If you feel the urge, don’t be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for, anyway? – Will Rogers

Tonight I heard the wild goose cry,

Wingin’ north in the lonely sky.

Tried to sleep, it weren’t no use,

‘Cause I am a brother to the old wild goose.

— 1950 hit record for Frankie Laine, music and lyrics by Terry Gilkyson

If you are puzzling over the course jazz is taking in the second decade of the new century, this would be a good weekend to be in New York at the Winter Jazzfest. The event is packed with young artists making waves that excite fans their ages and younger, and frustrate many older listeners who have rigid convictions about what constitutes jazz. There is a wide range of musicians and styles, but the prevailing direction is forward, not back. It is an intriguing festival that has Jenny Scheinman, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Jason Moran and Linda Oh under the same umbrella. The festival takes place in several Greenwich Village clubs. Nate Chinen’s piece in The New York Times summarizes what listeners can expect. Here is one of his descriptions:

Ms. Scheinman, a violinist, and Mr. Moran, a pianist, both favor a direct but slightly warped sense of melody, balancing the rustic and the urbane. Their duo rapport should be a genuine conversation.

To read the whole article, go here. To help you get in the mood for some of what you might encounter if you attend, this video has Ms. Scheinman with bassist Ben Allison’s band at the Jazz Standard last fall. Allison is also on the festival this weekend. Shane Endsley is the trumpeter, Steve Cardenas the guitarist, Rudy Royston the drummer.

A memorial service for Stacy Rowles is set for Sunday, January 10, in the auditorium of the Musicians Union local in Hollywood, California. The growing list of more than fifty musicians who will perform in tribute includes Pete Christlieb, Joe LaBarbera, Charlie and Sandi Shoemake, Gary Foster and Mike Melvoin. The trumpeter and singer died in late October of injuries from an automobile accident. She was the daughter of pianist Jimmy Rowles.
The affair will start at 11:00 a.m. and run into the evening. From the organizers’ invitation:

Please be our guest, we’ll be serving tri-tip and chicken with beer, wine and softer things at the bar. If you make a dish you are proud of, you are welcome to bring a taste for the table. One of the rules of the house when Stacy entertained was ‘nobody leaves hungry’, and we never did!

Rifftides reader Ty Newcomb sent a link to video of the Dutch singer Fay Claassen doing Gerry Mulligan’s “Line for Lyons.” After enjoying it, I noticed that YouTube has another version of the piece by The Dave Brubeck Quintet. What to do? Why, show you both, of course.
First, we see and hear the composer with Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jack Six and Alan Dawson at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1972. The director goes berserk with reverse zooms out of the stage lights, but a little dizziness is a small price to pay for a fine performance. Brubeck enjoys the work of his compadres and joins them in a round (so to speak) of counterpoint. Mulligan, sporting his old-man-of-the-mountains look that year, wrote and recorded the tune in the key of G 20 years before, but Desmond preferred it in B-flat and that’s where they play it here.

If you’re keeping track, Fay Claassen also chooses B-flat. She plays Chet Baker to Jan Menu’s Mulligan in an arrangement that thrives on tempo changes. Hein van de Geyn is the bassist. John Engels is on drums.

Among her other accomplishments, Ms. Claasen is a Chet Baker specialist. This double CD is devoted to her interpretations of his trumpet solos and his vocals.

On his JazzWax blog, Marc Myers begins a series about pianist Dick Hyman. What a good idea. The first installment of the interview adds a video clip of Hyman and Billy Taylor doing a two-piano duet on “Hot House.” If you thought Hyman played only Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, read Marc’s interview, then watch that clip.

