Dena De Rose and Marvin Stamm, The Nearness Of Two (Teatro Della Muse). On the heels of De Rose’s splendid new trio CD comes the stealth release of the pianist and singer’s impromptu partnership with Stamm. She and the trumpeter found themselves in the ancient town of Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast. A jazz festival producer, Giancarlo Di Napoli (he’s Italian), suggested that they do a concert. Stamm and De Rose had never played together until that evening. Indeed, De Rose had never performed in duo with a horn player. They agreed on a repertoire but had no rehearsal. They played in a small hall to open the 2006 Ancona Jazz Festival. Di Napoli recorded the concert. The result is a CD preserving a brilliant instance of what can happen when two improvising musicians meeting for the first time draw on a common language. To digress only slightly, here’s a paragraph from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers:

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who play it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources, and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

Whatever the age difference between Stamm and De Rose, in their collaboration there is not so much as the hint of a barrier. To the contrary, they delight in reaching into that universal fund of devices and employing them to surprise and challenge one another and themselves. It is a journey of discovery that lasts more than an hour, and there is not a lackluster moment.
The musicianship of women who sing, regardless of their instrumental excellence, is often taken for granted. From the beginning here, De Rose’s playing on “There Is No Greater Love’ obviates any suggestion that she is less than superb as a pianist. Accompanying Stamm, soloing, and engaging in fanciful exchanges with the trumpeter, she is magnificent. She does admit a small defeat during a round of trading four-bar phrases. After Stamm makes his horn growl lustily, she says, “No fair; I can’t do that.” Otherwise, it’s an even match. Seven minutes into the second track, “Corcovado,” when she sings her first notes of the concert, it comes as a mild shock to the listener intent on her improvising to realize that this angelic vocalist is the pianist who has been swinging like crazy while rolling out a carpet of rich chords that might make Jobim wish that he had thought of them. I must also observe how effective a dramatic device it is when a good singer makes her appearance only after the band–in this case De Rose and Stamm–has set the stage. That was routine practice in the swing era. It died out after singers emerged from the ranks of sidemen and sidewomen to become featured attractions and more or less take over popular music.
Stamm has perfected the art of playing quietly without sacrificing facility, tone, range or expressiveness. Throughout, he executes stirring doubletime passages at the volume of an intimate conversation. His muted solo on “In The Glow of the Moon,” a song De Rose wrote with Meredith d’Ambrosio, is just one memorable instance. Another is the counterpoint he initiates in “I’m Old Fashioned.” De Rose scats in parallel with her single-note piano lines while the two alternate fours and intertwine melodies with such complexity that any annotator would have to labor long and hard to get them down on paper. A peak of fascination and excitement comes in the blues, Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” begun by Stamm, reflective and unaccompanied. It melds into a brisk tempo that launches De Rose into several rollicking choruses, Stamm into several more, and the pair into a succession of their mirror-minded exchanges, then a flying final unison statement of Monk’s famous chromatic melody.
There is more; deeply felt performances of “The Nearness of You” and “Imagine;” Stamm soaring on piano updrafts among the heights of the minor intervals in Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean;” a loving treatment of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring.”
Somewhere back there, I referred to the stealth release of this gem. It is on a small, nearly private, label connected with producer Di Napoli’s theater. It is unlikely to show up in your corner record store (as if there were any left), or on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It is beginning to look as if it is already becoming a collector’s item, offered on ebay at an inflated price. This CD deserves a long life and perpetual availability. The realities of the record business being what they are, if I were you I’d grab it while it’s still around.

Trying to keep up with new releases, I often get sidetracked by old favorites. It happens that my recent listening coincides with the birthday of two of the listenees.
Lou Levy, Lunarcy (Verve). Levy would have been 81 today. He died in January of 2001. From his post-World War Two beginnings with Georgie Auld through work with Sarah Vaughan, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra–among many others–Levy was in demand as a band pianist, soloist, and accompanist to major singers. Uncompromising in his musical standards, he was one of the most important pianists initially inspired by Bud Powell, and he made whoever he was playing with sound better. Every so often, I pull out his 1992 CD Lunarcy. Recorded in Los Angeles for the French label Polygram and released in the US by Verve, Lunarcy got less promotion than it deserved. Drummer Ralph Penland and the late Eric Von Essen, a remarkable bassist, complete the rhythm section. Pete Christlieb is on tenor saxophone on most of the tracks. It is a happy collaboration.
Carol Sloane, Dearest Duke (Arbors). This is also Sloane’s birthday. As far as I know, Dearest Duke is her most recent CD. Full disclosure that I am not an impartial observer of this music: I wrote the liner notes. This excerpt will give you an idea of my enthusiasm for her work in this collection of Ellington songs.

What is a jazz singer? There is no reliable definition, but there is an answer. Carol Sloane is a jazz singer. If she scats one note in a thousand, I’d be surprised. I would not be surprised if that note was full of the spirit of jazz. Vocalists have scatted entire songs, entire sets, without a glimmer of the jazz feeling that Sloane achieves with three words of a ballad.
This is not idle liner note chatter. We have evidence at hand. One minute and six seconds into “Sophisticated Lady,” hear how she employs phrasing, intonation and melodic ingenuity as she sings “…soon grow wise.” It is a gem of a moment in a compelling performance. Sloane finds the heart of Duke Ellington’s tune and makes the most of Mitchell Parish’s lyrics. In her care, the awkward line, “…and when nobody is nigh,” seems absolutely right.

Next time, more recent listening and, possibly, more detachment.

