Archives for April 2011

Trummy Young and Johnny Mercer wrote “Travelin’ Light.” Billie Holiday owned it. This version with an unidentified pianist was made in Paris in 1959, the year she died. It is one of her most affecting treatments of a song that became one of her signature pieces.

For more about Billie and “Travelin’ Light,” including her original recording of the song and an unusual version by Chet Baker, visit Bruno Leicht’s new blog entry.

The logical followup to the piece below about Chris Byars’ hero Lucky Thompson is a piece by Thompson. Here’s a film from Paris in 1959 at the Blue Note. The rhythm section is Bud Powell, piano; Pierre Michelot, bass; Jimmy Gourley, guitar; Kenny Clarke, drums. The compostion is Dizzy Gillespie’s and Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology.” The video clip ends before the tune does, but this is a rare opportunity to see the great tenor saxophonist in action with a band of his peers.

Make that two pieces by Thompson. This is from a 1957 French television broadcast. The song is “I’ll Remember April.” Michelot and Clarke are again in the rhythm section. This time the pianist is Martial Solal. Thompson’s ingenious exploitation of the chords is an example of the harmonic inventiveness that won him the admiration of musicians from the 1940s to this day.

Chris Byars, Lucky Strikes Again (Steeplechase).
This album by a gifted saxophonist, composer and arranger has several things to recommend it.

It presents 10 pieces written and arranged by Lucky Thompson (1924-2005), a saxophonist whose brilliance and originality as a player and writer failed to make him as well known as equally gifted contemporaries like Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Milt Jackson. Byars painstakingly transcribed most of the arrangements from recordings of a 1961 Thompson concert broadcast in Germany. Others, he arranged based on Thompson quartet records. Pieces like “Old Reliable,” “Could I Meet You Later?” “Another Whirl” and other discoveries are substantial additions to known compositions by Thompson.

Byars’ arrangements for an octet cast the tunes in the not-small, not-big format that offers tonal colors impossible in a quartet or quintet, with flexibility and subtlety difficult to achieve with the weight of a standard 15- or 16-piece big band. His sidemen include some of New York’s finest club and studio jazz musicians. Among them are trumpeter Scott Wendholt, alto saxophonist Zaid Nasser and trombonist John Mosca. Byars’ own playing evidences affection for Thompson’s, without indulgence in slavish imitation. His treatment of “Just One More Chance,” a major Thompson recording, is impressive.

The music reflects lessons Thompson learned from his contemporary Tadd Dameron, an arranger whose work was a pervasive influence in jazz from the late forties to the mid-sixties and has never lost its freshness. As Mark Gardner points out in his interesting album notes, Dameron’s example helped form Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce, Benny Golson and Oscar Pettiford. With this work, Byars can claim a place in that line. He deserves credit for reminding listeners, by way of this stimulating collection, of Lucky Thompson’s importance.

Shortly after Thompson’s death six years ago, Rifftides posted a summary of Thompson’s career and a guide to some of his recordings. To see it, click here.

Tony Emmerson’s blog Prague Jazz has come out of hibernation after several months of dormancy. It was, and presumably again will be, a prime source of information about music in one of eastern Europe’s great centers of culture. The main re-entry item is an interview with saxophonist Julian Nicholas, like Emmerson a native of the UK who has developed strong ties to the Czech Republic. The interview is capped with video of Nicholas in performance with the Emil Viklický Trio. The quirky cinematography is presumably by way of Viklický’s unmanned camera perched on his piano. The sound quality is good. To read the interview and see the performance, go here.

A friend just pointed out that this is the birthday of Joe Henderson (1937-2001). The Rifftides time clock says that I’m punched out for the holiday, but to post a remembrance of Joe I’m sneaking past the security guards and putting up this remarkable performance of a piece associated nearly as closely with Henderson as with the man who wrote it, Kenny Dorham. The initial recording of “Blue Bossa” was in 1963 with Dorham on Page One, Henderson’s debut as a leader. It was one of a remarkable series of Blue Note albums they made together. Perhaps it is not out of the question to imagine that during this 1994 performance in Munich, Henderson was thinking of his old pal. He is the only soloist, soaring on the support he gets from bassist George Mraz, drummer Al Foster and pianist Bheki Mseluku and ending with a quixotic coda—two of them, in fact.