Gary Peacock and Marc Copland, Insight. Marc Copland, Alone (Pirouet). Copland’s previous explorations on the fine German label Pirouet were four trio CDs and one by a quartet. In these new ones, he pares down personnel but not his signature keyboard touch, melodic inventiveness or harmonic astringency. Peacock, the brilliant bassist, gets top billing in the duo album, but he and Copland are full partners. Laced with chance-taking adventure, their interaction nonetheless produces an overall sense of contemplation and ease. The polish and unity of six compositions with joint credit to Peacock and Copland make it impossible to be sure which parts are written and which spontaneously created. Other provocative performances are of “All Blues” and “Blue in Green,” associated with Miles Davis; a spritely take on Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way;” Copland’s “River Run,” all shimmer and mystery; and Peacock jauntily plucking the lead in the 80-year-old standard, “Sweet and Lovely.”
Copland goes it Alone beginning with a softly insistent A-natural struck beneath the melody of Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes.” As the piece blooms, he returns to the ostinato now and then, a remembrance of things past. The figure helps frame the performance’s sense of longing or nostalgia that continues through Joni Mitchell’s “I Don’t Know Where I Stand.” Later, two other Mitchell songs become parts of an expressive whole in which Copland combines ten discrete compositions into a suite centered in wistfulness but not, perhaps, regret. His “Night Whispers,” “Into The Silence” and “Blackboard” are facets in the pensiveness, as are meditative abstractions on Stordahl and Weston’s “I Should Care,” Wayne Shorter’s “Fall,” and Bronislau Kaper’s “Hi Lili Hi Lo” bringing us to the end with another ostinato, this time in C-major.
A news release that arrived with the CD has a quote from Copland.

There’s no cut and dried technique other than this:
The desire, when playing, not to hit a single note or a single chord unless
It has a certain touch, a certain blend, a certain feel.

Copland has all of that, and these albums have staying power.
Freddie Hubbard, Without A Song (Blue Note). This collection of concert performances in England, previously unissued, captures the entire trumpeter. That means you get the daring explorer of chords, the exhibitionist technician and the balladeer who could break hearts with his lyricism. There are moments, as on “Space Track,” in which Hubbard is so unrestrained as to overwhelm the listener. There are others, notably in a long, wondrous version of “The Things We Did Last Summer,” when his tenderness makes you forgive him anything. The discovery of the music on this CD helps fill out a vital chapter of Hubbard’s touring career and makes his loss a year ago all the more regrettable. It is a logical companion to his MPS studio album The Hub of Hubbard, also recorded in December, 1969. The rhythm section is nearly the same in both, pianist Roland Hanna and drummer Louis Hayes, with Ron Carter on bass in England and Richard Davis in Germany.
BRIEFLY
Dan Nimmer, Yours Is My Heart Alone (Venus). The fleet young pianist of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra recruits the ace rhythm team of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash for an eclectic mix of standards, jazz classics and two of his own pieces. Surprise: Nimmer’s joyous treatment of the Gil Evans rarity “Jambangle.” No surprise: the bow to his hero Oscar Peterson with Peterson’s arrangement of the title tune. Special treats: Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo,” with a powerful Washington bass solo, and a driving “Falling in Love With Love.”
Sachal Vasandani, We Move (MackAvenue). Vasandani’s singing faintly suggests Kurt Elling, but that is less a matter of emulation than a similarity of attitude toward material. Without making an attempt, always doomed, to define jazz singing, suffice it to say that Vasandani does it and does it well. Jazz is in his phrasing, intonation and dynamics, whether on a chestnut like “Don’t Worry About Me” or his own songs “Every Ocean, Every Star” and the title tune. His voice has a reedy quality that maintains through the registers of his considerable range and his note manipulations.
Bob Green, St. Peter Street Strutters (Delmark). Bob Green is a pianist from New York, one of the world’s most dedicated Jelly Roll Morton specialists, now 88. He recorded this album at Preservation Hall in 1964 when he was visiting New Orleans. He plays the whey out of “Wolverine Blues,” “The Pearls,” “Sweet Substitute,” King Oliver’s “Snake Rag” and W.C. Handy’s “Atlanta Blues,” among others; fifteen pieces in all. The band’s unusual instrumentation is piano, cornet (Ernie Carson), banjo (Steve Larner) and tuba (Shorty Johnson). I hadn’t listened to Green for years and put this on wondering if he was as much fun as I remembered. He was.

