Archives for 2010

Dave Brubeck is spending his 90th birthday in the midst of his sizeable family and many close friends. Chances are that they will take time out to watch the documentary about his life. As they reminisce, it’s almost certain that Dave will tell a Blackhawk story or two. The club in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was his quartet’s headquarters for years before and after they became famous. It was the location of a pilot for a television series that never get off the ground. Mort Sahl, a friend and fan of the band, introduced the show. A wide shot near the beginning gives us a full view of the little club somebody once called “the temple of gloom.” The TV lights that day probably gave it the most illumination it ever saw. It was lit up by Brubeck, Miles Davis, Cal Tjader, Count Basie, Chet Baker, Art Tatum, Carmen McRae and most of the other jazz luminaries of the 1950s.
The Blackhawk is long gone. Brubeck is thriving. Here is a rare look at the classic quartet—Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello—at the Blackhawk:

Happy Birthday, Dave.

The Christmas season is underway. This makes it official.

Someone went overboard matching the color scheme of this video to the name of the tune, and the sound is distorted, but here is an exquisite 1962 version of “Blue in Green” by Bill Evans with Chuck Israels and Paul Motian. Be patient while the YouTube poster gets his commercial out of the way.

There was a time when the big three television networks had programs that presented music of quality. CBS-TV’s Camera 3, the original source of this clip, went out of business in 1980. Thanks to Evans scholar Mike Harris for calling the video to our attention. Mr. Harris recorded the Evans Secret Sessions box set.

