1947 was a good year for movies. It saw the release of Miracle on 34th Street, Gentleman’s Agreement, Life with Father, Lady from Shangai and Out of the Past, among other excellent films. New Orleans also hit the screen that year. It began life as an Orson Welles project, but Welles dropped it and went on to other things. If he had developed it, the movie might not have been in a league with Citizen Kane, but it would likely have had more to recommend it than the music. Unlike the other films mentioned above, New Orleans had an absurd story line, leaden dialogue and mediocre direction. Its take on the history of jazz is pure cliché, except for one element: the importance of Louis Armstrong. He, Billie Holiday, Woody Herman, Kid Ory and a raft of other musicians save the film and make it worth seeing again and again, even if you have to grit your teeth waiting for the next song.
In his new biography of Armstrong, Terry Teachout quotes the 1947 review by critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times: “Put it down as a fizzle in every respect but one. That is the frequent tooting of Louis Armstrong on his horn.” Maybe Crowther dozed off during “The Blues Are Brewin’,” with Holiday, Armstrong and Herman. Herman’s alto saxophone half-chorus demonstrates that he is underrated as a soloist. Holiday’s long solo confirms that she is not.

Maybe it was the holidays. Maybe I’ve been busy writing for a living. Maybe I’m lazy. Well, no matter. You finally have a new edition of Doug’s Picks. Consult the center column for the latest recommendations.

Here is a lovely opportunity to hear and see two masters toward the ends of their lives. Oscar Peterson played at the Montreal Jazz Festival in July of 2004 with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, guitarist Ulf Wakenius and drummer Alvin Queen. The piece is “Cakewalk.”

NHØP died the following April, Peterson in December of 2007. To see other videos from their Montreal concert, go here.

A few days into his 79th year, tenor saxophonist Hadley Caliman is thriving in the Pacific Northwest, starring in the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra and leading his own group. As a high school youngster, Haliman was a part of the yeasty Los Angeles jazz community of the late 1940s and early ’50s. After college, he went on to record extensively and work with musicians as varied as Gerald Wilson, Don Ellis, Freddie Hubbard, Santana and The Grateful Dead. Jim Wilke recorded Caliman in a recent Seattle Art Museum concert and will present it on his Jazz Northwest program this Sunday, January 24 at 1 pm PST, 4 pm EST. To hear it in the Seattle area, dial up KPLU-FM at 88.5. On the internet, go to KPLU’s web site.
Trumpeter Thomas Marriott (pictured with Caliman) is in the quintet with pianist Eric Verlinde, bassist Chuck Kistler and drummer John Bishop.
Here is video of Caliman a couple of years ago playing in the atrium of Seattle’s City Hall with some of the other major jazz artists who live in that city. Julian Priester is the trombonist, with Bob Hammer, piano; Buddy Catlett, bass; and Clarence Acox, drums. The sound quality is, well, like something you’d hear in an atrium, but it’s an opportunity to listen to five remarkable players in a remote corner of the United States with a rich fund of jazz talent.

Why consider in the same piece albums by pianists as unalike as Matthew Shipp and Greg Reitan? Because in different ways the ghost of Bud Powell informs their music; because pairing them may lead partisans of one to listen to the other and find unexpected rewards; because the profound dissimilarity between the iconoclast Shipp and the modern traditionalist Reitan typifies the wide variety of satisfactions to be found in jazz; and because they are more or less simultaneously releasing new CDs.
Matthew Shipp, 4D (Thirsty Ear).
Shipp’s initial inspiration was Bud Powell, who to a great extent is the underpinning of his music. The unfettered approach of the formidable technician and free adventurer Cecil Taylor is a potent strain in Shipp’s work, but no matter how far out he goes, Shipp’s sense of chord and line movement puts him closer to Powell than Taylor ever was. That is evident throughout the solo album 4D, nowhere more emphatically than in the roiling forward movement and occasional bebop phraseology of “Equilibrium,” which also has hints of Thelonious Monk and Earl Hines. In its opening bars, “Teleportation” bows even lower in Powell’s direction.
Throughout the album, Shipp glimpses other presences; John Coltrane in “Dark Matter” and “Stairs,” Taylor in “Jazz Paradox,” Ellington in “Prelude to a Kiss.” But to dwell on evidence of his influences is to ignore Shipp’s originality, which is bolstered by redoubtable technique. He sometimes holds his keyboard prowess in reserve, but when he unleashes it, as he does in a joyful “What is This Thing Called Love,” it can be dazzling. In addition to the two standards named above and his compositions (or spontaneous creations; it’s difficult to be certain), Shipp applies his daring, ferocity and wit to “Autumn Leaves,” “Greensleeves,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Frere Jacques.” “Frere Jacques?” Yes. Shipp proves that it is possible to operate out there on the edge without losing sight of the fundamentals.
Greg Reitan, Antibes (Sunnyside).
Reitan’s inner Bud Powell filters through Bill Evans and Denny Zeitlin. If there is direct Powell influence, it is more in his adaptation of harmonic concepts than in a reflection of Powell’s manic energy. His keyboard touch and chord voicings are firmly in the Evans school. He shares with Evans, Zeitlin and–consciously or unconsciously–with Keith Jarret, the floating time feeling that comes from rhythmic placement relating chords to individual notes. His interpretations of Evans’s “Re: Person I Knew” and Zeitlin’s “Time Remembers One Time Once” are notable in that regard. The trait also manifests itself in “For Heaven’s Sake,” the exquisitely understated “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and pieces by Jarrett and Wayne Shorter. Bassist Jack Daro and drummer Dean Koba are effective in support.
The tracks with Reitan’s own writing are the ones I keep going back to in Antibes. He told Orrin Keepnews, who wrote the admiring liner notes, that when he was preparing the album he had been listening to Glenn Gould play J.S. Bach. The title tune, the unaccompanied “September” and “Salinas” are direct reflections of that experience. Reitan so skillfully conceived them with Bachian rhythmic and harmonic principles and plays them with such precision and dynamic touch that one might almost be willing accept that Gould had come back as a jazz artist. Reitan’s Some Other Time was an impressive debut album last year. Antibes shows impressive growth and even greater potential.

