Archives for 2009

Comments are still arriving about Bill Kirchner’s list of recommended big band recordings since 1955. You will find the original item here and followups here. Not all of the comments are coming to Rifftides. As discussions will in the internet age, this one gravitated to other sites.
Here is a little of what the unfailingly provocative young composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote on his Secrety Society web site.

The thing is, there’s an awful lot of bigband music that is important to the history of jazz that doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I’m afraid this would include a s— -ton of music that is beloved by true bigband connoisseurs. For instance, I know this sounds heretical, but most of Count Basie’s output after Jo Jones left the group leaves me totally cold. Also, I’ve never really been able to develop much affection for the various Stan Kenton bands, etc, even when I respect the craftsmanship and inventiveness of some of the writing.
The stuff I like best and respond to viscerally and have invested time in studying in detail really represents only a small corner of the vast bigband universe. The center of this solar system is definitely the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra — especially the first edition of the group with Richard Davis on bass. This has been my favorite bigband since I was thirteen years old.

If Darcy wants to make “big band” one word, he’ll just have to deal with the usage police. To read all of his entry, which includes recommendations of his own, go here. His readers chime in with provocative comments of their own.
On Do The Math, Ethan Iverson, pianist of The Bad Plus, rambles engagingly with the big band discussion as a sort of touch stone. Here’s part of his rambling.

I didn’t come from a family interested in music. We had a record player but hardly any records. However, my aunt and uncle had a small collection of 60’s-era stuff, and when we visited them I would head straight to their living room and start spinning platters. The two discs that just astounded me were This Time By Basie: Hits of the 50s and 60s and Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings by Art Simmons.
(Simmons isn’t well-known; I haven’t heard his record in about 25 years. In fact, I had forgotten entirely about Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings until today. Within a few minutes of reading Darcy’s post, I found and purchased a copy on eBay for a slight sum. Looking at this fabulous cover art really takes me back.)
After realizing that I always played them over and over, my relatives let me borrow the Basie and Simmons records so that I could tape them on my home reel-to-reel player.
Perhaps my younger readers don’t know what a reel-to-reel player is. The picture at the top of this post might look like serious studio equipment – and maybe it is, high-end ones are still used – but the one in my house looked just like that and was merely the clunky predecessor to the compact cassette tape. A reel-to-reel tape deck was the only common way to tape an LP before about 1970 or so.

I stole Ethan’s picture of the old Sony reel-to-reel machine. Iverson does get back to the matter of big bands. To read his entire entry, click here.
I still have the Revox reel-to-reel I inherited from Paul Desmond and use it frequently. I wish that some of my newer components were of Revox quality.

Bud Shank’s honesty, forthrightness and cheerfulness came through in his playing. Those qualities and his transcendent musicianship were evident to all but those deafened by categorical imperatives having to do with geography, race and style. He lived to be 82, and he worked to the end, one of the great alto saxophonists in jazz. Shank died Thursday night shortly after arriving home in Tucson, Arizona, from Southern California. He had been working on a recording project. Earlier this year, he recorded a CD in a club engagement with the rhythm section he spent a lot of time with over the past decade, pianist Bill Mays, bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Joe LaBarbera. Mays sent a message this morning:

Our last work together was in January (4 nights at L.A.’s Jazz Bakery). Some very memorable tracks were recorded that week and I hope they see release some day. Bud was always willing to let the music “go where it wants” and set minimum “controls” on the players. His enthusiasm, optimism, laugh, and sense of humor, were a delight (after moving to Arizona he bought a truck and installed his no-more-used clarinet in the rifle rack!). I will miss the man very much.

