Archives for 2009

The Boston Globe‘s Steve Greenlee reports from the resuscitated Newport Jazz Festival that he found the weekend’s best music in the festival’s outlying precincts.

As the Alps tower over Swiss villages, stacks of compact discs tower over me. Sampling, auditioning, listening at length when something grabs my ear, I make my way through the CD Alps that surround me. If I live to be 115, which is my plan, there is no possibility of my fully hearing more than a smattering of these discs. Some of the arrivals in the never-ending stream of albums are from veterans, young and old, recording for prominent companies. Many more are by musicians or singers who produce, distribute and market their own wares. They hope that in the new economic reality of the record business their CD calling cards will land gigs, sales, reviews or notice from established labels. First in this brief survey of recent listening is one that could do all of that.

Lena Seikaly, Written In The Stars (Lena Seikaly). Ms. Seikaly sings with a rich mezzo-soprano voice, using intonation, timbre and control that reflect her classical training. Her phrasing, feeling and improvisatory leanings come from an understanding of jazz values. She makes the unconventional, even daring, decision to open her debut album by scatting her way into “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” Musicianship and her sense of proportion make the track, and the CD, a success. Ms. Seikaly may scat too much for some tastes, but she does it with a musician’s grasp of harmony, not merely straining to be hip.

The more intriguing aspects of her performances here are in the ways she uses phrasing and tonal shadings to interpret songs when she’s singing lyrics. There is an effective instance of that element of her work as she imparts a minor, almost modal, cast to her final chorus on “When I Fall in Love.” She brings slight but effective variations of the melody to her straightforward treatments of “The Very Thought of You” and “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love,” one of Charles Mingus’s most moving ballads. Ms. Seikaly and tenor saxophonist Bobby Muncy achieve a rich blend on the wordless “Gravitation” and on “Written in the Stars,” two of her four compositions here. Muncy solos well in a style influenced by John Coltrane. The Washington, DC, rhythm section is comprised of pianist Nathan Lincoln-Decusatis, bassist Tom Baldwin and drummer David McDonald. Leonardo Lucini subs on bass for one track. Ms. Seikaly is a singer with significant potential.

Bobby Broom, Plays For Monk (Origin). Broom is too young to have worked with Thelonious Monk. He has been Sonny Rollins’s guitarist for nearly thirty years. Rollins was a Monk sideman who absorbed the pianist’s compositional, harmonic and rhythmic ethos, and it is likely that some of Rollins’s Monk wisdom has rubbed off on Broom. When he was very young, Broom also worked with Art Blakey, Monk’s ideal drummer. However he obtained it, in this relaxed, accessible collection, he brings depth of understanding to interpretations of eight Monk compositions and two standards that Monk enjoyed playing. Broom is not a speed demon virtuoso of the guitar, but a thoughtful improviser who knows the uses of space in the lines he creates. With bassist Dennis Carroll and drummer Kobie Watkins, Broom finds the beauty, humor, subtlety and swing that Monk put into “Ruby, My Dear,” “Evidence,” “Work,” “Bemsha Swing” and, emphatically, the joy Monk always transmitted in his performances of the old pop song “Lulu’s Back in Town.” Broom gives a heartfelt treatment of Monk’s ballad “Reflections,” a composition of structural perfection. The guitarist graces the piece in a moving solo that Carroll follows with a statement of equal beauty. Broom closes with a Monk favorite, Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He plays it unaccompanied, out of tempo and with what may well be reverence for Kern as well as for Monk.

If you don’t get the reference implied in the CD’s cover photo, this picture will help. It’s one of Monk’s classic Riverside albums, Monk’s Music. Among its other virtues, it has Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane as sidemen.

