National Public Radio has activated a link to my interview with Scott Simon about Vince Guaraldi. This is it.

Hal Weary, A Rendezvous with Déjà Vu (halwearyjazz). Weary is a pianist from the west on the rise in New York City. The quintet numbers on his debut CD draw on the hard-bop/gospel spirit of Horace Silver and Art Blakey. On “Tenderly,” he touches on but soon departs from Erroll Garner. Unaccompanied on “Praise Medley” he seems to refer to the Ellington of “Reflections in D.” Weary and his sidemen, saxophonist Shantawn Kendrick, trumpet Kenyatta Beasley, bassist Gregory Williams and drummer Jerome Jennings, are newcomers to keep your ears on. In contrasting facets of his style, Beasley exhibits welcome appreciation for Kenny Dorham and Freddie Hubbard.

It would be all but impossible to keep up with guitarist Bill Frisell’s trips through the myriad precincts of music he inhabits. In his discography, you’ll find him in the company of Elvin Jones, ouds and bouzoukis, electronic mixes, Nashville studio aces, Jim Hall, music for silent films and string charts that might have been written by Lutoslazwski or Legiti. That’s just a start.
Two recent CDs find Frisell oriented more or less toward country music. But they are not albums of country music. All Hat is Frisell’s soundtrack for the motion picture of that name. It is fragmented in keeping with its job in the Texas melodrama, but Frisell connects the fragments by way of his distinctive sound and the nostalgic feeling with which he manages to inflect his every phrase.

The work of the eccentric Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer inspired Frisell to write and record Disfarmer. The music — full of blues shadings — reflects the sadness, lyricism and power that radiate out of Disfarmer’s portraits of plain country people. Taken together, the CDs capture the atmosphere and emotions in parts of the contemporary rural American south. The continuity between them comes, obviously, from Frisell’s playing but also from his canny employment in both projects of guitarists Greg Leisz, violinist Jenny Scheinman and bassist Viktor Krauss. Drummer Scott Amendola and harmonicist Mark Graham assist in Disfarmer.

They may seem an unlikey pair, but Frisell and the Czech pianist Emil Viklický were classmates at the Berklee School of Music in the 1970s. In 1979, they collaborated on a recording. It was just reissued as part of a CD called The Funky Way of Emil Viklický. Their five tracks with fellow ex-Berkleeites bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Vinnie Johnson feature an electronic keyboard and live up to the album’s title with music that has something in common with what Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul were doing at the time. Or, as liner note writer Lukas Machata so elegantly describes the recording session in Prague’s venerable Dejvice studio, “the quartet literally funked the hell out of the venue.” On other tracks in the compilation, Viklický plays acoustic or electric piano with his big band, Karel Velebny’s SHQ, the combo known as Energit and the fine singer Eva Svobodá. Regardless of context, there is a feeling of joy throughout.

Viklický’s collaborations with fellow Czech George Mraz on bass have always been superb. The newest one, Sinfonietta, is no exception. Lewis Nash is the drummer except on the title track ,which has Viklický’s longtime trio member Laco Tropp. The subtitle, The Janaceck of Jazz, alludes to Viklický’s fondness for the great Czech composer and his ability to interpret Janacek’s music and incorporate its spirit into his own compositions. Full disclosure: I wrote the notes for this album and will refrain from going on about it at length.

Tomorrow morning, November 28, I will be with Scott Simon, host of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday to discuss Vince Guaraldi. I had the privilege of writing the essay accompanying the new two-CD compilation of Guaraldi recordings. Celebrated for his Charlie Brown Christmas music, Guaraldi is the focus of a Weekend Edition feature. Mr. Simon and I will discuss the pianist’s career from his early years as a sideman to his fame as the musical alter-ego of cartoonist Charles Schultz’s Peanuts characters. Show producer Ned Wharton tells me that the piece is scheduled for about 9:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. To find your nearest NPR station, go here. Later note: You can go here to read about and listen to the conversationl.

Among the friends of Eddie Locke who took part in his memorial service in Manhattan on November 22 was bassist and author Bill Crow. Locke, a stalwart drummer based in New York for more than five decades, died last September at the age of 79. Bill prepared this report for Rifftides.