Shank was inconvenienced by the pulmonary problems that restricted his mobility the past couple of years. He spent more time in a wheel chair than suited him. Nonetheless, he traveled long distances to perform, as far as Japan, maintaining the vigor of his playing and the essential buoyancy that dominated his personality.
Over the years, we worked together on projects and I spent considerable time with him. When I was researching the long essay that became the booklet for the 1998 Mosaic box set The Pacific Jazz Bud Shank Studio Sessions (limited edition, long since sold out), I stayed with Bud and Linda Shank at their house in the woods near Port Townsend, Washington. Here’s a passage that says something about the man and about his lack of self-deception.

If the child is father to the man, then the thin, crew-cut diffident, inward-looking Bud Shank begat his opposite number. His substantial figure comfortable on a couch in a music room above a spacious lawn surrounded by tall pines, Shank agreed to do something he detests, look backward in music. With a mane of grey hair and a beard that squares off a solid jaw he has the look of a Victorian sea captain. His appearance is appropriate to the history of the seafaring town he lives in, but one floor below is a garage containing his collection of Porsches and an Infiniti Q45. Shank’s laugh comes often and usually accompanies strong opinions. It has resonance and a certain wryness. I persuaded him to listen to “Bag of Blues,” Bob Cooper’s unusual composition from 1956.
When it was over, he said, laughing, “I was very young at the time. Formative period. Still learning. Still searching. I could see evidence of some of those influences we talked about. Spots of Zoot Sims, spots of Lee Konitz, spots of Charlie Parker.
I told him, “When you were listening to yourself play a double-time passage, you said, ‘Show-off.'”
“Well, yeah, but I really wasn’t showing off in those days. It came from some musical reason but it didn’t fit the flow of what I was doing before or after. I guess that’s why it disturbed me. Again, that’s the mish-mosh of different influences that were in me in those days. I didn’t have it together yet.

Later, that night, or maybe the next day, we talked about his rise to fame in the 1950s when Los Angeles, always a good jazz town, became the center of what commercial interests and some critics decided was a school or movement. Shank’s quartet then had Claude Williamson on piano, Don Prell on bass and Chuck Flores on drums.

With the exception of those caught in the war between beboppers and moldy figs that was manufactured by know-nothing critics in the 1940s, no musicians have been more unfairly typecast than the young jazz players of Los Angeles in the 1950s.
“Neither Claude nor Chuck nor I was playing what was known as ‘west coast jazz’ music at that time,” Shank said. ‘That happened a few years before then and we were all breaking away from that.”
“Meaning what?” I asked. “What were you breaking away from?”
“The very delicate way that we all played in earlier years…” He stopped in mid-sentence. “I don’t even know what the hell west coast jazz is,” he said, with exasperation and no wry laugh. “It was something different from what they were doing in New York, so the critics called it west coast jazz. That Miles Davis Birth Of The Cool album, out of New York, probably started west coast jazz. It was also very organized, predetermined, written. It was a little bit more intellectual, shall I say, than had happened before. Jimmy Giuffre, Buddy Childers, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, Marty Paich, Bob Cooper, almost everybody involved; we all came from somewhere else, New York, Texas, Chicago, Ohio. The fact that we were in L.A. around the orange trees had nothing to do with it. I really think that everybody played the way they would have played no matter where they were. New York writers, they’re the ones who invented west coast jazz.”
“Those bastards,” I said.
“Those bastards,” he said, laughing uproariously.

It was a source of frustration to Shank that, for many listeners who didn’t keep up with music, his flute playing defined him. During his membership in the Lighthouse All-Stars in the fifties, he became one of the best jazz flutists in the world.

“I had always thought of myself as a saxophone player,” he told me, “but the flute thing just appeared and all of a sudden, it was ‘Oh, flute, flute, Bud Shank, flute,’ which didn’t sit too well, but at least people were noticing me, so, okay, let’s keep on doing it. I was a saxophone player. That’s all I’d ever thought of.”

