Today is the 100th anniversary of Johnny Mercer’s birth. To celebrate it, Dave Frishberg and Rebecca Kilgore will be the guests on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. See your local listings for station and time, or check here. If you live somewhere other than the United States or if your town doesn’t have an NPR station, the network will archive the program here, usually late the day of the broadcast.
We may presume that, whatever Ms. Gross has up her sleeve, Becky and Dave will accentuate the positive, among other things. I couldn’t find a clip of Mercer singing that famous song of his, but that’s all right because we can enjoy him with Bing Crosby in a recently unearthed television performance. It’s not jazz, except in the sense that these guys were marinated in jazz from the 1920s on. But, hey, Mercer mentions Bix.

Kurt Rosenwinkel, Reflections (Wommusic). From his first recordings in the 1990s, Rosenwinkel’s guitar playing has had an element of pensiveness. Regardless of tempo, complexity or adrenalin-fueled collaborators, he radiates the air of a man who won’t hurry through even his most complex improvisations. Rosenwinkel’s assurance and thoughtfulness are consistent in this set of standards, jazz classics and one original. Bassist Eric Revis and drummer Eric Harland are capable of speed and intensity, but here they are at one with Rosenwinkel’s thoughtfulness. The trio gives particularly loving treatment to Thelonious Monk’s title tune, Wayne Shorter’s “Ana Maria” and the standard ballad “More Than You Know.” The album’s longest track begins with Rosenwinkel’s leisurely unaccompanied introduction to his “East Coast Love Affair,” a tune beginning to show staying power in the jazz repertoire.

Every once in a while another 100 Best Jazz Recordings list pops up. A new one is batting about the ethernet. This time the source is the UK newspaper the Telegraph. The compiler is Martin Gayford, an art critic, biographer and sometime jazz critic. It’s a good list, but anyone who has the temerity to choose the best of anything, even the hundred best, opens himself up to the ire of fans. Mr. Gayford’s list, published on November 10, has already attracted a batch of “how could you leave out ___________” complaints. Please direct yours to the Telegraph and Mr. Gayford, not to Rifftides. To see the list, go here.
How could he leave out Woody Herman?

Dick Katz, The Line Forms Here (Reservoir). The news of Katz’s death at 85 last week sent me to the shelf for this 1996 recording. It covers the range of his talents as pianist, composer and arranger. He plays alone in a moving performance of Duke Ellington’s “Lotus Blossom,” in a trio supported by bassist Steve LaSpina and drummer Ben Riley, and blends the tenor saxophone of the veteran Benny Golson and the trumpet of newcomer Ryan Kisor in quintet arrangements. In the CD’s three blues pieces, notably on John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.,” Katz discloses himself as one of the most canny modern jazz blues players.
Admired for his harmonic knowledge and the subtlety of his touch, Katz was a favorite of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s pianist and music director John Lewis, who arranged for his first recording contract. In his days as one of New York’s busiest utility players, Katz worked with with Tony Scott, Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Dorham, and Carmen McRae, among many others. He came to the attention of a wide audience with the success of Benny Carter’s Further Definitions, on which he was the pianist in Carter’s spectacularly successful mixed marriage of swing and bop musicians. His collaborations with singer Helen Merrill, on the Milestone recordings The Feeling is Mutual and A Shade of Difference, fell out of print as vinyl albums, but Mosaic Records rescued them in a CD reissue. With Orrin Keepnews, Katz founded the short-lived but productive Milestone label.
For a comprehensive obitutary of Dick Katz, see Ben Ratliff’s New York Times article. For further insights through an interview with Katz, go to this installment of Marc Myers’ JazzWax. On its web site, WNYC-FM in New York has a video made last May of Katz reminiscing and playing with his contemporaries vibraharpist Teddy Charles, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Ron Free. The Rifftides staff thanks WNYC for permission to show it to you.

