Archives for 2008

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard journeyed out of the district last weekend to hear pianist Cedar Walton and his trio. Here is John’s review.

Smack in the middle of the mainstream – that’s where you’ll find Cedar Walton, still creative at the age of 74. The pianist brought his current trio to the Montpelier Arts Center in suburban Laurel, Maryland, on Friday, October 18, for an evening of warmly-received performances. On his way up, Walton worked with a literal who’s who in modern jazz: J.J. Johnson, Kenny Dorham, the Farmer-Golson Jazztet, and his best-known affiliation, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the band that featured Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard. And all along the way, his ability to write attractive tunes brought him further recognition.

Friday evening’s concert featured mostly Walton originals, leading off with “Cedar’s Blues”, an up, boppish line that served to warm up the band members, John Webber on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums. Webber favors the lower register of his instrument, giving Walton a rich launching pad for his inventions. Farnsworth’s style is strong without being obtrusive, always listening to the other players and complementing their work. The trio was tight and well-rehearsed.

Cedar Walton is very much a two-handed pianist, as he showed on his “Clockwise”, a piece in ¾ time containing a recurring Latin vamp. When he strikes a note or chord, it’s clear and strong. He doesn’t pound the keyboard, but his sound is definitely declarative.

On “Dear Ruth”, a jaunty-sounding melody taken at an easy walking tempo, Walton introduced a few bars of Garneresque left hand to good effect. The tune, said Walton, was dedicated to his mother, his first piano teacher. He told of her taking her young son to New York from their home in Dallas, Texas for the first time. Walton said he wanted to see Jackie Robinson play baseball. His mother opted for the Apollo Theatre in Harlem to see Count Basie and Billie Holiday. He smiled as he said his mother made the right choice.

Walton has long had the knack of creating catchy lines with a Latin flavor. His “Bolivia” is a good example. On Friday evening, the trio played “Ojos de Rojo” (Eyes of Red) as a way-up- tempo samba. The tune showcased Walton’s sparkling single-note lines set off by rich chords. Farnsworth’s drumming was sizzling and he also soloed effectively.

Only two pop standards appeared in the program, “Time After Time” and “Body and Soul”, both taken at walking tempos. Among the pianist’s own compositions, “One Flight Down” and “The Holy Land” stood out as interesting tunes that prompted exciting performances.

Cedar Walton wears his senior citizen status well. He has a warm, engaging personality to go with an enormous talent. He’s been a steady contributor to the language of modern jazz for more than forty years. And he hasn’t lost a step when it comes to delivering a rewarding listening experience. The Montpelier Arts Center concert was an evening well spent.

                                                                                        –John Birchard

There seems to be a shortage of Cedar Walton videos on the internet. The Rifftides staff found one made on New Year’s Eve 1985 at a club in Baltimore, not far from where Birchard reported. Walton was playing with vibraharpist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Mickey Roker. The engagement is likely to have been Jackson’s. Walton is featured on the first of two Duke Ellington compositions. The picture quality suggests a subaquatic environment, but the sound is good, or at least good enough so that you can plainly hear everyone. This is one you may not wish to view full-screen.

 

In The New York Times, Barry Singer has an update to the story of the remarkable Baroness
Pannonica de Koenigswarter, friend and supporter of major musicians including Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. The Baroness is seen here with Monk in a well-known photograph. She died twenty years ago. Singer writes:

A Rothschild heiress, she offered her home to countless jazzmen as a place to work and even live, while quietly paying their bills when they couldn’t find work. She chauffeured them to gigs around New York, toured with them as a kind of racial chaperon, and was even known to confront anyone she felt was taking advantage of her friends because they were black.

“I always likened her to the great royal patrons of Mozart or Wagner’s day,” the saxophonist Sonny Rollins said in a telephone interview. “Yet she never put the spotlight on herself. I try not to talk publicly about people I knew in jazz. But I have to say something about the baroness. She really loved our music.”

To read the whole thing, click here. And for a 2006 Rifftides story about Nica and the role of her Bentley in the life of the New York jazz community, go here.