He did a lot of flute playing in the sixties and early seventies, when rock and roll stifled opportunities in jazz and he supplemented his income with studio work. Shank is still a model for many who play the instrument. He disposed of the flute in the mid-seventies, along with his career in the studios. “From now on,” he said, “I’m a bebop alto player.” As he concentrated on the saxophone, the aggressiveness, even ferocity, of his playing expanded along with the size of his sound and a magnificent feeling of liberation.
What a bebop alto player he was.

The text of a remarkable address is making its way around the internet through the part of the world in which music matters, which is everywhere. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the Boston Conservatory’s music division, greeted the parents of incoming freshman students. He made the speech in the fall of 2004, but it has taken on new life lately, because of passages like this:

I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds

.
And this, which he told the parents he would be saying to their children:

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

Before he reached that point in his address, Paulnack talked about the ancient Greeks’ recognition of the similarity between music and astronomy, about Olivier Messiaen in a Nazi concentration camp writing and performing his Quartet For The End Time, about how the September 11 attack made Paulnack question the value of music, about how the performance of a piece by Aaron Copland affected a pilot who had seen a friend die in war half a century earlier.
Paulnack’s talk is about the unifying, healing nature of music. You can read the whole thing by clicking here.
I have never heard Karl Paulnack play the piano. His speech makes me want to.

Since Rifftides began nearly four years ago, I have posted frequently about Ben Webster – but not frequently enough. That would be impossible. Few improvising artists have achieved Webster’s level of supremacy at speaking their pieces with eloquence and brevity. I would not suggest that eloquence has fled; it is possible to be eloquent at length. But in the post-Coltrane age of solos as tests of endurance it may be unnecessary to point out that succinctness is not one of the guidelines in most jazz playbooks. Webster is an antidote to the ennui induced by long-windedness.
This year is the 100th anniversary of Webster’s birth. You may count on my finding every opportunity to call to your attention the art of that incomparable tenor saxophonist. This is a link to a recent piece that addresses a reader’s distress with a tenor saxophonist who pays tribute to Webster. It also leads you to video of a heartbreakingly beautiful Webster ballad performance and a series of comments from Rifftides readers. This link takes you to a piece from 2005 in which a woman who is neither a musician nor a critic encapsulates in a sentence the essence of Webster’s musical persona.
Here is Webster in two videos that materialized on YouTube just last November. He is with Oscar Peterson, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; and Tony Inzalaco, drums. The first piece is the blues he called “Poutin’.” The second is “Sunday,” one of his favorites for decades. This would seem to be early 1970s. Webster died in 1973.

Okay, we’ve had enough fun with Sue Raney’s Scopitone romp in the park. To see it and the comments about it, go here. But first, watch and listen to Ms. Raney sing a Henry Mancini song that has long been one of her signature pieces. This is the sort of thing I had in mind the other day when I used the adjective “divine” in referring to her.

I don’t know who the alto saxophone soloist is. He did a lovely job with the bridge.

Old pal Tim Ryan called my attention to an interview Judith Schlesinger, our leading combination jazz writer/psychotherapist, did with guitarist Gene Bertoncini nearly a year ago. The interview ran on the All About Jazz web site, and I missed it last April. Maybe you missed it, too. It is fascinating for its insights into Bertoncini’s musical thinking, his quick wit and his interchanges with Dr. Schlesinger. Verbatim transcribed interviews are far from my favorite form of journalism, but when they work, they can be valuable. This one works.
Here is an exchange that grew out of Judith’s mention of Bertoncini’s study of architecture at Notre Dame. He didn’t realize that he and Antonio Carlos Jobim had architecture in common. Throughout, Bertoncini is identified as GB, Dr. Schlesinger as AAJ.

