Archives for 2008

When Marc Myers at JazzWax.com decides to solve a mystery, he goes into full Sherlock Holmes mode. He has done that in an attempt to track down the complete personnel of the Shorty Rogers combo in the Looney Tunes cartoon Three Little Bops, which ran last week on Rifftides. I agree with critic Larry Kart’s conclusion that the baritone saxophonist is

Jimmy Giuffre. Follow this link to see the cartoon again and read Kart’s message. Giuffre worked often with Rogers in the 1950s, and the baritone in the film has the sound of Giuffre’s celebrated spoof R&B hit “Big Girl” with the Lighthouse All-Stars (CD cover pictured). Myers takes an interesting route to reach another conclusion about the baritone player. His detective work produces plausible speculation about the identities of the bassist, drummer and guitarist. See Marc’s posting here.

What matters most is that a delightful cartoon period piece is getting renewed attention. Still, if anyone out there in cyberspace has definite information about the makeup of the band, please let us know by way of the comment link below.

David Sherr, OtherWorld Music (Bel Air Jazz). Sherr is a composer and player of reed instruments and flutes. His background includes work with Sonny Criss, the San Francisco Ballet, Nelson Riddle, Lalo Schifrin, Don Ellis, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Frank Zappa, Oliver Nelson, Robert Craft, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, among several dozen others from assorted fields of music. In this CD, he brings together extensive portions of his music with that of J.S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen.

Sherr enlists members of the Bach Aria Group and superb jazz musicians including drummer Joe La Barbera, pianist Tom Ranier and bassist Harvey Newmark. His unaccompanied clarinet exposition of the third movement of Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time is brilliantly executed. He integrates free jazz with elements of Messiaen’s formidable quartet and succeeds in making all but the most perceptive and experienced listeners wonder about the line between what is written and what is improvised. In his “…Then Have I The Eagle’s Powers, Then Soar I Up From This World,” Sherr accomplishes a similar feat with themes from Bach’s “Aria” from Cantata 56. In it, voices deliver lines in several languages as if they were instruments in counterpoint, the jazz players free-associate with one another at a high level and a solo violin melds with the entrance to the next piece, Messiaen’s flute-piano duet “Le Merle Noir.”

This is music full of rich satisfactions, more of which become apparent on successive hearings. If Sherr attracts the attention he should with this unconventional and intriguing project on an obscure label, we will undoutedly be hearing more from him.

In his teenage years during the waning days of the big band era, Sherr went on the road as a saxophone player. His web site contains a long, occasionally disturbing and very funny journal of that experience. Here’s a sample.

Ernie Fields And His World Famous Orchestra, that’s us. A big hit record, a couple of smaller hits, the Dick Clark Show, the Regal theater, the country’s Number One R&B band and bookings in some pretty classy joints, like the one the other night near Dallas. And then again…

Tonight it was Temple, Texas, just south of Waco. (Wyatt has been calling it “Whacko” since this morning.) The sign over the entrance said “Rec Center” but “wreck center” would have been more like it. It had broken windows and chairs, a tiny stage and a piano that may never have been tuned. Roosevelt counted thirteen keys that didn’t work. He tried to get around the missing notes and wound up sounding like Thelonious Monk.

Billy’s bass drum kept slipping. He took a hammer he kept for such emergencies and drove a couple of nails into the rotting floor of the stage to brace the drum. The guy in charge of the building screamed, “What are you doing to my stage,” and ordered him to remove the nails. Bill pointed out that the “damage” was already done, so why not leave them in until we were finished, but the guy said no. So Billy pulled the nails and spent the rest of the night trying to keep from kicking the drum off the stage.

To read all of “On The Road At 18,” click here.

 

TWO CDs BRIEFLY NOTED

Philip Catherine, Bert Joris, Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Meeting Colours (Dreyfus). This has

 been out since 2005. I loved the album when I first heard it and just rediscovered it in a stack of review copies. Guitarist Catherine and trumpeter Joris, both Belgian, are the principal soloists in this collection of Joris’s arrangements of Catherine’s compositions (plus Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”) for the superb Brussels Jazz Orchestra. Joris is one of the finest trumpet soloists in the world. His writing is as good as his playing. Catherine, most widely known for his work with Chet Baker, Tom Harrell and Larry Coryell, solos with his customary imagination, economy and love for Wes Montgomery.