That grim parade that Bill Crow mentioned a couple of postings ago shows no sign of running out of marchers. The latest major jazz artist to go is Dave McKenna. The pianist died this morning at the age of 78. His family posted the announcement on his web site, which includes a good biography. YouTube has a slew of videos of McKenna playing. This medley of two of his favorite tunes, “Nobody Else But Me” and “I’m Old Fashioned,” is a good one to start with.

 

William Claxton, the master photographer who died a week ago, was a great raconteur. A sample of that side of his personality is available on the internet. In 1988, Terri Gross interviewed Claxton on her National Public Radio program Fresh Air. He discussed his experiences photographing, among others, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. To hear the conversation, go here and click on “Listen Now.”

As a bonus, listen to Felix Contreras’s short biography of arranger and composer Neal Hefti, who died on the same day as Claxton. It is illustrated with clips of three of Hefti’s most famous compositions. The accompanying obituary incudes a picture of Hefti and Frank Sinatra together, happy at one of Sinatra’s recording sessions.

The last thing I want is for Rifftides to become a death watch. Nonetheless, as James Moody says his grandmother once told him, “Folks is dyin’ what ain’t never died before.” Or, to use Bill Crow’s words in the subject line of a message today about the arranger, composer and former trumpet player Neal Nefti, “The parade continues.”

Hefti died at home in the Toluca Lake community of Los Angeles on Saturday, the same day and a few miles from his contemporary William Claxton, the master jazz photographer. Hefti was eighty-five. His writing for Woody Herman’s First Herd in the mid-forties helped lead the way in the transition from swing to bebop. His compositions included “The Good Earth,” “Apple Honey” and “Wild Root.” He breathed new life into some of the older pieces in Herman’s book, among them “Blowin’ Up a Storm” and “Woodchopper’s Ball.” He went on to write for other big bands including those of Harry James and Buddy Rich and –in the sixties–for Count
Basie. His “Splanky,” “Cute,” “Little Pony” and the sinuous version of “Lil’ Darlin'” are still staples of the band Basie left behind in 1984. The album he arranged, originally called simply Basie and now known as The Atomic Basie, was one of the great accomplishments of Basie’s so-called New Testament band. Hefti arranged for Frank Sinatra. With Bobby Troup, he wrote the standard song, “Girl Talk,” and he composed for The Odd Couple, Barefoot In The Park and other films.

“Lil’ Darlin” might well have remained Hefti’s signature composition had he not been contracted to provide the music for the ABC television series Batman. Laboring to come up with a theme that would grab attention by appealing to children and their equivalents in sophistication, he wrote a blues “tune” made up of two notes that repeated up a fourth, then a fifth on the scale. The lyric consisted of the title character’s name. He enjoyed telling people, “You know, I also wrote the words.” The piece helped make the show a success, became a hit record on its own and provided Hefti with a comfortable annuity.

In 1946, Hefti married Frances Wayne, whom he met when she was the singer on Herman’s band. He wrote for her the breathtakingly beautiful arrangement of “Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Joe.” She died in 1978.

In the nineties, Neal was an occasional participant in an informal lunch group of which I was a part when I lived in Los Angeles. He showed up on one occasion when pianist Jack Brownlow was visiting from Seattle. It was no surprise that the two of them, hit it off. Jack talked for the rest of his life about the thrill of meeting one of his musical heroes. That day, Neal reported that he had just bought a new Bach trumpet and was practicing. He said he planned to put together a small band and play gigs. Some time later, I asked him how he was coming along with the horn. “It’s on the shelf,” he said. The band and the gigs never materialized.

For a complete obituary, see this from The Los Angeles Times.

Here’s that message from Bill Crow about Neal Hefti and Bill Claxton.

I told this story in my second book, but I’ll tell it again here for those who haven’t read it: When I first moved to New York City in 1950, Dave Lambert became my friend, and he introduced me to many musicians at Charlie’s Tavern, one of whom was Neal Hefti. After that, whenever I ran into Neal at Charlie’s, we would say hello. About a year later, Dave hired me to sing in his vocal group on a demo recording for Neal’s wife, Frances Wayne. As we walked into a rehearsal studio at Nola’s, Dave greeted Neal, and said, “…and you know Bill Crow…” I held out my hand, but Neal looked completely baffled. “Bill Crow?” he said. “Then who’s Brew Moore?” He’d been saying hello to me for a year, thinking I was Brew.

