Archives for March 2009

The SF Jazz Collective rolls into town next week to play at the world class nonprofit performance hall we have here in an acoustically blessed former church. The local newspaper asked me to write an advancer.

YAKIMA, Wash. — For a few weeks each year, seven of the busiest musicians in jazz suspend their leadership roles and come together as the SFJazz Collective. Their 2009 tour will bring them to The Seasons on Wednesday.

According to alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, the band is having a great time.

“It’s a lot easier,” the Yakima favorite said, “when you start getting into the music and don’t have to worry about making mistakes and being stressed about playing the parts right. Then it just gets easier and turns into fun. We’re now starting to get to that point of this tour.”

Zenon, who has played The Seasons twice with his quartet, was calling just before a sound check for the Collective’s concert in Albany, N.Y. He has been a member of the SFJC since its founding. His colleagues in the septet are tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, trumpeter Dave Douglas, trombonist Robin Eubanks, pianist Rene Rosnes, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland.

To read the whole thing and see a photo of the band, go here. If you’re in the neighborhood, see you at the concert. I’ll be the guy giving a very short introduction. Be sure to come up and say hello.

The recession seems to be doing little to stem the flood of CDs. This posting and others to follow constitute one man’s attempt to deal with the rising tide. The quick hits below are not full-fledged reviews, far from it. They are acknowledgements of a few releases worth investigating. Many of them, no doubt, deserve full analysis. The Rifftides staff regrets that we cannot provide deep consideration of all recordings of merit–or demerit. Listening and writing are linear activities, and the clock keeps ticking. Doomed never to catch up, we’re trying to stay abreast of the infinite surge of new recordings.
Geoffrey Keezer, Áurea (ArtistShare). Pianist Keezer is in the thick of the Peruvian movement that is attracting more and more jazz musicians. His playing, compositions and arrangements radiate authenticity and the freshness of Afro-Peruvian jazz. With propulsion by percussionists Hugo Alcázar and Jon Wikan and bassist Essiet Okon Essiet, Keezer crafts inventions based on shifting rhythms and deep harmonies. His colleagues include saxophonists Steve Wilson and Ron Blake, guitarists Peter Sprague and Mike Moreno, and the gifted Argentinian vocalist Sofia Rei Koutsovitis. Keezer’s setting of Eduardo Falú’s and Jaime Dávalos’ “La Nostalgiosa” is profoundly moving. He equals it with his own “Miraflores.”
Fat Cat Big Band, Meditations on the War for Whose Great God is the Most High You are God (Smalls). Angels Praying (Smalls). The bizarre cover illustration and the title mantra of the Meditations CD steeled me for an outpouring of anger, new age rumination, avant garde self-indulgence or, possibly, all of that. Instead, in both albums we hear an 11-piece ensemble of good young New York players cruising the modern mainstream and soloing well. The compositions and arrangements by guitarist and leader Jade Synstelien are tinged with Mingus, Ellington and possibly a hint of Gary McFarland. I finally got to hear trumpeter Tatum Greenblatt, and understood why established trumpet soloists like Jay Thomas are talking about him. Synstelien’s vocals in a style reminiscent of Frank Zappa would fit the Industrial Jazz Group or Reptet. In this context, they come as a bit of a jolt. Maybe that’s what he intended.
Joe Temperley, The Sinatra Songbook (Hep). Yet another Sinatra tribute? Yes, please. Temperley, the baritone sax anchor and soprano saxophonist of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, plays standards from Sinatra’s repertoire. The only original is “Moontune,” composed by guitarist James Chirillo on the framework of “Fly Me to the Moon” with a jaunty out-chorus for the octet. Temperley’s LCJO colleagues trumpeter Ryan Kisor and pianist Dan Nimmer and five other state-of-the-art musicians are aboard. Everybody gets plenty of solo time, but Temperley is the central figure. His caressing of “Nancy” on the big horn is a highlight. Everything Nimmer plays is a highlight.
Bill Henderson, Beautiful Memory: Live At The Vic (Ahuh). Henderson is a few days short of his 83rd birthday. Only 81 when this was recorded, he was as vigorous, rhythmically assured, in tune and full of blues and bop essences as when I first heard him singing as a stripling of 36. Embracing a sophisticated ballad (“Sleepin’ Bee”), updating a traditional classic (“Royal Garden Blues”) or improving on Elton John (“Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word”), Henderson is utterly convincing.

