• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Recent Listening In Brief (short…capsulesque…itty-bitty…not long)

April 12, 2018 by Doug Ramsey

Danny GreenTrio Plus Strings, One Day It Will (OA2)

Pianist Green’s earlier album Altered Narratives put strings with his trio on three tracks. The melding with a string quartet worked nicely. One Day It Will carries the idea to album length, with excellent arrangements by Green and smooth interaction among a string quartet and the trio featuring bassist Justin Grinnell and drummer Julien Cantelm. Among many highlights: the evocative languor of Green’s “October Ballad,” Cantelm’s accents amounting to commentary behind Green’s dancing solo on “As The Parrot Flies,” Grinell’s solo on the waltz “Lemon Avenue,” the richness of Kate Hatmaker’s violin on “As The Parrot Flies.” Sound quality is superb.

Jeremy Pelt, Noir en Rouge Live In Paris (High Note)

The trumpeter and his quintet recorded Noir en Rouge in Paris during a heat wave last summer. They were hot in more than one sense. Pelt, pianist Victor Gould, bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Jonathan Barber and percussionist Jacuelene Acevedo had established their unity and fire in the earlier Make Noise! for High Note. Now they refined their togetherness before the famously knowledgeable and appreciative audience at the Sunset-Sunside club. Pelt long since established himself as a great trumpeter, continually refining his inheritance of the Lee Morgan-Freddie Hubbard-Woody Shaw tradition. His mastery of harmonic language, trumpet technique, phrasing and the art of knowing what to leave out make his continuing artistic growth worth following. In Paris, the quintet concentrated on Pelt compositions with the exception of a slow, deeply felt performance of Parisian Michel LeGrand’s “I Will Wait For You” from the film The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. One can almost hear the audience listening. Their second or two of silence following Pelt’s final note is as much a tribute as the applause and cheers that follow.

Kairos Sextet, Transition (Dafnison Music)

The Kairos Sextet are protégés of the superb Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto, who assembled them from among his students at Miami’s Frost School of Music after he came to the US a decade ago. The group has been in demand for work supporting major players including Dave Liebman and Joe Lovano, but in Transition, they are on their own, gloriously so. Prieto’s guidance may have been essential in the band’s formation, but trumpeter Sam Neufeld, saxophonists Sean Johnson and Tom Kelley, pianist Nick Lamb, bassist Jon Dadurka and drummer Johnathan Hulett have evolved into an ensemble whose solo abilities and big collective sound put them in the first rank of contemporary groups. The pieces are original compositions by the members, except for Victor Schertzinger’s classic “I Remember You.” Kelley gives it a stirring arrangement with minor-key flavors.

The Three Sounds, Groovin’ Hard, Live At The Penthouse 1964-1968 (Resonance)

There is no excuse for my having let this album languish on the shelf all these months. It is what upscale music magazines used to call a basic repertoire item. The Three Sounds thrived for a few years under the leadership of pianist Gene Harris. For most of the group’s existence, Andy Simpkins was the bassist and Bill Dowdy the drummer. Engineer and celebrated on-air host Jim Wilke recorded the group when he presented them in live broadcasts that became steady fare for Seattle-area listeners. The trio has sometimes been described as representative of jazz-rock, but their music was deeper and broader than the term suggests, as this album’s “Yours Is My Heart Alone,” “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” and “The Shadow Of Your Smile” attest. It’s not just a question of repertoire, but of musicianship and the blues feeling with which Harris, Simpkins and Dowdy infused everything they played. That includes Ray Brown’s “A.M. Blues,” Toots Thielemans’ “Bluesette” and Three Sounds specialties like “Rat Down Front” and “The Boogaloo.” Kalil Madi or Carl Burnett substitute on drums for Dowdy on a few tracks and carry the torch splendidly. Resonance Records and Wilke deserve praise for preserving the music and finally releasing this album. Warning: It could make you decide to dust off your 1960s boogaloo moves.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in