Archives for 2011

Not long ago, we told you about stealth comments intended to lure Rifftides readers to websites that sell stuff. This just came in from the United Kingdom:

just signed up at www.artsjournal.com and wanna say hi to all the guys/gals of this board!

That cheery greeting was disguised as a comment about a Rifftides post from March 2, 2006 and evidently sent in hopes that we would publish it with the link to an advertisement for an acne treatment. The ruse didn’t work, but it sent the staff back to look at the original post. Oddly, the bogus comment is the only one the story has attracted in the nearly six years it has been sitting in the archives. The story came from a reliable source, so, we’re going to run it by you again.

Several versions of a joke usually beginning something like, “A note walks into a bar….” are floating around the internet. Buddy DeFranco forwarded the most elaborate I’ve seen. The Rifftides management makes no claims about the reliability of the musicology in this tale:

A C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar. The bartender says: “Sorry, but we don’t serve minors.” So, the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished: the G is out flat. An F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.
A D comes into the bar and heads straight for the bathroom saying, “Excuse me. I’ll just be a second.”
An A comes into the bar, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor.
Then the bartender notices a B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and exclaims: “Get out now! You’re the seventh minor I’ve found in this bar tonight.”
The E-flat, not easily deflated, comes back to the bar the next night in a 3-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender (who used to have a nice corporate job until his company downsized) says: “You’re looking sharp tonight, come on in! This could be a major development.” This proves to be the case, as the E-flat takes off the suit, and everything else, and stands there au naturel.
Eventually, the C sobers up, and realizes in horror that he’s under a rest. The C is brought to trial, is found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of DS without Coda at an upscale correctional facility. On appeal, however, the C is found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental, and that all accusations to the contrary are bassless.
The bartender decides, however, that since he’s only had tenor so patrons, the soprano out in the bathroom, and everything has become alto much treble, he needs a rest – and closes the bar.

If you really want to know about the acne treatment, use the “Contact Me” link in the center column and the staff will send you the url. You need not be a resident of the UK to apply.

There is good news for jazz listeners in Southern California. The Jazz Bakery can stop roaming. That modern-day rarity, a major jazz club in Los Angeles, the Bakery lost its lease in 2009 and has been presenting concerts in a variety of halls, moving from one spot to another. Now it can reestablish itself in Culver City near where it started nearly two decades ago. A grant from the Annenberg Foundation and an agreement with a Culver City municipal agency will help make the new building a reality where founder Ruth Price wanted it. For details, see Chris Barton’s report in The Los Angeles Times.
During my Los Angeles period, the Bakery was a favorite haunt. Let’s hope that the new place will have the intimacy that made it a pleasure to hear music like this, played by Howard Alden and the late George Van Eps at the Jazz Bakery in 1994.

To see a Rifftides archive piece about Ruth Price, a bit of Jazz Bakery history and a video of Ruth singing, click here.

Rifftides reader Mark Stryker sent this reaction to the previous entry. Mr. Stryker is the music critic of The Detroit Free Press. He has good ears.

Just a coda re: “Moonlight in Vermont,” whose unusual lyrics were written by John Blackburn. The A section words are actually in the form of a haiku, with 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Nor do the lyrics rhyme. Also, a note on the interpretation: Whiting takes a big (and to my ear unfortunate) breath leading from the bridge into the final A section, separating the words “lovely” and “evening,” which breaks up the single image in the lyric that continues over the bar line: “People who meet in this romantic setting/are so hypnotized by the lovely evening summer breeze.”
Without disrespecting Whiting’s gifts, compare to how Jo Stafford sings it.
Singing a slightly alternate lyric, she doesn’t take the breath where Whiting does, making it through the bar line before grabbing some quick air after the first word (“shadows”) of the new 8 bars. But you can tell she’s trying to keep the line focused into single, unbroken thought, and her phrasing does give the impression of a more liquid, expressive legato, especially since the arrangement slipped into rubato on the bridge.

Of course, the master of using breath-control technique, the legato line and savvy phrasing to heighten the meaning of a lyric is Frank Sinatra. “Moonlight” was always a showcase for him in that way. He takes it ‘way further than Stafford, connecting the bridge to the last A with a suspended phrase that raises the tension to a peak before a wonderful release, making it all the way to the end of the sentence in the second bar before breathing; he even ornaments the word “evening” with a little downward portamento slide. The second time through the tune he ups the ante in what for me is one of the most electric moments in all of Sinatra Land. Over a rubato accompaniment, he sneaks a breath between “hypnotized” and “by” and then suspends time f-o-r-e-v-e-r. When he finally slides into the final 8 bars, the key slides up a step (thanks, Billy May) and the combination of Sinatra’s phrasing and the arrangement has the music reaching for the stars. Wow.