I only got to meet Bill Claxton once, when he and Dick Bock flew out to Boston to produce a Pacific Jazz album of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet at Storyville. Dick wanted to emulate a shot Dave Pell had done of Gerry’s original quartet in California, with everyone
looking up at the camera. Bill took a lot of shots of Gerry while walking around different Boston locations, but those weren’t used on the album. We recorded the music for the album during performances one evening at Storyville, and afterward Bill set up his camera. He spread a huge sheet of blue foil on the floor of the club, stood us on it, climbed a stepladder and got his cover shot. Then we all went to a great Chinese restaurant and feasted, while thoroughly enjoying Claxton’s charm and humor. (Dick Bock picked up the check.)

William Claxton’s cover shots appeared on ten CDs produced in Los Angeles by Dick Bank. The photographer’s last project for Bank was the cover photograph for the 2006 Andy Martin-Jan Lundgren album How About You? (Fresh Sound). 

Bank sent this note following Claxton’s death last weekend.

I had the idea for the cover to be a trombone (for Andy Martin) resting on top of the piano (for Jan Lundgren). It necessitated Clax getting up on a tall ladder to shoot it. I asked if it

wouldn’t be safer if it was shot with him standing on a box. He said, no, it had to be shot elevated to do it right. I was concerned about him climbing up on that ladder–something he had done hundreds of times–in his present state of health. He didn’t hesitate. I held onto the ladder and was ready just in case. He could have done it with his eyes closed. The result was exactly what I envisioned–no, better!–and lighted as only Bill Claxton could do it.

I had called him on his birthday last year as I always do, and told him we would be doing an album of Ralph Rainger music right after New Year’s, with Jan Lundgren, Chuck Berghofer and Joe La Barbera. Before I could say, “I hope you’ll be able to join us,” he said he would love to be there and would it be all right to drop by. Can you imagine: Bill Claxton asking me if it would be OK to be there? I called a few weeks before to remind him and he said yes, he was looking forward to it.

The weather was terrible on January 6. It had been raining heavily all day. I did not expect him to drive over to Entourage Studios in North Hollywood from his Beverly Hills home on such a dreadful day. We were underway and I happened to look over my right shoulder and there he was sitting behind me! He was unobtrusive, as he always was when he had a camera in his hands. He loved what he heard and was very complimentary of Jan Lundgren, as always, and said he was looking forward to hearing the album. It will be out in a few weeks. He would have loved it.

He gave me a gift which was wrapped. I could tell it was a book. I was really touched and told him I wanted to open it at home when I was alone. It was The House That George Built by Wilfrid Sheed, a history of the golden age of American popular music. That he came out on that day, which I know was a personal favor to me, moved me deeply. The gift and the card that was with it is something that I will treasure for the rest of my life. He signed the card, “You’re the best…your friend and fan, Clax.”

William James Claxton is my hero!

–

For more thirty years, John Fordham has been favoring the British public with his finely-honed critiques and observations about jazz. Most of his work has appeared in the newspaper The Guardian, but he is also the author of an entertaining and informative history of jazz. Fordham is a full-range listener with good ears and a writer with an open mind, as interesting on The Bad Plus as he is on Humphrey Lyttleton. 

In a flow of 881 words, Fordham’s most recent column manages to encapsulate the development of jazz piano. It begins…

The iconography of jazz usually features smoky images of coolly wasted-looking individuals in natty hats blowing saxophones. But if saxes and trumpets have seemed like the quintessential jazz instruments, it’s the piano that has been absolutely central to the development of the music.

…and includes this paragraph on two seminal pianists:

The tormented, fitfully visionary pianist Bud Powell participated in the inception of bebop as a teenager, and his approach refined the Earl Hines “trumpet” style to a dazzling melodic display similar to bop hero Charlie Parker’s sax lines. A very different founding-figure of bebop, the former gospel-pianist Thelonious Monk, came from a more eccentric angle. Monk liked erratic silences as much as sounds, struck frequently dissonant chords with a drumlike whack, and composed some of the most enduringly personal themes in the jazz repertoire.

To read the whole thing, go here. If Fordham is a bit lenient in his assessments of some UK musicians, that tolerance is more than offset by his overall perspective on the music. For a selection of his Guardian blog entries, click here.