At St. Peter’s Church, a lot of good music was played by a lot of Eddie’s friends, including Warren Vache, Richard Wyands, Jackie Williams, Murray Wall, Mike LeDonne, Paul West, Louis Hayes, Bill Easley, Lodi Carr, Tardo Hammer, Michael Weiss, Leroy Williams, Cathy Healy, Larry Ham, Jon Gordon, Bill Charlap, Sean Smith, Rossano Sportiello, Adam Nussbaum, Marty Napoleon, Ray Mosca, Ray Drummond, Barry Harris, Barry’s choir of angels and your correspondent. Eddie’s friend Bill Easley, his two sons, Edward Jr. and Jeffrey, and his companion, Mary Ellen Healy, gave eulogies.
Eddie was one of several remarkable Detroit jazz musicians who made careers in New York. He and Oliver Jackson developed a variety act in Detroit called “Bop and Locke,” in which both drummers also sang and danced. They were booked into the Apollo Theatre in 1954, and took that opportunity to move to New York City, where Eddie met and was mentored by “Papa” Jo Jones.
Eddie began working at the Metropole, and in 1958 he joined Roy Eldridge’s band. He played with Eldridge and with Coleman Hawkins through the 1960s, until Hawkins’ death in 1969. During the 1970s he went into Jimmy Ryan’s club on West 54th Street, and was the house drummer there until the club closed in the early 1980s.
I got to know Eddie through the cornet player Dick Sudhalter. Eddie and I were in Dick’s rhythm section on many concerts and club dates. When Dick moved to the North Fork of Long Island and began playing concerts and jazz festivals there, I often picked Eddie up in Manhattan and we drove out to the jobs together. I enjoyed the stories he would tell me on those long rides, and I always enjoyed playing with him when we got there.
Eddie was also a teacher, much loved by his students. He taught music at the Trevor Day School in New York City, and also had private students. He was a great believer in the importance of passing on the lore and knowledge he had received from his elders to the next generation of jazz musicians.

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Crow.
For video of Eddie Locke in performance, see this earlier Rifftides posting.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, Spiritual-Dimensions (Cuneiform). The exploratory trumpeter follows up last year’s triumphal Tabligh with a reshuffled quartet and goes himself one better by adding an excursion into electronic territory. The first CD again has Vijay Iyer at the piano and synthesizer and John Lindberg on bass, but in place of drummer Shannon Jackson Smith uses two bulwarks of avant garde percussion, Pheeroan AkLaff and Don Moye. The double drum contingent produces moments of force, as in the opening minutes of “Umar at the Dome of the Rock, parts 1 &2,” but remarkable moderation later in that piece and in “Pacifica.” Smith’s muted long tones in “Pacifica” set a mood exploited by Lindberg and the drummers in a three-way conversation. Smith’s trumpet manipulations in “South Central L.A. Kulture” set a bleak scene that soon becomes populated with aural characters suggested by the title, some vaguely menacing, some amusing in the manner of overzealous hipsters. As in his other quartet ventures, Smith employs his compositional skills in ways that leave the listener unsure what is written, what is suggested and what is pure spontaneous invention. That is as it should be when this kind of music succeeds. I don’t suggest that Smith’s music is easy to listen to. Nor is it intended to be. But for the listener who opens up to it, there are rewards.
CD 2 retains Lindberg and AklLaff and introduces a phalanx of electrified strings commanded by the formidable guitarist Nels Cline. It begins not with an onslaught but in a continuation of the trumpet soliloquy, full of introspection, with which Smith concluded the first “South Central L.A. Kulture” track on CD 1. Two minutes or so into the piece, three amplified guitars, Skuli Sverrisson’s electric bass and Okkyung Lee’s cello make themselves known underneath. (I’d have written this review just to use those musicians’ names.) Now, we’re getting ready for the assault. But, no. Smith continues to build the sound with the slow assurance of a practiced hypnotist, allowing each player enough individual expression to add interest without detracting from the whole. That is more or less how the rest of CD 2 unfolds, with wit, taste and restraint in the use of resources. In his later years, Miles Davis led the way to this kind of music, and he has been allotted plenty of credit and blame for it. In the final balance of Davis’s music, his jazz-rock period was not his most successful, but he lifted a veil to show younger artists a new landscape. Wadada Leo Smith is one who transmogrified that vision into a personal and highly effective way of making music.
Ximo Tébar, Celebrating Erik Satie (Xàbia Jazz). Over the years, several jazz artists have interpreted individual pieces by Satie (1866-1925), the French visionary who inspired the impressionists and whose music has outlasted the minor ones. In this invigorated collection of Satie compositions, Tébar takes his admiration nine steps further and fills a CD. An accomplished mainstream guitarist, the Spaniard’s free leanings and bag of wa-wa tricks meld entertainingly with Satie’s harmonic surprises and wry turns of melody. Executing precise arrangements, the octet Tébar assembled for the 2008 Xàbia Jazz Festival catches the spirit of Satie’s works in the ensembles and plumbs the music’s undercurrents in their solos. His band of New Yorkers are trumpeter Sean Jones, trombonist Robin Eubanks, saxophonist Stacy Dillard, keyboardists Jim Ridl and Orrin Evans, bassist Boris Koslov and drummer Donald Edwards. The Satie pieces most often trotted out – “Gymnopédie 1” and “Gnossienne 1” – are here, but so are less well-known creations like “Idylle” and “Airs A Faire Fuir,” all performed with a sense of delight and discovery. Easily available in Europe, the CD has yet to pop up on US store shelves or web sites. It is worth seeking out from European sources on line.
Quartet San Francisco, QSF Plays Brubeck (ViolinJazzRecordings). The ability to swing began to steal into the ranks of classical strings players a few years ago. Although they may not discuss it in the polite company of their easily-shocked older colleagues, some of them are also improvising with proficiency and joy. There is convincing evidence of both phenomena in the QSF’s CD of 10 pieces by Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Violinists Jeremy Cohen and Alisa Rose solo convincingly in Cohen’s evocative arrangement of the Desmond tune. 5/4 time, of course, is no barrier to these conservatory-trained musicians. The violist is Keith Lawrence, the cellist Michelle Djokic, who solos dramatically on Brubeck’s religious theme “Forty Days.” The quartet’s blend, balance and tonal qualities are those of an experienced chamber group that has developed a personality disclosed on two previous CDs. Brubeck’s cellist son Matthew incorporated passages from Ellington tunes into his nimble arrangement of “The Duke.” Bay Area musicians Larry Dunlap and Robert Gilmore, respectively, wrote the arrangements of “Bluette” and “Forty Days.” Cohen arranged the other Brubeck pieces and an extra, “Greensleeves,” under its alternate title “What Child Is This,” just in time for Christmas. One of the highlights of the album is Cohen’s transcription for the strings of Desmond’s “Strange Meadowlark” solo from the original Brubeck quartet recording.