No one could play like Bud; too difficult, too quick, incredible!–Thelonious Monk

Bud is a genius.–Charlie Parker

Bud is a genuine genius.–Duke Ellington

He laid down the basis of modern jazz piano.–Dizzy Gillespie

Bud was the most brilliant that a spirit might be, a unique genius in our culture.–Max Roach

If I had to choose a single musician according to his artistic merit and the originality of his creation, but also for the greatness of his work, it would be Bud Powell. Nobody could measure up to him.–Bill Evans

…and you just know she loves Bud Powell.–Alan Broadbent to Gene Lees, on seeing a beautiful girl pass by.

Once again, Bill Crow’s The Band Room column in the New York musicians union Local 802 newspaper, Allegro, is packed with anecdotes. Here are two.

Outgoing (Local 802) President Mary Landolfi told me this one: Her husband Pat and another tuba player, Lew Waldeck, had arranged to meet at the Carnegie Tavern after a benefit at Carnegie Hall. The major attraction at the benefit was Frank Sinatra, and when Lew came into the Tavern afterward, he was all agog. “Pat,” he said excitedly, “I just met Frank Sinatra, and he spoke to me!” “What did he say?” asked Pat. “He was coming down the stairs just as I was going up, and he said, ‘Get the f*** out of my way!'”

Woody Herman had profound distaste for the fiscal hassles and burdens that made his life miserable in his final years. This story from Bill’s column perfectly captures Woody’s feelings about the business aspects of his profession.

John Altman once had Al Cohn as a houseguest, and Al took John to meet Woody Herman. Al introduced him, saying, “John has a big band.” Woody grabbed John’s outstretched hand, looked earnestly into his eyes, and asked, “Why?”

To read all of Bill’s column, go here.
San Francisco pianist Roberta Mandel sent this excerpt from an interview with drummer Shelly Manne. The story has been around for a long time. I haven’t been able to track down the source of the interview, but anyone who has dealt with ignoramus producers will hear the ring of truth.

Interviewer:
Have you ever gone into the studio and had someone say, “I want you to sound like the guy who did the drums on … ?”
Shelly Manne:
I did a date with Jimmy Bowen, the song was “Fever.” I had never worked with Jim, but I had made the original record of “Fever” with Peggy Lee. It actually said on my part, “play like Shelly Manne.” So I played it just like I played it originally. The producer stormed out of the control room, walked over to me and said “Can’t you read English? It says “play like Shelly Manne.”
When I told him I was Shelly Manne, he turned around and went back into the booth. I think he’s selling cars now.

James Moody is in Detroit this week. Mark Stryker, the music critic of The Detroit Free Press, heralded the event with a column that begins:

James Moody is my hero, and he should be yours. At 84, the irrepressible saxophonist and flutist remains a ferociously creative musician, playing with passion, energy and a sense of wonder at the endless possibilities of music.

Stryker provides a sketch of Moody’s career, then a section that includes this exchange:

Q: Do you practice every day?
A: I try to. If I don’t, I get a little cranky.

A sidebar to the column describes a few recommended Moody albums. To read the whole thing, go here.
Mark Stryker sent a couple of Moody anecdotes as Rifftides supplements to his column.

