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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Archives for 2008

The Film Music Of Ralph Rainger

The release of a new CD, The Film Music Of Ralph Rainger, is the occasion for my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Coupled with an article about the contemporary motion picture composer A.B. Rahman, it is headlined, Another Who Has Been Unjustly Forgotten and begins: 

For years, Jack Benny opened his CBS radio and television broadcasts with “Love in Bloom.” The comedian’s violin butchery of his theme song became a running coast-to-coast Sunday night gag. As a result, the piece became even more famous than Bing Crosby had made it with his hit record in 1934. Generations of listeners and viewers heard Bob Hope close his NBC shows with “Thanks for the Memory,” which he introduced in a movie, “The Big Broadcast of 1938.” The song was inseparable from Hope’s career. 

Ralph Rainger, the man who wrote those songs, was a pianist and recovering lawyer from Newark, N.J., who also composed such standards as “Easy Living,” “If I Should Lose You,” “Here Lies Love,” “Moanin’ Low,” “June in January,” “Please” and “Blue Hawaii,” most often with lyricist Leo Robin. Rainger and Robin turned out dozens of songs for Hollywood movies. They were frequently on the hit parade with Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and the Gershwins. George Gershwin died at age 38, Rainger at 41. But while Gershwin’s fame increased after his death, Rainger’s name faded. With their beguiling melodies and challenging chord progressions, Rainger’s works are frequent vehicles for improvisation. Yet, in my experience, most musicians who play those songs respond with puzzled looks when asked who wrote them. That might have been the case with bassist Chuck Berghofer, pianist Jan Lundgren, drummer Joe La Barbera and the incomparable vocalist Sue Raney until producer Dick Bank recruited them to record the CD “The Film Music of Ralph Rainger” (Fresh Sound). 

To read the whole thing, run out and buy a copy of the Journal or click here for the online version. The article praises the CD, but it concentrates on Rainger’s successful, grotesquely terminated career. The album demands greater attention, and gets it here. 

The Chuck Berghofer Trio: Thanks For The Memory, The Film Music Of Ralph Rainger (Fresh Sound).

Producer Dick Bank swears that this is his last project. If that proves to be true, he is retiring a champion. He provides Berghofer with a classy repertoire, two superb sidemen and the first leader assignment in the bassist’s distinguished career. Berghofer gets the music underway by playing the melody of “Miss Brown to You.” The stentorian sound of his bass is beautifully captured by engineers Talley Sherwood and Bernie Grundman. La Barbera and Lundgren gently escort Berghofer into a chorus of improvisation. Lundgren follows with his first solo in a CD full of work that makes this the best recording so far by a remarkable pianist. In the Journal piece, I wrote:

…it is the first all-Rainger album since pianist Jack Fina managed to reduce Rainger’s tunes to dreary cocktail music in a 1950s LP. Mr. Lundgren, a brilliant Swedish pianist, plumbs the songs’ harmonic souls. He illuminates even the prosaic “Blue Hawaii,” which — to Rainger’s horror — became a huge hit in 1937. “It will disgrace us,” he told Robin. “It’s a cheap melody . . . a piece of c-.” 

(In a touch of irony that Rainger must have come to appreciate, sheet music sales of “Blue Hawaii” barely exceeded 40,000, but sales of Crosby’s recording of the song skyrocketed and it was on Your Hit Parade for six weeks.) 

It is not only Lundgren’s harmonic ear and gift for chord voicings that elevate his work here, but also his unforced swing and an easy keyboard touch that puts him in a class with Jimmy Jones, Ellis Larkins, Tommy Flanagan and his countryman Bengt Hallberg. His tag ending on “Sweet is the Word for You,” with Berghofer walking him home and La Barbera nudging every fourth beat, is exhilarating. Lundgren’s wry interpolations are a significant part of the fun. They show deep familiarity with, among other sources, Lester Young, as In two quite different uses of a phrase from Young’s 1943 recording of “Sometimes I’m Happy.” 

Throughout, La Barbera reminds listeners why, from his days with Bill Evans, he has been one of the most respected drummers in jazz. His touch with brushes equates to Lundgren’s at the piano, and he employs it to construct a full-chorus solo on “Blue Hawaii” proving that a drum set can be a melody instrument.

Sue Raney is the guest artist for two of Rainger’s best-known songs, “If I Should Lose You” and “Thanks for the Memory.” They are perfectly served by the richness of her voice and interpretations. The performances are among her best on record.