AAJ: In discussing your music, people often speculate about how your architect training informs your playing. There’s another great musician who was also into architecture, and that was Jobim.
GB: Really?
AAJ: Apparently he was always good at drawing, so when he got married and needed to make some reliable money, he took the entrance exams for architecture school. But he only studied a year before going back to music.
GB: Wow, that’s wonderful! I didn’t know that. I owe you for this. We met backstage once. Did he ever talk about being influenced by architecture?
AAJ: Not that I know of, but Goethe once said that architecture was “frozen music.” What’s your take on the connection?
GB: In architecture, you’re analyzing a couple of things: artistic balance, balance in design and what constitutes good design, and the needs of people. When designing a structure of any kind you have to be concerned about what’s going to be happening inside the structure, and how it’s going to make life better for the people in it, whether in a residential or commercial situation. And that opens up all kinds of sensitivities in you. This awareness can easily translate into your music: it becomes a combination of satisfying yourself and being concerned with the needs of the listener.
I’m always thinking about how my music will affect people–I can’t wait to play this for somebody, because I think it’s going to make them feel good. Then there’s the idea of making a presentation, because an architect always has to present a completed concept for a client. The whole concept is there on paper. I believe very much that this has influenced my sense of arranging: I present a concept for each tune I play, pretty much, that I’ve thought about. There’s a beginning and ending and a middle; there’s balance, you know, in a harmonic sense, and in a linear sense, like looking at the elevation of a building.
That’s one of the reasons why I work out a lot of things on the guitar. It’s not just learning the notes, or how to improvise, it’s working out arrangements to improvise from. There are things I just play off the top of my head, but for the most part, I want to have a really great concept for each thing I play.

To read the entire long interview, go here. To hear samples of Bertoncini’s splendid duo guitar CD with Roni Ben-Hur, click here.

Marc Myers, the proprietor of the blog called JazzWax, audited one of the polymath Mr. Kirchner’s classes at the New School and filed a report that begins:

Bill’s two-hour class took his 40 students through Miles Davis’ bio and recordings, complete with 13 prime audio examples. The sound system in the New School’s fifth floor “performance space” is sensational. Each digital recording was vivid and exciting and rich with warm sonic detail. In between tracks, Bill filled in the blanks with authoritative notes:

Marc’s piece includes Kirchner’s list of recordings used in the class and appends video of a latterday Davis performance when Miles was well into his electronic period. To see his report, click here. I’m not ready to agree that Davis’s performance is a work of art, particularly in comparison with the other tracks on Bill’s list, but it is worth seeing and hearing. Once.
If you missed the saga that began with Kirchner’s list of big band recordings since 1955, see the Rifftides exhibit two below this one. It will link you to the previous installments.

I would go to the library and borrow scores
by all those great composers, like Stravinsky,
Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what
was going on in all of music. Knowledge is
freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just
couldn’t believe someone could be that close
to freedom and not take advantage of it.

It was because of Bill [Evans]’s influence, I
think, that I always had classical music on
around the house. It was so soothing to think
and work by. I mean people would come by
and expect to hear a lot of jazz on the box,
but I wasn’t into that at the time and a lot of people
were shocked to hear me listening to classical
music all the time, you know, Stravinsky, Arturo
Michelangeli, Rachmaninoff, Isaac Stern.

I don’t like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

You cant play nothing on modern trumpet that doesn’t come from him, (Louis Armstrong) not even modern shit. I can’t even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang

.
Photo © Jamie Parslow, 1970

Bill Kirchner started this big band discussion on March 20 with a list of recordings recommended to his advanced composing and arranging students in New York. He drew some praise and some scattered fire from Rifftides readers, most of which appears in the exhibit two below this one. Mr. Kirchner requested the right of reply. The Rifftides staff is happy to grant it.