I heard two stories in recent days that encapsulate Moody’s lifelong approach to learning and evolving as a musician. Dave Liebman told me that one of his early tours with Elvin Jones was part of package with a Giants of Jazz group that included Moody. Moody comes to the back of the bus to ask Liebman and fellow saxophonist Steve Grossman to write out some stuff for him. At one point, Illinois Jacquet turns around and shouts something like, “They ain’t into nuthin'” — at which point Moody says to them, “Don’t listen to moldy figs.”
Then James Carter told me he was on a tour once with Moody and every day it was, “You show me something on the horn and I’ll show you something.” Those two stories occurred some 30 years apart.

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Stryker.
For a sample of Moody’s energy, sound and harmonic inventiveness, here is a performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ow” at a Swiss festival in 1985, when Moody was a mere 60 years old. The composer is on trumpet. The bassist is Ray Brown, who was on Gillespie’s 1940s big band with Moody. Gene Harris is the pianist, Grady Tate the drummer.

Wednesday night, the 2010 NEA Jazz Master awards went to pianists Kenny Barron, Cedar Walton and Muhal Richard Abrams; arranger, composer and band leader Bill Holman; saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef; vibrahaphonist Bobby Hutcherson; singer Annie Ross (pictured at the ceremony); and record producer George Avakian. They received their medals and checks in a National Endowment For The Arts ceremony at Lincoln Center. To read accounts of the event by Nate Chinen of The New York Times and my artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel, click on their names in this sentence.
Congratulations to all of the recipients.

An American jazz master who relocated to Europe nearly four decades ago died yesterday in Denmark hours after eight of his peers were honored in New York. Drummer Ed Thigpen succumbed to heart and lung problems in a hospital in Copenhagen, his home since 1972. He was 79. Thigpen was universally admired for his technique, which he applied with taste and musicianship that made him one of the best known drummers in the world during his long run as a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio. Here, he is featured with Peterson and Ray Brown in Italy in1961, playing Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud.”

I made the tenor sax – there’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else. – Coleman Hawkins

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice. – Stan Getz

The tenor’s got that thing, that honk, that you can get to people with. – Ornette Coleman

Speaking of Seamus Blake (see the item below), I looked for a video clip with him in action and came across one of the 28-year-old Blake in heavy company. He follows the late Michael Brecker in solo on Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” All of the other information I can give you is that this was in Japan in 1999 and that the pianist is David Kikoski. The camera work suggests that this was filmed during an earthquake of at least 6.5 on the Richter scale. You may want to take a seasickness pill before you watch. Still, the sound quality is good. Young Blake calmly follows an astonishing solo by an established master and develops one of his own.

