• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Recent Listening: Trios. Part 2, Carrothers, Smith, Sills, Peterson

May 9, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

Bill Carrothers, Joy Spring (Pirouet). Carrothers, a pianist, lives in a remote area of Michigan, has a quixotic web site and records copiously for European labels. A prodigious technician, he is a master of the Joy Spring.jpgreassembled melody and the customized harmonic scheme. Here, he renovates pieces from the repertoire of the great trumpeter Clifford Brown. “Joy Spring,” recognizable by a few of its phrases, is a slow meditation. “Jordu,” becomes, improbably, a march. When he observes tempos and harmonies resembling those of Brown’s recordings, Carrothers makes the pieces his own through ingenious chord transformations. “Daahoud,” “Tiny Capers” and “Gherkin for Perkin” are among the subjects of his makeovers. Bassist Drew Gress and drummer Bill Stewart are Carrothers’ co-conspirators in this stimulating set.
Dr. Lonnie Smith, Spiral (Palmetto). With never a thought of retooling tunes a la Carrothers, the maestro of the Hammond B3 organ nonetheless ventures well beyond conventional organ trio clichés. He continues to produce CDs whose swing and good feeling compelLonnie Smith Spiral.jpg smiles and the rhythmic employment of pedal extremities. Smith is, however, considerably more than a party music organist, as he demonstrates with the moodiness and surprise chordal turns of his minor-key title tune, the rhythmic variety in “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and the apiary atmospherics of his interpretation of Harold Mabern’s “Beehive.” His swing is irresistible in “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” his bluesiness profound in Slide Hampton’s “Frame for the Blues.” Guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg and drummer Jamire Williams are admirable in support. In his 68th year, the Dr. is in.
David Sills Light Touch (Dasil). Tenor saxophonist Sills takes his time, constructing thoughtful lines that tell stories. Even at brisk tempos, as in Charlie Parker’s “Blues for Alice” and Thumbnail image for Sills Light Touch.jpghis own “It’s All You” (his line on “It’s You or No One”), he is unhurried and cogent. With pianist Chris Dawson and bassist Derek Oles, Sills applies his capacious tone and pliant imagination to pieces by a variety of composers including Horace Silver, Cole Porter, Hermeto Pascoal and Bill Evans. There are high points in moments of counterpoint between Sills and Dawson, an increasingly impressive pianist. Sills plays flute to great effect on Evans’ minor blues “Interplay.” Oles solos powerfully for one chorus on the piece. That’s all he needed. This first CD on Sills’ own label is a sleeper. It deserves attention.
Oscar Peterson & The Bassists (OJC). One of the most unusual trio recordings of Oscar Peterson’s career was of a performance at the 1977 Montreux JazzOscar Peterson & Bassists.jpg Festival in Switzerland. It is still in the OJC catalog. He appeared not with bass and drums or bass and guitar, but with two formidable bassists. Ray Brown’s association with Peterson went back nearly 30 years to the beginning of the pianist’s American career. The astonishing young Dane Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen was a more recent colleague. The three played a set that included memorable versions of “There is no Greater Love” and “Reunion Blues,” but the piece de resistance was a “Sweet Georgia Brown” containing an unaccompanied Peterson chorus that someone cut out of the Montreux video, labeled the “Greatest piano solo ever” and posted on YouTube. I can imagine Oscar countering that claim by invoking Art Tatum. But here is that breathtaking solo in the context of the complete performance, allowing you to judge for yourself.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Mel Narunsky says

    May 9, 2010 at 10:52 pm

    I should not be making comments about the Bill Carrothers release but, as I am unlikely ever to get the opportunity to hear it, I’ll go ahead anyway. One of my pet musical peeves is when musicians change the melody of a composition that is not their own while stating that melody, or when they change the harmonic structure of a composition during improvisation – or even the whole structure of a tune (as Miles did to “When Lights Are Low” [Benny Carter] – which was incorrectly adopted by many other musicians). It’s not what the composer intended and to my mind becomes a different composition based on original idea by someone else.
    Oh well… as you stated in your review, Carrothers makes the pieces his own through ingenious chord transformations. But they are still presented as being by Clifford Brown.
    When Richard Rodgers heard someone messing with any of his songs he raised hell. And why not? It was his creation after all.
    Response:
    (Except in “Joy Spring,” which is clearly a free rumination on Clifford Brown containing a few references to the tune, I don’t hear Carrothers changing the structures of the pieces.
    As for Miles Davis and “When Lights Are Low,” he abandoned the bridge, or B, section of the tune altogether, simply raising the A section a fourth and making it the eight-bar bridge. It was a mystifying decision, since Carter’s bridge has an inspired chord progression. Davis made the song less interesting. Marian McPartland and I once discussed the Davis recording. She was indignant. “Oh, how could he DO that to Benny’s song?” she said. Because of Davis’s popularity and influence, several generations of young jazz musicians grew up thinking that’s how the piece was supposed to go. — DR)

  2. Rob D says

    May 12, 2010 at 1:54 pm

    I have OP to thank for making me a jazz fan. Those Norman Granz Pablo label records were really what got me into the music and one recording in particular “Oscar Peterson Live In Russia” stuck with me for years. It was a great intro to the repertoire and styles of mainstream jazz musicians.
    But I don’t find OP as rewarding to listen to as I once did. There are a few CD’s that I still enjoy but he generally loses out to Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and others of that era. He was a titanic talent but I think he stayed in the same bag and once you’ve heard it enough..it’s enough and doesn’t reward further listenings as much as the aforementioned artists.

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...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

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.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in