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Eternal Interlude (Sunnyside). The ensemble is Large, all right, in the size of the band — 20 pieces — and in the expansiveness of Hollenbeck’s vision. He is a composer who moves into, out of and beyond established categories of musical thinking and a drummer who brilliantly meets the challenges he sets himself in his writing. Drawing on his mentor Bob Brookmeyer’s example of originality and fearless innovation, Hollenbeck tempers the contemporaneity of his ideas with glances into the rear-view mirror of his creative imagination. Hence, his amusing expansion of the main idea of Thelonious Monk’s “Four In One” into “Foreign One.” Gary Versace’s neo-boogie piano introduction sets up an expanding and contracting field of rhythmic patterns, orchestral textures and solos. It ends in a fiesta of intersecting lines across the brass and reeds, melding into 18 concluding quarter notes struck in unison on piano and cymbals, as insistent as a railroad crossing’s warning signal.
“Eternal Interlude,” the title piece, is nearly 20 minutes of impressionism in which the sensation of floating is sustained through energy created by the contrast between long ensemble tones centered on flutes, and percussive effects of marimba, piano and drums. In this piece, the exquisite subtlety in Hollenbeck’s writing is reminiscent of what the late Gary McFarland used to achieve with woodwinds. Much the same can be said of “The Cloud,” which has the added elements of whistlers, a section of aphorisms spoken by Theo Bleckmann and Bleckmann’s wordless vocalizing. “Perseverance” comes as close to traditional big band writing as we’re likely to hear from Hollenbeck. The resemblance is mostly in contrapuntal lines between brass and reeds, a succession of rowsing, even rowdy, saxophone solos and a masterly drum solo.
In “Guarana,” infectious Latin rhythms and minimalist repetition work hand in hand. “No Boat” is a two-minute tone poem, full-bodied but subdued. It has the effect of a closing prayer.

Yesterday was the Marine Corps’ 234th birthday. Today is Veterans Day and Ernestine
Anderson’s birthday. To celebrate all three, I gave the Rifftides staff the day off and my Italian friend Vigorelli Bianchi took me on a long, looping tour of this big old valley.

Back to work tomorrow. The plan is to do a bit of catching up, with brief reviews of additional recent, and maybe a few not-so-recent releases.

Linda Oh, Entry (Linda Oh Music). Oh is a 25-year-old Chinese from Malaysia who grew up in Australia, plays bass and has a Masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Her music, as eclectic as she, eludes classification except as fresh and uncompromising. She achieves remarkable unity using spare instrumentation, nicely crafted compositions and sidemen who listen closely and react to her, as she does to them. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire share Oh’s instrumental skill and her economical application of it. Her acoustic bass sound is firm, clear and deep. She has no evident tendency toward invading guitar territory, as many young bassists do, and she makes satisfying note choices even in material that might encourage the randomness of free jazz.
The music has moments of annunciatory boldness–there is a kind of bebop fanfare in “Gunners”–but even at its most complex and active, Oh, Akinmusire and Calvaire exercise the restraint of artistic judgment. In “Numero Uno,” Akinmusire overdubs himself into a brass choir of contrapuntal voices before the piece evolves into a series of thoughtful solos and a stretch of interactive improvisation. The swift “Fourth Limb” is all three-way interaction for its first half, with sparkling trumpet work from Akinmusire over Calvaire’s pointillist drumming, then a bass solo that manages coherence at a demanding tempo. Though the CD package gives no composer credits, all of the pieces but one seem to be by Oh. The album concludes with the contrast of intensity and, ultimately, peacefulness in a cover of The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Soul to Squeeze.” This is the debut recording of a musician who leaves the listener with a keen sense that she knows who she is and where she is headed. It is available as a CD here or an MP3 download here.

Because of the high volume of comments Rifftides received following our piece on the death of pianist Eddie Higgins, the staff thought there might be widespread interest in a memorial concert. We bring you the announcement as it arrived by e-mail from Florida. This will give you time to make plans to fly in from, say, Tokyo or St. Thomas.

