris. Morris is better known as a guitarist, but his pizzicato bass work here is fine. Elsewhere, his bowing is considerably less successful. Although at a couple of junctures, “Quivering With Speed” suggests John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” its primary characteristics are not harmonic interest but velocity and Shipp’s flurries of notes.
In previous recordings, Shipp’s music has often made me nervous. There are moments in Piano Vortex where it makes me smile.

As the fiftieth Monterey Jazz Festival wound down, we received this communique from Rifftides reader and Montery veteran Robert Walsh.

Thanks for passing along the NPR coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Jazz Festival, venue of many of my most cherished memories. (Jimmy Lyons and I worked together on the American College Jazz Festival sponsored by American Airlines in the early 1970s,) Here are some of those memories:
Saturday afternoon blues shows. Black ladies in red jump suits sashaying around with bright parasols. Jimmy Witherspoon and Joe Williams “cutting” each other for a half hour or more.
Joyous, spontaneous jitterbugging in a corner at stage left.
Thursday night “cast parties” featuring broiled tuna caught a day or two earlier off Montauk Point on Long Island by Percy Heath. Relaxed background jazz led by Mundell Lowe and his wife, Betty Bennett
Fending off bogus “press” (always with their whorish girl friends) while a volunteer at the gate. They tried every ruse in the book.
Watching the charismatic Black Jesus pimp and his entourage slithering through the lounge.
Raving about the superb high school all-stars on Sunday afternoons. I think Matt Catingub (Mavis Rivers’ son) was one. Another was young Ted Nash. The pro guests went all out themselves.
Eavesdropping on guitarist George Benson rehearsing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” with the MJQ. Georgeous; don’t think it was ever recorded.
Meeting an affable Buddy Rich (long on the outs with Jimmy Lyons because of a costly overtime performance), who had volunteered to fill in for an ailing Stan Kenton, despite having broken a big toe poolside at home. He goosed up “Intermission Riff” a tad, to the obvious delight of the band members, and playing his (to me, unique) Channel One Suite.
I wish more credit for the depth, diversity and quality of MJF performances was given to John Lewis, its music director for many years. He was constantly checking out new talent (e.g., Ornette Coleman) and people suggested to Jimmy Lyons. My personal example: I asked Jimmy at one point why Marian McPartland had never been invited to MJF. He told me John had long felt Marian was too derivative. But when, presumably at my belated prompting, Jimmy asked John to take another look at Marian, John found that she had at last found that elusive “voice.” (PS, John once told me his favorite jazz pianist was, of all people, Thelonious Monk.)
Bob Walsh

If you are not at the Monterey Jazz Festival’s fiftieth anniversary celebration this weekend — even if you are — we can direct you to a report that captures some of the festival’s history and flavor. Occasional Rifftides contributor Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento, California produced a Monterey piece for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. When you get to the site (that’s a link), click on the red and white “Listen” button.

Thelonious Monk’s importance and influence keep growing. As they do, his value to the culture at large gains deeper recognition. A major university is honoring Monk in the most meaningful way, erecting a monument made of his music and other arts it influences.
Thirty-seven years ago, Monk appeared with his quartet at the Raleigh, North Carolina, nightclub called the Frog & Nightgown. His performances there were the only times that Monk played in his home state. He was born in Rocky Mount, NC, in 1917 and moved with his parents to New York City the next year. Tonight, the two surviving members of the1970 edition of Monk’s quartet are playing a concert at Duke University in Durham, near Raleigh, a major event of Following Monk, Duke’s six-weeks of programs honoring the pianist.
From the series brochure:

The most original musician in jazz history was born in a dirt-road town in the plains of eastern North Carolina, all cotton fields, railroad tracks, and tobacco warehouses. Following Monk retraces a jazz prophet’s links to his native state, returning home to pay respect to a talent that transcends place.