All interesting comments, some of which require nothing additional from me, though some do. First, a general comment: my list was compiled so that students could obtain some great recordings at reasonable prices. (Most of the CDs on the list can be had for under $10. That leaves out some collector’s items.)
To Ted O’Reilly and Barak: the Stan Getz Change of Scenes album I mentioned (with the Clarke-Boland Big Band) contains what is by far the most adventurous and stimulating writing I’ve ever heard by Francy Boland. As for Gerald Wilson, his album that I would have included, Moment of Truth, is listed on Amazon.com for $95-way beyond the budgets of most students.
To Ed Leimbacher: call me pertinacious, but I’ve never found Neal Hefti’s writing on The Atomic Basie, good and memorable as it is, as compelling as that by Frank Foster, Thad Jones, Frank Wess, Ernie Wilkins, and Billy Byers on the three albums I mentioned. As for the Verve Jazz Masters 36 and 48, they are anthologies (the only ones currently available, to my knowledge) of Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band and Oliver Nelson big band music, respectively. (Full disclosure: I did liner notes for both CDs and picked the selections for the former.)
To John Shade and Mark Stryker: I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Toshiko Akiyoshi’s writing, but with occasional exceptions (I included “Sumie” in the now-out-of-print Smithsonian Big Band Renaissance boxed set), I cannot. The late Rayburn Wright, one of the greatest composing-arranging teachers, once described her writing to me as follows: “It makes sense horizontally but not vertically.” Her bands were consistently excellent, though.
To Richard Mathias: Gary McFarland is one of my biggest influences as a composer-arranger. Alas, Profiles is one of those too numerous McFarland recordings that has never made it to CD (and which in any case contains only about half of the music from that 1966 concert). The October Suite (which, thank God, was finally reissued on CD a few years ago and is still available) is one of my desert-island records. Steve Kuhn graciously allowed me to xerox the scores, which I use in my teaching.
To Jim Brown: I merely said that Bill Holman’s charts on the Kenton Contemporary Concepts album represent his very best work, and a great introduction to it for students. But I wouldn’t presume to say that he has done nothing as good since the early ’60s; I don’t believe that for a moment.
To Mark Stryker: Slide Hampton IS on the list-sort of. There are several splendid charts by him on the Joe Henderson Big Band album I listed. And like you, I’ve enjoyed Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976 –though in that vein I prefer Muhal Richard Abrams’ writing to Braxton’s.
To Dave Frishberg: You’re a world-class musician who deserves much respect. The Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker is a nice record that I enjoy on occasion. But to me, it has little of the musical and emotional depth of The Far East Suite, …and His Mother Called Him Bill, and countless other Ellington albums. P.S. : I “get” Mingus. And Coltrane. Does that make me a bad person in your eyes?

New comments have shown up. I have attached them to the March 20 and March 23 items and will post others as they arrive. Now, Rifftides will move on to other matters.

When I was researching last month’s entry about Paul Desmond and the Scopitone, I encountered a film that seemed so unlikely, I set it aside to share with you later and only now remembered it. The divine Sue Raney, it turns out, was a Scopitone artist. I doubt that this song survives in her repertoire, but it certainly fit Scopitone’s ’60s European mod ethos.

Bill Kirchner’s list of recommended big band albums, compiled for his students, brought reaction. As might have been predicted, knowledgeable and opinionated Rifftides readers sent in their comments. Here they are. If more come in, we will compile and post them. Thanks to everyone who responded.

Very nice list. I am glad to see some names included (Don Ellis, Claire Fischer) that others might leave off. I hope your students dig into the music you are suggesting. Of course, I can’t help mentioning a few of my favorite big band CDs from the period for possible inclusion:
Terry Gibbs: Terry Gibbs Dream Band.
Vince Mendoza: Blauklang (a real sleeper here, and not widely heard since it is on a European label).
Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band: The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays
Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around.
And I just got a copy of a (still to be released) CD earlier this week that knocks my socks off . . Vipassana: Numinous Plays the Music of Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. Imagine Steve Reich collaborating with Maria Schneider . . . If you get a chance to hear it, check it out. – Ted Gioia

Nice list, though I might drop a couple, and add something from both
the Clarke/Boland Big Band, and Rob McConnell’s Boss Brass. – Ted O’Reilly