Frank Glover, Politico (Owl). Glover plays clarinet in modern mainstream territory that shares a border with free jazz. In this reissue of a 2005 CD that had limited distribution, he performs with the energized rhythm section of pianist Steve Allee, bassist Jack Helsley and drummer Bryson Kern. His writing for a string ensemble on one piece and a 14-piece band on another has intimations of Gil Evans and Béla Bartok. Glover’s playing, rich and woody in the lower register, tends toward shrillness during virtuoso excursions into the upper regions of the horn. His improvisations have a nice balance between long phrases and whirlwind flurries with adventuresome interval leaps. In the final movement of his 3-part “Concierto Para Quarteto,” Glover and pianist Allee execute stunning unison passages that blend in and out of free sections so subtly that only the closest attention discloses what is written and what is improvised. Stimulating stuff.

Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, The Classic Prestige Sessions, 1951-1956 (Prestige). The 25 tracks in this two-CD set have been reissued to a faretheewell over the years in various configurations, and no doubt will continue to be for years to come. Like Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Dickens novels, the poetry of Yeats and Fred Astaire’s films, they should be available in perpetuity. The five years of recordings here cover some of Davis’s and Rollins’s best work from their relative conceptual innocence in the immediate post-bop period to the mid-fifties, when each had become a formidable musician on the verge of fame and enormous influence. The sidemen constitute a hall of fame of the era. They include John Lewis, Percy Heath, Roy Haynes, Walter Bishop Jr., Art Blakey, Jackie McLean, Horace Silver and Charlie Parker. Yes, Charlie Parker. For any serious jazz listener, familiarity with these recordings is necessary to an understanding of how jazz developed over the past sixty years. A valuable bonus is Ira Gitler’s liner note memoir about the days when he worked at Prestige as a jack of all trades and was intimately involved with most of the musicians who produced this essential music

Marc Myers’ JazzWax wraps up a four-part interview with Denny Zeitlin, packed with good questions, and answers that give insights into an intriguing man. For decades, Zeitlin has maintained parallel careers as a jazz pianist and a practicing psychiatrist. Myers asked him how empathy plays a role in both pursuits.

When I’m doing my most effective work as a musician playing with other musicians, I try to lose that positional sense of self so I can enter their musical world and merge with what they’re doing. With a patient in my office, I do my most effective work when I’m able to enter their psychological life so deeply that I can really seem to feel what it is that he or she is feeling. Yet in both cases, there’s a part of me that is still available, that is able to pull back and observe the process that both of us are in.

To read all of the interview, go to JazzWax.com. For a piece I wrote about Zeitlin in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, go here.

Yesterday was Louis Armstrong’s 108th birthday, and I forgot to mention it. To make up for that oversight, Rifftides brings you Armstrong in 1958. Pops’s singing and playing partner is his pal of 30 years, Jack Teagarden. Louis was 57 years old and playing beautifully on every level — range, tone and ideas. At 2:41, listen to him turn a little lip bobble into pure gold. The cornetist who kicks things off is Ruby Braff.

One day I heard a pianist play `Honeysuckle Rose,’ … and I was hooked. I said, `What is that?’ He said, `jazz,’ which was a word I had never heard, and I asked him to spell it for me. My life was changed after that. – Joe Zawinul

I am an improviser, … I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. – Joe Zawinul

For a white Viennese boy to write a tune that’s that black is pretty remarkable. He just captured the essence of the African-American heritage, just the statement of melody and feeling of that song. Clearly, in some past life, Joe must’ve been black. – Herbie Hancock on “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Zawinul has been gone nearly two years. For a Rifftides reminiscence posted upon his passing, go here. It includes the story of why Cannonball Adderley’s first-choice take of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was nixed by the record company.

Put aside all of the old arguments about whether this is jazz, jazz-rock, fusion, world music, ethnic music, R&B, funk or something else. The arguments don’t matter anymore, if they ever did. This is truly, to borrow Ellington’s overused phrase, beyond category. There is no more stunning instance of what rhythm, harmony and harmonics can do for a repeated riff. Joe Zawinul wrote the song. This version of Weather Report is Zawinul at his electronic keyboard arsenal, Wayne Shorter playing two kinds of saxophone, Jaco Pastorius on bass and Peter Erskine on drums. The performance is from a concert in Germany in 1978. There are a couple of rough spots in the tape. Be glad the tape exists. YouTube says this clip has been viewed more than a million times.