Word has just come in that William Claxton died on Saturday in Los Angeles of congestive
heart failure. He was one day short of his eighty-first birthday. With his pictures of Chet Baker in the early 1950s, Claxton established himself as a brilliant photographer of jazz musicians and went on to a career as one of the most admired camera artists in the world. He did incomparable work not only in jazz, but also with a varied array of personalities including Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, Fred Astaire, Joan Baez, Steve McQueen, Chris Rock and Benicio Del Toro.

Clax was a friend, a colleague, good company and — in a category that seems sparsely populated in our hard, fast world — a gentleman, meaning that he was kind, polite, honorable and unfailingly considerate.

To see some of Bill Claxton’s work go here. This obituary from The Los Angeles Times includes a striking candid portrait of Clax by the Times’s Gary Friedman and one of Clax’s shots of McQueen. It does not include one of the Chet Baker photographs that helped make Chet and Claxton famous. The one to your left is from a session for Baker’s 1954 album Chet Baker And Strings. 

McCoy Tyner, Guitars (Half-Note). This is one of the most engaging Tyner collaboration projects since he teamed with the late tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker to record Infinity in 1995 and with Wayne Shorter the following year in the session that produced Extensions. For this release, the pianist set up in a studio with stalwart rhythm companions, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Jack DeJohnette. He brought in four guitarists — John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Derek Trucks, Mark Ribot — and Bela Fleck, a banjoist with the fluency of a guitarist. Each of the string artists played two or three pieces with Tyner, Carter and DeJohnette. The CD is accompanied by a DVD that provides fascinating views of this music being prepared and recorded.

Although the pairing of chording instruments presents plenty of opportunities for clashes, there are no fatal collisions here. Some of these meetings are more rewarding than others, but each is interesting, at the very least. An air of inquisitive camaraderie hangs over all of the sessions. Scofield, who has a mainstream history aligned with Tyner’s, seems most at home. Perhaps he was least intimated by the heavyweight rhythm section. His headlong linear improvisations and hurdy-gurdy sound work beautifully in Tyner’s “Blues on the Corner” and in “Mr. P.C.,” a staple of John Coltrane’s book when Tyner was Coltrane’s pianist. In addition to Tyner’s customary large helpings of bounding chords, his own work throughout has passages of the kind of single-note lines that were important to the success of his great Impulse! and Blue Note albums of the 1960s. In his solo on “Mr. P.C.,” Carter reminds us that in the post-Scott LaFaro era when bassists aspire to the facility of guitarists, a good old-fashioned walking bass solo executed by a master is among the deepest satisfactions in jazz.

The most daring pieces on the album are two free improvisations in duo by Tyner and the adventurous session guitarist Marc Ribot. Ribot is heavily electronic on both, irritatingly so on “Improvisation 2” but achieving on “Improvisation 1,” among other effects, the soothing sound and feeling of a cello. He is a powerhouse on “Passion Dance,” allowing little contrast with Tyner’s equally dense and commanding piano. Ribot employs restrained Wes Montgomery octave chords on “500 Miles” and generally lays back in his solo following a reflective one by Tyner, but can’t resist including a few self-conscious wa-wa licks.

Fleck sounds at home with Tyner, and Tyner with him on the banjoist’s “Trade Winds” and “Amberjack” and, notably, on “My Favorite Things.” On the latter, Fleck solos with so much dexterity, imagination and hip manipulation of interior time that it almost makes me want to swear off ever telling another banjo joke. With the swing of his jaunty three-four patterns, DeJohnette is superb on this track. The slide guitarist Derek Trucks evokes country music and urban blues in Tyner’s “Slapback Blues” and in Henry VIII’s “Greensleeves,” which adheres to Coltrane’s general approach and in which Tyner finds freshness despite having played it for four decades.