There will be a Jam Session tribute
to Eddie Higgins
on Sunday, December 6
from 4pm to 6pm
in the ArtServe auditorium at 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd.
(Ft. Lauderdale Library branch)

Haydn (Eddie) Higgins 1932 to 2009

Pot Luck finger food, please. Soft drinks provided. BYOB.

Free admission.

Contributions to the Haydn (Eddie) Higgins Memorial Music Scholarship Fund
will be gratefully appreciated.
For information about the jam session and scholarship, call 954-524-0805.

I think Haydn would like the BYOB part.

Family members and friends are planning a memorial service for Stacy Rowles. No date has been set. The trumpeter and singer died at home in Burbank, California, on October 27 of injuries from an automobile accident two weeks earlier. She was 54. The daughter of pianist Jimmy Rowles, she studied piano for a time. Despite her father’s example, she was not attracted to the instrument. She eventually tried an old trumpet that was in the Rowles house and immediately took to it. The vibraphonist and teacher Charlie Shoemake, with whom she studied for a time, told me today, “Stacy was a natural talent. She listened to the right people, and her ear took her to the right places.”
Ms. Rowles and her father co-led a group in Los Angeles for a time in the early 1990s. She recorded three albums with him. They included Me And The Moon, which featured her on flugelhorn and as a singer. Jimmy Rowles died in 1996. Me And The Moon is an out-of-print collector’s item. Jazz enthusiast and frequent Rifftides correspondent Gordon Sapsed used the title tune as the soundtrack for a tribute montage of his photos of Stacy. He posted it on YouTube. Both Rowleses play and sing.

Also on YouTube, but off-limits to embedding bloggers, are two performances by Swinging Ladies, one of several all-female groups with which Stacy Rowles played. They are from a concert in front of Hannover, Germany’s, imposing town hall, the Rathaus, in 1998. With her are Sharon Hirata; alto and tenor saxophone; Janice Friedmann, piano; Lindy Huppertsberg, bass; and Jill Fredericksen, drums. You will find them by clicking here and here.

Bill Crow’s column, The Band Room, has for decades been a feature of Allegro, the monthly publication of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. He fills it with what he is most famous for after his bass playing, anecdotes about musicians. Sometimes the stories concern well-known performers, sometimes less celebrated journeymen. It took me a couple of minutes to recover from the one that follows.

The Rifftides series of posts on improving hearing by listening to bass lines leads inevitably to Scott LaFaro. It was less LaFaro’s virtuosity that made a difference in the role of the bass than the uncanny group thinking and interaction he made possible in the Bill Evans Trio. LaFaro was what Evans had been looking for, dreaming of, a bassist who thought about music, and specifically about time, as the pianist did. There is an invaluable pre-LaFaro Evans album with his friend Don Elliott, the multi-instrumentalist. The CD consists of informal rehearsals at Elliott’s house in 1956 and ’57. I reviewed it for JazzTimes eight years ago. Here is the applicable section of the review.

In a snippet of conversation at the end of their workout on the changes of “Doxy” (misidentified in the booklet as “Blues #2”), Evans talks about his ideal of group interaction.
Evans: “I like to blow free like that, with no ‘four’ going, but you know where you’re at. It’s crazy. If everybody could do that, if the bass could be playing that way –why not– drums could just…” (he vocalizes in imitation of a drummer playing free).
Elliott: “That’s right; doesn’t have to help you.”
Evans: “Not if everybody feels it, man.”
It would be 1959 before Evans put bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian together in a group in which everybody felt his way of playing time. They went on to reform the very idea of the jazz trio, but this glimpse into his thinking tells us that Evans was ready years earlier.

LaFaro may have felt ready when Evans was expressing his vision to Elliott, but he was on the west coast, a 21-year-old still developing. There is precious little of him on record from his Los Angeles days. Two recordings, one with Victor Feldman, the other with Cal Tjader and Stan Getz, provide strong indications of his growing musicality and technical prowess.
There is even less of early LaFaro on film or tape, to my knowledge only two pieces, both from Bobby Troup’s Stars of Jazz television program. LaFaro was in tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca’s formidable quintet with Feldman on piano, trombonist Frank Rosolino and drummer Stan Levey. Here are both of those clips, “Cherry” and “Chart of my Heart.” The video quality is dreadful and there are audio dropouts, but this is our only option for seeing Scott LaFaro in action. If your speakers have tone controls, turn up the bass setting and you’ll find it easier to follow his lines.