Dave Brubeck is getting a lot of attention. With his 90th birthday three days away, he is the subject of performance reviews, articles and editorials in dozens of newspapers from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and Britain’s Guardian. His music is being played over the air to a degree unprecedented since the early 1960s, when “Take Five” was a popular hit. On National Public Radio, Terry Gross replays her 1999 Fresh Air interview with Brubeck. Viewers of cable television in the United States and the BBC in Great Britain can celebrate Brubeck’s 90th birthday by watching a new documentary. Dave Brubeck, In His Own Sweet Way traces his life, career, influences, and effect on modern music and culture. The program is running this evening at 9 on BBC4 and in the US on Monday, Brubeck’s birthday, on the TCM channel at 5 pm EST, 2 pm PST.
With Clint Eastwood as executive producer and occasional on-screen guide, the documentary directed by Bruce Ricker combines film, videotape, audio recordings and photographs from a variety of sources and uses them to tell of Brubeck’s transformation from budding cattleman to an artist whose music reached around the world. It includes a previously unreleased conversation between Brubeck and Walter Cronkite, sequences of the classic Brubeck quartet with Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello, and fellow musicians evaluating Brubeck’s importance.
Ricker is impressive in his skill at coalescing and blending disparate elements—especially pieces of unrelated interviews—into a coherent and entertaining story. The consummate filmmaker Eastwood was often in the editing room with him. The rare films include Brubeck’s teacher Darius Milhaud at work composing, Desmond and Brubeck playing in the early days and lots of footage and photos of the large, affectionate and talented family of six children headed by Brubeck and his wife Iola. The program explains Mrs. Brubeck’s crucial role in managing the original quartet’s connection to college campuses, a move that established the band as a force in jazz and started a cultural trend. Desmond is amusing in his graphic description of Brubeck’s tendency to wildness at the keyboard in the early years of their partnership.
Apparently because of their closeness to Eastwood, the documentary brings in pop singer Jamie Cullum and crossover pianist David Benoit to discuss Brubeck’s music, with occasional interjections by Bill Cosby. Eastwood’s friend director George Lucas helps make Eastwood’s case that fellow northern Californians like Brubeck, Jack London and Ansel Adams are a breed apart. Sting and Yo-Yo Ma also make appearances, Ma in a lively cello duet with Brubeck’s youngest son Matthew. The actor Alec Baldwin does the film’s narration, which is spare, low-key and infrequent. The sound and pictures make the point: Dave Brubeck achieved success without varying from quiet, rigorous devotion to his principles. This documentary will charm his fans and advocates. It may make his detractors reconsider.
TCM will precede the Brubeck documentary with a showing at 1:30 pm EST of the 1962 British movie All Night Long, a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello, in which Brubeck and Charles Mingus, his friend from early San Francisco days, make cameo appearances and play a duet.
Naturally, Brubeck’s record companies are capitalizing on all of the fuss. Brubeck reissues abound. Concord, the music conglomerate that has acquired upwards of a dozen labels, owns Fantasy, a company Brubeck helped to found in 1949. Its two-CD compilation The Definitive Dave Brubeck reaches back far beyond the Fantasy years to “I Found a New Baby,” a solo he recorded in 1942 as a college student. It continues with the octet he formed after World War Two, trio performances from the late forties and early fifties and a substantial cross section of tracks by the quartet he formed with Paul Desmond in 1951. It includes the original quartet’s breathtaking 1953 performances of “How High the Moon” at Oberlin College and “All the Things You Are” at College of the Pacific. The second disc concentrates on music from Brubeck’s Concord and Telarc albums of the ’70s, ’80s and later.
Brubeck joined Columbia Records in the mid-1950s. It became the label on which he had his biggest hits, beginning in the days when jazz still enjoyed widespread popularity. In his Columbia career the centerpiece, as far as popular success went, was “Take Five,” the first jazz single to sell more than a million copies, in defiance of the inroads rock and roll was making into popular taste. Columbia/Legacy’s Dave Brubeck: Legacy Of A Legend is another two-CD compilation. It fills in the decades between Fantasy and Concord and incorporates tracks from 15 albums, and collaboration with Carmen McRae, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rushing and Leonard Bernstein. “Take Five,” of course, is part of the package, and so is a previously unissued concert version of “Three to Get Ready,” with the classic quartet full of good humor nearly to the point of giddiness. Brubeck’s son Darius contributes liner notes of substance.
As if that weren’t enough, Sony Masterworks has also reissued two packages containing 10 of Brubeck’s most successful or important Columbia albums in their entirety. The first volume of Dave Brubeck: Original Album Classics has Brubeck Plays Brubeck, Brandenburg Gate Revisited, Gone with the Wind, Jazz Goes to College and Jazz Impressions of New York.
The second 5-volume set has the “time” series, Time Out, Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Time Further Out, Time Changes and Time In. And they’re going at fire-sale prices. Columbia has never been shy about reissuing, re-reissuing and re-re-reissuing music, but this landslide of Brubeck albums, some long unavailable, is unprecedented. And welcome.

Randy Weston, The Storyteller (Motéma). This is the latest chapter in the 84-year-old pianist’s long-running love story about Africa. Weston’s African Rhythms Sextet includes the great trombonist Benny Powell in one of his last recordings, alto saxophonist T.K. Blue, bassist Alex Blake, drummer Lewis Nash and conga specialist Neil Clarke. He made the album almost exactly a year ago in performance at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York. With the rhythm section generating heat near combustion levels, some of the ensemble passages approximate the excitement of the Dizzy Gillespie big band of the late forties that blended Afro-Cuban rhythms into jazz. Solos by all hands express the passion—sometimes smoldering, sometimes volcanic— that has typified Weston’s music for six decades. The entire CD is a highlight, but Weston devotees will find particular stimulation and a good deal of humor in the reworking of his classic “Hi Fly” and its recapitulation, “Fly Hi.” Nash and Clarke achieve moments of jaw-dropping percussion virtuosity. Weston’s piano playing continues to embody the spirits of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington.
John McNeil/Bill McHenry, Chill Morn He Climb Jenny (Sunnyside). McNeil tempers his trumpet virtuosity with shots of wry. In tenor saxophonist McHenry he has found his ideal counterpart and foil. In this successor to their superb 2008 CD Rediscovery, the pianoless quartet reprises and, to put it mildly, reinterprets additional pieces from the repertoires of the Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker quartets of the 1950s. There are hints at the timbres and moods of those groups, but this is no ghost band. Free but tethered to tradition, it is in the spirit of 21st century downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn jazz. Most often, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Jochen Rueckert lay down measured swing that leaves McNeil and McHenry at their leisure to roam freely within—and occasionally outside of&#151the bounds of “Carioca,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Aren’t You Glad You’re You” and from the pen of Russ Freeman, “Batter Up,” the tricky blues “Bea’s Flat” and “Maid in Mexico.” Throughout, the horns contrive little duet riffs that they manage to make sound as if they had just thought of them. Three of the tunes depart from the west coast play list. Thad Jones’ “Three And One” and Wilbur Harden’s loping “I Got Rhythm” contrafact “Wells Fargo” inspire some of the quartet’s most passionate work of the date, which was before an audience at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. Miles Davis’ “Pfrancing,” is primarily a blues background for McNeil’s parting announcement. That enigmatic album title? It’s an anagram of the leaders’ names.