With his unaccompanied “Love in Bloom,” Lundgren banishes recollections of Jack Benny’s violin clowning. He finds harmonic treasure beneath the surface of that abused melody, as he does in another solo piece, “Faithful Forever.” Hugely popular in the 1930s, those songs are less known today than many of Rainger’s others. The jaunty “Havin’ Myself a Time,” which Lundgren and Berghofer perform as a duo, is nearly forgotten, but the harmonic possibilities Lundgren finds in it show that it is worthy of revival. 

In addition to the trio music, the CD has a ten-minute final track that amounts to a little documentary. Lundgren introduces a 1937 interview with Rainger. Bank, the producer, introduces a segment of a1940 ceremony of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in which Rainger plays the piano and his partner Leo Robin sings “Love in Bloom.” The 32-page CD booklet is packed with information and photographs. If I make all of this sound like an exercise in nostalgia, do not be misled. The musical material may be standard songs from the 1930s, but Lundgren, Berghofer and La Barbera constitute one of the hippest trios of our time. This album is on my top-ten list for 2008 and will be permanently installed in my CD player for a long time.

Meet Ralph Rainger

Rainger was a very good pianist. In 1933, Paramount featured him playing his music in a promotional short subject that included cameo appearances by Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier. It ends with superimposed shots of Rainger improvising separate parts simultaneously on three pianos. Sound familiar? Of course, but it was three decades before Bill Evans recorded Conversations With Myself. I wanted to put the film directly into Rifftides, but embedding the clip is forbidden. To see it, click here.

Hubbard Update

For a comprehensive Freddie Hubbard obituary, see Peter Keepnews’s article in this morning’s New York Times.

Freddie Hubbard Is Gone

Freddie Hubbard died this morning in the Sherman Oaks district of Los Angeles. He was hospitalized there since he had a heart attack on November 26. Hubbard was 70. 

From the trumpeter’s first recording with the Montgomery Brothers in 1958, it 

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was evident that reports coming out of Indianapolis were true: the city had produced a remarkable trumpet player, one who might equal another twenty-year-old, Lee Morgan. After his arrival in New York, Hubbard quickly proved the point. The two were the enfants terribles of their generation of post-bop trumpeters. Hubbard succeeded Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, then went on to a solo career. Hubbard and Morgan admired and, in one celebrated recording, challenged one another. 

The precision, lyricism and harmonic ingenuity of Hubbard’s playing flourished on a wave of power. Initially, there was a large component of Clifford Brown in his work, but his gifts and his outsized personality overrode any possibility that Brown or anyone else, would dominate his style. There were low points in Hubbard’s career: when he answered the seductive call of supposed riches and made a few tepid crossover albums for Columbia, and after 1992 when his embouchure suffered permanent damage from an infected lip. Nonetheless, the dozens of recordings he made under his own name average high in quality, including the sets for Creed Taylor’s CTI label that took a pounding from many critics. The early Hubbard albums on the Blue Note label, packed with virtuosity and excitement, are uniformly excellent. Some of his most compelling solos are on other peoples’ dates, notably so with Bill Evans on Interplay and Oliver Nelson on The Blues And The Abstract Truth. 
After the difficulty with his chops, Hubbard was frequently featured in concert and on recordings with the New Jazz Composers Octet, a cooperative band spearheaded by trumpeter and arranger David Weiss, who idolized Hubbard and later became his manager. I heard them at the Vienne Festival in France in 2000. The band sounded wonderful and was clearly pulling for him, but Hubbard struggled on his signature pieces “Sky Dive,” “Red Clay” and “One of Another Kind.” I wrote about the festival for Gene Lees’ JazzLetter. 

Freddie Hubbard, the last great trumpet stylist and innovator in jazz, has been through a miserable few years. He failed to care for an infected split lip and attempted, with characteristic Hubbard bravado, to overblow through the problem. Surgery made it worse. He told me that royalties from his compositions have brought him a comfortable living, but that not being able to play well has kept him frustrated. For him there is agony in the solution, the dogged hard work to rebuild his embouchure. Although he knows that playing long tones saved other trumpeters, he said, “Man, that sh– is so boring.” Hubbard’s constitution and metabolism militate against boredom.