Bill K.’s list pretty much nails it. I would also suggest JJ Johnson’s
Brass Orchestra on Verve (1997). Architecturally ambitious, rich
in color (no reed section), stylistically comprehensive, and swinging.
JJ’s compositions and arrangements mostly (“Enigma,” “El Camino Real,” etc.) but also arrangements by Slide Hampton, Robert Farnon, Robin Eubanks; and “Swing Spring,” “Gingerbread Boy,” and “Wild Is The Wind.” Long out of print on the CD side, Amazon lists a few copies from its affiliated sellers ($7.15!!) and iTunes has it as well. I’d go for the CD: the booklet is superb and you get notes and a full personnel listing. Full disclosure: I greenlighted the project during my term at Verve. It was probably the biggest money-loser we had, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I miss JJ. – Chuck Mitchell

Seems to me slightly pertinacious to recommend the Basie items listed but then omit the so-called Atomic Basie album on Roulette, often considered the highwater mark of his Fifties band. And what the heck are the Verve Master CDs doing there; do they represent actual albums reissued without name? Or are they anthologies (as would seem)? Also, I would nominate the lovely Laurent Cugny albums dedicated to Gil Evans’ works (and including his participation in small ways) as worthy end-of-life tributes to a real Master; it would be interesting to know what Maria Schneider, Gil’s assistant and protege, thinks of them. – Ed Leimbacher

How about something by Toshiko Akiyoshi: Kogun, perhaps, or Long Yellow Road? They seem to me to be both original, with their synthesis of East and West, and powerful. – John Shade

As a high school student in the mid 60’s (grad 1967) and a saxophone/jazz arranger nerd, I wore out several copies of Woody Herman’s ’63 and ’64 albums along with This Time By Count Basie: Hits of the 50’s and 60’s. My friends were into the Kenton Band, which, other than the live Neophonic Orchestra album, bored me. Don Ellis was big too. I did get swept into this for a while.
The local Wallgreens Drug Store had a “cut out bin” with jazz albums that sold for $1.00. Gary McFarland’s Profiles entered my life. It was the most creative writing I had heard. Innovative yet unpretentious use of altered big band instrumentation. What would normally be the standard trombone section has Bob Brookmeyer on valve bone, Jimmy Cleveland, Bob Northern on French horn, and Jay McAllister on tuba. The reed section is stacked with a mix of the the best doublers and improvisers in New York at the time. Phil Woods, Jerry Dodgion, Zoot Sims, Richie Kamuca, and Jerome Richardson. We get Gabor Szabo AND Sam Brown on guitar (Gabor gets to be Gabor) plus Richard Davis on bass.
My sax player friends were all claiming to be learning “Giant Steps.” I transcribed McFarland’s “Winter Colors” for the school jazz band. A short time later I got a copy of Gary McFarland’s October Suite featuring Steve Kuhn on piano. These two albums turned me into a college composition major. – Richard Mathias

Without nominating a specific example, I’d like to see something from the subgenre of bands that play charts based on recorded solos, like the Monk Town Hall big band and Supersax. Besides “I like it,” I think these bands represent a step in the process by which bebop turned into a musical canon, with acknowledged classics–Bird’s solo on “Embraceable You” or Monk’s on “Little Rootie Tootie.” – John Burke

Bill Holman’s album Brilliant Corners (his arrangements of Monk’s
tunes) belongs in every “best of” list, imho. I wish there was a mention of Gerald Wilson and the Clarke-Boland Big Band. – Barak
(Bill Kirchner included Clarke-Boland in his Stan Getz category – DR)

I fully concur with Kirchner’s comments re: Holman’s earliest work being his best. As much as I love his writing, and I’ll go to hear it at every opportunity, I’ve never heard anything written after the early 60s that approached what he did before then. – Jim Brown