With Dave Brubeck’s 90th birthday five days away, anticipation of the event is materializing in news stories, interviews, radio airplay, web tributes and accolades from colleagues and admirers. Marc Myers’ piece in The Wall Street Journal includes this paragraph:

Clean living, a happy marriage and global popularity have made Mr. Brubeck a media darling–and a target of envy. “Even in the ’50s I’d hear critics and musicians say, ‘Oh, Brubeck, he’s different’–meaning separate from the rest,” Mr. Brubeck said. “Others described my music as West Coast cool or light. Listen to our version of ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ from 1952. Tell me, what’s cool about that?”

You be the judge. The recording is from 1951, not ’52, but 59 years later, it’s understandable that anyone could lose track of a year. This was an NBC Radio live remote from the Surf Club in Hollywood. The record label lists ony Brubeck, Paul Desmond and bassist Wyatt Ruther. The drummer is Herb Barman.

Cool? Please use the comment link at the bottom of this post.

Woody Herman First Herd, December 10, 1945
Neil Hefti, arranger
Woody Herman, vocal
Sonny Berman, trumpet solo
Bill Harris, trombone solo

Brad Goode, Tight Like This (Delmark). During his Chicago days, Goode worked through his influences, notably Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, into early individuality. He has a Gillespie moment during his muted solo on the exotic 1942 Xavier Cugat song “Nightingale,” but it’s a rare example of his playing a direct quote. Goode has serious fun exercising his trumpet virtuosity. Creativity and taste balance his technical skill so that his smears, swoops, glissandos, flawless interval leaps and notes in the stratosphere serve the music. Louis Armstrong’s solo on “Tight Like This” (1928) and Bix Beiderbecke’s on “Changes” (1927) are among the early milestones of recorded jazz trumpet. They may have had an effect on Goode, but it would take microscopic analysis of his playing on those tunes to turn up traces of anything resembling imitation. His approach on “Tight Like This,” while spectacular and often high above the horn’s normal range, is relatively conservative in content. Elsewhere, it’s another story. In their solos on “Changes,” both he and pianist Adrean Farrugia go adventuring outside the borders of the harmonic structure, abetted by bassist Kelly Sill and drummer Anthony Lee, who shine throughout the album.
In other familiar material, the four often loosen or tighten the time within set tempos. Their elastic rhythmic collaboration produces stimulating tension and release in Irving Berlin’s “Reaching For the Moon.” 1940s trumpet icon Freddie Webster’s “Reverse the Charges” finds Goode puckish in a muted workout on slightly altered “I Got Rhythm” changes. Lee’s drum commentary punctuates Sill’s spirited solo on the piece. Farrugia constructs a solo mainly using fragments until he builds into full employment of both hands and displays a rich harmonic imagination. With the rhythm section surging in a fast ¾ treatment, Goode floats into “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise” to create a solo of remarkable fluidity and continuity of ideas. He plays his ballad “Midwestern Autumn” muted and close to the microphone in a mood of reflection. The progressive harmonies of “Climbing Out” allow freedom that Goode and Farrugia revel in, with the trumpeter making joyous octave jumps. “Summary,” “The River” and “Bob’s Bounce” are additional evidence that Goode is a composer of substance as well as a formidable improviser. This band deserves attention. It rewards close listening.

