Archives for February 2019

This week, music lost two venerable and influential figures.

Andre Previn (above), who distinguished himself as a performer and composer in a wide range of styles and genres, died on Thursday at his home in New York City. He was 89. A gifted pianist whose work as a film composer and orchestrator began before he left high school, Previn won four Academy Awards for his film scores. He performed orchestral works and wrote many pieces played by renowned musicians including the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, to whom he was married for a time. Another of his wives was the actress Mia Farrow. Early in his career, he was married to Betty Bennett, a San Francisco singer, and later to Dory Langan, a singer and songwriter. After their divorce, Ms. Langan established a career using the name Dory Previn.

In interviews, I found Previn bemused by the difficulty that critics, and sometimes his fellow musicians, encountered when they tried to strike a balance in considering his variegated musical personas. He told me a story about touring in Europe in the 1990s with his trio that included bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Mundell Lowe (pictured left, Previn and Brown). One of their performances was in Vienna’s venerable Musikverein, where Previn had often been guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. Some of the members of the orchestra attended the concert. Afterward, he said, the lead player of one of the Philharmonic’s sections visited him in the green room backstage.
“Maestro,” the man said, “it was wonderful, but how did you memorize so much music?”
“We didn’t memorize,” André told him. We were improvising.”
In disbelief, the lifelong classical musician said, “You improvised in public?”

#

Ira Gitler (pictured above), a jazz critic of exhaustive knowledge and unshakable conviction, died on February 23 in Manhattan at the age of 90. He was an invaluable chronicler of the crucial years when jazz made the transition from the swing era into bebop and a model of clarity who set standards for generations of writers who followed him. During my years in New York and long after, I was fortunate to count Ira among my friends. His book Swing To Bop (Oxford) is a classic likely to remain a basic resource for decades. The obituary  by Matt Schudel for The Washington Post is a fine account of Ira’s career and accomplishments.

Ira Gitler, RIP

Bill Mays Trio Live At COTA

Pianist Mays recently reassembled his trio for a concert and their first CD release in more than ten years. Mays, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson came together in a live performance at last Fall’s COTA (Celebration Of The Arts) festival. The audience at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, was enthusiastic in welcoming Mays and the trio back to what was his main stomping ground before he began splitting his year between the Pennsylvania mountains and Southern Florida. The listeners were treated to a hand-in-glove relationship among the three that was as strong as ever. Their program began with the Van Heusen/Mercer standard “Darn That Dream” in a medley with Johnny Mercer’s “Dream,”  and went through a repertoire that encompassed pieces by Mays and Bill Evans, and a tribute to Lennie Tristano.  Deer Head Inn favorite Bob Dorough’s “Nothing Like You” is a highlight. Others are an extended, magnetic, version of Jay Livingston’s “Never Let Me Go” and Wind’s firm, poignant solo on Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes.” It is good to hear this finely attuned trio together again.

From their previous incarnation, here are the Mays Trio in his composition with a title that is appropriate at the moment to vast swaths of the United States and many other parts of the world: “Snow Job.”

Long ago, Billie Holiday dubbed Lester Young the President of The Tenor Saxophone. The title long since morphed into “Prez.” Young was beloved among his fellow musicians for his influential playing. He also won admirers for the subtlety and understatement of his way of expressing himself when he was away from his horn. Many of his turns of spoken phrase are alive in the language sixty years following his death.

Mosaic Records’ Sunday website feature today includes a youtube clip of Monica (Mrs. Stan) Getz recalling a bus ride with Young and the hyperkinetic alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt. It includes her memory of a classic instance of Prezidential rhetoric.

Jeremy Pelt The Artist (High Note Records)

For nearly two decades, Pelt has made it clear via his trumpet playing, and occasionally in interviews, that he is attuned to what other artists achieve in their work. That sensitivity extends well beyond jazz—indeed, beyond music. For this album, his primary inspiration came from the 19th century French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In notes for Pelt’s first album, Profile (2001) I observed, “Pelt’s own studiousness is audible, as are his confidence, his senses of proportion and humor, and the depth of his musicianship.” There is no humor in the subjects of the Rodin sculptures on which Pelt bases the elements of his five-part suite.

There are, he points out, “dignity and despair” in Burghers of Calais (pictured above) and the struggle of moral opposites invoked by L’Appel Aux Armes (The Call To Arms). Pelt’s Gates Of Hell, was inspired for Rodin by a vision in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It features Pelt playing into a cup mute and creating intensity through repetition plus a bit of judicious electronic manipulation and, at a key moment, a brief open-horn scream. As always in his albums Jeremy Pelt surrounds himself with colleagues attuned to his musical, artistic and intellectual wavelengths. In the case of The Rodin Suite, they are Victor Gould, piano; Vicente Archer, bass; Allan Menard, drums; Alex Wintz, guitar; Chien Chien Lu, vibraphone and marimba; and Frank Locrasto, Fender-Rhodes. My recommendation is that you listen to this album after reading Pelt’s liner notes. Then, listen to it again.

 

Blogging has been sporadic (at best) lately because I’m into a non-Rifftides writing project about Chet Baker that is taking even longer than I thought it would. I’ll fill you in on it when I come up for air.

In the meantime, let’s remember the February 2nd birthdays of two saxophonists, Stan Getz (b. 1927) and Sonny Stitt (b. 1924). In the pictures, Getz is on the left. In the video below, they are together in Los Angeles in 1956. The front line also includes Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. The rhythm section is John Lewis, piano; Herb Ellis, guitar; Ray Brown, bass; Stan Levey, drums. Take a deep breath, then press the arrow on the video.

 

In case you didn’t notice, that is from the essential album For Musicians Only, which is still in circulation, thank goodness.