The compulsion to power his way through good times and bad resulted in glorious music and monumental frustration. I last spoke with Freddie in 2006 at a reception for National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. He was in good spirits, if rather subdued, and seemed to have accepted that his chops weren’t coming back. We sat around remembering good times together in New Orleans and he favored me with a few unprintable Art Blakey stories. Later at a post-function concert that evolved into a sort of jam session, he was asked to sit in. He declined. 
Obituaries are beginning to appear on web sites. Newspapers will have them in the morning. This one from Billboard has the essential biographical details. 
No obituary can transmit the authority, muscle and emotional reach of Hubbard’s playing. Here he is in 1984 with Blakey, pianist Walter Davis, Jr. and bassist Buster Williams playing Benny Golson’s “I Remember  Clifford.”
  
To see and hear Freddie Hubbard twenty-two years earlier, when he was the fieriest member of The Jazz Messengers, visit this Rifftides archive installment.

Progress (+ -) Report

My PC-to-iMac conversion project is coming along nicely. I should have the new computer figured out any year now. It will be nice if that year turns out to be 2009.

 

Compatible Quotes: Computers

User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” ~Dave Barry 

But they are useless. They can only give you answers. ~Pablo Picasso 

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. ~John F. Kennedy

Weekend Extra: Lester Young

With so little video of Lester Young, every foot of him performing on film is precious. Loren Schoenberg calls attention to a performance by Young that showed up recently on You Tube. Whoever submitted the clip from a kinescope of Art Ford’s Jazz Party television program provided no information beyond Young’s name. Ray Bryant is the pianist. The bassist is Vinnie Burke, who was on many of Ford’s shows. Does anyone recognize the drummer? We catch a glimpse of cornetist Rex Stewart, who does not play with Young on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” The sound is about a beat out of synchronization with the video. At the end of the piece, Ford introduces Sylvia Syms, whose song is chopped aborning. Such are the vagaries of You Tube; you take what you get. In this case, we are grateful to get Lester. This was most likely 1958 or ’59, shortly before he died.  

    

           

To be reminded how rich jazz was with major musicians fifty years ago and to see a substantial section of one of Ford’s broadcasts, click here.

Joyeux Noel, Frohe Weihnachten, Feliz Navidad, Christmas Alegre, Lystig Jul, メリークリスマス, Natale Allegro, 圣诞快乐, Καλά Χριστούγεννα, 즐거운 성탄, И к всему доброй ночи

Whatever your language, the Rifftides staff wishes you a Merry Christmas, a happy holiday season, a rewarding 2009 and good listening. 

   

CDs: Bley And Silver

While probing the mysteries of the Macintosh universe and meeting with frustrations, roadblocks and delights (man, this thing is FAST), I have continued to listen. Here are impressions of two of the CDs that have kept me company during my slam-bang self-tutorial and late-night iMac school. 


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Carla Bley And Her Remarkable Big Band: Appearing Nightly (Watt/ECM). Somehow, this album got by me when it came out in late summer. Since it arrived a few days ago, I’ve listened to it repeatedly, chuckling, occasionally laughing out loud and shaking my head at Bley’s ingenuity and the skill and good humor of her soloists. It had been too long since my last Carla Bley fix.  

Briefly, then, the premise of these pieces seems to be that nostalgia is what it used to be, only more fun. The title composition, “Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid,” was a commission from the 2005 Monterey Jazz Festival. It begins with Bley unaccompanied at the piano. She synthesizes a set that she might have played at the Monterey bar where she worked as a teenaged cocktail pianist in the 1950s. In one minute and twenty-seven seconds, she melds into a coherent whole, phrases from “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Night and Day,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “Stella By Starlight” and “Sweet and Lovely.” Then the suite begins. Whether or not it fufills the CD booklet’s tongue-in-cheek claim that it is “A Carla Bley Masterpiece in Four Parts,” it is serious jazz orchestration at a high level. The leader’s usual array of superior soloists has a field day with it. 
Bley was commissioned by a band on the Italian island of Sardinia to write the CD’s first two pieces, “Greasy Gravy” and “Awful Coffee,” around the theme of food. There are plenty of allusions to support the proposition…”Salt Peanuts,” “Watermelon Man,” “Tea for Two,” “You’re the Cream in My Coffee, ” “Chopsticks,” “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Hey, Pete, Let’s Eat Mo’ Meat.” Bley’s “Someone to Watch,” also loaded with quotes, and Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You” wrap up the album. The recording took place before an audience at a night club in Paris, so, naturally, Bley felt obligated to work in an orchestrated quote from “April in Paris.” 
Lest I leave you with the impression that the CD is a variety of musical vaudeville, I assure you that there is a master arranger at work here. For all the fun and games, Bley’s canny use of voicings often makes thirteen horns sound like at least four more. She builds dramatic contrast between the horn sections one moment and achieves tight integration among them the next. There is a surprise of one kind or another around nearly every corner.
Bley’s settings for soloists inspire their creativity and swing. Trumpeter Lew Soloff, trombonist Gary Valente, drummer Billy Drummond and saxophonists Andy Sheppard, Wolfgang Puschnig and Julian Arguelles stand out. Steve Swallow drives the band and provides much of its texture and color. Playing electric bass, he retains the sound, soul and propulsiveness he had on the acoustic instrument he left behind decades ago, while gaining a guitar-like fluency in the upper register. He is a remarkable musician. 
I don’t know whether this CD is a masterpiece. I do know that it’s an hour of superbly written and performed music that can lift spirits. 

Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers (Blue Note). Horace Silver made a stir with Stan

Horace Silver.jpg

Getz and with his own trio album in the first half of the 1950s. But this is the set that sent him into the consciousness of listeners around the world when it was released in 1955. Silver’s infectious piano playing, the brilliance and directness of his compositions and the chemistry of the quintet he co-led with drummer Art Blakey propelled him into a successful career that has lasted more than half a century. 
The album is one of the pillars of the hard bop movement and a de riguer item in any halfway serious collection. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, iconic soloists, constituted one of the great horn partnerships of the fifties; Silver, Blakey and bassist Doug Watkins a rhythm section that inspired musicians everywhere. Silver’s eight compositions, including “The Preacher,” “Doodlin’,” “Creepin’ In,” and “Room 608,” are classics, basic repertoire items for serious jazz players and listeners. If you are one of the thousands of travelers stranded by the Northern Hemisphere’s dreadful holiday weather, I wish you the good luck of having Horace Silver and Jazz Messengers on your iPod.

The Bill Evans Christmas Serenade

Christmas week is underway, time to listen to the only vocal performance Bill Evans is know to have recorded. I wish I had thought of posting the audio clip, but full credit goes to Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages. Rifftides reader Russ Neff called it to our attention. Click on this link. When you get to the Bill Evans site, click on the word “Here” in the first panel. Prepare to smile.

Weekend Extra: Two Violins With “Four Brothers”

All I can tell you about this is that the violinists are Katica Illenyi and Csaba Illenyi.The Hungarian Wikipedia entry did not help me learn more. I only wish that Jimmy Giuffre had heard this version of his best-known composition and arrangement. 

             

Thanks to Bobby Shew for calling this to our attention.

There Will Be A Brief Pause

Posting will resume after I have spent a little time getting to know my new iMac. After beginning on a KayPro 2 and spending more than twenty years with PCs, I have switched to Macintosh. So far, it is exhilarating, but there is a lot to learn. I feel like the audience in the commercial that announced the advent of the Mac twenty-four years ago.

 

Dave Brubeck, 88 Keys, 88 Years, Another Honor

On Tuesday, Dave Brubeck was inducted into the California Hall of Fame along with elevenBrubeck.jpg others including actors Jane Fonda and Jack Nicholson, fitness maven Jack LaLanne, musician and producer Quincy Jones, chef Alice Waters and — posthumously — Theodore Geiss (Dr. Seuss), scientist Linus Pauling, architect Julia Morgan, and Dorothea Lange, the photographer best known for documenting the human toll of the Great Depression.

Brubeck turned eighty-eight on December 6. Paul Conley of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California, spoke with him yesterday about the honor and about his plans. To hear the conversation and see Conley’s video of Brubeck, click here.

“What? You Know About Leo?”

Shortly after I posted the Doug’s Picks selection of Wadada Leo Smith’s new CD, Tabligh (see the center column), I was in a meeting with Daron Hagen. I casually mentioned Smith. “What?” he said, full of excitement. “You know about Leo?” It turns out that Hagen, a distinguished composer of operas, chamber music and orchestral works, was a teaching colleague of Smith at Bard College and holds him in high regard. That led to a discussion of one of Hagen’s — and my — favorite propositions, that music is music and there are only two varieties–good music and what Duke Ellington called the other kind. Hagen places Smith squarely in the first category.

Coincidentally, You Tube has just put up a video of Smith and his Golden Quartet. It is apparently from a television program, but in typical You Tube fashion the only information we get is the names of the players: Smith, pianist Vijay Iyer (misidentified as Lyer), bassist John Lindberg and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. Before they play, Smith speaks briefly about the nature of the blues. The piece ends inconclusively, but given the nature of the music it is difficult to know whether that is by design or because the video reached You Tube’s time limit.