Rifftides reader Jim Eigo followed up on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece about Denny Zeitlin by sending this photograph. He took it last night at Zeitlin’s gig at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. From left to right, Buster Williams, Zeitlin, drummer Matt Wilson, fully involved. 

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I write about Denny Zeitlin. The piece is pegged to the simultaneous releases of his new trio CD on the Sunnyside label and a Mosaic box set with nearly all of Zeitlin’s Columbia trio recordings. The article begins:

In October 1963, a 25-year-old Johns Hopkins medical student sat at a concert grand piano in the East 30th Street studio of Columbia Records in New York and played a masterpiece of a jazz solo. Denny Zeitlin, from a Chicago family devoted to medicine and music, had come to New York for a 10-week fellowship in psychiatry at Columbia University. But the medical student, a pianist since the age of 2 and a professional musician during his high-school years, had also found time during his New York sojourn to study with the seminal composer George Russell, who became one of his champions, and to sit in with some of the city’s leading jazz players.

It goes on to tell the story of Dr. Zeitlin’s extraordinary life-long equal commitments to music and medicine, which…

… are not enough to absorb Dr. Zeitlin’s curiosity and energy. Tall, bearded, lean as a figure in an El Greco painting, he is also devoted to mountain biking, fishing, gastronomy and wine. Nor does he dabble in those interests. As with music and psychiatry, he pursues them.

To read the whole thing, click here, or pick up a copy of the Journal at your doorstep or the nearest news stand.

Music was probably born of the natural rhythms of life. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when people who dedicate themselves to life science release their creative energy in music. – Karen Schmidt in the journal Yale Medicine, 1998

…music is my heritage, I cannot help it – Albert Schweitzer

I gave up my position of professor in the University of Strausbourg, my literary work, and my organ playing, in order to go as a doctor to equatorial Africa -Albert Schweitzer, The Primeval Forest

Regarding Lou Levy’s Lunarcy CD reviewed on March 5 (scroll down), a Rifftides reader who identifies himself as Fergus wrote:

You might ask Universal why Lunarcy isn’t available on iTunes in the US as it is elsewhere.

The Rifftides staff passed that suggestion on to Universal publicist Regina Joskow. She said that she, in turn, would relay it to the appropriate folks at the record company. I added a suggestion that Universal, which encompasses Verve, also reissue the Levy CD. Ms. Joskow’s reply encapsulates the dilemma that faces record companies and, therefore, listeners unable or unwilling to substitute digital downloads for compact discs.

As you can imagine, it becomes far more challenging to release something physically as there are minimum quantities that have to be manufactured. Sadly, fewer and fewer music retailers exist, ESPECIALLY ones that care about jazz. The demise of Tower Records was a huge blow to the jazz industry as it accounted for such a huge portion of our business. Now that Circuit City is gone and Virgin is on its way out, things are looking even more grim. While Borders and Barnes & Noble still sell music, Borders is not doing well and it looks as though they’re going back to their core business of book selling. Amazon is a wonderful account, but one usually shops on Amazon with a particular title in mind. It’s so sad. My record collection is largely built on spur-of-the-moment purchases that took place in the aisles of Tower. “Oh, Bobby Timmons? I really like his work with Art Blakey…maybe I should check out this album…” and so on. I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the phenom. And suddenly, your house is taken over by records.
I know I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but it bothers me that my kids’ experience of obtaining music is largely relegated to shopping on iTunes. In truth, they do borrow liberally from my music library, but I remember those days of lying on the living room floor, reading liner notes, memorizing lyrics, and just staring at beautiful album covers. I’m sorry my kids won’t replicate that experience, but I guess I shouldn’t impose my values on them. It all just makes me a little sad.