Have a good weekend.

Pianist Bill Mays and the Oregon Festival of American Music Orchestra will perform George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue tonight. Mays tells Rifftides it will be the full-blown composition that debuted in 1924 with Gershwin as soloist, not the shortened version frequently performed by symphony orchestras. For details, click here. If you happen not to be in Eugene, Oregon, you can hear it live in a web-streaming broadcast on KLCC-FM, Eugene’s public radio station, at 8:00 pm PDT, 11 pm EDT. Click here, then click on either the MP3 or Windows Media player.

George Russell died Monday night. Here are some of the facts of his life, outlined by the Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — Jazz composer George Russell, a MacArthur fellow whose theories influenced the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died. His publicist says Russell, who taught at the New England Conservatory, died Monday in Boston at age 86 of complications from Alzheimer’s.

Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and attended Wilberforce University. He played drums in Benny Carter’s band and later wrote ”Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and was the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz. Russell developed the Lydian concept in 1953. It’s credited as the first theoretical contribution from jazz.
Russell is survived by his wife, his son and three grandchildren. A release says a memorial service will be planned.

The first sentence of that AP story barely suggests Russell’s importance. There will be much more written and spoken about him in the next few days by scholars and historians, as there should be. The work he did, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, had major influence on the thinking and performance of musicians who were shaping new ways of approaching the music. On a radio program I did in the sixties, I devoted five weeks of broadcasts to Russell’s music. This was the introduction to that series on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans in September and October of 1966.

Over the next few programs we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell – not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but also because of his influence of the development of jazz in the sixties, an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized even by many musicians. It may well develop that Russell is having an impact on the course of jazz as great as, or greater than, that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the write and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. Hence, pan-tonality.
That’s a brief and far from complete reduction of George Russell’s theory, on which he worked for ten years. It’s all in Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Jazz Improvisation.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.
Discipline.

Improvising Russell’s way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. Some of their names: Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Don Ellis, Dave Baker, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Eric Dolphy. Evans is featured soloist in Russell’s 1959 Decca recording, Jazz In The Space Age, the most thorough application of Russell’s theories to a large band. If you’re not familiar with Russell, all that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there’s a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle, but it’s there. And, I should add, it’s more evident after several hearings.

For five Saturdays, engineer Charlie Flatt played and I talked about Russell’s music, reaching back to 1947 and his “Cubano Be-Cubano Bop” for Gillespie and up to his 1963 quintet album The Outer View. The survey included the classic “All About Rosie,” commissioned by Brandeis University in 1957, the smalltet recordings for RCA, Russell’s series of Riverside albums and the remarkable suite New York, New York, a 1959 work that brought together, among other players, Evans, Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Phil Woods, all interesting young musicians who went on to be among the most influential in jazz.

For a sense of Russell and New York milieu in which he operated in the late 1950s, video of a 1958 edition of The Subject Is Jazz brings together several of the musicians who played his music. It includes a version of Rusell’s “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” with a Bill Evans solo not as electrifying as the one on this recording. Nonetheless, it presents Evans in the context of Russell’s work, and it is followed by critic Gilbert Seldes interviewing Russell about his concept. The program also has two pieces featuring Billy Taylor. If you stay with it for all 24 minutes, you’ll see credits for the musicians. And, yes the trumpeter identified as Carl Severinsen is Doc Severinsen. You may never have thought of him as a bebopper, but listen to those solos.

Was George Russell a force in opening jazz to greater freedom In the late fifties and early sixties, as I suggested 43 years ago, or did his Lydian Chromatic Concept synthesize ideas that were already in the air? Some of each, perhaps. Either way, he created some of the most stimulating music of his day, up to, including and beyond his collaboration with avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry. I am less enchanted with his later electronic works, but I’m going to dig them out and give myself another chance with them. After all, it’s George Russell; there may be more than met the ear the first time around.

Following that 1966 series of radio programs about Russell, I sent him a transcript, not knowing whether he would ever see it. I heard reports from New York that he was discouraged and had left the US to live in Europe. A few months later he sent me a letter from Stockholm.