I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don’t even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style, hell, they’re all Jelly Roll style. –Jelly Roll Morton

When Jelly Roll said that he wrote his first jazz tunes in 1902, or that he used scat-singing as far back as 1907, there is not only no proof to the contrary, but Jelly’s own considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation. –Gunther Schuller in Early Jazz

He could back up everything he said by what he could do. –Omer Simeon

Film producer Andrew Thomas writes with news of what perhaps everyone but Jack Berry and I knew:

Like many fans of Vince Guaraldi, I make sure that Google sends me an alert every time he’s mentioned in posts and blogs, so I was directed to this Rifftides page.
I was surprised by your suggestion that there is little evidence of Vince on film or tape. There is actually a decent amount, and much of it is included in the feature-length documentary I premiered with my partner Toby Gleason at the Monterey Jazz Festival last September — including Vince on screen performing “Star Song” (with Bola Sete both in studio and live at the Trident), “Treat Street”, “Samba de Orpheus”, and more…. as well as film of Vince rehearsing with the choir for the Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass, and performing on the road at various universities. (These are beyond the three Jazz Casual programs on which he appeared, and all of it restored and transferred in high definition… unlike those YouTube clips that someone ripped-off and posted without regard to quality or copyright.)
Of course, it’s not hours of performance footage… but the program is scored using rare unpublished Vince recordings (from his private collection), as well as new performances by George Winston, Jon Hendricks and several others, and conversations with Dave Brubeck, John Handy, Dick Gregory, and… well, there are quite a few people who participated. Vince himself is featured in extensive on camera interviews as well.
The film is called “The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi”, and more information can be found at http://www.anatomyofvinceguaraldi.com
We’re hoping that it will be in release both theatrically and on home video this year, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

If that happens, I’ll look forward to reviewing the film.

On a New Years eve in the mid-1960s, my wife and I attended a dance with music by Duke Elllington. At midnight, Ellington nodded casually and the band concocted a head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” that sounded very much like this. As you listen, please accept the wishes of the Rifftides staff for a perfect 2010.

2009 brought to the Rifftides doorstep an unprecedented number of albums hoping for attention. If I had listened all day every day this year, I could not have paid proper attention to even a small percentage of them. I have been attempting to catch up with some of the CDs in the stacks that occupy what’s left of my floor space (shelves are no longer available). In this series of posts, I will call to your attention a few of them. Some of these items will be not so much reviews as listening suggestions. I won’t bother you with music that bores or disappoints me, and I know that I run the risk of overlooking a masterpiece. C’est la vie et à l’écoute.
Plunge, Dancing On Thin Ice (Immersion). Plunge is among the best post-Katrina jazz developments in New Orleans music. In the city’s tradition of absorbing, assimilating and combining disparate elements, this unorthodox trio is indeed on thin ice at times, without losing sight of the shore of New Orleans convention. Trombonist Mark McGrain, saxophonist Tim Green and bassist James Singleton are out there with chancy harmonies, elastic time and forays into electronics, but they are also inside the blues and slow-drag feelings of their city. They generate moments reminiscent of music as various as the Jimmy Giuffre trio’s folksiness, 1960s free experimentalism, and that long march to the cemetery uptown or out by the lake. This is a lot of music from three people. The deep tones of Singleton’s bass are as evocative in Plunge as in Rhythm Is Our Business (Storyville). Svend Asmussen, Makin’ Whoopee…And Music (Arbors).
Asmussen turned 93 three days ago. He is not as overtly astonishing a violinist in the Arbors CD recorded this year as he was when he made the tracks in the Storyville compilation in 1953 and 1958. He is a deeper one. In the reissue, the novelty recordings that helped make him a Danish national figure include a couple of his vocals that are discomforting on grounds of taste (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny”) or execution (his rush through “Darktown Strutters Ball”), but there is little of that. His playing is impeccable throughout and in several places palpably exciting. He has two exquisite duets with guitarist Ulrik Neumann.
On Makin’ Whoopee, if the nonagenerian Asmussen is less acrobatic than his 45-year-old self and slightly less sure of bow, his tone is darker, his expressiveness deeper, his celebrated harmonic sense intact and his swing steady. Highlights: his samba called “Fiddler in Rio,” a gorgeous reading of Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages” and a swaggering solo in Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Among his accompanists, pianist Richard Drexler and Asmussen’s longtime guitarist Jacob Fischer are superb.
Ithamara Koorax & Juarez Moreira, Bim Bom: The Complete João Gilberto Songbook (Motéma). Gilberto’s influence on Brazilian and much of the other music of our time has been pervasive for half a century. Yet, his repertoire primarily consists of songs composed by others, most prominently Antonio Carlos Jobim. In the development of modern samba Jobim was to Gilberto as Dizzy Gillespie said Charlie Parker was to him in bebop, the other half of his heartbeat. Gilberto has written only 11 songs, most of them less familiar than “Bim Bom,” each of them exquisite in its own way. This gem of an album by the Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax and guitarist Juarez Moreira gathers all of Gilberto’s songs under one cover for the first time. Gilberto himself has never done that. The purity and tonal accuracy of Koorax’s voice, the perfection of her phrasing and interpretation, beautifully serve the songs in ways that should delight the composer. Moreira accompanies her with subtlety and harmonic resourcefulness that suggest Gilberto’s own guitar playing. He has two tracks to himself. You may be familiar with “Bim Bom,” “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” and “Minha Saudade,” but unless you’re a Gilberto completist, “Vôce Esteve Com Meu Bem?” “Bebel” and the others may be new to you. Koorax and Moreira are a fine way to meet them. Early in the collection, Koorax sings “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” in Portuguese and later, in a separate track, in flawlessly unaccented English. I’d be hard-pressed to say which is the more charming.