Here’s a cheery version of Irving Berlin’s classic holiday song. It’s by Jimmie Lunceford’s band, recorded in 1939. The vocal and exuberant trombone solo are by Trummy Young. Have patience, please. It takes the Garrard disc jockey a while to get it cued up, giving you nearly 15 seconds to read the record label.

Happy Easter.

For reasons involving the configuration of the new publishing platform, Rifftides had to put off posting a new batch of Doug’s Picks. The crack artsjournal.com technical team has eliminated the barrier and in the right-hand column you will find the staff’s recommendations of new CDs by a pianist leading a big band, a pianist leading a trio and the welcome reissue of classic Stan Getz quintet recordings. We are also alerting you to a delightful Erroll Garner DVD and a book that takes a seriously lighthearted approach to use of the language.

Speaking of roses…

Oh, we weren’t? Well, we are now. The resident rose expert around here informed me the other day that two famous roses are named in honor of Louis Armstrong. The same breeder developed both of them. His name is Sam McGredy (pictured), an Irishman who moved to New Zealand more than 40 years ago. Among rose aficionados around the world he became famous for his hybrids. McGredy’s “Satchmo” rose came first, in 1970. According to Stirling Macoboy’s The Ultimate Rose Book, experts admire it “for its bright scarlet color, its shapely clusters of double flowers and its freedom of bloom.”

McGredy is reported to believe that “Satchmo’s” 1977 hybrid offspring, “Trumpeter,” also named in tribute to Armstrong, supersedes its parent. Again quoting Macoboy, the flowers “are only slightly scented, but they are borne in great abundance and hold their jazzy color until they drop, without fading, burning or turning purple.” You may read into those qualities whatever metaphorical significance pleases you.

Now, to the main event. You knew this was coming, right? It’s Louis and the
All-Stars on tour in Europe. Oddly, this seems to be the only video of Armstrong performing one of his biggest hits. For reasons not explained, less than two minutes in still photos take over and the performance ends abruptly at 3:18. But it’s what we have, and it’s a treasure.

On his Armstrong web site Ricky Riccardi has a comprehensive history of Pops’ affair with “La Vie en Rose,” including seven MP3 versions by Louis and a clip from the motion picture Wall-E.

If Sam McGredy or rose breeding interest you, this link will take you to an on-camera interview with McGredy about his long career and some of the roses he’s named after friends and acquaintances, including the one known as “Sexy Rexy.”

In a section of a Hank Jones master class DVD that was a 2008 Doug’s Pick, Jones critiqued budding jazz pianists. One of them was a 21-year-old Julliard graduate named Aaron Diehl. For Jones, Diehl played “I Cover The Waterfront” and Art Tatum’s arrangement of Massenet’s “Elegy.” Apart from a slight reservation about Diehl’s use of dynamics in the first piece, Jones had nothing but praise, especially for the way the young man scaled the heights of “Elegy.” “If you should decide to stay in the music profession,” he told the young man, “I see nothing for you but a bright future.”

Diehl decided to stay. Good idea. Last Saturday, the American Pianists Association announced that he had won the 2011 Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz competition. The fellowship carries a $50,000 cash prize. In addition, according to the association’s announcement, over the course of two years Diehl will receive in-kind career development with the value of an additional $50,000. The jury members included pianists Geri Allen, John Taylor and Danilo Pérez, New York Times music critic Nate Chinen and Al Pryor, an executive of Mack Avenue Records. For details about the competition, see Becca Pulliam’s account on the NPR website.

Diehl lives in New York, where he is music director of St. Joseph of the Holy Family Church in Harlem. For further biographical details, visit his website. His duties at St. Joseph’s leave him time for performances, some of which have made their way to the internet. Here are two, a solo interpretation of Fats Waller’s “Viper’s Drag” that opens and closes in a mood of rumination appropriate to the church setting—I wish Fats could have heard it—and a quartet presentation at Dizzy’s club in New York of John Lewis’s “Django.” At the end of “Django,” Dizzy’s impresario Tadd Barkan introduces the sidemen.

