Archives for March 2014

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There is no possibility of keeping up with the flow of albums pouring out of what is often described, absurdly, as a declining jazz scene, but it can be interesting to try. Here are brief observations on a few more or less recent CDs.

Sam Boshnack, Exploding Syndrome (Shnack Music)

Sam Boshnack is an aggressive, rowdy, uneven trumpeter who heads a quintet of adventurers from Seattle’s avant jazz community. She (Samantha) contains her and her band mates’ wildness within carefully balanced compositions supported by tight harmonies and demanding rhythms. Lyricism and sardonic wit coexist in the title track with its floating Dawn Clement piano solo, a howling Beth Fleenor vocal like something from the sound track of a Rob Zombie movie, and a Moussorgskian fanfare. In her primary role, Fleenor solos smoothly on clarinet and bass clarinet. Boshnack’s “Suite for Seattle’s Royal Court,” particularly in the final movement, has moments of majesty. It has others of whimsy. The suite encompasses further impressive piano playing by Clement, pastoral Fleenor clarinet and a nicely sculpted Isaac Castillo bass solo. In all tracks, Castillo and the young drummer Max Wood are an effective rhythm team. Boshnack’s writing and her energy make her progress worth tracking.

Bud Powell, Birdland 1953 (ESP)

Listeners coming to Powell for the first time by way of this three-CD set may be intrigued that so much seems familiar. The familiarity is because there is a significant component of Powell DNA in virtually every pianist in the modern jazz idiom. His influence is pervasive. When Powell was at his peak, as he often is in these recordings, no pianist but his idol Art Tatum could match his keyboard virtuosity, energy and ability to improvise lines that moved with uninterrupted flows of creative intensity. Powell’s 20-week engagement at Birdland came as he emerged from nearly two years of crisis in mental and emotional problems that would plague him until his death thirteen years later at the age of 41. For details of his health and tragic life, see Peter Pullman’s invaluable 2012 biography Wail: The Life of Bud Powell.

The ESP box set collects most, if not all, of Powell’s Birdland recordings. His bass/drum accompanists were Oscar Pettiford/Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus/Haynes, Franklin Skeete/Sonny Payne, Mingus/Art Taylor, George Duvivier/Taylor, Curley Russell/Taylor— an elite of young New York bebop rhythm teams. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Powell’s fellow founding fathers of bop, sit in. Gillespie is on two tracks, Parker on three, one of which includes an amazing solo on “Cheryl” into which he inserts Louis Armstrong’s epoch-making “West End Blues” introduction. Powell, brilliant throughout, reaches an apogee in the September sessions that contain some of his best compositions, among them “Parisian Thoroughfare,” “Un Poco Loco,” “Oblivion” and “Glass Enclosure,” as well as remarkable performances of “Embraceable You” and “My Heart Stood Still.” An announcer’s voice and snatches of Powell playing “Lullaby of Birdland” pop up half a dozen times. It was the theme song of a radio program that originated in the club. Sound reproduction is hardly high fidelity, but skillful remastering has substantially improved the quality of the tape recordings over previous releases, some of them bootlegs.

Ambrose Akinmusire, The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier To Paint (Blue Note)

The tracks with singers in this haunting album will receive the most attention. That’s how things work in this pop-oriented culture, and if the vocals bring attention to the trumpeter’s engrossing album, so much the better. On an emotional scale, the music ranges from peaceful tracks with strings (“The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits,” “Inflated By Spinning”) to an insistent quintet voyage of discovery called “Richard (conduit).” In his 2011 Blue Note debut, When The Heart Emerges Glistening, Akinmusire’s playing was so complete in terms of technique, tone and content that it seemed unreasonable to expect improvement. There is improvement, however—increased intensity that pulsates beneath the surface of this music.

The vocals are by Becca Stevens, Theo Bleckman, the British soul singer known as Cold Specks, and a child who in “Rollcall for Those Absent” reads the names of young murder victims including Trayvon Martin. They are so integrated with the music that the pieces with singing would be ineffective without it. Akinmusire’s closely knit quintet has tenor saxophonist Walter Smith, pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown. The impressive young guitarist Charles Altura is a guest on several pieces. The pieces, all by Akinmusire except for Ms. Stevens’s “Our Basement,” are 21st century successors to art songs by Schubert and Wolf and works of miniaturists like Chopin, Schumann, Satie, Prokoviev and Schuller. Like its title, the album’s music is a sort of poetry.

