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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Christmas CDs: Matt Wilson, Matassa/Anderson

December 19, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

The other day a man who acted on last year’s Rifftides recommendation of Carla Bley’s Carla’s Christmas Carols let me know that he was disappointed in the album. Indeed, he was offended by it. In the review, I described the “tenderness, wit, harmonic brilliance, wide dynamic range and wry sense of nostalgia” in Bley’s arrangements of traditional holiday songs. My friend said that he likes his Christmas songs straight, without “all those minors.” I refrained from a discussion of the importance of minor chords, scales, keys and intervals.
If you don’t mind adventurism, including minors, in holiday music, Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O (Palmetto) gives you plenty of it. To 14 traditional songs and a couple of modern classics the drummer brings his customary humor, infectious swing, ingenuity with assorted percussion instruments and—now and then—good-natured raucousness. Wilson’s trio mates are saxophonist-flutist-clarinetist Jeff Lederer and bassist Paul Sikivie. Lederer is on tenor sax in “Winter Wonderland” and the band has MatWil Christmas.jpgthe sound and feeling of Sonny Rollins in his Way Out West and Village Vanguard trio days of the 1950s. With Wilson using bells, the music combines prayerfulness and avant garde abandon in a medley of Albert Ayler’s “Angels” and the traditional “Angels We Have Heard on High.” The liberated spirit of Christmas present continues with vigor in Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time is Here.” As the three waltz with lighthearted seriousness through “The Chipmunk Song,” Lederer’s soprano sax takes the chattery title role. In “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Lederer’s bass clarinet and Sikivie’s bass generate an atmosphere of menace that Wilson penetrates with deft brush work.
Through “Snowfall,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, and all the others, Wilson, Lederer and Sikivie decorate familiar music with unconventional ideas. The album has the comedy of “Mele Kalikimaki” as a polka with a bonkers clarinet solo, and “Little Drummer Boy” as the bebop vehicle for a wonderfully structured short Wilson drum solo. Alternating wildness and calm, Wilson and company inject irony into Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” but the CD also has lyrical readings of “Snowfall” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” This is the most stimulating Christmas collection I have heard this year.
Greta Matassa & Clipper Anderson, And to All a Good Night (Origin).
To ears accustomed to hearing the same holiday songs again and again, Matassa’s and Anderson’s repertoire is fresh. The composer and lyricist credits include familiar names—Johnny Mandel, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, Victor Young, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini and Irving Berlin. But the Mandel-Bergman “A Christmas Love Song,” Bacharach’s and Hal David’s “Christmas Day” or Bill Mays’ and Mark Murphy’s “November in the Snow” have not been played ad nauseum in department stores and super markets. Berlin’s “Count Your Blessings” may be the most familiar song here. Yet, despite its origin in the movie classic Holiday Inn, it is not often included inMatassa & Anderson.jpg Christmas collections.
Matassa is one of the best-known vocalists on the west coast, Anderson one of the most respected bassists. They have been a team for several years, with Anderson singing and playing in live appearances. Now, on record he makes it clear that he is a substantial vocalist with admirable timbre, intonation and phrasing. In his duet with pianist Darin Clendenin on “Count Your Blessings,” for three minutes Anderson can make you forget that Bing Crosby owned the song. Matassa shines here, bringing restraint to the tender songs, art-song refinement or her signature bluesy passion to others. She polishes facets of all of those attributes in the medley of “It’s Christmas Time” and “Sleep Well, Little Children.” Clendenin and drummer Mark Ivester join Anderson’s powerful bass in the rhythm section. Susan Pascal is on vibes in three pieces. Ivester’s two young daughters add the charm of their voices to Matassa’s in “Where Can I Find Christmas?”

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  1. Bill Kirchner says

    December 20, 2010 at 8:07 am

    In his memoir “No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood,” André Previn tells of a Hollywood studio executive who asked why a certain film score sounded strange. One of his flunkies replied that it was because the composer used “minor chords”. Therefore, the executive issued an edict prohibiting the use of “minor chords” in his studio’s film scores.
    Re Christmas carols, try to imagine how “Carol of the Bells” or “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel,” among others, would sound without minor chords.
    (The Previn book is a delight. Among the other adventures he recounts from his studio days as a teenaged wunderkind is booting an opportunity for romance with Ava Gardner. Here’s a link to the book—DR)
    http://www.amazon.com/No-Minor-Chords-Days-Hollywood/dp/0385413416

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 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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Doug’s Picks

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Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger

Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger A generation of Canadian musicians is coming to prominence in their youth and making substantial impressions. One is drummer Harry Vetro. After he was graduated from the University of Toronto Jazz Program, the 23-year-old spent much of last year exploring his country as it celebrated its 150th year of […]

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Weekend Listening Tip: Maria Schneider & The SRJO

Jim Wilke tells us that his Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Maria Schneider conducting the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The program comes from his recording of the second of Ms. Schneider’s two concerts with the SRJO early this month. Her work has brought her five Grammy Awards, victories in many readers and critics […]

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Monday Recommendation, A Day Late: Atlantis Quartet

Atlantis Quartet, Hello Human (Shifting Paradigm Records) If you visit the Shifting Paradigm Records website in search of Hello Human, you may be startled to see the legend, “Name Your Price,” near a box with a dollar sign and an empty space waiting to be filled. In fairness, the offer has a notation that reads, […]

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Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown) Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world. Crosby retained that distinction until the expanding dominance […]

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Monday Recommendation (Unavoidably Delayed)

Wayne Shorter, Emanon (Blue Note) Although Wayne Shorter’s saxophone artistry and that of his quartet need no enhancement, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra shares the first disc of this three-CD collection. As always, the Orpheus is impressive for the precision of its musicianship, but the combination plods compared with the exhilaration of the second and third […]

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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

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