It is like I have waited a lifetime to hear someone say the things which you did concerning my music (and if I never hear them again I will not feel that my efforts in jazz have gone unrewarded). I received the transcript at the right moment, too, for I was in one of those states of flux that I’ve come to accept as a necessary but painful part of artistic growth. It is very trying during these times to keep one’s self-confidence and I must admit that my morale was sagging more than a little bit. But your sensitive views of my music worked wonders.

Closing a long letter, Russell wrote that he hoped we would meet one day. We never did.
(For an obituary containing insights into Russell’s methods see the article by Brian Marquard and Michael Bailey in today’s Boston Globe)

I am not in the business of promoting night club engagements. Nor do I intend to be. However, this is so rare an event on the east coast, I would hate to think that Rifftides readers in and about New York might fail to hear about it.

As a companion unsolicited plug, allow me to call your attention to the most recent Kilgore-Frishberg collaboration on CD, Why Fight The Feeling, their collection of Frank Loesser songs. Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes. I got paid, but I’ve spent the money, and I don’t get royalties.
From the notes:

Loesser was a master at converting everyday language into lyrics that, as Frishberg put it, “Take the listener by the ear and lead him around.” A fledgling songwriter in New York in the late 1950s, Frishberg got to know Loesser. He has never forgotten the guidelines the older man gave him:
“Try to make everything refer back to the title. Make the lyric belong to the song, and the title should have something to do with it. Keep focused in on what the title is saying. He told me to avoid colorful language unless I put a rest nearby so that the audience could have time to digest it. Otherwise, they’d be admiring, or wondering, or puzzled about it and lose the next lyric or two, because the purpose of writing is to get their attention and keep it.”
Anyone familiar with Frishberg’s songs knows that Loesser’s advice made an impression, but you’ll have to consult Dave’s recordings for evidence; the only songs here are his mentor’s. In line with their long-time agreement, Dave doesn’t sing when he and Becky perform together. That’s only fair; she doesn’t play piano when he sings.