News of Margaret Whiting’s death at 86 on Monday must have sent her fans to the shelves in search of her recording of “Moonlight in Vermont.” She recorded the song in 1943 when she was 19. It helped make her a star, and she stayed on the charts well into the 1960s, surviving even as rock and roll displaced scores of her pop music contemporaries.
Johnny Mercer did not write the lyric for “Moonlight in Vermont,” but when he was the creative power at Capitol Records he chose the song for Whiting. Mercer and Frank Loesser helped shape her singing from the time she was the grade school daughter of their fellow songwriter Richard Whiting. In a passage from Gene Lees’ Mercer biography Portrait of Johnny, Whiting recalled how Mercer prepared her for the record session.

“…Johnny said, ‘I want you to think, what does Vermont mean to you?’
“I said, ‘A calendar with a church in the snow.’
“He said, ‘there are more images.’
“I said, ‘Well, there’s got to be summer, winter, fall. Fall. Everybody goes to see Vermont in the fall for the leaves.’
“He said, ‘I want you to think of those pictures. I want you to think of the coming of spring. I want you to think of summer, people swimming and people walking, people having a lovely time outdoors.’
“So we go in and record it and I’m envisioning all these pictures. It gave me something to go on. That’s what he taught me and that’s what Loesser taught me. Pick up that sheet music and look at those lyrics and make them mean something. Read the lyric aloud, over and over and over. Recite it until you get it. Your own natural instincts will tell you.”

Here’s the record: Trumpeter Billy Butterfield and his orchestra, with Margaret Whiting’s vocal.

For an obituary of Margaret Whiting, go here.

Partially blind, totally brilliant, for decades James Thurber (1894-1961) entertained readers with the incisiveness and wit of his stories and drawings. His most famous story is probably “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which was distorted into a film that Thurber detested. Almost everything he did was for print, most of it in The New Yorker. There were exceptions. He wrote the hit play The Male Animal, appeared on stage in an adaptation of his stories called A Thurber Carnival, and collaborated with the composer David Raksin on an animated version of The Unicorn in the Garden, the most famous of more than 75 fables Thurber wrote. The fables inevitably ended with punch lines that served as morals.
This is not the anniversary of Thurber’s birth, his death or of any special occasion connected with him. It is simply a good day to watch The Unicorn in the Garden and listen to Raksin’s lovely score.

This is a classic collection of Thurber stories.