This seems to be the week for unexpected videos to materialize. In the piece highlighted in the previous exhibit, Jack Berry joined me in lamenting that we could find no evidence of Vince Guaraldi on film or tape. Jazz writer Ken Dryden came to the rescue this morning with a reminder that Guaraldi’s trio backed Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster in a 1962 episode of Ralph J. Gleason’s Jazz Casual program on PBS. Here are two excerpts recalling one of the great singer-instrumentalist partnerships. There is no Guaraldi solo, but superb accompaniment by him, drummer Colin Bailey and a bassist hidden behind Witherspoon who is most likely Monty Budwig.

The Witherspoon-Webster encounter is available on a DVD with another Jazz Casual show devoted to Jimmy Rushing.
And here is Guaraldi finally getting to solo. This is a latterday version of the piece that twenty years earlier had made Webster famous when he was with Duke Ellington.

The recent reissue of music by Vince Guaraldi and subsequent Rifftides and radio ramblings led the veteran print and broadcast journalist Jack Berry to grace a new web site with an account of a piquant Guaraldi adventure. It has to do with Vince’s ability to make lemonade.

When he climbed up on the bench and began his first tune, however, something ominous occurred. There was an entirely dead note on the piano. Guaraldi halted the song and looked into the middle distance with an expression of deep bemusement.
“Here’s trouble,” I predicted to Ms. Hoffman.
Guaraldi tapped the dead note, tentatively at first, then with increasing violence. THUNK, THUNK, THUNK. Dropping his head, he thought for a moment, then began gently tapping the conspicuously expired key.

To read all of Berry’s piece, go to Oregon Music News. It is good to know that he will be contributing often to that site.

When Terry Pollard died the other day, I scoured the internet in hopes of finding video of her playing. I had no luck. But moments ago, Mark Stryker of The Detroit Free Press notified me that a clip has appeared on YouTube of the pianist in Terry Gibbs’s quartet on The Tonight Show in 1956. They play “Gibberish,” on the harmonic pattern of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” then a riotous vibes duet on the Charlie Parker blues “Now’s The Time” with Tonight Show host Steve Allen accompanying on piano. This is an unexpected treasure.