There is no video of the Evans trio with LaFaro and Motian. Their primary recorded legacy is in Portrait in Jazz, Explorations and Sunday at the Village Vanguard. The CD titled Waltz for Debby was compiled from the Vanguard date. This is its title tune, decorated with a photo montage courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube.

That was June 25, 1961. Twelve days later, Scott LaFaro died at the wheel of his automobile when it crashed in upstate New York. He was 25 years old.
It would be inaccurate, but not grossly inaccurate, to say that no jazz bassist who emerged from the 1960s onward developed free of debt to LaFaro. To the extent that Evans, LaFaro and Motian changed the concept of the piano trio–and that is a considerable extent–LaFaro’s influence extends much further than the bass.

In the first paragraph of Part 3 of this series, it was not by random choice that I included Red Mitchell’s name in the short list of important bassists who emerged in the 1940s. He discovered ways of playing the instrument that made a difference in the bass’s role in jazz. Bill Crow, the hero of part 3, has kindly agreed to expand on some of the reasons for Mitchell’s importance.

In between the Blanton (and Pettiford) soloing styles that were so influential in the 1940s and 50s and the new age that was marked by Scott LaFaro’s playing, was Red Mitchell. Red was the first bassist I heard who used a lower action, pressed rather than pulled the strings and used some left-handed plucking articulation. It cut his in-person volume down a lot, but was phenomenal on recordings. And his solo lines were melodic, horn-like, and very original. He opened up the ears of a lot of us to other possibilities of the instrument. I think he may have given Scotty some ideas. And this was all pre-amplification. When Red finally started using pickups, the result was beautifully audible soloing at the highest level.
Bill Crow

In the early 1980s, Mitchell worked frequently in a duo with Bill Mays. In their performance of a Thelonious Monk piece, he demonstrates what Bill Crow emphasizes about his peer’s skill and originality.

For the new segment of our adventure in letting bassists be our guides, author, critic and sometime Rifftides commentator Larry Kart has a fine idea.

May I suggest, for Part 4, Paul Chambers behind Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb on “So What.” Like Heath and LaFaro in their various ways, where Chambers puts “one” is a place where no one who’s playing with him literally is, but it’s a place that all can touch and play off of. I think that’s a fairly basic (no play on words intended) general principle.

Good suggestion. The performance is from a 1959 episode of The Robert Herridge Theater on CBS-TV. Herridge introduces the program and the piece. Gil Evans leads the orchestra, whose function in this clip is to set the mood for “So What.”

As you may recall from parts 1 and 2, our theme in this series is that by concentrating on the lines played by a good string bassist, you can gain an understanding of the shape and structure of a piece of music, feel its heartbeat, sense its soul. Duke Ellington’s Jimmy Blanton in the early 1940s opened the possibilities of the bass as an improvising instrument in modern jazz. Oscar Pettiford followed, then Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Red Mitchell (this is a limited and selective list) and Scott LaFaro.
From the early 1960s, in great part due to LaFaro’s influence, bassists went beyond the instrument’s traditional basic function in jazz of supplying swing and harmonic guidance. In many cases for better, in others for worse, virtuosity to the point of acrobatics became a part of standard bass operating procedure.
A consistently satisfying bassist from the pre-gymnastics era of the instrument, still at work, is Bill Crow. A trumpeter, then a drummer, then a valve trombonist, Crow became a bassist in 1950. A very few of the leaders he has worked with are Stan Getz, Claude Thornhill, Terry Gibbs, Clark Terry, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, Lee Konitz, Marian McPartland and Eddie Condon. I’m showing you a picture of Bill because in the clip that follows, you will get only a glimpse of him behind the front line of the Gerry Mulligan Sextet.
This was Rome in 1956, the same year the picture was taken. The other players are Mulligan, baritone saxophone; Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; Zoot Sims, tenor saxophone; Jon Eardley, trumpet; and Dave Bailey drums. The piece is Mulligan’s “Walkin’ Shoes.” The absence of a piano means that the bass is crucial to the harmonic life of the tune. The listener can let it be his guide without a redundancy of chords from a piano. You may notice that the members of the big band in the background are paying rapt attention. No wonder.