Bill Frisell’s relatively delicate approach brings the intensity down a notch, but his guitar is in sonic, psychic and musical balance with the rhythm section. His piece “Boubacar” melds into a mesmerizing treatment of “Baba Drame” by the Mali singer, composer and guitarist Boubacar Traoré so that the two pieces comprise an entrancing tribute to Traoré. On Tyner’s “Contemplation,” the third waltz of the album, Frisell commands attention with his quiet assurance and the logic of his lines. Carter has a particularly thoughtful and easy-going solo on this piece. The DVD — all three hours of it — gives viewers a choice of four angles from which to watch the music being made. That is an innovation of John Snyder, who produced the sessions and wrote liner notes of rare honesty and frankness. A sample:

When Marc suggested that he would overdub a solo, Ron put down his instrument, walked over to him, towering, and asked somewhat humorlessly, “What school did YOU go to man? This is CREATIVE music. We don’t do that.

Unusual notes. Unusual album.

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

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’.”

That’s all?!

A fool who never sang it,
Julie

All video clips of Garner playing “Misty” seem to have been removed from the internet because of copyright conflicts. So, let’s settle for this one of him playing “All The Things You Are.”

As for LaRosa, here he is with Nat Cole and Peggy Lee on Cole’s 1957 TV show.

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 Curson, Tomasz Stanko and Harry Beckett; pianist John Taylor; saxophonist John Surman; drummer John Marshall; and Collier himself on bass. I have made no secret of my admiration for Collier’s work. From a review last year of his 1967 album Dark Blue Centre:

His writing for a pianoless seven-piece ensemble had economy, daring and just enough whimsy to prevent the music from perishing of an overdose of self-regard, the fate of so much avant garde jazz of the sixties.

To read the whole thing, go here. Later, there was another Rifftides piece about a Collier reissue:

The looseness and cogency in Collier’s arrangements are in ideal balance to contain the wildness, daring and–it must be emphasized–good humor of the soloists. There is no trace of the anger and willfull distortion that marred so much avant garde playing in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Hmm. Do we detect a theme? If you decide to explore Collier’s music, that new site is a good place to start. Be aware that the audio montage is a slow loader, even if you have a high-speed connection.

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 “Listen Now.” I did that. It is playing as I write, and tonight — to quote Duke Ellington — I shall sleep with a smile on my face.

 (Pictured, L to R, Charlap, K. Washington, P. Washington)

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 stood apart from the pack of bop trumpeters. Gryce was a Charlie Parker alto saxophonist who had a nice way with a melody and colored his improvisations with the deep knowledge of harmony that characterized his innovative compositional technique. Some of the fourteen Gryce compositions in this compilation became minor classics, among them “Social Call,” “Satellite” and “Capri.” “Nica’s Tempo” is a jazz standard. “The Infant’s Song” should be.

As fine as Gryce’s soloing is here, it is Farmer’s work that lingers in the mind, and not only for his celebrated melodic qualities. His command of the instrument and fiery blowing at fast tempos remind us what a complete trumpeter he was early in his career. His work on the quicksilver “I Got Rhythm” variant called “Deltitnu” is a prime example. Horace Silver does a fair amount of scene stealing with the forthright swing and humor of his piano solos. Freddie Redd and Duke Jordan are the other pianists; Percy Heath and Addison Farmer the bassists; Kenny Clarke, Art Taylor and Philly Joe Jones the bassists. In addition to their other attractions, six of the tracks benefit from the effortless keyboard touch and inventiveness that made Jordan the envy of other pianists.

This single disc combines three sessions that originally appeared on the Prestige albums When Farmer Met Gryce and Art Farmer Quintet. Both of those are still available individually.

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 includes the Argo quartet session called Zoot. They were recorded a month apart with the same rhythm section; pianist John Williams, bassist Knobby Totah and drummer Gus Johnson. Here is some of what I wrote in the notes for that 1995 reissue:

One of the great writing talents of the 1940s, Handy did sensational work for the Boyd Raeburn band. His arrangements of pieces like “Dalvatore Sally,” Tonsillectomy” and “There’s No You” were some of the most important writing of the bebop era. But from
the mid-forties to the mid-fifties little was heard from or known about Handy except for the extended work called “The Bloos,” recorded in 1946 but not released until 1949 as part of Norman Granz’s ambitious album, The Jazz Scene. There was a renewed flurry of interest in Handy after he made two albums under his own name for Label “X” in 1955 and teamed up with Sims for the alto-tenor-baritone session in November, 1956, and another ABC Paramount date, Zoot Sims Plays Four Altos, in January, 1957. Since then, Handy has been inactive in jazz. His work with Zoot is particularly valuable as one of the few bodies of evidence of his great talent.