Interesting list that, obviously, touches lots of bases. One immediate addition ought to be Anthony Braxton’s Creative Music Orchestra 1976 (Arista/Mosaic). I’ve always considered it Braxton’s definitive record for the way it reconiles his unique take on the tradition with experimentalism. The album includes two jagged yet groovy stompos with culicue saxohone lines and puncy brass that comes out of Ellington, et. all, but there’s also a remarkably wild march that connects the dots between Sousa, Ives, post-Webern classical modernism and the jazz avant-garde — quintessential Braxton. A few other possibilities that come to mind off the top:
Gunther Schuller’s writing for either of the two albums with Joe Lovano, Rush Hour and Streams of Expression (both Blue Note), bring his Third Stream ideas up to date in very satisfying ways.
I’d like to figure out a way to get Slide Hampton on the list — probably The Way by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (Planet Arts), which features all Hampton charts. Toshiko Akiyoshi’s band ought to be on the list too. The great early RCA LPs from the mid ’70s are now out as a Mosaic Select box, but if I had to pick just one, it would be Long Yellow Road. – Mark Stryker

I saw Bill Kirchner’s list of commendable big band albums since 1955, and I think he’s left out the one album that stands out far above anything on the list, and that’s The Nutcracker Suite by Ellington/Strayhorn on Columbia c.1961. As I see it, this is the most intelligent, most resourceful, most imaginative, musically impeccable, and wittiest composing and arranging for big band that’s ever been heard in jazz. And the band’s performance is electrifying. How does one leave this out–and include two Charles Mingus albums? I don’t get it. But hey, I never got Coltrane either. Or Elvis. Sue me. – Dave Frishberg

Bruno Leicht writes from Germany, embedding a weekend viewing and listening present.

Browsing YouTube can be an adventure. Never seen this film before. Louis Armstrong and the All Stars at Newport, 1958. — Please listen and look closely. Miles was wrong; Pops was no Uncle Tom. This man WAS serious, nothing else but a super-professional artist here. Just watch him play his trumpet, look at his face when he announces the last number: Absolutely no traces of “Uncle Tom”, except the joy of performing some funny lyrics of Rockin’ Chair with a surprise guest.
Pops was a man of jazz: Deep, concerned and totally focussed on the music, on the people he performed with, and on the audiences he played for. His sound is so clear and strong here, I’m completely overwhelmed.
Especially on minute 2:26 is a particularly brilliant phrase, two glissandi in a break, perfectly timed … can’t describe them … It’s amazing how he does that. Pure genius to me. No one else could do such little big things as convincingly as Louis Armstrong.

In Los Angeles, The Jazz Bakery is losing its lease. The nonprofit performance hall’s guiding spirit, Ruth Price, says that it will live on…somewhere. Today’s Los Angeles Times has the story.

George Avakian has produced recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, among others. With the 78 rpm albums of Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens that he oversaw for Columbia Records in the 1940s, he invented the jazz reissue.
George turned 90 this week, and there was a huge party for him at Birdland in New York City. A wide cross-section of the jazz community turned out for the celebration. A splendid ad hoc mainstream band signed on to honor Mr. Avakian. They were David Ostwald, tuba; Randy Sandke, trumpet; Wycliffe Gordon, trombone and vocals; Anat Cohen, clarinet; Mark Shane, piano and vocals; Kevin Dorn, drums. Michael Steinman, proprietor of the excellent Jazz Lives web site, was there to report on the party.
Steinman’s report includes four videos of the band playing and one of George, with his customary charm, addressing the celebrants. To see it, click here.
Happy Birthday, George.

Among the French impressionist composers who intrigued jazz musicians as early as the 1920s was Erik Satie. His Gymnopédies for piano were particular favorites. In later years, some jazz players, including Bill Evans and Herbie Mann, adopted them into their own repertoires. Satie’s Gnossiennes may not be as familiar as the Gymnopédies, but they have qualities of their own and are no less captivating. Here is Alexandre Tharaud playing the Gnossienne no. 1. The video production includes scenes of the pianist’s hands disembodied and the piano being tuned, enigmatic touches that seem somehow appropriate to the mysterious personality of the composer.