Drori Mondlak, Point In Time (Lilypad). Mondlak’s quartet is integrated, balanced and musical, with no show-off features for the drummer leader. Mondlak, saxophonist and flutist Karolina Strassmayer, guitarist Cary DeNigris and bassist Steve LaSpina solo with conviction. Except for Frank Foster’s “Simone,” the pieces are by members of the quartet. The collection might have benefited from more of the grit of DeNigris’s “I’ve Paid Some Blues” and “No Name Blues” and Mondlak’s “The Prance,” but if Mondlak’s aim was to create an atmosphere of thoughtful relaxation, he succeeded. Mondlak has a witty solo on Strassmayer’s “It Once Was a Waltz.” LaSpina’s fluidity and strength are important to the success of this music. Strassmayer’s work shows why she is one of the most interesting alto saxophonists under forty. DeNigris’s and Mondlak’s like-mindedness contribute to the success of the venture.

In today’s Washington Post, Matt Schudel writes about Frank Wess. The 86-year-old tenor saxophonist and flutist is still active and about to play in Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his early career. Schudel quotes pianist Billy Taylor, Wess’s contemporary, about the saxophonist’s influence on him when they were in high school together.

“He’s the reason I don’t play the tenor saxophone,” Taylor says. “I was going to try to be the new Ben Webster,” the tenor saxophonist who worked with another notable Washington jazzman, Duke Ellington.

Then Taylor heard Wess, and he decided to stick with the piano.

“Even in his teens, he was really a remarkable player,” he says.

To read all of Schudel’s article, click here.

Wess was a principal arranger and soloist in Count Basie’s band during the 1950s and early ’60s. In this video clip, he solos on his composition “Corner Pocket,” following trumpeters Thad Jones and Al Aarons.

The You Tube heading for this video clip of Toots Thielemans at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1992 says that it has been viewed 40,422 times. Do yourself a favor and make it 40,423. Quincy Jones was the conductor of the WDR Big Band. He was enamored of Toots’s musicality, wit and warmth. Who isn’t?

Have a good weekend.

And if I have a strong point, it’s that I like to believe it’s not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality.

You can be in Tokyo or Alberta at four in the morning in your hotel and you can still practice if you feel like it. A trombone cannot do that at four in the morning.

The Rifftides staff is attempting to keep ahead of the CD tsunami described in this recent post. It’s an impossible assignment, but they’re a game bunch. Herewith, brief reviews of approximately 0.06% of the accumulated mass of discs.

Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy). In some of these previously unreleased concert performances, the tenor saxophonist reaches peaks of the intensity, drive, inventiveness and whimsy that have kept him inimitable for nearly six decades. His “Tenor Madness” solo from Japan in 2000 is one of Rollins’s most compelling recorded blues statements. There’s a remarkable “Easy Living” from Poland in 1980. “More Than You Know,” recorded in France in 2006, concludes with a ravishing extended cadenza that is a tour through the inner workings of a great melodist’s creative process. The most recent track, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from Rollins’s 2007 Carnegie Hall concert, is curiously tentative despite the presence of bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes. The architectonic “Blossoms,” from Sweden in 1980, is anything but tentative. Full of risk-taking, it is twelve-and-a-half minutes of Rollins at his most penetrating and complex.

Mike Melvoin and Kim Park, The Art Of Conversation (City Light). Pianist Melvoin and alto saxophonist Park, veterans who deserve wider recognition, shine in this aptly-named duo collaboration. It grew out of Park’s sitting in on a Melvoin gig in Kansas City. Park makes  engaging personal use of inspiration from his KC predecessor Charlie Parker, notably so in

his visceral, blues-inflected soloing on “I Remember You,” a tune lastingly linked to Parker. The fleetness and harmonic richness of Melvoin’s improvisations are consistent throughout this collection of familiar standard songs. As for justification of that title, he and Park truly listen to and stimulate one another’s ideas, as good conversationalists will. This music is available as a download.

Billy Harper, Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2 (Talking House). Harper was one of the most profound of the tenor saxophonists to emerge in the wake of John Coltrane. This CD, full of post-Coltrane muscle and mysticism, recalls the swirl of free jazz in the sixties and seventies, even unto Amiri Baraka reciting his jazz-history-lesson poetry and Harper on one track singing a little like Leon Thomas did on all those Impulse! LPs. Fronting a relentlessly energetic septet of like-minded seekers, Harper solos with his full range of formidable technical mastery and the power and conviction of a gifted preacher. This CD seems to be hard to get. Although it was released in October, Amazon is the only web site I can find that is offering it. Amazon claims to have just one copy–used–at $90.00 U.S. (!) It may be available as an MP3 download.