In a concert billed as “Thelonious Monk’s Homecoming: Raleigh’s Frog & Nightgown, 1970,” Tenor saxophonist Paul Jeffrey and drummer Leroy Williams will be joined by another Monk veteran, bassist John Ore. From the new generation affected by Monk, Jason Moran will be at the piano. They are recreating the Frog & Nightgown dates. Concertgoers will also hear a recording of the 1970 Monk engagement.
The series opened last Saturday with a concert by the Kronos Quartet, Monk admirers and interpreters since before their genre-busting Monk Suite CD in 1985. Subsequent events will feature modern dance; a theatrical production, Misterioso, inspired by Monk; lectures by critic Stanley Crouch and historian Robin D.G. Kelley; and concerts by Jason Moran, Johnny Griffin, Henry Butler, Charles Tolliver, Andy Bey, Kenny Barron, Randy Weston, Jessica Williams, Barry Harris, Charlie Haden with Hank Jones, and Jerry Gonzalez with his Rumba Para Monk.
For dates, times and further information about this Monk festival, see the Duke Performances web site. Any time is a good time to be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region of North Carolina. With this Monk fiesta, now is a perfect time.
While you’re in a Monk’s mood, I recommend Thelonious Monk Live at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival, one of a new series of previously unissued Monterey concerts. It’s the classic Monk quartet with saxophonist Charlie Rouse and drummerBen Riley. But in this case, bassist Steve Swallow was conscripted at the last minute from Art Farmer’s quartet. In those days, Swallow had not yet abandoned the upright acoustic bass. He knew the tunes, fit in seamlessly with the Monk band, added an element of pzazz and played a splendid solo on “Bright Mississippi.” The regulars are in good form, too. The quartet becomes an octet for “Think Of One” and “Straight No Chaser” with the addition of four horns and arrangements by Buddy Collette. Trumpeter Bobby Bryant has a solo on “Think Of One” that is at once deeply thoughtful, logical and full of excitement. This is a solid addition to the Monk discography.

Finally, there is a Carmen McRae web site. It’s creators call it a tribute site. That designation smacks of fanzinedom, but don’t be misled; the McRae site is put together with knowledge as well as appreciation. It does not have a formal discography, but it lists, describes and in some cases illustrates her recordings decade by decade. It borrows an adequate short biography from the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and has a chronology excerpted from Leslie Gourse’s biography of McRae. Gourse’s book is dreadful, but this sample from her coverage of Carmen in the 1960s is right on the money:

Carmen hires pianist Norman Simmons as her accompanist, though he is wary of working with her because of her reputation for being tough, outspoken, and highly opinionated. Simmons soon learns to love and respect his boss on a professional level; he observes that she simply doesn’t let any one “stomp around” in her life.

That’s an understatement, as Carol Sloane makes plain in her story in a section of essays about McRae.

Carmen McRae
Each page of the site is loaded with photographs from all phases of Carmen’s life. The McRae site includes a reduction of the essay I wrote for the booklet accompanying the two CDs of her 1976 performances at Ratso’s, a club in Chicago, not, as the site reports, in Florida. Here is the unreconstituted version:

Carmen McRae never had to confront the kind of Tin Pan Alley songpluggers’ dross that her idol Billie Holiday was handed in the 1930s, but she had the same ability to transform ordinary material into something of value. Anyone who recalls the transitory Top Forty versions of the 1970s pop songs McRae sings here will marvel as she fashions them into proper companions for imperishable classics. She brings Bob Lind’s “Elusive Butterfly” and Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” into the room with Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi” and makes them welcome. “Elusive Butterfly” and “All By Myself” may not be great songs, but they had quality in a decade whose hit parade did not overflow with deathless works. Carmen had an unfailing ear for the best material.
For her, the main attraction of some of these songs may well have been the lyrics. A thorough musician who knew the implications of a song’s every chord, Carmen was also a supreme vocal actress, homing in on the emotional heat that would bond her to the audience. She often said that words were more important to her than melody. In her incomparably literate and deeply felt interpretations of lyrics, you can hear her love of the meaning in verbal connection. The pain and the catch in her throat are real when she sings, “I won’t let sorrow hurt me, not like it’s hurt me before.”
This collection also has generous samples of another aspect of her ability to communicate. As an audience schmoozer, Carmen was in a league with Dizzy Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley. Listen to the spontaneity of her funny asides during “‘Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and her earthy ones in “Just A Little Lovin’.” In her twenties and thirties she was gorgeous, with an exotic luminosity that glowed through the wariness she accumulated on the road in tough bands and rough clubs. As she aged, she took on an earth mother solidity and an armor of irony, but when she was pleased her face lit up with the young Carmen’s smile.