Scott Hamilton, Swedish Ballads…& More (Charleston Square)

The American tenor saxophonist and an all-star Scandinavian rhythm section explore pieces that are classics in Sweden and, in a couple of cases, around the world. After Stan Getz learned the traditional song “Ack Värmeland Du Sköna,” from pianist Bengt Hallberg in 1951, their Swedish recording of it migrated to the US. It acquired a new name, “Dear Old Stockholm,” and became a jazz standard. Hamilton takes it at a relaxed tempo. His and pianist Jan Lundgren’s four-chorus solos allow leisurely exploration of the piece’s major-minor harmonic scheme and the unusual structure that incorporates a four-bar bridge section. On full display are Hamilton’s big sound and easy-going wit, Lundgren’s harmonic inventiveness and the pianist’s touch reminiscent of Hallberg’s.

The only non-Swedish song on the album is its second best known. Quincy Jones wrote “Stockholm Sweetnin’” for a 1953 recording of American and Swedish all-stars including Hallberg, Clifford Brown, Art Farmer, Lars Gullin and Arne Domnerus. Its ingenious melody line is constructed on the chords of “You Leave Me Breathless.” The song’s harmonic transitions in and out of the bridge present improvisational challenges that don’t phase Hamilton, Lundgren and bassist Jesper Lundgaard. The Danish drummer Kristian Leth uses brushes throughout and solos sparingly but is notably effective in his breaks on the Swedish piano hero Jan Johansson’s “Blues i oktaver,” a highlight of the collection. Leth produced the album. Lundgren wrote the informative liner notes about the songs. Olle Adolphson’s “Trubbel,” the World War Two hit “Min soldat” (“My Soldier”), Ulf Sandtrom’s “You Can’t Be in Love With a Dream” and Ove Lind’s “Swing in F” round out the CD. All are tunes that other players might profitably adopt. Hamilton is one of the most prolific recording artists in jazz, with dozens of albums in his discography. This is one of his best.

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From time to time, we reach into nine years of posts stored in the Rifftides vaults for pieces that the staff thinks are worth a second look. This is one of those times.

“Third Stream” seems a quaint term nearly half a century after it kicked up a bit of a fuss in jazz and classical circles. Still, it never quite goes away, as the recent Eric Dolphy posting reminded me. Two of the names that remain associated with the movement are Gunther Schuller and Leonard Bernstein. Several years ago, I wrote about Schuller’s central role in creation of the term and implementation of the concept. It was in a review of a CD reissue of two daring and indelible Columbia albums of the late 1950s, Music for Brass and Modern Jazz Concert. In a moment, documentation of Bernstein’s peripheral but highly visible role in the Third Stream movement. First, about Schuller from that 1997 Jazz Times review:

In his notes for Modern Jazz Concert, Gunther Schuller emphasized the unimportance of pigeonholing the music, “…I will therefore not categorize and typecast the six works on this record.”

Nonetheless, Schuller could not long deny the insatiable human need to label. In 1957 he created a name for this music that drew upon the jazz and classical traditions. It was “Third Stream.” There had been successful meldings of the improvisation and swing of jazz with big classical forms at least as far back as Red Norvo’s 1933 “Dance of the Octopus,” but “Third Stream” caught on as a moniker and persuaded many listeners that the marriage was new. If it attracted attention to the works in this album, then no harm and considerable good was done. The inspired playing of Miles Davis on John Lewis’ “Three Little Feelings” and J.J. Johnson’s “Poem for Brass” allowed producer George Avakian to convince Columbia to commit large resources to a Davis project that turned out to be Miles Ahead. That revived Davis’ partnership with Gil Evans and led to Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. “Poem for Brass” was the first major indication that J.J. Johnson was a large-scale composer. “Pharaoh” allowed Jimmy Giuffre to extend his range beyond the 16-piece band. Schuller’s “Symphony for Brass and Percussion” was not a jazz composition but its presence on the Music for Brass album under the baton of Dmitri Mitropolous shed prestige on the entire undertaking.