Jerry Gonzalez y Los Piratos Del Flamenco (Sunnyside). Since he moved to Madrid, the trumpeter, flugelhornist, conguero and co-leader of the Fort Apache Band has gone well beyond taking an interest in Spain’s flamenco tradition. He has absorbed its mystique and

 even begun to have an effect on its evolution. The closely held flamenco community has let him in and Gonzalez has managed to get them to accept the idea of jazz improvisation in the context of contemporary flamenco performance. In a cultural feedback loop, Gonzalez brings jazz sensibilities inspired by Miles Davis and Gil Evans into the milieu of Spanish music that helped to inspire the classic Davis-Evans album Sketches Of Spain. His venture is a work in progress. This CD demonstrates the results so far. “Monk’s Dream (Monk’s Soniquete)” with Gonzalez overdubbed on multiple horns to the accompaniment of flamenco hand-clapping rhythm is, as they say in Madrid, un viaje.c

Some readers have reported a problem with the links to CD sources in the recent Rifftides piece about Kenny Wheeler and Don Thompson. The links have been remade and should be working fine.

Sometimes comments about Rifftides pieces show up considerably after publication. We just got one from reader Dave Mackey about an animated cartoon we linked to on April 30, 2007. Bless the readers. We wouldn’t have known about the cartoon if a reader hadn’t sent an alert in the first place. The paragraph immediately below is the original item. It is followed by the Looney Tunes itself, now embedded in the blog. And THAT is followed by Mr. Mackey’s comment. It’s a great reason to rerun a minor masterpiece.

Rifftides reader Bruce Tater came across a classic Warner Bros. cartoon from the Looney Tunes series. He called our attention to Three Little Bops, a perfectly preserved piece of 1950s hipness. Stan Freeburg is the narrator. Shorty Rogers did the music. Notice the stylized drawings of the nightclub audience. Don’t miss Shorty’s little sui generis muted solo near the end.

It’s likely those nightclub denizens were drawn by assistant animator Bob Matz; most of the heavy lifting was done by Gerry Chiniquy, who was simply one of the most brilliant animators in the Friz Freleng unit and deserved this showcase.

Now, a music question: anyone know who else played on the session? The music was recorded on the Warner Bros. soundstage by the regular crew that recorded the cartoon scores. The bare music score exists and was released on one of the recent Looney Tunes DVD’s, and it’s slated by Milt Franklyn, who was one of the studio’s two musical directors (the other being the legendary Carl Stalling).

Dave Mackey

If you know the other musicians, please let us in on it by way of a comment

Jazz isn’t dead or dying. It’s just waiting to be heard. The photograph shows an eleven-foot line of CDs on the floor of my music room. There are 352 of them. They are some of the review copies that have arrived in the past couple of months. Boxes and shelves in my office hold at least three times that many more.  A stack of DVDs on the credenza behind where I am writing reaches to within a few inches of the ceiling. None of these recordings is yet in the permanent collection. They are languishing, hoping to be reviewed.

 

I estimate that there are 1,050 CDs and thirty-five DVDs on hold. Let’s assume that each is an hour long, a low average. If I were to spend eight hours a day, including weekends, listening and watching, it would be–appropriately–April 1^st, 2009, before I finished. But I would not finish because long before then I would have been taken to the loony bin. In the meantime, at the current rate, a couple of thousand more recordings will have arrived. Did I mention the storage problem?

 

All a reviewer can do is hope that experience, knowledge, instinct and luck will guide him toward what to pull from that long line. If the next Armstrong, Young, Parker, Evans, Coleman or Coltrane is there and I miss him (or her), I’ll be sorry, but listening is a linear proposition, and there’s only so much time.

 

Below is the next installment in my attempt to keep up with the endless flow of recordings.

Kenny Wheeler, Other People (Cam Jazz). Perenially adventurous, always on the leading edge of music, Wheeler was seventy-five when this was recorded in 2005. His

playing on trumpet and flugelhorn is brilliant, with little of the lassitude that has sometimes crept in as he aged. The even more striking aspect of this CD is Wheeler’s writing. He applies his distinctive style to strings, a medium new to him as a composer.

Lacing his horn lines through and around the Hugo Wolf String Quartet, Wheeler brings to string writing the tart voicings, subsurface rhythms and plaintive melodies that have long characterized his compositions and orchestrations for combinations of horns. The Wolf Quartet’s interpretations of the sections with long, keening lines emphasize the pungency and poignancy that is central to Wheeler’s work. On some 

pieces, Wheeler’s frequent piano companion John Taylor solos with his customary incisiveness and lyricism. The most stunning achievement in the recording, however, has neither horn, piano nor improvisation. It is Wheeler’s “String Quartet n. 1,” a through-composed concert work with riveting thematic development and gently insistent rhythmic pulses. This is the belated debut of a composer of concert chamber music to be taken seriously.

