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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

You are here: Home / 2008 / Archives for October 2008

Archives for October 2008

Compatible Quotes: Guitar

October 13, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice.--Andres Segovia There is only one thing more beautiful than one guitar; two guitars--Frederic Chopin They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''--Wallace Stevens, The Man With The Blue Guitar … [Read more...]

Correspondence: About Erroll Garner

October 11, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Julius LaRosa sent a reminiscence. This quote from Wikipedia: "Garner was self-taught and remained an 'ear player' all his life - he never learned to read music." A hundred years ago we shared a bill in Pittsburgh...or was it Boston...or was it Chicago...and by coincidence went there on the same flight. Anyway, during the usual small talk I asked, re: "MISTY", how he came up with that gorgeous melody. He replied, I daresay innocently, "I was sittin' in a plane, just like this...imaginatin'." … [Read more...]

Graham Collier On The Web

October 10, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The British composer, arranger and leader Graham Collier has a new web site that should win awards for design, thoroughness and easy navigation. The home page contains a link to a thirteen-minute montage of music from nine of Collier's eighteen albums over forty years. The montage is designed to be played while the visitor roams the site. It is a clever teaser, making the roamer want to hear more of Collier's daring writing played by superb musicians, among them trumpeters Kenny Wheeler, Ted … [Read more...]

Bill Charlap On The Radio

October 9, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The Bill Charlap Trio with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington played Wednesday night in a live broadcast on National Public Radio and Newark, New Jersey's, WBGO-FM. The program of well more than an hour consisted of one of the trio's sets at New York's Village Vanguard. Coincidentally, Charlap opened with Gigi Gryce's "Satellite" (See the next item). If you missed the broadcast, you may be glad to know that NPR archived it. You can listen to it by going here and clicking on … [Read more...]

Recent Listening: Art Farmer And Gigi Gryce

October 9, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Art Farmer-Gigi Gryce Quintet: Complete 1954-1955 Prestige Recordings (Fresh Sound). In 1953, Farmer arrived in New York from California with Lionel Hampton's band, Gryce from his Fulbright studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honneger. The next year they began a two-year collaboration in a quintet that amalgamated their instrumental skills with approaches to form and harmony that eased away from the rigidities of bebop. Farmer, with his lyricism and relatively soft tone, already … [Read more...]

Recent Listening (And Viewing): Zoot, Dog, Woman & Handy

October 8, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

It's a pleasure to run into old friends in places where you don't expect them. Yesterday, I encountered Zoot Sims in a dog food commercial. He was in good company; a cute pooch and a beautiful woman. The music was "Blinuet," one of several pieces George Handy wrote for the 1956 ABC Parmount album Zoot Sims Plays Alto, Tenor and Baritone. If you would like to hear all of "Blinuet" and the rest of that sterling collection, you'll find it on a CD reissue called That Old Feeling. The disc also … [Read more...]

Recent Listening: Ted Nash

October 7, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Ted Nash, The Mancini Project (Palmetto). The multi-reed star of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra finds the jazz core of fourteen Henry Mancini songs or themes from films and television shows. There are familiar melodies here, but Nash avoids some obvious choices--the Pink Panther theme and "Moon River" for instance--to explore more obscure pieces. Among them is a gorgeous alto saxophone-piano duet with Frank Kimbrough on the ballad "Cheryl's Theme" from a movie called Sunset. Bassist Rufus … [Read more...]

Big Festival In A Small Town

October 4, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The Yakima Herald-Republic asked me to write about the musicians who will appear in The Seasons Fall Festival October 10-18. The piece ran in On Magazine, the paper's weekly arts and entertainment supplement. Here is the lead paragraph: A weeklong festival of this quality would make a splash in any major city, including New York and Los Angeles. The Seasons has managed to put it together in a high-desert town of 85,000 people in the upper left corner of the nation. In the online version of the … [Read more...]

Portland Festival Performers To Be Named

October 3, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The Portland Jazz Festival's news conference yesterday yielded no information about performers for the revived festival. A pledge of major support from Alaska Airlines on Tuesday brought the festival back from the dead. The demise of the event was announced in early September, but Alaska Air came zooming in "out of the blue," as artistic director Bill Royston put it, to resuscitate the festival. At the news conference, festival officials did not name headliners or other musicians for the … [Read more...]

Monty Alexander At Blues Alley

October 3, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard went to the city's leading jazz club to catch a veteran pianist. Here is his review. Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander has arrived at Washington, DC's Blues Alley for a four-night stand. If the US is looking for a source of renewable energy, we need seek no further than the bandstand in that venerable Georgetown jazz joint. Gesturing to the wall behind the piano, Alexander told the opening night audience that he was happy to return to Blues … [Read more...]

PDX Festival Redux

October 1, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

The Portland Jazz Festival reports that it is not dead after all. Nearly a month ago, the festival announced that a lack of major sponsorship and funding caused it to be canceled. Earlier this year, the telephone company Qwest dropped out as the event's primary sponsor. With the economy limping, fuel costs high and revenues pinched, airlines are not thriving, but Alaska Air Lines is flying to the festival's rescue, aided by a coalition of former and new sponsors. Alaska Air has promised … [Read more...]

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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, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Doug’s Picks

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

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Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger

Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger A generation of Canadian musicians is coming to prominence in their youth and making substantial impressions. One is drummer Harry Vetro. After he was graduated from the University of Toronto Jazz Program, the 23-year-old spent much of last year exploring his country as it celebrated its 150th year of […]

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Weekend Listening Tip: Maria Schneider & The SRJO

Jim Wilke tells us that his Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Maria Schneider conducting the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The program comes from his recording of the second of Ms. Schneider’s two concerts with the SRJO early this month. Her work has brought her five Grammy Awards, victories in many readers and critics […]

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Monday Recommendation, A Day Late: Atlantis Quartet

Atlantis Quartet, Hello Human (Shifting Paradigm Records) If you visit the Shifting Paradigm Records website in search of Hello Human, you may be startled to see the legend, “Name Your Price,” near a box with a dollar sign and an empty space waiting to be filled. In fairness, the offer has a notation that reads, […]

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Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown) Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world. Crosby retained that distinction until the expanding dominance […]

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Monday Recommendation (Unavoidably Delayed)

Wayne Shorter, Emanon (Blue Note) Although Wayne Shorter’s saxophone artistry and that of his quartet need no enhancement, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra shares the first disc of this three-CD collection. As always, the Orpheus is impressive for the precision of its musicianship, but the combination plods compared with the exhilaration of the second and third […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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