There is a second piece, evidently from the same program. If you watch it, I recommend setting aside preconceived notions. The music is fascinating – and wild. This also cuts off unceremoniously, an annoying feature of far too many web videos. Click here.

Frances Lynne

From San Francisco comes news of the death of Frances Lynne, the singer who worked with Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck before there was a Brubeck Quartet. Ms. Lynne went on to sing with Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa as the big band era wound down. Her first recording, however, was not until 1991 with her husband, John Coppola’s band. She and the trumpeter were married for fifty-six years. She was eighty-two years old. Reviewing her CD, Remember, I wrote, “Often discussed but seldom heard, Ms. Lynne is a charming singer.”

She worked in the late 1940s at San Francisco’s Geary Cellar in a group called the Three Ds in which Brubeck was the pianist. In 1949, Desmond stole her, Brubeck and bassist Norman Bates from the Three Ds leader for a job at the Band Box near Palo Alto. In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, Ms. Lynne recalled that experience.

Oh, it was a funny little gig, just an ordinary little gig, and the people from Stanford used to come in and sit there and inspire us, especially Dave and Paul. They’d get on a kick where they’d play all these fugal things. It was just a great happy thing. When I was singing, Paul played behind me. He never got in my way. He was the kind of player who was intuitive and inspirational. He’d never do anything unmusical. He was just a sweet, sweet person. He was interested in what you said and what you thought. Everybody likes that. He was attentive and he was very, very talented. Nobody got a sound like that out of the alto saxophone.

And, you know, those little jobs at the Geary Cellar and the Band Box never seem to die. I still hear people talking about them. And I’m glad, very happy, because that’s my only claim to immortality. I got a lot of offers in those days, but I wanted to stay with the group. I was like a little puppy, I was having so much fun. 

At The Band Box, 1948 1.jpg

Norman Bates, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Frances Lynne at the Band Box, 1949

After the Band Box job ended and following her time with Krupa, Ms. Lynne worked in New York, including a spot on television, then returned to San Francisco. She and her husband kept their home there while Coppola went on the road as a member of Woody Herman’s Third Herd in the fifties and later led his band in the Bay Area. She sang occasionally, always winning praise for her intonation, phrasing and sensitivity to the meaning of lyrics.

For more on Frances Lynne, see Jesse Hamlin’s article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Other Places: Europe

Among Rifftides readers in Europe are the proprietors of three web logs helpful to those who wish to keep up with developments on the continent.

Tony Emmerson’s Prague Jazz concentrates on music in the Czech Republic. George Mraz,

Emmerson.jpg Emil Viklický, Frantisek Uhlir, Gustav Brom, Miroslav VitouÅ¡ and a few other Czech musicians are widely known. Emmerson (pictured) writes about them, but he also keeps tabs on the current crop of players known mainly in Eastern Europe. He sometimes stretches the definition of what many listeners consider jazz, but he’s on top of developments. Here is an excerpt from a piece about a band at the new Charles Bridge Jazz Club.

As well as a good venue a good evening requires a good band, and the Luboš Andršt Blues Band certainly falls into this category. We here at Prague Jazz are proud fans of the mighty Luboš and the musicians he usually plays with. With him for this concert were perennially funky electric bassist Wimpy Tichota, drum powerhouse Pavel Razím, and Jan Holeček on keys and vocals.

What the band delivered was three sets of hard-hitting electric blues, ranging from gospel spirituals to a rocking blast of “Cross Road Blues” (R. Johnson). Their arrangement was very close to the Cream interpretation that has become known as the definitive version to many people. LuboÅ¡’s improvised solo was dazzling, while Holeček wailed the lyrics with passion. His voice is very similar to a young Robert Plant, and he could no doubt make a good living in a Led Zeppelin tribute band if he was so inclined.

Emmerson also sometimes posts photographs of Czech musicians in action, like this one of the amazing singer Iva Bittová and Mraz in a recent concert in Bern with Emil Viklický’s trio. 

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Laco Tropp and Iva Bittová, photograph by Benno

To visit Prague Jazz, click here.

The German trumpeter Bruno Leicht (pictured) has a blog with the cumbersome name, Bruno
Leicht presents His Old & New Swingin’ Dreams
. He posts at irregular intervals, alternates 

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between German and English and devotes himself more to American jazz from the classic and bebop periods than to what is happening now in Germany. Still, he manages to unearth interesting audio clips and videos and occasionally comes up with anecdotes that make his pages worth a visit. An example: His encounter with Chet Baker.