 

Don Thompson Quartet, For Kenny Wheeler (Sackville). Thompson is one who takes Wheeler seriously, indeed. In his CD notes about Wheeler, the composer, bassist, pianist and vibraharpist writes of his fellow Canadian:

I can’t think of anyone else in jazz with his gift of melody and understanding of harmony and counterpoint. It’s my opinion (and that of many others) that Kenny is the most important composer in jazz today. To me he is today’s Duke Ellington.

All of the compositions are by Thompson. Only “For Kenny Wheeler” and “K.T.T.” (Kenny

Type Tune) overtly refer to Wheeler in their titles. Throughout, Thompson’s compositional methods reflect Wheeler’s. Because of the skill and assurance of the quartet, this complex music flows as naturally as if was standards and ordinary blues. Thompson’s sidemen are his longtime colleague Terry Clarke on drums (they were together in Paul Desmond’s last band), saxophonist Phil Dwyer and bassist Jim Vivian, three of Canada’s most distinguished musicians.

Thompson plays piano on six of the tracks, vibes on two with Dwyer supporting him and soloing on piano. Dwyer tends toward dreaminess on soprano and gutsiness on tenor, as in the decidedly unordinary “The Peregrine Blues,” with its eccentric intervals and glancing counterpoint with Thompson’s piano. Vivian and Clarke are splendid throughout. Clarke’s brush and cymbal commentary behind Dwyer’s tenor on “Another Time, Another Place” is a highlight, Vivian’s solo on “For Scott LaFaro” another. The recordings I return to for frequent play over the years are those in which I keep hearing new facets. This seems destined to be one of those albums.

As usual, things are happening in jazz in Philadelphia, the town that produced John Coltrane,
Ray Bryant, Red Rodney, the Heath brothers, Richie Kamuca, Christian McBride, Joe Venuti, Shirley Scott, Jaleel Shaw, Luckey Roberts, Mary Ann McCall, Kenny Barron, Benny Golson, Philly Joe Jones and several Eubankses, to name perhaps ten-percent of the important players from that city. Rifftides reader Oliver Wunsch reports on a new development.

I wanted to share a new site we JUST launched here at Painted Bride Art Center in Philly, that represents our own attempt to marry new media with the jazz compositional process, called Big Ears Philly. The site is a tool for John Hollenbeck and 12 Philly jazz musicians to communicate and refine ideas as they prepare to develop new work during their residency at Painted Bride. Each artist maintains a blog, can post video, and can share audio files of work in progress. It also is obviously designed to bring audiences into this process. So this is just a note to say check it out, and I’ve enjoyed your writing. We’re really looking towards blogs as THE location for jazz journalism these days.

That seems to be the way things are going, Mr. Wunsch. See this recent posting.

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents? — Mark Twain

The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it’s only the people that make them unsafe.–Frank Rizzo

Yes, I’d like to see Paris before I die. Philadelphia will do.– W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee 

Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia. — Epitaph Fields proposed for himself

On election day, the Providence Journal ran two editorials concerning matters important to Rhode Islanders. One was about the governor’s suggestion that it’s time to end the  state income tax (a questionable idea, the paper said). The other was on the death of pianist Dave McKenna, one of the state’s cultural heroes. To read the Mckenna editorial, go here. Thanks to Rifftides reader Steve Caminis for calling it to our attention.

For the October 18 announcement of McKenna’s death, video of him playing and reader comments, go to this Rifftides archive page.

Rifftides reader Ken Dryden writes:

It’s funny, but I discovered Joe Sullivan the same way I found out about Meade Lux Lewis, when rocker Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake & Palmer) recorded one of his pieces, “Little Rock Getaway.” Though there was very little in print of Sullivan’s work under his own name in the early 1970s, I managed to find a couple of LPs. He was also one of the pianists featured in Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual series, issued on a Koch CD with the Earl Hines performance and likely on DVD/VHS in the series.

(In the Jazz Casual series, the Sullivan program is paired with one featuring cornetist Muggsy Spanier. — DR)

This is Joe Sullivan’s birthday. Although Rifftides posted an item about Sullivan and others only three months ago, it is never too soon to call him to the attention of listeners who may not have made the acquaintance of a man who inspired countless other pianists. Here is a Rifftides golden oldie.