Well, the way I play, I try not to be a ‘repeater pencil’, ya dig? Originality’s the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.—Lester Young

When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.—Billie Holiday

In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.—Lee Konitz

Anyone who doesn’t play like Lester Young is wrong.—Brew Moore

It has become a Rifftides tradition to remember Paul Desmond’s birthday. The 86th anniversary of his birth coincides with the American celebration of Thanksgiving, as did the 52nd, his last. For the occasion in 1976, Devra Hall cooked a turkey dinner for Desmond and her parents, Jim and Jane. She took the photograph that afternoon. Here’s the story of the end of that part of the day, told by Devra in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

“It was a very quiet dinner. Paul was not feeling well, but he was clearly happy not to be home alone. He didn’t have to say a word around my folks. They talked a blue streak, usually, but he was just very comfortable. My fondest recollection is that I made him dinner on his last birthday.”

The senior Halls and Desmond went back to Jim and Jane’s apartment when they left Devra’s, and on the way stopped at the Village Vanguard. Thelonious Monk was performing there. Between sets, they all gathered in the Vanguard’s kitchen, the closest thing the club has to a Green Room. In the book, Jim tells about it.

It was the most coherent conversation I ever had with Thelonious, in the kitchen with Paul and me and Thelonious. I had a sort of nodding acquaintance with Monk, but he and Paul really connected. I’m not even sure what they talked about, just standing around in that kitchen, going through old memories and things. It was nice.

I wish that Desmond and Hall had sat in with Monk at the Vanguard. Alas, Paul almost never sat in with anyone, including the night he and I went to hear Bill Evans and Bill all but begged him to play. But that’s another story. It’s in the book. In lieu of a collaboration with Monk, let’s listen to Desmond solo in a relatively little known performance of “Stardust,” a tune that he and Dave Brubeck recorded several times over the years. This was 1953, a productive and creative year for the early edition of the Brubeck quartet.

If you saw a slightly different version of this post here last year, please be patient. You’re likely to see it again next year.

Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Nasheet Waits & Guests, Tarbaby: The End of Fear (Posi-tone). Pianist Evans, bassist Revis and drummer Waits comprise a leaderless or cooperative trio who live up to the album’s subtitle. They are not afraid to go wacky, nearly unhinged, in two free pieces, “Heads”—featuring trumpeter Nicholas Payton at his most liberated and chancy—and “Tails,” with the avant garde alto saxophonist Oliver Lake sitting in. Payton and Lake rein in their wildness for the melody choruses in a quintet interpretation of Sam Rivers’ “Unity” but hold back little in their solos and simultaneous improvisation. Tarbaby is not afraid to plumb the romance and lyricism of Fats Waller’s 1932 ballad “Lonesome Me,” with a touching reading of the melody by tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen. In “Brews” Evans is not afraid to skew the good old B-flat blues toward the lamented, half-forgotten pianist Herbie Nichols and a couple of chromatic runs straight out of Teddy Wilson. Nor in his “Jena 6” is he afraid to demonstrate the harmonic individualism that makes him one of the most interesting jazz pianists under 40 (he’s 34).
Enough of the fear gambit. On the Nasheet Waits composition “Hesitation,” Payton covers the range of the trumpet using a spacious tone in all registers and a succession of connected ideas laden with emotion. This is among his best recent work. Payton, Lake, Allen and the rhythm section light up Andrew Hill’s “Tough Love.” Hip-hop aficionados may be able to understand the spoken conversations woven into the opening track, “E-Math,” although I suspect that the chatter was intended not to be understood but to supply atmosphere. It does that, but only the most agile brain will be able to separate the flows of music and voice. Perhaps it’s best to let it just wash over you. At any rate, it lasts only two minutes or so, then the album moves on to the marvelous “Brews” and the rest. Through pieces composed by members of the band plus those by Hill, Waller, Rivers, Paul Motian and—surprisingly—the hardcore punk/reggae group Bad Brains’ “Sailin’ On,” Tarbaby and friends give us an album that seems all but certain to wind up on the year’s 10-best lists.