Sam Stephenson of the Jazz Loft Project at Duke University shepherded the Thelonious Monk Town Hall 50th anniversary concerts at the end of February. See this post for a link to a review of the events. Mr. Stephenson sent a few post-concert anecdotes for our amusement. The Rifftides staff found them interesting and asked him to expand them for publication. We thank him for permission to bring them to you.

At the 1959 Town Hall show the great writer Martin Williams went onstage and talked about Monk’s music for 20 or 30 minutes before the music, as if justification was needed to bring Monk’s music from the downtown Five Spot to the uptown Town Hall. Then, Monk brought out his quartet and they played four tunes. Then, finally the tentet came out and played the music you can now hear on the Riverside CD.

What we did instead, with Tolliver’s show, was build a sequence that gave the audience, we hoped, a sense of the architecture of Monk’s music. Stanley Cowell came out first and played a magnificent version of In Walked Bud on solo piano. Then he was joined by Rufus Reid on bass and Gene Jackson on drums and they played a swinging Blue Monk. The third tune, Rhythm-a-ning, was played by quartet with Marcus Strickland on tenor. Then Tolliver came out with the rest of the band. During rehearsals it was clear that Tolliver’s hand was firmly in control of the first three tunes, even though he wasn’t onstage for the performances. There was something distinct he wanted out of each tune to build toward the tentet.
Most serious listeners liked both shows. Some preferred one or the other, and a few said they couldn’t stand Moran’s show, but some advocates of Moran’s show were the most passionate of all who have weighed in. I guess that’s normal for adventurous new music. We’ve received a ton of amateur feedback, some of it outlandish. One man in New Canaan, CT emailed the general address for Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, where I work, and complained that in the age of Obama and racial healing there should have been some white people in Moran’s band. We were speechless. He also said Moran’s music had nothing to do with Monk and everything to do with individual virtuosity. We’re speechless at that, too.




The only tune played either night that wasn’t played in the original Town Hall concert (both Tolliver and Moran played the same tunes in order) was the gospel tune “Blessed Assurance” (aka “This is My Story, This is My Song”) which Moran’s tuba player, trumpeter, and trombone player performed as a funeral dirge fadeout as the whole band walked offstage in the middle of the show. A man sitting behind my wife was apoplectic, stammering to everyone within earshot, “This isn’t Monk. Monk would never have played a tune like this. This is outrageous.” The man obviously hadn’t heard Monk’s Columbia album Straight No Chaser (the original recording, not the movie soundtrack) in which Monk played exactly that tune in much the same rhythm and phrasing that Moran had the brass trio play it to conclude a sequence that included a Rwandan drum sample in a Nasheet Waits drum solo. The sequence also had film footage shot in fields near the Monk ancestral home – the plantation of Archibald Monk, near Monk’s Crossroads – in Newton Grove, N.C. where a number of Monk’s relatives still live today. I thought it was extremely unique and powerful.



The night before during Tolliver’s show there was another man who was hysterical that Tolliver didn’t talk to the audience in between tunes, didn’t tell the names of the tunes (they were listed in the concert program) nor identify his soloists (all were identified in the program, too). I was told the man was seething with anger even while the band got a tremendous standing ovation after playing Little Rootie Tootie the first time and again after they played it a second time as an encore like Monk did.
One of the most heartening aspects of the project was to have around thirty Monk family members in attendance, and to have trombonist Eddie Bert and French horn player Bob Northern (aka Brother Ah) from Monk’s original band. Eddie was backstage before Tolliver’s show and I heard Tolliver’s trombone player Jason Jackson ask him, “You got any tips for me?” With a look of awe and bewilderment, Eddie said, “No, I don’t. All I know is, we rehearsed for a month.” Jackson played Eddie’s signature parts on “Monk’s Mood” beautifully.
I met a number of Monk’s cousins after the Moran show, including Pam Monk Kelley and Edith Monk Pue. Pam, an educator who has done extensive research on the family tree, asked me if I could attend their family reunion this summer. Her question made me feel better than just about anything that happened all week.
It’s been a fascinating experience for me and I feel very privileged to have been able to be involved.