It is not good enough simply to recycle an archive piece. As a double bonus, here are two versions of Sullivan’s most famous composition, “Little Rock Getaway.” The first is his 1933 Parlophone recording, the second the Decca recording from 1935, by which time he had shaped the famous melody line.

If Sullivan were alive, he would be 102 years old. He died on October 13, 1971.

In the scratch-scratch tradition of cross-referencing that is an important aspect of the blogosphere, Don Heckman has responded to the November 4 Rifftides piece about him, The Los Angeles Times and the general decline of writing about jazz in newspapers. That posting is two exhibits down the page. Heckman asks:

Do the complaints, the angry emails, the letters to the editor make a difference? Well, as Jake Barnes said to Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

To read Don’s post, click here.

When I was in college and involved in the jazz community in Seattle, I helped to arrange a concert in my home town. Some of the musicians who traveled to the interior of the state to perform in that conservative agricultural community were black. One of my closest childhood friends came to the concert. Afterward, I took him to a party for the musicians. In the course of the socializing, I danced with a newer friend, the pianist Patti Bown. When I returned to the table, my old buddy told me, with considerable heat, that he was ashamed I had touched a black woman, although that was not the term he used to describe her.

I had not thought about that evening in decades. It came back to me last night as I listened to the next president of the United States speak to the world. I hope that my friend was watching, too.

Newspapers everywhere were retrenching even before the world financial crisis tetered on the edge of recession and finally fell into it. Declining readership and shriveling advertising revenue demanded cost-cutting. To no one’s surprise, staff and space reductions claimed arts coverage early. When newsroom budgets start to shrink, cultural journalism is among the first targets because editors know that there will be relatively few complaints. In a world of minuscule and increasingly fragmented attention spans focused (ha) on hip-hop, Britney Spears and movies about high school musicals, jazz is even more a minority interest than string quartets, modern dance and bagpipe solos.

Jazz writers still appear sporadically in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Seattle Times and a few other major papers. Few of them are full-time staff employees. Free lance contributors who once covered live jazz and reviewed recordings regularly show up in print less and less often. Call it the Heckman phenomenon.

Until recently, Don Heckman, the jazz critic of The Los Angeles Times, wrote fairly often about jazz in and around the second largest city in the United States. At the beginning of his career at the Times, Heckman worked in tandem with Leonard Feather to provide readers with some of the most complete daily jazz coverage in the world. Like Feather, he was never a staff member. After Feather died in 1994 Heckman, an experienced musician, careful listener and talented writer, became the Times’ chief jazz contributor. He still is, but the contributions are declining to the point of disappearance. Around the turn of the century, jazz coverage was put under the supervision of the Pop Music editor at the Times. What eventually happened is typical of the fate of jazz coverage at most American newspapers. Here is a little of what Heckman wrote recently on his blog about the current situation.

Several months ago, a new editor took over the reins of the Pop Music department from the acting editor. I was told, almost immediately, by her that jazz reviews would be reduced in number, and would essentially have to be pitched to her for approval That represented an immediate and significant change, since — as one who is deeply aware of developments in jazz, here and elsewhere — I had generally done my own scheduling of reviews, with oversight from the acting editor. In addition, the Sunday jazz record review spotlight disappeared.

In scheduling my reviews — of both live concerts and recordings — I tried to balance the major name programs with as much coverage as possible for the Southland’s huge array of world class jazz talent. That approach became virtually impossible when the reviews were cut back to one a week. Within a month or two, they were cut to one every ten days. After that it became a matter of submitting events I thought were important, and hoping that coverage would be permitted. It usually wasn’t.

About two or more months ago, I was advised that the free lance budget for Pop had run out for the year, and that I should contact my editor in late December to consider what could be covered when the new budget came into effect in January. Basically that meant that I could do no reviews for the last 3 1/2 months of the year.

Considering the concentration and frequency of jazz in Los Angeles and Orange counties, that dictum is an absurdity, but L.A. is far from the only place where jazz coverage is drying up. To see all of Heckman’s posting and learn what besides music he heard when he covered the recent Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition, go here.

Not by the way, Mr. Heckman is devoting a substantial share of his time, energy and perceptiveness to a web log. That decision seems somehow familiar. I am adding a link to Here, There and Everywhere under Other Places in the center column.  

How is the jazz coverage in your newspaper? Use the comment link below to reply. In your brief paragraph describing the situation, please include the names of your city and your paper.