Archives for August 2014

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This is Labor Day weekend or, if you prefer the Canadian spelling, Labour Day weekend. Monday will see official observance of the day established in Canada in 1872 and the US in 1887 to honor the economic and social contributions of working people. It long ago expanded to a three-day holiday weekend that marks the unofficial end of summer, the return of children to school and huge sales at department stores, automobile dealerships and sellers of electronics. Millions of Americans celebrate Labor Day by grilling and consuming pieces of meat marinated in or covered with barbecue sauce.

So, what could be more appropriate than to honor the laboring classes with two versions of Lil Hardin Armstrong’s classic composition. The first, from 1927 is by the man she was married to at the time and his Hot Five. The second, cooler, with the title and the beat altered, was recorded 41 years later.

Louis Armstrong (tp); Kid Ory (tb); Johnny Dodds (cl); Lil Armstrong (p); Johnny St. Cyr (bj). November 9, 1927.

Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Airto Moreira, drums; Joe Beck, guitar; Wayne Andre, Paul Faulise, Bill Watrous, Kai Winding, trombone; John Eckert, Joe Shepley, Marvin Stamm, trumpet; Ray Alonge, Tony Miranda, French horn; Don Sebesky, arranger. November 20, 1968.

Tomorrow: A rather different piece of Labor Day music .

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News has arrived that my notes for the new Jan Lundgren solo piano CD have been submitted to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for a possible Grammy nomination. I hasten to emphasize that a submission is not a nomination. The essay required some of the most exhaustive research I have ever done for an album annotation. It involved the pleasure of listening repeatedly to All By Myself and investigating the history of each of its 14 pieces, classics from what we have all come to call the great American songbook. I thought I knew something about the backgrounds of “‘Round Midnight” and “My Heart Stood Still,” to mention two of the tracks. Yet, surprising information surfaced about each of them and most of the others.

I was flattered that producer Dick Bank asked me to do the writing, happy to be involved in a minor way with so important an achievement, and to be given carte blanche concerning length (the essay is more than 5,000 words). Liner notes aside, Jan Lundgren thinks—and I agree—that the album is the best recorded work of his more than two decades as a professional pianist. It is a milestone in his career.

Is a liner note writer walking a thin ethical line when he mentions a project with which he is connected? I don’t think so. This isn’t a review. I’m sharing good news. I want to share it with Rifftides readers.

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From Philadelphia comes news of the death of John Blake, Jr., a violinist who combined his classical training, love for the African-American musical tradition and sense of adventure to become prominent on the forward edge of jazz in the 1970s. Blake was 67. He made his mark recording with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and soon won the Violinist Deserving Wider Recognition category in the Down Beat Critics Poll. His fame widened when he toured with Grover Washington, Jr’s band and then with pianist McCoy Tyner in several of Tyner’s groups. He worked with a variety of artists including Duke Ellington, Steve Turre, Cecil McBee, James Newton and Billy Taylor. In recent years, Blake devoted much of his time and energy to the development of musical interest in young people in his native Philadelphia.

Here is Blake in 2001 with Taylor, bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper in a program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

For an obituary of Blake, see this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It includes video that shows Blake’s affinity for young people.

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Following the Bill Evans birthday piece three days ago, a note from Alan Broadbent about Evans reminded me of a Rifftides post from five years ago. The piece placed Evans in the context of his work in the 1950s with George Russell. It appeared on the occasion of Russell’s death, and it included video of some of Evans’ most stimulating playing. This appeared on July 29, 2009.

George Russell died Monday night. Here are some of the facts of his life, outlined by the Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — Jazz composer George Russell, a MacArthur fellow whose theories influenced the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died. His publicist says Russell, who taught at the New England Conservatory, died Monday in Boston at age 86 of complications from Alzheimer’s.

Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and attended Wilberforce University. He played drums in Benny Carter’s band and later wrote ”Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and was the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz. Russell developed the Lydian concept in 1953. It’s credited as the first theoretical contribution from jazz.
Russell is survived by his wife, his son and three grandchildren. A release says a memorial service will be planned.

The first sentence of that AP story barely suggests Russell’s importance. There will be much more written and spoken about him in the next few days by scholars and historians, as there should be. The work he did, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, had major influence on the thinking and performance of musicians who were shaping new ways of approaching the music. On a radio program I did in the sixties, I devoted five weeks of broadcasts to Russell’s music. This was the introduction to that series on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans in September and October of 1966.

Over the next few programs we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell – not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but also because of his influence of the development of jazz in the sixties, an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized even by many musicians. It may well develop that Russell is having an impact on the course of jazz as great as, or greater than, that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the write and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. Hence, pan-tonality.