The band seemed to be stoned which didn’t seem to bother Chet. He was more worried about his horn which didn’t work properly. He sat there, pushing the valves, then he grabbed the mike and asked something like: “Some trumpet player around?” I was seated right in front of him and said: “Yes!” He intended to play on my trumpet and so I fetched it from the checkroom and handed it over to him. He took it, looked at it and counted: “One, two, three, four!” into a very fast and boppish “Conception,” George Shearing’s masterpiece, a tune as closely connected to Miles Davis as it was to Chet Baker.

He played it in the key of C, that’s what I remember. After the tune, he waved my trumpet over his head, smiled at me in a sardonic way and pretended dashing my horn in some corner. I was quite shocked but of course got the joke in the same second. This was my first real instrument, a Getzen Capri but with a little hole in the middle tube.

What do I remember yet? He played the rest of the concert on his own horn and … he kept my valve oil. When I arrived later at home I found it gone. Chet Baker, a thief!

To check out Bruno Leicht’s blog, go here.

In Russia, the editor of Jazz.Ru magazine, Cyril Moshkow (could that be his real name?)

Moshkow.jpgoperates an extensive web site in Russian. But, Moshkow (pictured) tells, Rifftides,

For those disadvantaged by little or no Russian, we do have a safe (however tiny) harbor in English. At least we mean it to keep our Western visitors informed on what we do, but, alas, I cannot say that we update the English section too often.

Nonetheless, the site has helpful tidbits like this:

FAQ: IS THERE JAZZ IN RUSSIA, REALLY? The answer is “YES”. The first jazz concert in Russia took place in Moscow on October 1, 1922. The band was local, called no less than The First Jazz Band of the Republic, led by not a musician, but a dancer, 

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one Valentin Parnakh (1891-1951)(pictured), who also was a gifted poet, poetry translator, and literature historian, and spend seven years (from 1915 to 1922) in Western Europe. That band was later employed by the great theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, in one of his plays where the sounds of live jazz should represent the “Western reality.” The band included piano, saxophone, clarinet, trombone and a trap set. One of the musicians known to be a part of this band was pianist Yevgeny Gabrilovich (1899-1993), later a successful playwright and movie screenplay writer.

Moshkow’s magazine concentrates on contemporary Russian jazz of all stripes. The current online edition in English, for instance, has short pieces on tenor saxophonist Igor Butman and the multi-instrumentalist Arkady Shilkloper, two of Russia’s best-known jazz players.

We will add the web addresses of these sites to the list in the Rifftides center column of links to Other Places.

CD: Ernestine Anderson

Ernestine Anderson, Hot Cargo (Fresh Sound).   

In these 1956 sessions, Anderson’s early singing has lost none of its naturalness, musicality or appeal. HHot Cargo.jpger accompaniments by Harry Arnold’s big band and Duke Jordan’s trio sound equally fresh. I wrote earlier that this was one of the best vocal albums of the 1950s. I am revising that assessment. It is one of the best vocal recordings of the last half of the twentieth century. Sweden’s Metronome label originally released this perennially new collection as It’s Time For Ernestine. Mercury issued the LP in the US two years later and called it Hot Cargo, despite the disapproval of its producer, Börje Ekberg, and Anderson. Whatever the title, it is still time for Ernestine.

CD: Wadada Leo Smith

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, Tabligh, (Cuneiform).  stalwart of the avant garde forWadada.jpg nearly four decades, Smith continues at the head of the pack in free jazz. In this set of four moody, barely-structured pieces, the trumpeter frequently evokes late-period Miles Davis. He sometimes takes the horn below its natural range to explore pedal-tone territory that Davis never visited. Pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Shannon Jackson have developed an uncanny ability to react to Smith’s flights of unrestrained imagination. The sidemen also have impressive solo moments. Iyer’s virtuosic turns are notable. On the long title track, the four interact with astonishing energy and empathy.

CD: Alexander String Quartet

Alexander String Quartet,

Retrospections (Foghorn Classics).

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The ASQ plumbs the seriousness, assertiveness and sense of glee in quartets 1, 2 and 3 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wayne Peterson. Peterson draws on inspiration from sources as varied as samba, bluegrass, the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and predecessors including Bartok and Ives. He integrates those influences in spirit, not letter. Played by the Alexander String Quartet with deep understanding, Peterson’s pieces take the listener to unanticipated places. This music is not for background to household chores, dog-walking or doing your taxes. It rewards listening with your feet up, your head back, your eyes closed, a glass of something good nearby and your imagination ready to soar.

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Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, … [MORE]

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