Diehl wrote a fascinating account for Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math blog of how Mirjana Lewis, John’s widow, educated him about Lewis’s music and the Modern Jazz Quartet. To read it, go here.

“I see nothing for you but a bright future.”—Hank Jones, 2004

It seems unlikely that anyone who follows jazz closely has not encountered Mr. P.C., counselor to musicians who wish to do the right thing but are confused about what that is. However, it’s tough to keep up with much of even the most valuable information in the bounty—not to say glut— of digital outpourings. If you have missed Mr. P.C., Rifftides is happy to call him to your attention. The credo prefacing his column on the All About Jazz website begins:

Inspired by the cutting edge advice of Abigail Van Buren, the storied bass playing of Paul Chambers, and the need for a Politically Correct doctrine for navigating the minefields of jazz etiquette, I humbly offer my services.

Here is a sample of his services—the Q and some of the A in an exchange from his most recent column:

Dear Mr. P.C.:
A friend of mine books a successful outdoor music series featuring crowd-pleasing groups like rock cover bands. He called me up and told me that there was a problem: crowds had grown too large, forcing the city to hire extra police and trash collectors. Because of the city’s budget crisis, he was under pressure to book bands that would draw smaller crowds. Then he offered my jazz trio a date in the series.
How should we dress for the gig?
— Kirk, New York




Dear Kirk: I totally understand your dilemma. Since the crowd is used to rock bands, they probably expect your trio to wear spandex body suits with plunging chest lines and cucumber-stuffed crotches. But that would objectify you as mere sex objects—albeit middle-aged, saggy ones—and detract from the profundity of your art.

On the other hand, if you were to dress in the more high-toned attire of intimate jazz clubs and cocktail lounges, all the nuances—matching patterned bowtie and cummerbund, polished cufflinks, ruffled shirts—would be lost in the physical distance between you and the audience.

But these may be moot points. Given all the challenges they’re having with their budget and trash collection, don’t you think they’ll expect you to help clean up the garbage after your performance? Well, there’s your answer!…

Well, there’s part of the answer. To see all of it and some of his other advice, go here.

Those who note a resemblance between the portrait of Mr. P.C. on the upper left and the Seattle pianist Bill Anschell may be onto something.

Think about it. Have you ever seen them together?

One Monday night in the ‘70s, I found myself seated at a table in the Village Vanguard with Manny Albam, listening to the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. During a break, I said to him, “I wonder why you haven’t written something for this band.”

“So do I,” he said.

To my knowledge, Albam never did write for the Jones-Lewis band. I wish that he had. He created wonderful music for lots of other people, though. It has always puzzled me that he wasn’t better known outside of the tight jazz circles of New York and Los Angeles. Nine years following his death, he remains one of the most respected composer-arranger craftsmen of the last half of the 20th century. If you’re not familiar with Albam, his classic The Blues is Everybody’s Business (1957) is a fine place to start.

On tonight’s installment of Jazz From the Archives on Newark, New Jersey’s WBGO-FM, Bill Kirchner will play some of the great variety of music Albam made in his last decade. The program will be streamed live on the web. Here’s Bill’s preview:

Manny Albam (1922-2001) was one of NYC’s busiest recording composer-arrangers in the 1950s and ’60s. After focusing on education for two decades, he experienced something of a career renaissance in the ’90s.

We’ll hear Albam’s 1990s writing in a variety of settings: with pianist Hank Jones and the Meridian String Quartet; the SDR Big Band in Stuttgart, Germany; saxophonist Joe Lovano’s “Celebrating Sinatra” with chamber orchestra; singer Nancy Marano and the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra; and a special tribute to his close friend and fellow composer-arranger Bob Brookmeyer.

The show will air this Sunday, April 17, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.

NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

In the meantime, or any time, this video will show you Manny Albam conducting a piece he arranged for pianist Billy Taylor, who talks about their collaboration.