Fast forward to 1962 and Leonard Bernstein’s series of televised New York Philharmonic concerts for young people. He included in one of the concerts a piece by Schuller called “Journey Into Jazz.” The segment found Bernstein entertaining, informative and wordy. The portion of the video available to Rifftides excludes much of Bernstein’s setup explanation, which began with a small jazz group on stage with him. It is not just any jazz group. It is Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy, Benny Golson, Richard Davis and Joe Cocuzzo. The band plays briefly, then Bernstein says the following, leading us into the video.

BERNSTEIN: Now that’s about the last sound in the world you’d expect to hear in Philharmonic Hall, isn’t it? Sounds more like your next-door neighbor’s radio, or the Newport Jazz Festival. And yet, that’s a sound that’s been coming more and more often into our American concert halls, ever since American composers began trying, about forty years ago, to get some of the excitement and natural American feeling of jazz into their symphonic music.

Even so, in spite of these tries at combining jazz and symphonic writing, the two musics have somehow remained separate, like two streams that flow along side by side without ever touching or mixing–except every once in a while. But it’s those once-in-a-whiles that we’re interested in today: those pieces in which the jazz stream now and then does sneak over to the symphonic stream, and for a moment or two, flows along with it in happy harmony. And these days–at least, for the last five or fifty years, that is–there is a new movement in American music actually called “the third stream” which mixes the rivers of jazz with the other rivers that flow down from the high-brow far out mountain peaks of twelve-tone, or atonal music.

Now the leading navigator of this third stream–in fact the man who made up the phrase “third stream”–is a young man named Gunther Schuller. He is one of those total musicians, like Paul Hindemith whom we discussed on our last program, only he’s American. Mr. Schuller writes music–all kinds of music–conducts it, lectures on it, and plays it. Certainly he owes some of his great talent to his father, a wonderful musician who happens to play in our orchestra. We are very proud of Arthur Schuller.

But young Gunther Schuller–still in his thirties–is now the center of a whole group of young composers who look to him as their leader, and champion. And so I thought that the perfect way to begin today’s program about jazz in the concert hall would be to play a piece by Gunther Schuller–especially this one particular piece which is an introduction to jazz for young people–

The Rifftides staff thanks pianist-composer Jack Reilly and blogger Ralph Miriello of Notes On Jazz for calling our attention to the video from Leonard Bernstein’s Young Peoples Concerts.

To explore the hundreds of posts in the Rifftides vaults, see “Archives” in the right-hand column and select a month and year.

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Alto saxophonist Med Flory was best known to the general public as an actor, but jazz listeners are most likely to remember him as the co-founder and leader of Supersax. Flory died this week at the age of 87. He made hundreds of appearances in television shows and a few in motion pictures, usually as characters in westerns and action flicks. He’s the big man in the foreground in a scene from the 1966 film Night Of The Grizzly. He was a familiar presence in Mannix, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Magnum P.I. and other TV series. Flory once told the Associated Press that the acting made it possible for him to keep Supersax together. In 1972 he co-founded the group with bassist Buddy Clark and built it around transcribed and harmonized solos from the recordings of Charlie Parker. Supersax had two alto saxes, two tenors and a baritone accompanied by piano, bass and drums. It often featured trumpet solos by Conte Candoli or trombone solos by Frank Rosolino or Carl Fontana. The band won the 1974 Grammy Award for best jazz performance. From their album with the L.A. Voices, here’s Supersax with “Embraceable You,” instrumental and vocal arrangement by Med Flory in a stunning treatment of the Parker solo.

Through the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Supersax recorded a dozen albums. Apart from Supersax, Flory maintained active playing until a few years ago. Operating his acting and music careers in parallel, he often took part in big band concerts, jazz parties and the festivals of the Los Angeles Jazz Institute. For a summary of Med Flory’s career, see the obituary by Don Heckman in The Los Angeles Times.

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Iola Brubeck died today. She had been under treatment for cancer discovered several months ago during oral surgery. She was 90 years old. Her children made the announcement through the University of the Pacific, home of the Brubeck Institute. Mrs. Brubeck and her husband Dave were alumni of the university. They met there at a student dance in the early 1940s and decided that night they would marry, which they did a few months later. Mrs. Brubeck died peacefully at home in Wilton, Connecticut, with her family around her. To see the announcement, go here.