2008 update: Handy re-emerged in the mid-1960s to compose for the New York Saxophone Quartet. He wrote a few record reviews for Down Beat in the late sixties. He died in 1997 at the age of seventy-seven. Handy’s biography at the Institute for Studies in American Music web site describes him as an “enigmatic iconoclast.” The label is justified.

I hope that Handy’s and Zoot’s estates are collecting royalties from the dog food people.

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 Reid and drummer Matt Wilson are central to the effectiveness of “The Party,” with Nash stomping in full-blown R&B mode on tenor sax and Kimbrough lacing his solo with wry harmonic departures.

Nash’s trombonist father Dick and saxophonist uncle Ted were veterans of the big band era who made the transition to Los Angeles studio life and worked in dozens of Mancini sound track projects. He chose several of these pieces because of his father’s and uncle’s prominence in the screen versions. Mancini wrote the evocative “Something for Nash” for Dick Nash to play in the film Blind Date. His son does it on alto flute. In the exposition chorus of “Dreamsville” from Peter Gunn he pays tribute to his uncle Ted’s wistful alto sax treatment before doubling the tempo. The quartet romps through the rest of the track, with solos by Nash and Kimbrough in the bebop spirit. Nash inserts a phrase from “Solar,” one of the few direct quotes I’ve heard from this restlessly inventive soloist.

Nash is impressive on alto, soprano and tenor saxophones, flute and piccolo, but it is his range of expression on tenor that has me going back to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Soldier in the Rain,” “Two for the Road and the modal “Experiment in Terror.” Even when he roughens his tone and leaps up and down unorthodox intervals, he maintains a captivating lyricism. Part of the success of this album comes from the order and pacing of the tracks, including transitional use of four Mancini pieces in versions less than two minutes long. Nash leaves the listener with a sense of the thread of characteristic melodicism that makes Mancini’s music not merely a collection of superior pop pieces, but a substantial and durable body of work.

(More Recent Listening tomorrow) 

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 YH-R article opposite a reference to a picture of me, the editors have instead placed a photograph of Tierney Sutton, a much better idea. To read the piece, go here.

I hope that Rifftides readers will be among the legion of listeners pouring into Yakima for what has the makings of a memorable week. Below is video of a performance by one of the festival’s headliners, Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band, with Gonalez, flugelhorn and percussion; his brother Andy, bass; Larry Willis, piano; Steve Berrios, drums; and Joe Ford, alto saxophone.

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 festival, which is restored to its original dates, February 13-22, 2009. No time was set for the roster to be put in place. Royston’s festival co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith said, “We are putting on our track shoes. We are contacting our landlord, insurance company, all the artists and agents in New York and artists across the world.”

The bailout is a big enough municipal deal in Portland that The Oregonian has an editorial about it in this morning’s edition.

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 Alley. “I’m personally familiar with all these bricks,” he said. The gray-haired pianist is backed by bassist Hassan J.J. Shakur and drummer Herlin Riley. The trio swung the Frank Sinatra vehicle “Come Fly With Me” with extraordinary vigor, setting the tone for the first of two sets. Before the cheers could die down, the pianist was already laying out the rhythm for one of the calypsos inspired by his West Indies background. It turned out to be “Mama, Look-a Boo Boo.”

One of the most attractive items in Alexander’s eclectic repertoire is the Johnny Mandel-Paul Williams ballad “Close Enough for Love.” For the most part, he treated the song gently, but couldn’t resist sliding into medium four-four time for a few choruses before returning to ballad tempo. That’s the thing about Monty Alexander — the guy seems to have inexhaustible energy and he is prone to turning every tune into a tour de force. If James Brown was the hardest working man in show business, ol’ Monty is not far behind. In Riley and Shakur, he has a pair of kindred souls who exude joy in the romping, stomping style of their leader. Alexander is a crowd pleaser in the best sense of the term. A look around the club during his performance revealed no furrowed brow or look of glazed-eye boredom. The folks in attendance were having a good time, swept up in the music and getting their (considerable) money’s worth.

The Monty Alexander Trio appears at Blues Alley in two sets per evening through Sunday. (Oct 5)

                                                                                  –John Birchard