Outrage continues to grow in the Latin jazz community over the decision of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) to drop the Best Latin Jazz category from the annual Grammy awards. The NARAS Board of Governors this week decided to eliminate nearly a third of the award categories, but the loudest protest has come from Latin jazz artists, their fans and record labels that specialize in Latin music. NARAS president Neil Portnow defended cutting the number of categories from 109 to 78 as “restructuring.” He countered charges that big record companies can influence the Grammy voting and, as Larry Rohter reported in The New York Times, “seemed to be arguing that the committee that cut 31 Grammy categories was acting to preserve the integrity of the awards.”

As Eddie Palmieri, Bobby Sanabria and other Latin jazz musicians continue to protest, people in many areas of music are calling into question the overall thrust and and purpose of the Grammys. Among them is the saxophonist, composer, arranger, producer and Grammy-award-winning bandleader Bob Belden. Belden has committed his thoughts on the matter to paper in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, Woody Allen and Stan Freberg. He has allowed Rifftides to share them with you.

NARAS TO BAN MINOR CHORDS
By Bob Belden

Adding further fuel to the fire, NARAS announced late last night that the
use of “Minor Chords or any chord that would constitute a breach of the peace is prohibited in songs or arrangements submitted for Grammy Consideration”.

In another ruling, the board, at the urging of Cee-Lo and the panel of
America’s Got Talent and American Idol, have created a “Best Profane Song Of The Year” category. When asked by reporters about this about-face in lieu of dropping categories, a spokesperson for NARAS said “F___ you”. They are also considering for the “Best New Artist” category the use of a text message voting system to appeal to audience participation and ensure that the least talented “artist” will always win based on popularity and media exposure, the true philosophy of NARAS.

In another move to boost revenue, each major category will have a
corporate sponsor. “Song of the Year” will now be “Comcast Song of the Year.” “Best New Artist” will be “Exxon Best New Artist.” Hilton Hotels will sponsor “Best Lounge Act.” Sony will sponsor “Best New Sony Artist.” The Emir of Dubai, Warren Buffet and Osama Bin Laden have donated money to the NARAS Executive Travel Fund to get “branding rights.” Rumors are that The Trump Organization wants branding rights to all of the R&B and Hip Hop awards as a reflection of Donald Trump’s closeness with “the blacks.” Newt Gingrich is reported to want branding rights to an R&B category out of “historic traditions.” The State of Arizona wants rights to all Hispanic categories in order to deport all of the artists who enter. We know of deals in the works for “Phil Spector Best Female Artist,” the “Suge Knight Humanitarian Award” and “Goldman Sachs Best Country and Western,” but details are not forthcoming; all is hush-hush at NARAS headquarters in the Blackwater/Halliburton building.

Henceforth, the Grammy statues will contain advertising. When artists accept the awards, they will be instructed to hold the objects in a way that will allow one or two corporate logos to flash in front of the millions of viewers. This money will be donated to the NARAS Executive Compensation Fund. CBS will also charge a ‘”flash view” fee for any artist who wants to have a one-second “cut to” shot in the televised show. If an artist or manager wants more “flash time,” the fee is increased.

Dropped before their first year of awards were “Best Overdubbed Solo”,
“Best Latin Jazz Vocals Sung in Actual Latin,” “Best New Payola Artist,” “Best New Monopoly Label” and “Best Baritone Saxophone Solo.” The live band will be eliminated, on grounds that most of the nominated artists will not know the difference.

I had the middle part kind of vaguely in mind. I thought, “We could do this, but then we’d have to modulate again and we’re already playing in 5/4 and six flats, and that’s enough for one day’s work.” Fortunately, we tried it, and that’s where you get the main part of the song.—Paul Desmond

At the time, I thought it was kind of a throwaway. I was ready to trade in the entire rights of “Take Five” for a used Ronson electric razor.—Paul Desmond

Desmond changed his mind about swapping the “Take Five” royalties for a shaver. Following his death in 1977, his will directed gifts of personal items and bequests of cash to a number of relatives and friends. The royalties went elsewhere. As recounted in the Coda chapter of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond:

The balance of Desmond’s residuary estate, after payment of debts and taxes, went to The American Red Cross. “Residuary” is the fateful word in that provision of Desmond’s will. Every year since his death, through his royalties from “Take Five,” his other compositions, his recordings and his share of the Brubeck Quartet recordings, Desmond has kept on earning. Noel Silverman (the executor of his estate) sends the Red Cross the money in increments of $25,000 as it accumulates in the estate’s account. In 1991 the total reached more than a million dollars.