Steve Kuhn, Mostly Coltrane (ECM). Kuhn pays homage to John Coltrane, who briefly employed him in 1960 when the pianist was on the doorstep of his career. His tribute encompasses elegiac, earthy and wildly exploratory facets of the great saxophonist. It may remind listeners that, despite a relatively low profile, Kuhn is a major pianist of our time. His grasp of the nature, or natures, of Coltrane’s music is evident throughout. His keyboard touch, his fluidity, the flow and density of his harmonies, the way he supports Joe Lovano, make that plain. Lovano is a saxophonist drenched in Coltrane’s spirit who has the technique to summon it without resorting to either mindless direct imitation or the thrashing about that render so many Coltrane acolytes sterile. Bassist David Finck and drummer Joey Baron are connected with Kuhn and Lovano as if by neural attachment. Their accompaniment consists of not merely a carpet of rhythmic support underneath the piano and saxophone, but threads woven into the music.
When I was in New York last month, one of my unanticipated treats was being taken to the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame Awards ceremony at Lincoln Center. The posthumous inductees included Coltrane. The artists ASCAP chose to represent his music were Kuhn and Lovano. Their exquisitely slow “Central Park West” was so mesmerizing that when it ended it kept the audience in suspended animation for what seemed a full minute before applause erupted. Judi Silvano, Lovano’s wife, was sitting behind me. She leaned over and said, “You see why I married him.” The “CPW” here is shorter, marginally faster and doesn’t weave quite the spell of the duet that night in the Allen Room, but it is a lovely interpretation of one of Coltrane’s most affecting pieces. In addition to “Crescent,” “Like Sonny,” “Spiritual” and six other Coltrane compositions, Kuhn provides two new pieces, the glistening unaccompanied piano solo “With Gratitude,” and “Trance,” with an appropriately hypnotic Lovano solo on the Hungarian instrument known as a tárogató.
To represent Coltrane’s final days, when he was searching for what he called a “universal sound,” Kuhn chose “Configuration,” from the 1967 album Interstellar Space. Coltrane’s recording was a chromatic exercise that developed into startling bursts of energy exchanges with drummer Rashied Ali. Kuhn’s version follows the pattern, with Lovano approximating Coltrane’s unbridled free will and passion and Baron demonstrating the full range of technique that he often keeps in reserve. Kuhn contributes a new element, a whirlpool of a piano solo. He is breathtaking in his technical control while taking advantage of the freedom to impose self discipline. Following a few bars of simultaneous improvisation with Lovano, Kuhn makes a spontaneous composition that has form and logic. Elliott Carter, George Crumb or any other modern concert composer might have spent weeks writing it and been happy to have done so. Kuhn creates it on the spot. Art Blakey was fond of saying, “Jazz musicians are the greatest musicians in the world.” Kuhn’s solo on “Configuration” is supporting evidence for that argument.
Steve Kuhn, Baubles, Bangles And Beads (Venus). Kuhn is one of several prominent pianists recording for the Japanese label Venus, whose CDs until recently were available outside of Japan only as expensive imports. Now, Amazon.com offers them at moderate prices. In this trio recording, one of several he’s done for the label, Kuhn, David Finck and drummer Billy Drummond explore themes by classical composers. Some of the pieces are in their original forms, among them a gutsier approach then we usually hear to Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1.” Kuhn and the trio also play Chopin’s “Prelude In C-Minor, No. 20, Opus 28” and Lehar’s venerable “Vilia” from The Merry Widow. Other tracks are standard songs adapted from the classics, including the title tune, “Stranger In Paradise,” “‘Til The End Of Time” and “If You Are But A Dream.” Kuhn’s waltz treatment of the third movement of the Brahms Symphony No. 3 has an amusing stop-time hesitation in the arrangement and one of several sterling Finck bass solos in the album. I am slightly bothered by Kuhn’s frequent use of repeated triplet figures in his right-hand lines, which seems to have become a habit. That is a minor irritant in a CD overflowing with playing marked by lyricism, terrific chord alterations and irresistible swing.
Eric Alexander, My Favorite Things (Venus). Tenor saxophonist Alexander has recorded several CDs for Venus. Here, with the rhythm section he favors, he applies his capacious sound and modern mainstream approach to “As Time Goes By,” “Airegin,” “Triste” and “Lover Man” in addition to the Richard Rodgers title tune and other standards. In years of working together Alexander, pianist David Hazeltine, bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth have bonded into a tight quartet that avoids coasting even on the most familiar material. Alexander’s spontaneous coda to Jobim’s “Triste” is a nice surprise. Hazeltine, a complete pianist, is satisfying throughout. He and Alexnder are deep and thoughtful in a remarkably slow “Stella By Starlight,” refreshing to hear after that perfect tune’s having been converted by too many jazz players into a romp.
From Johnny Griffin With Love (Storyville). The three CDs in this box have some of Griffin’s best work for the Danish label. The fourth disc is a DVD with performances by Griffin at New York’s Village Vanguard and his fellow tenor saxophonist Eddie Lockjaw Davis at Copenhagen’s Jazzhaus Sluketter, both with quartets. In the first CD Griffin is with the redoubtable rhythm section of pianist Kenny Drew, bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Arthur Taylor in 1964 at the Montmarte Jazzhouse in Copenhagen. The second disc, twenty years later at the same club, pairs Griffin with Davis, his favorite tenor sax sparring partner. Pianist Harry Pickens, bassist Curtis Lundy and early in his career, drummer Kenny Washington, are the support troops. On his own, Griffin is formidable, blazing with speed, chops and fluid ideas. When he and Davis team up, he becomes even more speech-inflected and, sometimes, confrontational in his soloing. They were one of the most stimulating and exciting horn duos in all of jazz, and their live performance together in this 1964 club date is a highlight of their partnership. With Drew again and with Jens Melgaard and Ole Streenberg on bass and drums in 1989, relatively late in his career Griffin had lost nothing of technique, drive or imagination. Griffin came to love and excel at ballads, and this third disc in the set has moving performances of Ralph Rainger’s “If I Should Lose You” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Isfahan.” It closes with an extremely fast version of Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning” that Griffin chooses as an occasion for not only several fearsome choruses but also a series of silly and thoroughly enjoyable whoops, hollers and a few honks.
As the DVD opens, we hear the rhythm section of pianist Ronnie Matthews, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Kenny Washington wailing on a fast blues in F as we watch pedestrian and auto traffic on Seventh Avenue outside the Vanguard. The camera takes us inside. Griffin launches into chorus after chorus of impassioned playing and Matthews follows suit with some of the best recorded soloing of his career. Drummond and Washington are in the same groove–and the same league. This version of Griffin’s “A Monk’s Dream,” 13-and-a-half-minutes long without a superfluous note, is a triumph. The two tunes on Davis’s portion of the DVD, recorded in 1985, feature drummer Ed Thigpen, the stalwart bassist Jesper Lungaard and Niels Jørgen Steen, a fine journeyman Danish pianist. Thigpen and Lundgaard clearly enjoy their relationship, Steen plays good solos, and Davis is at his usual high level, which is to say gruff, warm and swinging. The camera work, direction and sound reproduction are superb. The video is slightly grainy when viewed on a big screen, but that is a minor flaw to which the eye adjusts and is not a problem on an average-sized computer screen. These are honest, ungimmicked, portrayals of jazz bands at work and constitute one of the best jazz videos ever. When the DVD ends, the viewer has been present at two memorable performances.
Hashem Assadullahi, Strange Neighbor (8bells). Assadullahi, a composer and saxophonist who lives in Oregon, bases six of his pieces on “actual and fictional” people in the Texas neighborhood where he grew up. The ten tracks have variety that runs from attractive melodies to free playing, slapstick humor, 1920s German cabaret kitsch and what could pass for part of the soundtrack of an Italian Western. Assadulahi’s front-line partner in the quintet is trumpeter Ron Miles, a flexible and imposing presence throughout. The writing, now legato and thoughtful, now pointillist and scattered, is integrated with occasionally unfettered collective improvisation by the horns, guitarist Justin Morell, bassist Josh Tower and drummer Jason Palmer. Miles is from Denver. The members of the rhythm section are stalwarts of the Portland jazz community. This is a substantial debut album for Assadullahi.