Spring is here and my Italian friend Vigorelli Bianchi took me for our first ride of 2009. It was blustery and the sun was only occasionally peering between cloud banks, but we had a great time. Stamina was okay. The legs need conditioning. I stopped to speak with a fellow cyclist who was repairing a tube done in by a goathead thorn. I mentioned how good it felt to finally be out after weeks of unusual cold.
“I’ve done 500 miles this year,” he said.
Oh.

For his advanced composing and arranging students, saxophonist, composer, arranger and educator Bill Kirchner recently compiled a list of recommended big band CDs recorded since 1955. Kirchner teaches at The New School and Manhattan School of Music in New York City and New Jersey City University. Bill agreed to let me share the list with Rifftides readers, who may find some of their favorites but not others.

RECOMMENDED BIG BAND CDs, 1955-PRESENT–Bill Kirchner

Muhal Richard Abrams: The Hearinga Suite (Black Saint)
Count Basie: April in Paris, Frankly Basie (both Verve), Chairman of the Board (Roulette)
Carla Bley: Big Band Theory (Watt)
Bob Brookmeyer: New Works–Celebration (Challenge)
Miles Davis-Gil Evans: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain (all Columbia)
Duke Ellington: The Far East Suite, …and His Mother Called Him Bill (both RCA/Bluebird)
Don Ellis: Tears of Joy (Columbia/Wounded Bird)
Gil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions (Blue Note), The Individualism of Gil Evans (Verve)
Clare Fischer: Thesaurus (Atlantic/Koch)
Stan Getz: Big Band Bossa Nova (arr. Gary McFarland), Change of Scenes (w/ the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band) (both Verve)
Joe Henderson: Joe Henderson Big Band (Verve)
Woody Herman: Giant Steps (Fantasy/Original Jazz Classics)
Thad Jones-Mel Lewis: Consummation (Blue Note)
Stan Kenton: Contemporary Concepts (Capitol)
Joe Lovano (with the WDR Big Band arr. by Mike Abene): Symphonica (Blue Note)
Charles Mingus: Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia)
Mingus Big Band: The Essential Mingus Big Band (Dreyfus)
Gerry Mulligan: Verve Jazz Masters 36 (Verve)
Oliver Nelson: Verve Jazz Masters 48 (Verve)
Buddy Rich: The New One, Mercy, Mercy (both Pacific Jazz)
Maria Schneider: Evanescence (Enja)
Vanguard Jazz Orchestra: Up From the Skies (arr. Jim McNeely), Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard (both Planet Arts)
Kenny Wheeler: Music for Large and Small Ensembles (ECM)

I suggested to Kirchner that, despite Bill Holman’s splendid work on the Kenton Contemporary Concepts album, one of Holman’s own CDs should be on the list. He replied,

As much as I respect what he’s done on his own, I think that the Kenton CC album shows him at his very best–and is for students the best introduction to Holman’s work. (In the same way that Stravinsky did great things all during his career, but never wrote anything “better” than The Rite of Spring.)

If you submit a suggested addition to Bill’s list, kindly give a musical justification. For our purposes, “I like it” is not justification. Please use the Comments link at the end of the item. When we receive enough replies, we’ll post a followup.

I have written here from time to time about the harm the United States has done itself by failing in recent years to practice the cultural diplomacy that did it so much good for decades following World War II. After the Berlin Wall fell and European communist totalitarianism followed, the Clinton administration dismantled the United States Information Agency. The USIA’s functions, we were told, would be taken on by the State Department, but State has done little with them during a period when the US has been in crucial need of international good will. The Bush administration began taking down the Voice of America. It appears that the VOA has little chance of regaining its extensive international outreach which, of course, included a major component of jazz broadcasting.