Dave Brubeck’s new pacemaker seems to be working. Here’s a headline from this morning’s Worcester (MA) Telegram-Gazette:

To read a review of Friday night’s concert in Worcester, go here.
We have found no explanation of why Chris Smith and Cody Cox were substituting for Michael Moore and Randy Jones, Brubeck’s regular bassist and drummer.

Pianist Jack Reilly’s recital at the Johns Hopkins Medicine Center in Baltimore on November 9 paid musical tribute to the memory of the doctor who saved his life.

The concert of Reilly’s original work was recorded. To see and hear it, click here. Thanks to the folks at Johns Hopkins for providing the printed program.

BOOK ONE
1) C Major 7) E flat Major
2) C Minor 8) E flat Minor
3 D flat Major 9) E Major
4) C sharp Minor 10) E minor
5) D Major 11) F Major
6) D Minor 12) F Minor
INTERMISSION
BOOK TWO
13) F sharp Major 19) A Major
14) F sharp Minor 20) A Minor
15) G Major 21) B flat Major
16) G Minor 22) B flat Minor
17) A flat Major 23) B Major
18) G sharp Minor 24) B Minor

Dave Brubeck’s 90th birthday is on December 6. Observances are beginning. This weekend in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under music director William Schrickel will play a celebratory concert with three pieces by Brubeck. They include one of his first extended orchestral works, Elementals, and the U.S. premiere of an adaptation for solo violin and strings of “Sleep, Holy Infant” from La Fiesta de la Posada. Three others pieces on the program are by George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Darius Milhaud, composers Brubeck admires. The Milhaud piece is La Création du monde, the French composer’s 1923 venture into jazz, the music he often credited with revitalizing European art in the 1920s. Following World War Two, Brubeck studied with and was encouraged by Milhaud at Mills College in California.
As Schrickel, was planning the concert, Brubeck’s son Chris sent him this photograph of a self-portrait that Milhaud gave the Brubeck family in 1958. The lines of the drawing are themes from La Création du monde.

The message in the bottom right corner reads, “To the 7 Brubecks, the Owner of the Square Foot. Souvenir of Creation du Monde, Milhaud 1958.” In a note to Bill Schrickel, Iola Brubeck explained:

The reference to the “square foot” stems from the fact that Milhaud was a Jewish refugee in this country. His apartment in Paris was destroyed by the Nazis when they occupied Paris and the German elite took over his family home in Aix-en-Provence. His parents remained on the estate disguised as gardeners. Amazingly, no one gave away the secret. However, Milhaud never saw his parents again. They died before the war was over and he could safely return to Europe in 1947. When we were building our new home in Oakland, he asked that we reserve one square foot for him, because he said “I want to have someplace I can stand and say “this is my own”. We did just that. We reserved one square foot–unfinished–in the hearth of the living room fireplace. When he visited us in 1958, he saw the square foot, asked for a piece of paper and the next day we received in the mail the sketch of Milhaud and the themes from Creation du Monde. We have the piece of paper in a safe and had the portrait engraved on copper to place in the hearth. When we moved to the East Coast we brought it with us, and that is what Chris photographed for you.

For details about Sunday’s concert and to hear an interview with Bill Schrickel about Brubeck’s effect on his musical life, go here.