• Overkill word of the day, perhaps the decade: Absolutely.
This week on The News Hour on PBS television, nearly every person interviewed began answers to a total of approximately 150 questions with, “Absolutely. ” That frequency, from educated people discussing policy issues, is typical at all levels of public and private life.
Perhaps we can bring back “yes.”
• Inapt phrase of the day, perhaps the century: No Problem.
Ask for more water in a restaurant and the waiter says, “No problem.” Tell the supermarket cashier “Thank you,” and she says, “No problem.” Extreme example: the other day I wished a passerby a good morning. He replied, “Hey, no problem.”
This is getting out of hand.

Larry Bunker’s versatile drumming, vibes playing and skill as an all-’round percussionist put him in demand by jazz players, symphony conductors, film and television studios, and singers. He worked with an array of artists that included Gerry Mulligan, Pierre Boulez, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Dizzy Gillespie, Gary Burton and Michael Tilson Thomas. In the mid-sixties, Bunker (1928-2005) took time to fill an ambition. For years, he had dreamed of playing with Bill Evans, and for a year or so left his lucrative first-call Los Angeles life to go on the road and record with Evans’ trio.
In this performance with Evans and bassist Chuck Israels, we hear–and see–why Bunker was so highly regarded for his playing with brushes. Following a rapid version of “Israel” and BBC-TV host Humphrey Lyttleton’s farewell, Evans ends with his “I Got Rhythm” variant called “Five,” toward the end working in a few bars each of “The Theme” and “Taps Miller.” Throughout, he and Israels have spirited exchanges with Bunker.