It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

Flip Philipp & Ed Partyka Dectet, Hair Of The Dog (ATS). In their third album as co-leaders, Philipp and Partyka make a substantial addition to the recorded history of medium-sized jazz groups. From bands led by Fletcher Henderson through Red Norvo, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, James Moody, Shorty Rogers, Dave Brubeck, Teddy Charles, Rod Levitt, Bill Kirchner and Charles Mingus—among many others— arrangers for six to eleven pieces have achieved flexibility that the mass of a sixteen-piece band inhibits. Philipp is an Austrian vibraharpist active in jazz who for twenty years has been principal percussionist of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Partyka is an American trombonist who heads the jazz department at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria. They are gifted composers and arrangers who relish referring to styles that preceded them, but are distinctively modern in harmony and voicing. In “Woman Trouble,” Partyka uses sinuous wa-wa effects right out of Ellington and Philipp gives his Milt Jackson tribute “Groove Bag” a boogaloo sensibility, but they are not in the retro business.
The music has freshness, vigor, precision, daring and, often, a kind of wacky amiability. Philipp’s “Minors” opens with a series of downward glissandos across the band, abruptly morphs into what could be car-chase music or something adapted from Raymond Scott, then settles into lightning solos by Philipp and pianist Oliver Kent, interspersed with tightly written ensemble punctuations. Partyka’s voicings in “Hair of the Dog” give the band expansiveness that belies its medium size. They provide Jure Pukl a cushy platform for his tenor saxophone in one of several impressive solos by the young Slovenian. All of the musicians except drummer Christian Salfellner get solo time. Salfellner contributes swing and sensitivity, commodities more rare and valuable than drum solos. “Kotzen Beim Steuerberater” has an exhilarating improvised duet between Robert Bachner on euphonium and the audacious bass clarinetist Wolfgang Schiftner. Fabian Rucker’s heartfelt baritone saxophone takes center stage in Partyka’s richly orchestrated “Let it Go, Ro.” The title, an anagram, refers to the piece’s original setting as Verdi’s “La donna è mobile.” Kent, Philipp, and Rucker on bass clarinet, float through Philipp’s “Time,” arranged to languid effect by Partyka. The solos are consistent reminders of the abundant pool of jazz talent in Central Europe, but it is Partyka’s and Philipp’s writing that gives this album its lasting value.
Wadada Leo Smith and Ed Blackwell, The Blue Mountain’s Sun Drummer (Kabell). Ed Blackwell’s drumming never lets you forget that he was from New Orleans. Blackwell, who died in 1992, was a master of polyrhythmic complexity. He helped Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry pioneer free jazz. Part of him was always the little boy listening to Paul Barbarin, Monk Hazel and other drummers whose spirit he absorbed as he grew up in the Crescent City. In this newly-released 1986 encounter, he teams with trumpeter Smith in 10 duets that together have the character of a suite. Blackwell and Smith played these spontaneous pieces in a broadcast on the radio station of Brandeis University. As he interacts with Smith, intimations of the New Orleans parade beat combine with the iconoclasm that in the 1960s Blackwell brought to modern jazz drumming and Smith to the new thing of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “The Blue Mountain’s Sun Drummer,” the title tune, sets Smith’s clarion calls, trills and flurries of notes against Blackwell’s off-meter bass drum thuds, tom-tom bumps, glittering explosions of cymbal splashes and chattering snare patterns. Still, this music is not crowded. The two do not produce the sturm un drang that often make free jazz seem undifferentiated walls of sound. The underlying waltz feeling of “Mto: The Celestial River” is anything but intimidating.
Smith and Blackwell make use of quietness and, in some cases, silence. On flugelhorn and, briefly, flute, for “Sellassie-I,” Smith establishes a hymn-like melody and Blackwell maintains an implacable beat on his hi-hat, making spare comments and punctuations on other parts of his set. The effect is hypnotic as the piece melds into “Seven Arrows in the Garden of Light” and takes on increasing intensity. Smith reflects his orderly composer’s mind as he improvises with thematic development that is even more evident in “Buffalo People: A Blues Ritual.” He is an inventor of melodies. For all of his ability to generate thunder, Blackwell reminds us that in a close listening and playing encounter with an equally thoughtful musician, he could be lyrical. Smith is flourishing in the new century, with a number of interesting projects. It is good to have this fresh and timeless record of his collaboration with a master of modern drumming.
Bobby Hacket, Bob Haggart: V-Disc Parties (Jazz Unlimited) The glories of Hackett’s cornet and Haggart’s arrangements fill 21 tracks recorded for American service men and women during and after World War Two. The first five pieces are by a recreation of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. They include two of the original members of the ODJB 26 years after the New Orleans band made the world’s first jazz records. Trombonist Eddie Edwards and drummer Tony Spargo were still vital, a reminder of how rapidly jazz developed in its first three decades; bebop was in its early stages when these records were made in 1943. Clarinetist Brad Gowans and pianist Frank Signorelli fill out the ODJB revival roster. There is little evidence in the Hackett ODJB sides that bop is about to pop, or in eight others he led in 1948 that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other boppers were now flourishing. What is evident is that among post-Beiderbecke cornetists, Hackett occupies a unique place. The perfection of his tone, flow of lyrical ideas and swing can astonish a listener. His companions on the 1948 tracks include guitarist Eddie Condon, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, trombonist Cutty Cutshall, baritone saxophonist Ernie Carceres and drummer Morey Feld, recorded beautifully and all playing at the tops of their games.
In the eight-piece band that Haggart leads in a 1947 V-Disc session, there are more than hints of bebop. Haggart announces it with a direct quote from Gillespie’s “Oop Bop Sh’Bam” as the introduction to a novelty called “Possum Song.” His ensemble writing includes boppish licks that attest to his openness to new ideas and his ability to make them serve his music. The music is swing, but some of Haggart’s arrangements are akin to what young writers like Neil Hefti and George Handy were doing for Woody Herman and Boyd Raeburn at the time. The backgrounds he puts behind the soloists on “Haggart’s Lady” (based on “What Is This Thing Called Love,”) are echoes of Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House.” He transforms the chestnuts “Indian Love Call” and “Bye Bye Blues” into boppish original works. Haggart’s eight-piece band features Hucko, alto saxophonist Toots Mondello, the little-known tenor saxophonist Art Drellinger, pianist Stan Freeman, Haggart on bass and Chris Griffin, an overlooked trumpet hero of the big band era. Griffin’s lead and solo work here is remarkable. I don’t know how much circulation these recordings got among soldiers, sailors, Marines and Coastguardsmen in the 1940s. They deserve plenty now.