Seamus Blake, Bellwether (Criss Cross). Since 1993, when Seamus Blake was 22, Gerry Teekens of Criss Cross Records has been traveling from Holland to New York to record the gifted Canadian tenor saxophonist. Teekens was one of the first recording executives to document Blake’s work, and he has been doing it ever since. Bellwether is Blake’s sixth Criss Cross album as a leader. He has been a sideman on 16 others. That is hardly overexposure for a musician of his inventiveness. Blake’s technique makes him one of the fastest tenors since Johnny Griffin. His speed can be dazzling, but he employs it in the service of the stories he tells in his solos, not merely for display. Often, he spins out his inventions in long, lyrical lines, as in “A Beleza Que Vem” and “The Song That Lives Inside,” two of his five compositions on the CD. The remaining tracks are John Scofield’s “Dance Me Home” and the third movement of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor. Blake included the second movement of the quartet on his previous recording. The liner notes quote him as saying that he treats the Debussy movement as if it is a tune, “and we create a solo section out of some of the chords and loop that area. I guess you could say we sort of ‘jazzify’ it.” Yes, you could say that. Blake’s quintet includes his longtime collaborator pianist David Kikoski, guitarist Lage Lund, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Bill Stewart. Blake often works in Stewart’s band. Whether it is the result of intensive rehearsal or of sympathetic listening among close colleagues, this band has a sense of contrast that is welcome in an age when many jazz groups operate on one dynamic level.
Kenny Dorham, The Flamboyan, Queens, NY, 1963 (Uptown). This broadcast recording is a treasure unearthed after 47 years. Alan Grant, who hosted the broadcast from an obscure club in an outer borough of New York City, preserved the tape of the program. It documents the early stage of the partnership between Dorham, one of the great trumpet soloists of the bebop and post-bop eras, and the young tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. Among the herd of Coltrane clones, Henderson was beginning in the early 60s to attract attention as an individual voice. He went on to be recognized as a modern master of the instrument. The pair made two Blue Note albums together under Dorham’s leadership, three under Henderson’s and one under Andrew Hill’s. This unexpected and welcome preview of their symbiosis deserves a place alongside the Blue Notes.
Dorham’s solo on “Dorian” includes a quote from “I Get The Neck of the Chicken,” an unlikely insertion into a modal piece and typical of his subtle wit. The lyricism of his work on “I Can’t Get Started,” “Summertime” and an early version of his composition “Una Mas” is based in the warmth of his sound and the depth of his unique exploitation of chords. It is a reminder of why nearly half a century later Dorham is an influence on the harmonic thinking of young players. Henderson, fully formed by 1963, solos with daring, passion and tonal qualities that make him immediately recognizable. The rhythm section of pianist Ronnie Matthews, bassist Steve Davis and drummer J.C. Moses is solid and effective despite Matthews having to accommodate to a horrid piano. The CD presents the club performance intact as a broadcast. Grant’s announcements are on tracks that can be programmed out by those who don’t want to hear them on repeated listenings, but they are reminders that there was a time when little clubs presented major players and radio stations did live remotes.
Sam Sadigursky, words project iii miniatures (New Amsterdam). As we pointed out in a Rifftides posting two years ago today, jazz and poetry never really became a movement. Over the past 90 years or so, the hybrid form has had a few peak periods and some embarrassing lows. On the strength of Sam Sadigursky’s work, we may be at one of the peaks. This is Sadigursky’s third CD of poetry set to music or, to be more accurate, poetry integrated with music. His voice, guitar and reeds are in play, along with the voice, trumpet and keyboards of Michael Leonhart. They also use a collection of miscellaneous instruments including Sadigursky’s glockenspiel and Leonhart’s pump organ and waterphone.
Sadigursky employs several womens’ voices to read poetry by Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Maxim Gorky, Kenneth Patchen, contemporary poets David Ignatow, Maureen N. McLane, Sadi Ranson-Polizzetti and others. The poems are rightly described as miniatures because of their length, not their ideas. This is a far cry from a band wailing a blues as a poet reads. There seems to be little improvisation except in the readers’ timing, phrasing and inflections. Yet, the work generally has the feeling of jazz spontaneity. Ignatow’s brief “Content” becomes a wordscape of intersecting lines. Gorky’s “O Muzyke Tostykh” is his late 1920s screed against the middle class infatuation with jazz, which he called the music of degenerates. Sadigursky sets it to a background voiced in minor for bass clarinets, flute, trumpet, glockenspiel and percussion. Through repetition, the four lines of Williams’s “El Hombre” become a mantra riding on the insistence of light Latin rhythm. And so it goes, each poem treated differently, each rewarding the listener’s attention and effort.
BRIEFLY
John Stowell, Anson Wright, The Sky At Our Feet. Anson Wright, Tim Gilson, Ukiah’s Lullaby (Open Path). All of the poetry on The Sky At Our Feet is by Wright. It evokes the beauty and mystery of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in the American desert Southwest. John Stowell reads the poems and accompanies himself on guitar, in some cases overdubbing instruments so that the starkly etched imagery of Wright’s words stands out against the ripples and shimmers of Stowell’s music and what Wright’s web site calls “light electronic scores.” Those augmentations don’t detract from Stowell’s rich backgrounds. A sensitive and resourceful guitarist turns out to be a fine speaker of poetry.
Wright is a guitarist as well as a poet. In that role, he devotes Ukiah’s Lullaby to duets with bassist Gilson. Six of the tunes are his, four Gilson’s. Wright’s “Orion” has the flavor of the kind of modal structures Miles Davis pioneered with “Milestones” and “So What.” They enhance harmonic interest through the spareness of Wright’s strategic chords and melody lines and Gilson’s tuning of his bass in fifths a la the late Red Mitchell. Gilson’s ballad “Sometimes There Are No Words” is beautifully bowed by the bassist.
Mike Longo Trio, Sting Like A Bee (CAP). The remarkable, and remarkably unheralded, pianist’s new CD is a sequel to his –what else?– Float Like A Butterfly of 2007. The Oscar Peterson protégé and Dizzy Gillespie rhythm section stalwart stings as effectively as he floats, opening with Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” and closing unaccompanied with a righteously two-fisted take on Gillespie’s “Kush.” Along the way, Longo, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Lewis Nash explore pieces by Clifford Brown, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein and Cole Porter. They combine delicacy and strength in a compelling treatment of Clare Fisher’s “Morning” and radiate Charlie Parker’s bop spirit in Longo’s “Bird Seed,” which could profitably have gone on much longer. Riches are unlikely for jazz musicians, but Longo surely deserves a bigger portion of fame.