Correspondence from Bill Kirchner, saxophonist, composer, arranger, teacher, author, broadcaster (does this guy sleep?):

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).
After graduating from North Texas State University and playing with the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman orchestras, trumpeter Marvin Stamm (b. 1939) settled in New York City in 1966. For more than two decades, he was a first-call studio musician. Since the late 1980s, he has concentrated on his career as a touring jazz soloist.
We’ll hear Stamm playing on recordings with composer-arrangers Johnny Carisi, Frank Foster, Thad Jones, and Rich Shemaria, and with his own quartet (with pianist Bill Mays, bassist Rufus Reid, and drummer Ed Soph) and The Inventions Trio (with Mays and cellist Alisa Horn).
The show will air this Sunday, November 21, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.
NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

Rifftides is adding to the blogroll at the bottom of the center column a link to Stamm’s website. At the site, there’s a link to Cadenzas, his newsletter of interesting reflections and, often, provocative thoughts about music and life.

It happens now and then: I am tied up on deadline for an article that demands extensive research. The Rifftides staff reports that there is no stash of shelf material, a serious breach of preparedness. They will be reprimanded. In a life misspent in journalism I have been conditioned to find dead air and blank space unacceptable. That translates to discomfort when the blog goes unrefreshed.
Fortunately, a solution arrived in the form of a fine video to which a friend alerted me. This is a performance in 2000 by Charlie Haden’s Quartet West at the Jazz Baltica festival in Germany. The piece is Haden’s “Hello, My Lovely.” The arrangement, presumably by Alan Broadbent, is for the quartet and the Schleswig-Holstein Chamber Orchestra. Broadbent conducts and plays piano. Haden is the bassist, Larance Marable the drummer. Tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts outdoes himself. Bill Henderson is mentioned in the on-screen credits, but he is nowhere to be seen or heard. The high quality of the picture makes full-screen viewing a good idea.

The Haden Quartet’s debut recording of “Hello, My Lovely” is on this album.

This is neither the anniversary of Danny Barker’s birth (January 13, 1909) nor of his death (March 13, 1994). I need no special occasion to write about Danny. He was born in New Orleans, where I served with him on the board of the original New Orleans JazzFest and was lucky enough to become his friend. No one has ever had a warmer, more genuine companion.

Largely because he reverted to banjo after he returned home in the ’60s, Danny has been typecast as a traditionalist and, because of his singing, as an entertainer. Both labels apply, but there was more. He was a musician of wide scope, deep harmonic knowledge and the gift of swing—a catalyst in any musical setting. As a very young man, he played with Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet and, after he moved to New York, with James P. Johnson and Henry Red Allen. In the 1930s, he was the rhythm guitarist in some of the best bands of the decade, including those of Lucky Millinder, Benny Carter and Cab Calloway.
Barker provides propulsion in this piece from a 1939 Teddy Wilson all-star date with—in solo order—Wilson, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Carter, Billie Holiday, Eldridge, Wilson and Ernie Powell. Milt Hinton is the bassist, Cozy Cole the drummer.

As bebop was developing in the early 1940a, Barker and his bassist chum Milt Hinton from the Calloway band jammed with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He recorded in 1945 with pianist Sir Charles Thompson in a not-quite-bop session that also included Parker, Dexter Gordon, Buck Clayton, bassist Jimmy Butts and drummer J.C. Heard. Be patient; it takes the disc jockey half a minute to get the needle onto the record.

Barker was a superb natural entertainer who reached into his Creole heritage to give authenticity to pieces like this one at the Ascona jazz festival in Switzerland.

I tried to find a recording that I could embed of Danny singing his most famous composition, “Save the Bones for Henry Jones.” No luck. You’ll find it on this album. “Save the Bones” was a hit in separate versions by Nat Cole and Johnny Mercer. Here, they collaborate on the song in one of Cole’s television programs in the 1950s.

During his later years, Danny was curator of the New Orleans Jazz Museum and grand marshal of the Onward Brass Band. He and his wife, the singer Blue Lu Barker, frequently performed together. They are pictured here in 1950 or so (courtesy of the Tulane Hogan Jazz Archive). Danny took under his wing developing young musicians, including Branford and Wynton Marsalis and Nicholas Payton, and helped them to absorb the New Orleans tradition and spirit. He never flagged in doing all that he could to insure that the city’s music thrived. New Orleans has a big place in its heart for Danny Barker, and so do I.