For years, the Red Cross accepted the money but recognized the flow of payments only in form letters. In 2002, Silverman had had enough of the relief agency’s bureaucratic insensitivity. He wrote a letter that included this paragraph:

It is easy to accuse the Red Cross of ingratitude. I suspect that that may be less than accurate. It may simply be that the organization is poorly run, badly mannered, or understandably not concerned with gifts which are not dependent on whether or not they are acknowledged. Come to think of it, organizational ungraciousness may not be such a bad description after all.

That resulted in a high-ranking Red Cross official going from Washington, DC, to New York to meet with Silverman. She pronounced herself “horrified.” The Desmond estate began to receive closer attention. From the book:

Finally, the Red Cross informed Silverman that at the annual dinner dance of the organization in New York, Desmond would be honored with a posthumous tribute. On April 8, 2003, Silverman accepted the honor in Paul’s memory. He announced at the banquet that Desmond’s total contribution to the Red Cross had reached four million dollars and was growing.

“He has left us a double legacy—not only the art itself but the ongoing proceeds of that creativity as well,” Silverman told the Red Cross executives, donors and staff members. “It is easy to forget, however, that the Paul Desmonds of our world need and deserve our support just as we need theirs. Not because they may end up as contributors to the Red Cross, but because they constitute the soul of our society. Our failure to support them—the authors, the artists, the musicians, the dramatists, even the ones that defy easy description—leaves us poorer. We are who we are because of them. Our government’s increasing insistence that the arts are irrelevant or, worse yet, subversive, is of course sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect, as it needs to be in a vibrant, pluralistic society. We cannot easily do without organizations like the Red Cross, and we fail to support them at our peril, but the same is equally if not more true of our artistic community. Honoring the Paul Desmonds of the world is not a luxury. It is a necessity, and the fact that the Red Cross is the financial beneficiary of his munificence is simply icing on the cake.”

I spoke with Noel Silverman this morning. He told me that Desmond’s contributions to the Red Cross, largely by way of “Take Five’s” royalties, are now “well north of six million dollars.”

When Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond took time out for tips from Indian musicians during their 1958 State Department tour, the exchange worked both ways. The Brubeck Quartet’s tour was an important component of the cultural diplomacy the United States practiced during the Cold War. Among other inspirations Brubeck picked up on the international road more than half a century ago was the 9/8 Turkish rhythm that became the basis for his “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” Desmond had long been working into his improvisations the minor feeling of near- and middle-eastern music, as—most famously— in “Le Souk” on the Jazz Goes To College album. Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo” and Desmond’s “Take Five” had yet to be written when the picture on the left was taken, but the Brubeck group left impressions in India and Pakistan that helped insinuate modern jazz into the cultures of those countries. Able to not only absorb from other musics but also contribute to them, jazz has become more and more natural to musicians there, as have Indo-Paki scales, ragas and quarter tones to western musicians.

With improvisation common to the music of both cultures, it may have been inevitable that something like the Sachal Studios Orchestra would develop. Founded by a businessman and philanthropist named Izzat Majeed, Sachal Studos in Lahore provides some of Pakistan’s most talented musicians a place to pursue their craft. Its current project is an album called Sachal Jazz: Interpretations of Jazz Standards & Bossa Nova, due out in May. According to an advance track list, it opens with “Take Five.” Here is the promotional video. The soloists are Balu Khan, tabla; Nafees Khan, sitar; and Tanveer Hussain, guitar. The conductor is Riaz Hussain. The string arrangement may not be long on innovation, but it follows the dictum drummer Joe Morello gave Brubeck before they made the original recording, “Keep that vamp going.”