The photograph to the left shows Mrs. Brubeck with her husband and Duke Ellington in the 1970s. Long before then, she played an essential role in the early years of her husband’s career as pianist, composer and bandleader. This passage from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, describes the crucial part she played in 1953 in the development of the Dave Brubeck Quartet:

In her role as manager, booker and publicist in the lean days before Brubeck signed with Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation, Iola Brubeck acted on an idea that led not only to more work for the Quartet, but also to a major change in the relationship of jazz to its audience. As far back as the 1920s, jazz musicians played on college campuses, but almost always for restricted fraternity and sorority dances. The Brubecks’ pioneering opened the college market as a source of work for jazz artists and helped open society’s ears to wide acceptance of jazz as a mature cultural element.

Mrs. Brubeck wrote more than one hundred colleges and universities, enclosing reviews of the Quartet’s recordings and live appearances. She suggested that The Dave Brubeck Quartet would be ideal for campus concerts and offered a deal that appealed to student associations—a low fee for the band and a split of profits . A few bookings developed. Early on, the band often played in lecture rooms or cafeterias doubling as concert halls, with students wandering in and out during the performances. By the time Joe Glaser’s office took over the Quartet’s management, the system was working. The young agent Larry Bennett, Iola said, “took the idea and ran with it.”

For their March, 1953, appearance at Oberlin College in Ohio, the Quartet found itself in the acoustically blessed chapel of an institution known for the quality of its music department. The audience knew what it was hearing and responded with enthusiastic appreciation. In a canny business move, exchanging broadcast rights for ownership of the master recording, Brubeck allowed the Oberlin campus radio station to tape and later air the concert. When Fantasy issued the performance as a long-playing record, a phenomenon was established: Jazz kept on going to college and Brubeck created an audience that has been loyal to him for decades.

Later, Mrs. Brubeck became her husband’s partner in songwriting, contributing memorable lyrics to many of his compositions, among them those for his musical The Real Ambassadors. She managed all of that professional involvement while raising six children during the years of Dave’s travel as leader of one of the world’s busiest musical organizations.

Through my early coverage of Brubeck and Desmond and, ultimately our friendship, I came to know Iola and the Brubeck family. The friendship continued over the years. When it came time for me to write the Desmond book, she and Dave were primary sources. We spent hours in interviews. They agreed to provide the biography’s foreword. Following Dave’s death in December of 2012, Iola and I stayed in touch, even toward the end as her own health problems became complicated. We exchanged messages until recently. Hers were unfailingly cheerful and upbeat, including the last one about deciding to discontinue therapy. We were together for a few moments at Dave’s memorial service last May. She had just spoken movingly about her husband and his music in a way that made me think of Paul Desmond’s description of her as “the incomparable, regal Iola.”

“For All We Know” was one of her favorite songs.

As the digital revolution makes inroads into traditional publishing based in paper, bookstores are not having a notably good century so far. Hardly a week goes by without news of a large or small bookstore, including those owned by chains, going out of business somewhere in the US. Yakima, Washington, the longest running of the Ramseys’ many hometowns, has an independent bookstore that does well because this reading community supports it. That is in no small part because Inklings Bookshop (pictured below) stays keyed into the town and the region, with a flair for promotion and special events. One of Inklings’ biggest book soirees takes place tomorrow. The store is bringing together 12 authors to talk about and sign their books. I’ll be signing copies of Poodie James. The book fair will be near the store in the building of a former library branch that expanded to bigger quarters; I told you, folks around here read a lot. The place is empty now, so they suggested that each of us bring a table, a chair, a poster and cookies to offer browsers. Here’s a link to a story about the event that includes word sketches of the authors. The article is by Pat Muir, who edits the weekly entertainment supplement of the Yakima Herald-Republic.

If you’re going to be in the area, come early and maybe you’ll be in time to get a cookie. If your plans don’t include being in the Pacific Northwest and you wish to know about my books, click on “Purchase Doug’s Books” at the top of the page.