That’s a brief and far from complete reduction of George Russell’s theory, on which he worked for ten years. It’s all in Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Jazz Improvisation.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.
Discipline.

Improvising Russell’s way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. Some of their names: Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Don Ellis, Dave Baker, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Eric Dolphy. Evans is featured soloist in Russell’s 1960 Decca recording, Jazz In The Space Age, the most thorough application of Russell’s theories to a large band. If you’re not familiar with Russell, all that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there’s a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle, but it’s there. And, I should add, it’s more evident after several hearings.

For five Saturdays, engineer Charlie Flatt played and I talked about Russell’s music, reaching back to 1947 and his “Cubano Be-Cubano Bop” for Gillespie and up to his 1963 quintet album The Outer View. The survey included the classic “All About Rosie,” commissioned by Brandeis University in 1957, the smalltet recordings for RCA, Russell’s series of Riverside albums and the remarkable suite New York, New York, a work recorded in 1958 and 1959 that brought together, among other players, Evans, Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Phil Woods, all interesting young musicians who went on to be among the most influential in jazz.

For a sense of Russell and New York milieu in which he operated in the late 1950s, video of a 1958 edition of The Subject Is Jazz brings together several of the musicians who played his music. It includes a version of Rusell’s “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” with a Bill Evans solo not as electrifying as the one on this recording. Nonetheless, it presents Evans in the context of Russell’s work, and it is followed by critic Gilbert Seldes interviewing Russell about his concept. The program also has two pieces featuring Billy Taylor. If you stay with it for all 24 minutes, you’ll see credits for the musicians. And, yes the trumpeter identified as Carl Severinsen is Doc Severinsen. You may never have thought of him as a bebopper, but listen to those solos.

Was George Russell a force in opening jazz to greater freedom In the late fifties and early sixties, as I suggested 43 years ago, or did his Lydian Chromatic Concept synthesize ideas that were already in the air? Some of each, perhaps. Either way, he created some of the most stimulating music of his day, up to, including and beyond his collaboration with avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry. I am less enchanted with his later electronic works, but I’m going to dig them out and give myself another chance with them. After all, it’s George Russell; there may be more than met the ear the first time around.

Following that 1966 series of radio programs about Russell, I sent him a transcript, not knowing whether he would ever see it. I heard reports from New York that he was discouraged and had left the US to live in Europe. A few months later he sent me a letter from Stockholm.

It is like I have waited a lifetime to hear someone say the things which you did concerning my music (and if I never hear them again I will not feel that my efforts in jazz have gone unrewarded). I received the transcript at the right moment, too, for I was in one of those states of flux that I’ve come to accept as a necessary but painful part of artistic growth. It is very trying during these times to keep one’s self-confidence and I must admit that my morale was sagging more than a little bit. But your sensitive views of my music worked wonders.

Closing a long letter, Russell wrote that he hoped we would meet one day. We never did.
(For an obituary containing insights into Russell’s methods see the article by Brian Marquard and Michael Bailey in today’s Boston Globe)

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Mike Harris is one of several Rifftides readers who sent reminders that this is Bill Evans’ 85th birthday. Over a decade in the 1960s and ‘70s, Mr. Harris surreptitiously recorded the pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York. His recordings make up the eight-volume box set Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. In a note, he suggested, “—perhaps worth a mention?”

This anniversary of the most influential jazz pianist of the second half of the twentieth century is worth more than a mention. From my notes for The Secret Sessions:

After young Bill Evans (1929-1980) got out of the Army in 1954, he became an indispensible sideman on the New York jazz scene. He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are harmonies that Bil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.

With the 1958 sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and initially, drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all of his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis’s change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment and imagination of the soloist.

That was “Flamenco Sketches.” For an appearance at Umbria Jazz in Italy in 1978, Evans reunited with Philly Joe Jones, the drummer with whom he had formed a strong partnership in the Davis sextet 20 years earlier. The bassist was Marc Johnson, a regular member of Evans’ last trio. The piece is Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” a staple of Evans’ latterday repertoire.

For Bill Evans in a variety of settings, go to this YouTube page and begin browsing through dozens of audio tracks and videos.

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Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday afternoon will feature the Jensen sisters, trumpeter Ingrid and saxophonist Christine. Their prestigious rhythm section has pianist Geoffrey Keezer, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Jon Wikan. Wilke recorded the quintet at the Centrum Jazz Port Townsend festival in July.

From Jim’s announcement:

The sisters grew up in Nanaimo, BC and have gone on to successful musical careers. Christine Jensen now lives in Montreal where she composes for and leads her own jazz orchestra. Ingrid is based in New York, leads her own groups and plays with the Maria Schneider Orchestra and other ensembles. Both have recorded numerous CDs and tour internationally.