Let us pursue the music appreciation method outlined in Part 1 (see the following exhibit). The theory is that concentrating on the bass lines of superior players can sharpen your perception of the music. Today’s lesson is from another great bassist. It’s Niels Henning Ørsted-Pedersen in 1971 at the Café Monmartre in Copenhagen. Niels Jørgen Steen is the pianist, Jørn Elniff the drummer, Finn Ziegler the violinist.
NHØP was 25 years old. He had already established himself as the bassist most in demand by American musicians visiting Europe. Concentrate on his notes and you will be rewarded. Shortly after the video begins, Ben Webster and Charlie Shavers, the co-leaders of the band, discuss the premise.

In the days when I was learning to truly listen, Red Kelly gave me a piece of valuable advice. He told me to close my eyes and in my mind isolate and concentrate on the bass player. He said that when I felt and understood what the bassist was doing, the rest of the music would begin to fall into place. It was a coincidence, of course, that Red was a bass player.

As an impoverished student, I had a limited record collection. It consisted of a dozen or so 10-inch LPs, and it happened that Percy Heath was the bassist on about half of them, with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet, then a new group.

Red’s advice was invaluable. To this day, I lock in on the bassist for a blueprint to the shape of a piece, and I am still fascinated by Heath’s bass lines. In the following performance by the MJQ of Milt Jackson’s blues “Bag’s Groove,” Percy is in customary form with his spacious but concentrated tone, impeccable note choices and irresistible swing. This is from the Zelt festival in Freiburg, Germany, in 1987. The video producers insert a title misnaming the tune. A German YouTube viewer reacts in the comment section:

“das insert “BACKGROOVE” ist richtig peinlich!”

“Really embarrassing,” he says. Well, yes, but not as embarrassing as the director, asleep at the switch, who keeps the camera on John Lewis during all three choruses of Heath’s bass solo. Nonetheless, this is a splendid performance. You may as well close your eyes and focus your attention on Percy’s notes because you’re going to see little of him.

Red Kelly is the bassist on Kenton At The Tropicana, one of the best live albums in Stan Kenton’s discography. Backed by the Kenton trombones, Red also appears as featured vocalist on the heartbreaking ballad “You and I and George.” In a small group setting on another album, he is with his friend and fellow bassist Red Mitchell and guitarist Jim Hall in the classic Good Friday Blues, now packaged with other Hall recordings in a CD called Blues On The Rocks. Mitchell plays piano and leaves the bass work to Kelly.

The television comic Soupy Sales loved jazz, knew its history and many of its leading players. Early in his career, when he had a local show in Detroit, he frequently presented jazz stars as guests. After Sales died on October 22 at the age of 83, many obituaries mentioned that the only known video of Clifford Brown performing is from a kinescope recording of the Sales show. For decades, it was assumed lost, but Sales found the film in his garage in the mid-1990s. Here is the trumpeter in February, 1956, five months before he died at 26 in an auto crash, playing “Lady Be Good” and “Memories of You.”

In his blog I Witness, Ed Leimbacher muses about the pervasiveness of Thelonious Monk as a model for or influence on other pianists. In an essay packed with album citations, he acknowledges 18 pianists from Jelly Roll Morton to Keith Jarrett who have made an impact, then writes:

Reviewing the Art Farmer Jazz Icons DVD the other day stimulated thoughts of his unique place in the pantheon of major jazz soloists. I started to write them, then realized that I already had. Here is an excerpt from the Farmer chapter of my book Jazz Matters.