Every once in a while, Retta Christie asks pianist, singer, songwriter and raconteur Dave Frishberg to be the guest on her radio program. He usually arrives with items from his private stash of rare and unusual records, tapes and cylinders. Tomorrow, Monday, December 5, is one of those days. To hear Frishberg and Christie on the quaintly call-lettered KBOO, go here from 12 to 2 pm (PST) and click on “Listen Now.â€
Archives for December 2011
Weekend Extra: A Story About Elvin
In Portland, Oregon, there’s a radio storyteller named Lynn Darroch. He tells about ordinary people and events near home or extraordinary ones abroad or, often, about jazz. When he performs in public, he may hire a musician or two and make a video. Here’s Darroch with guitarist John Stowell and tenor saxophonist Rob Davis, prominent inhabitants of Portland’s rich music scene. The story is about Elvin Jones.
To learn more about Darroch, Stowell and Davis, and to hear and see more stories, go here.
Lennie Sogoloff Still Presents
For a couple of weeks, I’ve been waiting for permission to post photographs from the collection that Lennie Sogoloff donated to Salem State University in Massachusetts. Sogoloff was the proprietor of Lennie’s On the Turnpike, a club north of Boston that presented jazz, comics and cabaret from 1951 to 1972. In that era, it was not unusual for artists to appear in clubs for a week, two weeks or longer, not the one- or two-night gigs customary in the 21st century. The range of performers that Sogoloff hired was remarkable. It ran from budding humorists and singers (among them Jay Leno and Bette Midler) to established jazz artists, including Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Among the recordings From Lennie’s was Jaki Byard’s Live!, a masterpiece that—for no apparent good reason—has gone out of print and become a bizarrely overpriced collectors item. Maybe Concord Records can explain why. In the 1963 photograph above, Sogoloff is introducing trumpeter Joe Newman. Five years ago, he turned over his archive of photographs and other memorabilia to Salem State U., which has posted many of the pictures on the web.
Thanks to the university archivist, Susan Edwards, for permission to show you a few of Sogoloff’s, and his customers’, memories.
Woody Herman and Sal Nistico
To see the entire Sogoloff collection of 118 photographs, go here.
Coincidentally, as we were about to post this item, Alan Broadbent alerted the Rifftides staff to a video clip of Sogoloff in 2011. The pianist remembers Lennie’s as “the great club where I heard Miles with Herbie and Wayne in 1966 or so.”
The irrepressible Lennie is still presenting artists he loves and respects, but in rather different circumstances, at the Devereux Nursing Home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Listen to what he says when his interviewer asks him about jazz “actsâ€â€”—words to remember.
If you’d like to hear Mike Palter and Lynne Jackson perform a song with words by Palter and music by Alan Broadbent, go here.
Motian On Motian
National Public Radio’s Fresh Air last night rebroadcast Terry Gross’s 2006 interview with drummer Paul Motian, who died on November 22. Motian’s conversation was like much of his drumminglow-key, definite and often surprising. Here is some of what he said.
I’m not a showpiece drummer. … I feel like I’m an accompanist. It’s my sort of thing to make the other people sound good, as good as they can be. I feel like I should accompany them, and I should accompany the sound that I am hearing and make it the best that I can — that I can do.
To listen to the broadcast, go to the Fresh Air archive.
For the Rifftides remembrance of Motian, go here.
Muted Art
During the years in which Art Farmer (1928-1999) played trumpet as his main horn, his muted work was a pleasure to hear. After he switched to flugelhorn in the early 1960s, his playing took on greater lyricism and depth, but because there were no flugelhorn mutes, a satisfying aspect of his sound went by the wayside. Then, in the late ‘70s he found a technician who was able to convert a trombone mute so that the flugel could accommodate it. Here’s Farmer on muted flugelhorn in 1982 with a superb rhythm section: Fred Hersch, piano; Dennis Irwin, bass; Billy Hart, drums.
I have posted this video beforebut not for a couple of yearsand no doubt will again. We play favorite records often. Why not favorite videos? Art’s ending cadenza alone would be worth the return visit.
For the previous “Blue Monk†appearance, other Art Farmer videos and reflections on his importance, go here.