The program airs at 2 PM PDT Sunday on KPLU-FM, 88.5, Seattle-Tacoma, Washington. It will stream on the web at kplu.org. (Photo by Jim Levitt)

From the other coast, saxophonist, bandleader and broadcaster Bill Kirchner (pictured) sends word that the Newark/New York station WBGO will drop the venerable Jazz From The Archives at the end of December. Kirchner has two shows in the works before the series ends. Here is part of his announcement.

For my final two shows (August 17 and September 14), I’ve decided to focus on my proudest achievement in 45 years as a professional jazz musician: the music of my own Nonet, which was a working, touring,
NYC-based band between 1980 and 2001. The Nonet recorded five albums–one of them a 2-CD set. (go here for a listing of them).

The band included some of NYC’s finest jazz musicians and, I daresay, developed a unique identity. All of the three reed players “doubled” extensively on woodwinds, the two trumpeters on fluegelhorns, and the bass trombone provided a rich “bottom”; all this combined with a versatile rhythm section. As critic Larry Kart put it: “A musical coat of many colors, Kirchner’s Nonet sounds at times as though it were twice its actual size.”

Bill’s show will air this Sunday, August 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 http://www.wbgo.org/.

Have a good weekend.

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The jet lag is pretty much gone now, and I’m settling back into a normal routine, or as normal as routines get around here. Before memories begin to fade, I will post a few illustrated impressions of the Ystad festival that did not make it into the Rifftides posts from Sweden or my Wall Street Journal report, and perhaps a few of our visit to Copenhagen, which was too short. For the next day or two, however, I’m on deadline for liner notes to accompany Houston Person’s next album.

For the moment, I leave you with film from 85 years ago, a performance by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. It’s a rare glimpse of a popular 1920s jazz band in action, professionally filmed with good sound. It shows us Nichols, Pee Wee Russell and Eddie Condon when they were in their early-to-middle twenties, years from becoming institutions. Those who think of Russell as an eccentric clarinetist may be surprised at his relatively straightforward playing here. The film showcases Condon’s singing, not to mention his lightfooted returns to the bandstand, but don’t miss the swing he generates on rhythm banjo. He was always much more than a curmudgeonly front man who ran a nightclub.

The musicians: Red Nichols (cornet), Tommy Thune and John Egan (trumpet), Herb Taylor (trombone), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Irving Brodsky (piano), Eddie Condon (banjo and vega lute) and George Beebe (drums).

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I’m back from Europe, too jet lagged for any good use but reluctant to go long without posting. In such situations, trolling the Rifftides archive usually hooks something worthy of another look.

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August 24, 2005

A couple of weeks ago, the Italian plum tree in our little orchard broke off at the base of its trunk and fell over, loaded with hundreds of perfect purple plums. Before the hired man chopped it up and hauled it away to a useful end in someone’s fireplace, I harvested the tree’s final crop and stashed it in bushel baskets.

This evening, I pulled a chair up to the dissecting table in the garden shed, switched on the radio and set to work cutting the plums, removing the pits and putting the halves into dehydrators. My timing was lucky. Terry Gross replayed her interesting 2000 interview with Robert Moog, the synthesizer inventor who died on Sunday, and Northwest Public Radio followed Fresh Air with Franz Schubert’s Quintet in C.

(Added for this 2014 revival of the post, here is the first movement, played at the 2008 Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival by Susanna Yoko Henkel and Stefan Milenkovich, violins; Guy Ben-Ziony, viola; Giovanni Sollima and Monika Leskovar, cellos.)

If one of the primary aims of jazz improvisation is the creation of melody, could there be a more inspirational concentration of examples than in this astonishing work? Each of the four movements is awash in melodies that implant themselves in the listener’s mind. The melodies are sustained by Schubert’s harmonic genius, as bold as Beethoven’s; visionary in the early nineteenth century. Any developing jazz player would benefit by paying close attention to the little melodies, as fleeting as thought, in the brooding Adagio, and to the ripping chromatic dance tune of the Scherzo that Shubert contrasts with the movement’s funereal slow section. They are examples to aspire to as surely as those of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Bobby Hackett, Miles Davis and the other great melodists in jazz.

Solos by Armstrong reflect his love of the Italian operas that were a living part of New Orleans when he was learning. Charlie Parker quoted melodies from classical composers, including Wagner, that he absorbed from radio, records and live performances. Desmond had a fund of Stravinsky phrases on which he worked variations and permutations. How many teachers in the high school and college programs turning out the majority of today’s prospective jazz players immerse their students in melodic geniuses of classical music as well as those of jazz and the Great American Songbook?
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To browse nearly nine years of Rifftides posts, go to “Archives” in the right column. You may also enter a name or topic in the “Search The Site” box at the top of the page. There’s a lot of stuff there.