Browsing the McRae site accomplishes what a good music site should; it makes you want to hear the music. It leads the reader to dozens of McRae recordings. If I had to choose just one for my desert island, it would be The Great American Song Book, a dumb title for a great album. This brilliant 1972 collaboration at Donte’s in Los Angeles with pianist Jimmy Rowles includes “The Ballad of Thelonious Monk” and an “I Cried For You” that sets a singers’ standard for up-tempo relaxation.
You Tube has a generous handful of Carmen McRae performances. I recommend all of them, but be sure not to miss this one and this one. And take a look at that web site. It’s worth your time.

The veteran singer Bob Stewart’s stock in trade is superior ballads delivered with intelligent interpretation, good phrasing and deep feeling. His new compilation CD, Did I Remember? gathers tracks from several of his collections and finds him generally at his best. Stewart’s support troops include pianist Hank Jones, saxophonist Frank Wess, bassist Michael Moore and drummer Mel Lewis. His backing on two tracks is by the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, on others by string ensembles and studio orchestras. Among songs like the title tune, “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “If I Love Again” and “Prelude to a Kiss, his cover of the Barbra Streisand eighties hit “Someone That I Used to Love” is a ringer. Stewart gives the song his best shot, but it doesn’t hold up to the other material. He compensates with his sensitive treatment of “The More I See You.”
To hear and see Stewart in a combo with Frank Wess on tenor saxophone in obligato and soloing, click here for “Never Let Me Go.”
Coming soon, maybe even tomorrow: the continuation of our random survey of recent recordings.

A few of the things that are keeping my ears and eyes busy:
Bud Shank and Bill Mays: Beyond The Red Door (Jazzed Media). Old friends and co-conspirators in alto saxophone/piano duets at the highest level. Their melding of Russ Freeman’s “The Wind” and Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks” is exquisite.
Sam Yahel: Truth And Beauty (Origin). Yahel’s Hammond B-3 Organ, Joshua Redman’s tenor sax and Brian Blade’s drums. They were good when they were known as Ya Ya. They’re better now.
Miles Davis Quintet Live At The 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF). Davis, George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams when Davis’s new sidemen kept him on his toes and Williams liked to throw Miles off-balance to test his reflexes. That was good for Miles. You can hear the exhiliration and feel the tension.
Vern Sielert Dektet: From Here To There (Pony Boy). I heard Sielert the other night as the trumpet soloist with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra in his piece “Matranga’s Tonk.” He knocked me out. That piece is here, along with ten other examples of his high-level writing and playing. I’d love this CD if all it had was Tom Varner’s French horn, Rich Coles’ tenor sax and Sielert’s solos on “Matranga’s.” Sielert is an academic who can.
Gigi Gryce: Nica’s Tempo (Savoy). Gryce’s writing for a Birth-of-the-Cool size ensemble in this 1955 album is just cool enough for Art Farmer, Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Cleveland, Eddie Bert, Horace Silver, Julius Watkins and Cecil Payne, among others. The four quartet sides feature Thelonious Monk as Gryce’s sideman in the title tune and Monk’s wonderful “Gallop’s Gallop.”
Charles Mingus Live in ’64 (Jazz Icons). This is one of the new batch of DVDs in the invaluable Jazz Icons series. It captures the Mingus sextet with Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Coles and Dannie Richmond in three stops on their European tour. It is absorbing to witness the relationships among this extraordinary band while hearing everyone play so beautifully. More later on this series.
Stories of Anton Chekhov. If you haven’t read Chekhov in a while, you may have forgotten how depressing he can be in his subject matter while lifting you to the skies with the beauty of his writing and his ability to delineate character in the sparest brush strokes of prose.

Mark your calendars, set your clocks. Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard reports that next Monday’s concert in tribute to Willis Conover will be broadcast live on the Voice Of America. Start time is 7:30 pm EDT, September 17. You can hear the concert on the VOA’s live internet stream (that’s a link).
Paquito D’Rivera will lead the band with Milcho Leviev, George Mraz, Valery Ponomarev and Horacio Hernandez. Birchard reports one other important fact: He, John Birchard, will be the on-air host of the program.
For further details, go here.