If Paul Desmond had lived, he would be 85 years old today. The last birthday he celebrated fell on Thanksgiving, 1976. For the occasion, Devra Hall cooked a turkey dinner for Desmond and her parents, Jim and Jane. She took the photograph that afternoon. Here’s the story of the end of that part of the day, told by Devra in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

“It was a very quiet dinner. Paul was not feeling well, but he was clearly happy not to be home alone. He didn’t have to say a word around my folks. They talked a blue streak, usually, but he was just very comfortable. My fondest recollection is that I made him dinner on his last birthday.”

The senior Halls and Desmond went back to Jim and Jane’s apartment when they left Devra’s, and on the way stopped at the Village Vanguard. Thelonious Monk was performing there. Between sets, they all gathered in the Vanguard’s kitchen, the closest thing the club has to a Green Room. In the book, Jim tells about it.

It was the most coherent conversation I ever had with Thelonious, in the kitchen with Paul and me and Thelonious. I had a sort of nodding acquaintance with Monk, but he and Paul really connected. I’m not even sure what they talked about, just standing around in that kitchen, going through old memories and things. It was nice

.
It would have been intriguing if he’d sat in with Monk. I always thought I’d like to hear them play the blues together. I’ll settle, gladly, for a blues with his constant companions of the l960s.

Not that Rifftides intends to become a clearing house for performance announcements, but readers do sometimes send valuable listening information. Jack Kenny writes from London:

You might want to alert your readers to this. The London Jazz Festival
has just finished. I went to to the Carla concert last week and it is
broadcast tomorrow. It will be online all next week on the BBC
iPlayer.
Sadly for your American readers Carla seems to perform more in Europe
than she does in the States.
The following is a quote from the BBC site.

Jez Nelson presents a concert given by American pianist, bandleader and
composer Carla Bley as part of the 2009 London Jazz Festival. Bringing
her long-standing quartet The Lost Chords to the Queen Elizabeth Hall,
she combines dexterous musicianship with humorous and original
compositions. The group features renowned British saxophonist Andy
Sheppard, with leading American jazz musicians Steve Swallow on bass
and Billy Drummond on drums.
Bley’s prolific career has spanned four decades and many eclectic projects including Escalator over the Hill, a jazz opera that cemented her reputation as a composer. Bley also pioneered the movement towards independent artist-owned record labels by releasing and distributing her own music in the 1970s. In 2003, The Lost Chords formed out of a longstanding duo project with Steve Swallow, combining four of the major names in contemporary creative improvisation. For details of Radio 3’s coverage of the London Jazz Festival go to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/jazz/londonjazzfestival/2009/

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Kenny.
By Coincidence…
…YouTube has just posted Bley’s Lost Chords in performance at Vienna’s splendid Porgy & Bess club. Audio quality is acceptable. The zoom and attempts at focus during Steve Swallow’s solo may induce mild seasickness but, hey, with YouTube you get what you pay for. You can always close your eyes. This was November 12.