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The American bassist and singer Kristin Korb has lived in Denmark the past two years. In her Per Helsas GÃ¥rd concert, she included songs from her next album, Finding Home, about the effects of the move and the peace she has found in her marriage and her adopted country.

A protégé of the late Ray Brown, Ms. Korb’s bass playing is the foundation of her musicianship. She is an increasingly clever lyricist in the songs she writes, arranges and sings. “58 Boxes” was about “missing my stuff” during the weeks it was in transit from the US. She worked melodies from Miles Davis’s “All Blues” and references to James Brown’s “I Feel Good” into her introduction to Bob Dorough’s “Better Than Anything.” The lyric she set to “Groove Merchant” and her bass lines were perfect matches for the spirit and churchy harmonies of Jerome Richardson’s classic piece. Pianist Magnus Hjorth, played several impressive solos in the set. The other member of Korb’s trio, drummer Snorre Kirk, was buoyantly propulsive throughout.

In the first of his two appearances, the Ystad Festival’s artistic director Jan Lundgren and his trio hosted Grégoire Maret. The Swiss harmonica player is often mentioned as the new Toots Thielemans, the instrument’s modern jazz pioneer. Lundgren alternated solo and trio pieces with those that featured Maret. Veterans Jesper Lundgaard, on bass, and drummer Alex Riel played together in the pianist’s first trio. The rapport they established with him in the 1990s has, if anything, deepened. Their backing of Maret in “Velas,” Brazilian composer Ivan Lins’ tribute to Thielemans, had a blend of rhythmic muscle and lyrical sensibility that matched Maret’s interpretation. In “The Man I Love,” one of the pieces on Lundgren’s forthcoming solo album, Maret played in response to Riel’s drum figures. The two took the music beyond the edge of Gershwin’s harmonies, which inspired further adventuring by the quartet as they went out in a long, leisurely tag ending based on one chord.

In a Wall Street Journal article today about the festival and the state of jazz in Sweden, I cover Lundgren’s other performance in Ystad. The Journal is available at newsstands and, to WSJ subscribers, online.

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The Ystad Jazz Festival was packed with performances so tightly scheduled that time for blogging—and sleeping— was at a premium. Here are impressions of a few of the events.

In the splendor of the 19th century Ystad Theater, back-to-back concerts by the quartets of tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Charles Lloyd offered contrasting approaches to modern mainstream jazz.

Ebullient, Redman led his troops through three of his compositions and one by pianist Aaron Goldberg before he put his stamp on an American classic. After opening with “I’ll Go Mine,” Redman’s body language kicked in on “What We Do.” For the rest of the concert , his bobbing, weaving and spontaneous knee lifts served as visual counterpoint to the music. “Come What May” featured a Reuben Rogers bass solo of exceptional harmonic continuity. The rhythmic understanding between Rogers, Goldberg and drummer Gregory Hutchison gives the Redman quartet the buoyancy that was apparent throughout the concert, even on slower pieces. Goldberg opened his “Shad” alone in an introduction that was reflective but nonetheless set the atmosphere for the wild waltz-time adventure that developed.

With canny strategy, following four originals that challenged his listeners, Redman played the unadorned verse and first chorus of “Stardust,” one of the purest of all melodies. After that, the crowd was open to a treatment of the piece that sometimes verged on free jazz. “Curlicue,” a blues with altered harmonies, followed, then “Stagger Bear.” Redman said the piece was inspired by a dream he had about a drunk Teddy Bear. “Don’t ask,” he said. The encore was Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop” at a pace as fast as—maybe faster than—Gillespie’s original recording. The young veteran Hutchison dazzled the audience with his solo on “Bebop,” indeed, with his solo work throughout the concert.

Charles Lloyd opened his concert with the quartet playing what sounded like simultaneous improvisation, his beautiful tone floating above the rhythm section. Joe Sanders’ hefty bass sound and precise attack set up a transition into a blues dominated by Lloyd’s keening tenor saxophone. When he wasn’t playing, Lloyd moved around the stage, often stationing himself behind pianist Gerald Clayton and listening intently. Like Redman’s, Lloyd’s body language is an apparently unconscious aspect of his performance. Sometimes, he simply stands, weaving or swaying slightly. He announced the titles of none of the tunes. Lloyd said, in fact, not a word all evening. What I can refer to only as a flute thing in ¾ found him matching the heat of an exceptionally hot rhythm section. Sanders and young Justin Brown demonstrated the importance of bass-drum relations, obviously playing to and for one another, smiling and nodding in mutual approval. Back on tenor sax, Lloyd played abstractions decorated with Clayton piano interjections. The audience demonstrated its acceptance and approval of Lloyd’s curiously edgy yet relaxing music with a standing ovation and typical European unison handclaps that rang through the theater for minutes on end.