In his accompanying e-mail, Stryker asks:

… while her piano playing is really out of Bud, after watching the clip a couple times, I hear some similarities with early Horace Silver in the pinging evenness of her articulation, the blues allusions and the rumble in her left hand. Do you hear this or am I imagining — Blue Note trio Horace, when he was still playing long 8th note lines, before he distilled his right hand into short, jabbing ideas.

Yes, and I detect in Pollard’s work another derivative of Bud Powell’s influence, that of Hampton Hawes. Pollard spent some time with Gibbs on the west coast when Hawes was at his peak.
But, influences, schminfluences; she was an original.
Pollard’s only album as a leader was a 10-inch vinyl LP on the Bethlehem label, recorded in 1955, less than a year before the Tonight Show appearance. Her quintet included guitarist Howard Roberts and the brilliant trumpter Don Fagerquist. It was never reissued on a 12″ LP, much less on a CD. The 10-incher shows up on e-Bay and other web sites as an expensive auction item. But three tracks of the Terry Pollard LP are included on this CD compilation of performances by Fagerquist, who died in 1974 at the age of 46.

San Francisco’s Company C Contemporary ballet company includes this item in the announcement of its spring season.

Charles Anderson, Beautiful Maladies
 Music by: Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, George Benson and others 

Arranged and performed by: Chet Baker
Expanded from last season’s You Don’t Know What Love Is, Charles Anderson’s Beautiful Maladies, is set to seven exquisite ballads arranged and sung by West Coast Jazz legend Chet Baker. Enveloped by Baker’s silky smooth sounds, this dramatic ballet’s lush, sensuous movement and saturated colors carry us on an emotional journey through the complexities of love.

For details, go here.

Two year after he took over the Isham Jones band, Woody Herman had infused it with his personality and leadership. We see and hear evidence in this piece from a film short made in 1938. It may seem a quaint choice of material, but in the late thirties, King Oliver’s “Doctor Jazz” was still a minor staple in the repertoires of groups small and large. This is the polished pre-Herd Herman enjoying a novelty piece that he had recorded for Decca.

Terry Pollard was a gifted pianist whose ability paralleled that of her fellow Detroiters Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris. She shared their grasp of the bebop vocabulary and, some admirers claimed, swung even harder. I became aware of her when she recorded with the vibraharpist Terry Gibbs in the early 1950s. She is with Gibbs on this album, one of her few recordings. In the picture below, which I pirated from the photo section of Bill Crow’s web site, Ms. Pollard is at Birdland with Gibbs, Crow and drummer Frank Di Vito.

For more on Terry Pollard, see Mark Stryker’s column in today’s Detroit Free Press.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Bob Brookmeyer, but Darcy James Argue gives me a good run for my money. Brookmeyer, the ground-breaking composer, arranger, leader and nonpareil valve trombone soloist, entered his ninth decade this week. Early in December, the Eastman School of Music honored him for his lifetime of achievement and he sat in with the students there. I cannot improve on the eloquence about Brookmeyer in Argue’s Secret Society web log. A sample:

Brookmeyer is one of the greatest living composers, full stop — that’s not hyperbole, that’s just how it is. He is also a tremendous soloist on valve trombone (Bob gave up the slide instrument at the earliest opportunity). His swing feeling is unstoppable and as authentic as it gets: he grew up in Kansas City in the 1930’s, and first heard the legendary Walter Page-Jo Jones edition of the Count Basie band live when he was all of eleven years old. (Bob says the experience “gave me my first full-body thrill.”) He is a true improviser, never reliant on stock licks or patterns, and is consistently inventive and surprising even on the most timeworn standards.

Argue includes five MP3 playbacks of some of Brookmeyer’s best big band work. He links to several other tributes and evaluations and to Brookmeyer’s own account of the Eastman event. To read — and listen to — the whole thing, go here.
Congratulations to Darcy on a fine installment, and happy birthday to Bob Brookmeyer, an American cultural treasure cherished abroad and overdue for official recognition by his country.

“Open Country” is one of Bob Brookmeyer’s notable compositions from the 1950s. Here, he plays it with Gerry Mulligan in Mulligan’s quartet. Wyatt “Bull” Ruther is the bassist, Gus Johnson the drummer/