At the end of the piece two exhibits below, I wrote that I would depend on Rifftides readers to tell us about the Emil Viklický-Scott Robinson concert the night before last. Even better, journalist and blogger Michael Steinman took his video camera to the Bohemian National Hall of the Czech Center in New York.
Viklický played a lovely Petrof grand piano. Robinson used only three of the instruments from his armory—soprano and tenor saxophones and euphonium. No ophicleide or slide soprano this time. Thanks to Mr. Steinman, here are two pieces from the concert of January 5, 2011. In his introduction to the first, Robinson talks about the pair’s long friendship. He is at a distance from the camera’s microphone; you may want to temporarily increase the volume of your speakers.

For all nine videos from the concert, go here. To explore Michael Steinman’s YouTube channel, go here. You will find previous Viklický and Robinson posts in the Rifftides archives.

Digital video surprises pop up on the web. Here is an ad hoc edition of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. The valve trombonist is Mulligan’s frequent collaborator Bob Brookmeyer. Ray Brown, bass, and Art Blakey, drums, may have done this with Mulligan just once. YouTube tells us when, 1981. But who knows where?

Comments provide some of the most valuable content in Rifftides. We encourage everyone to submit comments. The staff decides which ones appear and is tolerant, but there are limits. We evaporate comments that would commercialize the blog by offering links to products or services, especially those of a—er—personal nature. Here is a comment allegedly in response to a post about Jelly Roll Morton. It had a link to a Las Vegas escort service. Considering some of the New Orleans parlors where Jelly played, maybe that makes a kind of sense, even if the comment itself does not.

It is very interesting for me to read this blog. Thank you for it. I like such topics and anything that is connected to them. I would like to read more on that blog soon.

Some of the sneak comments don’t have as much substance as that one. Here, however, is one reacting to reviews of Randy Weston and John McNeil that offers valuable information—if you own a bearded dragon.

I know the bearded dragon definitely does absorb some water via its
vent region and skin. Making them live and eat out of a container made of salt would be like having them ingest a lot of salt per day.

Can’t argue with that. The link was to a site selling Playdough. Maybe someone out there in cyberspace can explain the connection.
If you would like to react to what you actually read, watch or hear on Rifftides, please use the “Comments” link found at the end of each item. We would like to hear from you, unless you’re running the Bearded Dragon Playdough Escort Service.

Rifftidesers who live in or near New York City have the opportunity this week to hear and see together two musicians who have often received favorable mention in Rifftides—and elsewhere. Here is the announcement from one of them, the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson.

Hello everybody. 
Just wanted to let anyone who might be in New York know about the free duo concert I am doing this Wednesday with my dear friend and colleague Emil Viklický, who is making a rare stateside appearance from the Czech Republic. Emil is perhaps the most highly regarded pianist of his country and we have participated in many projects together, going back to the band we formed in college in 1977. Please come out if you can… Happy New Year to everyone!



Emil Viklický/Scott Robinson Duo
Wed., Jan. 5, 7:00 PM
Bohemian National Hall
Czech Center New York
321 E. 73 St., New York City
646-422-3399

Sorry for the late notice, but I just found out about this. The adventurous radio station KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon, is broadcasting a six-part series about the musician Butch Morris. The second part is this evening—soon. For how to tune in, go to the end of this piece. Morris is not merely a composer, arranger, bandleader or conductor. Or he is all of those things and more. Our colleague Howard Mandel, a specialist on the avant garde, says Morris’s music “is not jazz.” Or it is. This promotional clip for a film about Morris will give you a hint.

The Rifftides staff hopes that your 2011 will be as happy as this New Year’s Eve performance by Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. The conductor is Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Feliz Año Nuevo