In an Ystad park, Gunhild Carling led a big band composed primarily of her family members. She sang, shimmied, strutted and played trumpet, trombone, flute and bagpipes. Between numbers she delivered a nonstop stream of Swedish patter. Although her breathless pacing and fervor sometimes bordered on the absurd, Ms. Carling’s instrumental solos were substantial improvisations. On bagpipes, she played a blues solo notable for content, pacing and phrasing. In a piece of shtick straight out of 1920s vaudeville, she did the splits as she executed a downward trombone glissando, but her plunger mute solo on the next number was an accurate impression of Duke Ellington’s great trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton. Several members of the band played solos that reflected the swing era and edged on bebop. The Carling Big Band delivers credible jazz in the context of easily digestible comic entertainment.
(Carling photo by Markus Fägersten)

With her quartet, the young tenor saxophonist Ida Karlsson dipped into the legacy of John Coltrane and other post-bop musicians who came to prominence in the 1960s. Their music was equally based in the northern European reserve and subsurface power of Jan Garbarek and other Nordic artists who record for the ECM label. In the photo below, l to r, Gunnar Åkerhielm, Josef Karnebäck, Ms. Karlsson, Kristoffer Rostedt.

“Remember,” guitarist John Scofield said backstage before his performance at the Ystad Jazz Festival, “this is my rock band.” Is it ever. Formally named The John Scofield Über Jam Band, the quartet operates with an array of electronic and digital enhancements that gives it volume and intensity that a big band—even a couple of big bands—might be hard-pressed to equal.

“We should be tight,” Scofield said. “We’ve done 24 concerts in 27 days on the road in Europe.” Indeed, the solidarity of the group was impressive as it challenged the ability of the 120-year-old Ystad Theatre’s foundations to withstand shaking. Scofield and rhythm guitarist Avi Bortnick operated a collection of foot controls, and Bortnick a laptop computer, that made the Über Band concert a techno adventure. And yet, in pieces like “Snake Dance,” “Boogie, Stupid” and “Snap, Crackle, Pop,” it was sophisticated harmonic content as the guitarists interacted with one another and with electric bassist Andy Hess that justified the band’s inclusion in a jazz festival.

Quivers and shakes at the ends of phrases are trademarks of Scofield’s performances, and at Ystad there were plenty of them. Drummer Terence Higgins reacted to Scofield’s and Bortnick’s emphatic rhythmic turns with snaps, crackles, pops and other licks that complemented the guitarists’ ideas. The way he and Hess locked up was one indicator that the band is as tight as Scofield claimed. Higgins’s musical heritage is evident in his adaptations of the parade-beat tradition of his native New Orleans. Advanced electronica may not have been the main interest of an Ystad audience whose average age looked to be well above 50, but the Über Jammers inspired a standing ovation

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Packed to capacity, the 11th century Saint Mary’s Church in the center of Ystad hosted a magnificent performance of music from Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. A citizen who lives nearby told me, “There are more people in this church than there were on Christmas Eve.” Eva Ekdahl conducted her 34-voice Stockholm choir and eight instrumentalists in her husband Anders’ adaptation of Ellington’s work.

From the first bars of “Ain’t But The One,” it was evident that the performers grasped not only the religious conviction that Ellington put into his religious pieces but also the essence of swing that is crucial to their effective interpretation. Helen Larsson, a soprano of astonishing flexibility and accuracy, sang solos that Ellington wrote for his friend the great Swedish singer Alice Babs. The members of the four-man horn section were faithful to the styles of stars of the Ellington band who graced the music’s original performances. Patrik Skogh’s plunger-mute trumpet solos and alto saxophonist Pär Gerbacken’s evocations of Johnny Hodges were notably effective. Baritone saxophonist Victor Sand recalled Harry Carney, trombonist Åke Lännerholm Lawrence Brown. When the concert ended, bassist Anders Johnsson and drummer Per Ekdahl exchanged wide grins and a hearty handclasp that symbolized the good feeling permeating musicians and audience in the ancient church.

A footnote: Among its other fine qualities, the performance was a family affair; drummer Per and guitarist Bo Klum Ekdahl are the sons of conductor Eva and pianist-arranger Anders Ekdahl.

(Photos: Markus Fagersten)