Dena De Rose and Marvin Stamm, The Nearness Of Two (Teatro Della Muse). On the heels of De Rose’s splendid new trio CD comes the stealth release of the pianist and singer’s impromptu partnership with Stamm. She and the trumpeter found themselves in the ancient town of Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast. A jazz festival producer, Giancarlo Di Napoli (he’s Italian), suggested that they do a concert. Stamm and De Rose had never played together until that evening. Indeed, De Rose had never performed in duo with a horn player. They agreed on a repertoire but had no rehearsal. They played in a small hall to open the 2006 Ancona Jazz Festival. Di Napoli recorded the concert. The result is a CD preserving a brilliant instance of what can happen when two improvising musicians meeting for the first time draw on a common language. To digress only slightly, here’s a paragraph from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers:

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who play it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources, and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

Whatever the age difference between Stamm and De Rose, in their collaboration there is not so much as the hint of a barrier. To the contrary, they delight in reaching into that universal fund of devices and employing them to surprise and challenge one another and themselves. It is a journey of discovery that lasts more than an hour, and there is not a lackluster moment.
The musicianship of women who sing, regardless of their instrumental excellence, is often taken for granted. From the beginning here, De Rose’s playing on “There Is No Greater Love’ obviates any suggestion that she is less than superb as a pianist. Accompanying Stamm, soloing, and engaging in fanciful exchanges with the trumpeter, she is magnificent. She does admit a small defeat during a round of trading four-bar phrases. After Stamm makes his horn growl lustily, she says, “No fair; I can’t do that.” Otherwise, it’s an even match. Seven minutes into the second track, “Corcovado,” when she sings her first notes of the concert, it comes as a mild shock to the listener intent on her improvising to realize that this angelic vocalist is the pianist who has been swinging like crazy while rolling out a carpet of rich chords that might make Jobim wish that he had thought of them. I must also observe how effective a dramatic device it is when a good singer makes her appearance only after the band–in this case De Rose and Stamm–has set the stage. That was routine practice in the swing era. It died out after singers emerged from the ranks of sidemen and sidewomen to become featured attractions and more or less take over popular music.
Stamm has perfected the art of playing quietly without sacrificing facility, tone, range or expressiveness. Throughout, he executes stirring doubletime passages at the volume of an intimate conversation. His muted solo on “In The Glow of the Moon,” a song De Rose wrote with Meredith d’Ambrosio, is just one memorable instance. Another is the counterpoint he initiates in “I’m Old Fashioned.” De Rose scats in parallel with her single-note piano lines while the two alternate fours and intertwine melodies with such complexity that any annotator would have to labor long and hard to get them down on paper. A peak of fascination and excitement comes in the blues, Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” begun by Stamm, reflective and unaccompanied. It melds into a brisk tempo that launches De Rose into several rollicking choruses, Stamm into several more, and the pair into a succession of their mirror-minded exchanges, then a flying final unison statement of Monk’s famous chromatic melody.
There is more; deeply felt performances of “The Nearness of You” and “Imagine;” Stamm soaring on piano updrafts among the heights of the minor intervals in Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean;” a loving treatment of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring.”
Somewhere back there, I referred to the stealth release of this gem. It is on a small, nearly private, label connected with producer Di Napoli’s theater. It is unlikely to show up in your corner record store (as if there were any left), or on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It is beginning to look as if it is already becoming a collector’s item, offered on ebay at an inflated price. This CD deserves a long life and perpetual availability. The realities of the record business being what they are, if I were you I’d grab it while it’s still around.