Today is Billy Taylor’s 88th brthday. It has not gone unnoticed by his publicists that, coincidentally, the piano has 88 keys. Appropriately, they have posted on his web site 88 videos of Taylor playing in a variety of contexts; speaking informatively on CBS Sunday Morning, where for years he did commentary; and being interviewed by Charles Kuralt, Charlie Rose, Charles Osgood and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others.
It is worth noting that Taylor and Dave Brubeck have long maintained a mutual admiration society. Brubeck is also 88, and one of those web site videos brings us the two of them playing 176 keys. Michael Moore is the bassist, Randy Jones the drummer.

“Take The ‘A’ Train,” which you just heard, was Duke Ellington’s theme song. Taylor and Brubeck were guest pianists at the 70th birthday party President Richard Nixon threw for Ellington at the White House in 1969. I happened to be standing nearby at the afternoon rehearsal in the East Room when a photographer asked the two of them to pose together. Taylor said, “Sure, something might rub off,” eliciting a wide grin from Brubeck.
Happy Birthday, Billy.

To those who who knew Russ Freeman or his work it was a source of frustration that he elected during his final years not to play the piano. Freeman died in 2002 at the age of 76. He was part of the west coast jazz scene before it was called that. He worked in Los Angeles in the late forties and early fifties with Howard McGhee, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and other bop musicians. Then he got famous as the pianist in Chet Baker’s first quartet and attracted a following for his inventive work with Baker as accompanist, soloist and composer. Freeman wrote one of the classic jazz ballads, “The Wind,” in addition to “Maid in Mexico,” “Happy Little Sunbeam” “Fan Tan,” “Band Aid” and pieces titled for his love of baseball, among them “Batter Up,” “Safe at Home” and “Fungo.”. Freeman recorded one trio album of his own and made a stunning two-piano album with André Previn. He collaborated closely with drummer Shelly Manne in Manne’s quintet and two remarkable sets of piano-drum duets, one in 1954, another in 1982.
A concert that Freeman played in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1959 has emerged on a new CD. The ten tracks remind us of his stimulating blend of lyricism and percussiveness. The repertoire includes includes standards, with an intriguing “Lush Life,” a stirring “With a Song in My Heart” and a live version of “Fan Tan.” The bassist and drummer are not identiied. This is a substantial addition to the sparse discography of Freeman as leader and a reminder of the muscle and drive in his solo work.
Thanks to Wolfram Knauer of Jazzinstitut Darmstadt in Germany for calling my attention to an article in the Las Vegas Sun about Carolyn Freeman. Russ Freeman’s widow is at the center of a movement to create a jazz performance center in that Nevada city. In the course of the piece, she is quoted about her husband’s reluctance to perform.

Though he was a great musician, her husband never listened to music at home, she says.
“He focused so hard when he listened it wasn’t relaxing,” Freeman says. “He couldn’t tune it out. He’d hear the scores in movies. At a particularly dramatic moment he’d say, ‘Carolyn, listen to that string line,’ and it blows the whole movie.”
The Northridge earthquake in 1994, which killed 72 and injured thousands, drove the Freemans out of Los Angeles, and they ended up in Las Vegas. Both were retired by then.
“He didn’t play music anymore,” she says. “I asked him, ‘Why don’t you play? It’s your gift?’ And he said, ‘It’s very painful.’ Russ was a perfectionist. He said, ‘When the music is wonderful, it’s unbelievable, but most of the time it’s not.’ ”

To read all of the piece about Carolyn Freeman, go here.

In the center exhibit under the legend Doug’s Picks you will find new recommendations assembled by the Rifftides staff. They include CDs, a DVD and a book. They are by:
•A great pianist in the creative burst of his last days
•A bassist eschewing hybridized jazz for the straight but not narrow
•Another bassist, who sings as well as she plays
•A trumpeter at the beginning of what may turn out to be a significant career
•A composer with a keen ear, assessing his fellow composers

The following exchange showed up on the Jazz West Coast listserve today. It was attributed to Bill Crow’s book Jazz Anecdotes, although I couldn’t find it there. Wherever it’s from, it deserves wide exposure.

“How late does the band play?”
“About half a beat behind the drummer.”