It comes from Bill Kirchner, frequent Rifftides commenter, stalwart broadcaster and man of many parts, usually on reed instruments in the key of B-flat.

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From the Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).
Tenor saxophonist Jay Corre’s (né Lischin) career goes back to the 1940s with the Raymond Scott and Boyd Raeburn orchestras. But his time in the spotlight came in 1966-67, when he became the most frequently featured soloist in drummer Buddy Rich’s big band. Corre’s warm, Lester Young/Dexter Gordon-like style served him well in a variety of moods, from ballads to burners.
We’ll hear Corre on several albums with the Rich band, and on a recent trio recording.
The show will air this Sunday, November 22, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.
NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

Jazz History Preservation
Not all of the reconstruction work to be done in New Orleans is a result of Katrina’s damage. One of the city’s jazz landmarks has been falling apart for decades. Now, it appears that Crescent City officialdom may be about to ride to the rescue of the Halfway House. It could be a long, slow process. To read Danny Monteverde’s story in The Times-Picayune and see photos of the building in its heyday and in deterioriation, go here.
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Jazz.Com
I have not kept up with the doings at the valuable web site jazz.com now that its founder Ted Gioia has announced that he is leaving. My artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel, proprietor of Jazz Beyond Jazz, is looking into the matter. He has comments of his own and two lengthy responses from jazz.com contributor Alan Kurtz. To see Howard’s initial piece and his exchanges with Kurtz, go here.
Eddie Locke
Family and friends of Eddie Locke will celebrate the drummer’s life Sunday evening, November 22, at St. Peter’s Church, Lexington Avenue and 54th Street in New York City. Widely respected as a perfomer and a teacher, Locke died on September 7 at the age of 79. In his later years, he tended to be typecast in traditional bands because he deeply felt that kind of music and had a rich history with Red Allen, Dick Wellstood, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Warren Vache, Dick Sudhalter and many other exemplars of the genre. From Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins forward, he was in demand by players in all tributaries of the modern mainstream. Locke and pianists had a particular affinity. He could be found with his fellow Detroiters Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Roland Hanna, and later with Bill Charlap, Mike LeDonne and Tardo Hammer, to list a few of the thoroughly modern keyboard artists with whom he played. In this clip, he is in a familiar latterday milieu, with Duke Heitger, trumpet; Antil Sarpilla clarinet; Bill Allred, trombone; Bernd Lhotsky, piano; and Nicki Parrott, bass. This was in January, 2009, at the Arbors Records Jazz Party in Clearwater, Florida.

Among the score or so of musicians expected to perform at Locke’s memorial gathering are Charlap, LeDonne, Vache, Louis Hayes, Frank Wess, Ray Drummond and Richard Wyands. Barry Harris will be music director, a.k.a. traffic cop. Previous information that John Bunch has the job was in error.
Locke’s mastery of time and the fine art of wire brushes is on display in this CD with Vache, Charlap, bassist Dennis Irwin and tenor saxophonist Harry Allen.

Before the Rifftides staff gets back to business as usual, whatever that is, we’re finding it difficult to let go of thoughts about Johnny Mercer. Lines from his songs won’t go away — ever.

Alan Broadbent–pianist, composer, arranger, conductor for Diana Krall and Natalie Cole, among others–wrote in response to the Fresh Air program promoted in the previous exhibit.

Thanks for posting Dave and Rebecca’s Fresh Air show which I have just finished listening to and would have missed but for you.
Last week the TCM channel had a marathon of Mercer movies beginning in the late 30’s and I had to sit through hours of nonsense just to see him perform. Worth its wait in gold, though.
Speaking of “P.S. I Love You”: I learned it as a kid from Johnny Mathis (I think it was the flip side on a 45 of “Chances Are”). When I conduct for Diana she occasionally sings it as a solo feature and I never fail to choke up. The first time I heard her do it I could hardly conduct the next number from weeping uncontrollably. The way she sings it, It’s the first time I really understood that the person writing has nothing in particular to say and that everything is said behind the words.
I’m feeling very sad about the loss of it all. I was born way after my time.
But how can any of this compare to the new song my 9 year old son is learning from his guitar teacher, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?

The Fresh Air Mercer program is archived here.