Trying to keep up with new releases, I often get sidetracked by old favorites. It happens that my recent listening coincides with the birthday of two of the listenees.
Lou Levy, Lunarcy (Verve). Levy would have been 81 today. He died in January of 2001. From his post-World War Two beginnings with Georgie Auld through work with Sarah Vaughan, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra–among many others–Levy was in demand as a band pianist, soloist, and accompanist to major singers. Uncompromising in his musical standards, he was one of the most important pianists initially inspired by Bud Powell, and he made whoever he was playing with sound better. Every so often, I pull out his 1992 CD Lunarcy. Recorded in Los Angeles for the French label Polygram and released in the US by Verve, Lunarcy got less promotion than it deserved. Drummer Ralph Penland and the late Eric Von Essen, a remarkable bassist, complete the rhythm section. Pete Christlieb is on tenor saxophone on most of the tracks. It is a happy collaboration.
Carol Sloane, Dearest Duke (Arbors). This is also Sloane’s birthday. As far as I know, Dearest Duke is her most recent CD. Full disclosure that I am not an impartial observer of this music: I wrote the liner notes. This excerpt will give you an idea of my enthusiasm for her work in this collection of Ellington songs.

What is a jazz singer? There is no reliable definition, but there is an answer. Carol Sloane is a jazz singer. If she scats one note in a thousand, I’d be surprised. I would not be surprised if that note was full of the spirit of jazz. Vocalists have scatted entire songs, entire sets, without a glimmer of the jazz feeling that Sloane achieves with three words of a ballad.
This is not idle liner note chatter. We have evidence at hand. One minute and six seconds into “Sophisticated Lady,” hear how she employs phrasing, intonation and melodic ingenuity as she sings “…soon grow wise.” It is a gem of a moment in a compelling performance. Sloane finds the heart of Duke Ellington’s tune and makes the most of Mitchell Parish’s lyrics. In her care, the awkward line, “…and when nobody is nigh,” seems absolutely right.

Next time, more recent listening and, possibly, more detachment.

If you have wondered how those concerts turned out that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s Town Hall concert, Will Friedwald reported on them for The Wall Street Journal. As we mentioned last week in this Rifftides post, the bands were led by Charles Tolliver and Jason Moran. Here’s an excerpt from Friedwald’s review of the events.

The first night, Mr. Tolliver and his musicians reveled in the duality of Monk’s music — his basic themes are so simple that an amateur can easily pound one out on the piano, but to capture the nuances and the subtleties of his compositions takes a lifetime of study, even for the current generation of players who grew up on Monk’s tunes and studied them formally in music school.
On Thursday night, Mr. Tolliver and his men got those nuances almost exactly right. Starting, as the original concert did, with solo, trio and quartet pieces, pianist Stanley Cowell captured Monk’s spirit without mimicking every little dynamic of every little note.

To read the whole thing, go here.

Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.–Miles Davis

Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.–Frederic Chopin

Rests always sound well.–Arnold Schoenberg

Fifty years ago today, the Miles Davis Sextet began recording for Columbia Records the music that ultimately made up the album called Kind Of Blue. To observe the occasion, Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages commissioned an essay about that imperishable recording and its most recent CD reissue. The piece, by John Varrallo, is exclusive to the Evans site. It is worth reading.
Evans, who was central to the concept of the music on Kind Of Blue, had left the band by the time Davis appeared on CBS-TV’s Robert Herridge Theater in April of 1959. Wynton Kelly was now the pianist. John Coltrane was still on tenor saxophone, with Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers on drums and bass. Later in April, Evans returned to the band, but only to complete the final tracks for the album. Alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley is not on the television program. In this performance, the quintet is enhanced by three trombones, one of them played by Frank Rehak. You will see Gil Evans and the large orchestra that played with Davis in other segments of the broadcast. Herridge introduces the album’s most famous piece.

Columbia/Sony/Legacy has added to the chain of Kind Of Blue CD reissues an elaborate package that includes two CDs, a DVD and a vinyl long-playing record of the original album.