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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

The Montmarte Masks

January 28, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

If you have seen videos filmed at the Montmartre club in Copenhagen in the 1950s and ’60s, you may have wondered about the stylized wall masks that often show up in the opening moments. Rifftides reader Dave Bernard has wondered about them, too. Mr. Bernard researched the masks and reports the results in the comments section of a recent post about Bud Powell. To see the masks and what he has learned, go here.
While we’re at it, we may as well enjoy more of Powell at the Montmartre with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Jorn Elniff in 1962. During the first minute of the video, there is a wide shot of the wall of masks. Despite YouTube‘s lower-third card, the proper title of Thelonious Monk’s piece is “‘Round Midnight,” not “Around Midnight.”

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Comments

  1. rootlesscosmo says

    January 28, 2010 at 7:28 pm

    That’s gorgeous playing, but it’s a scandal how out of tune the piano was. (Almost the whole second octave above middle C is off–the unisons just aren’t in unison.) So many great recordings of those years, both live performances and studio productions, have this problem; I don’t know if this is due to the skimpy budgets of clubs and jazz labels, or to an attitude of disrespect for the artists and the music, but it must have been unpleasant (at least) to make music on such an ungenerous instrument, and it’s all the more extraordinary that Bud, Monk, Horace Silver (Messengers at Cafe Bohemia) and others managed to overcome the challenge.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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