If you have wondered how those concerts turned out that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s Town Hall concert, Will Friedwald reported on them for The Wall Street Journal. As we mentioned last week in this Rifftides post, the bands were led by Charles Tolliver and Jason Moran. Here’s an excerpt from Friedwald’s review of the events.

The first night, Mr. Tolliver and his musicians reveled in the duality of Monk’s music — his basic themes are so simple that an amateur can easily pound one out on the piano, but to capture the nuances and the subtleties of his compositions takes a lifetime of study, even for the current generation of players who grew up on Monk’s tunes and studied them formally in music school.
On Thursday night, Mr. Tolliver and his men got those nuances almost exactly right. Starting, as the original concert did, with solo, trio and quartet pieces, pianist Stanley Cowell captured Monk’s spirit without mimicking every little dynamic of every little note.

To read the whole thing, go here.

Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.–Miles Davis

Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.–Frederic Chopin

Rests always sound well.–Arnold Schoenberg

Fifty years ago today, the Miles Davis Sextet began recording for Columbia Records the music that ultimately made up the album called Kind Of Blue. To observe the occasion, Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages commissioned an essay about that imperishable recording and its most recent CD reissue. The piece, by John Varrallo, is exclusive to the Evans site. It is worth reading.
Evans, who was central to the concept of the music on Kind Of Blue, had left the band by the time Davis appeared on CBS-TV’s Robert Herridge Theater in April of 1959. Wynton Kelly was now the pianist. John Coltrane was still on tenor saxophone, with Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers on drums and bass. Later in April, Evans returned to the band, but only to complete the final tracks for the album. Alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley is not on the television program. In this performance, the quintet is enhanced by three trombones, one of them played by Frank Rehak. You will see Gil Evans and the large orchestra that played with Davis in other segments of the broadcast. Herridge introduces the album’s most famous piece.

Columbia/Sony/Legacy has added to the chain of Kind Of Blue CD reissues an elaborate package that includes two CDs, a DVD and a vinyl long-playing record of the original album.

Concerning the “Driving Be Bop” item below, Ted O’Reilly writes from Toronto: 

Over the years, Honda has called several vehicles, including a motorcycle, Jazz. Now Renault, the French auto maker, has unveiled a new model in its Kangoo line and named it the Be Bop.

Could Renault’s move kick-start a trend? How about:

The Renault web site indicates that the Be Bop is available in much of the world, but not in the United States, the land where its namesake originated.

In the past few days, three videos have materialized of a 1956 television performance by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. They show the group after Brubeck was elevated to general fame by way of a TIME magazine cover story but before Joe Morello and Eugene Wright replaced Joe Dodge and Norman Bates on drums and bass. As I wrote in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond,

It may be difficult for anyone who grew up after the pervasive hype of television and the omnipresence of the internet diluted the impact of print, to understand the power of a cover story in TIME. It brought massive attention to the subject and made him, or her, an instant celebrity. Brubeck’s career had begun to show that it had the potential for steady, respectable growth. Now it took off. Sales of his records leaped, not only of the new Columbias with Desmond, Bates and Dodge, but the Fantasys as well. The Quartet’s bookings increased and its fees grew exponentially.

Dodge resigned and Morello came aboard in the fall of ’56, so the TV program was most likely in the spring or summer of that year. As too frustratingly often with You Tube, the person who posted the videos gives no information about the program – not the date, the name of the show, the name of the host, the call letters of the station or the name of the city. I am attempting to dig up those facts. Stay tuned.
Of course, the music is what matters. The importance of Bates and Dodge to the early quartet has been obscured by the attention given Wright and Morello in the “classic” Brubeck Quartet following the massive success of “Take Five” in the early sixties. This is a rare chance to see Bates and Dodge and hear what a well-integrated band this was. To eliminate the bother of following links to YouTube, the Rifftides public service department brings you all three segments, totaling nearly 25 minutes. Enjoy.

If anyone out there in the blogosphere knows the missing who, when and where of these clips, please use the Comments link below.

Tonight and tomorrow night, Town Hall in New York City is observing the fiftieth anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s celebrated performance there with a ten-piece band. This evening’s concert will present trumpeter Charles Tolliver’s big band playing Monk’s music. WNYC will broadcast it live at eight o’clock EST. To hear it in the New York area, tune in to 93.9 FM. To hear it on the internet, go here.
Tomorrow night, pianist Jason Moran will lead an eight-piece ensemble in what is being described as a concert and media-collage. Both concerts will use W. Eugene Smith’s photographs of Monk and orchestrator Hall Overton as they created medium-size-band arrangements of Monk’s compositions. WNYC will record Moran’s concert and may broadcast it later.
Yesterday, Moran was in WNYC’s studios for the Leonard Lopate Show, discussing and demonstrating the challenges of interpreting Monk. Lopate brought in cameras, resulting in radio with pictures. Moran’s sidemen are alto saxophonist Logan Richardson, tenor saxophonist Aaron Stewart, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits.

The recording of Monk’s Town Hall concert of February 28, 1959, is a basic repertoire item for any serious listener.

What you’ve all been waiting for —
— new Doug’s Picks. Please see the center column.

Howard Mandel suffered a transportation glitch, but gamely picked up the reporting on the Portland Jazz Festival that I left dangling. The proprietor of Jazz Beyond Jazz, Howard does a fine job of pulling together the loose Portland ends. He manages to incorporate three video clips, including one of Laurel and Hardy that I could watch all night. To see his omnibus piece, click here.

Every few years, there is a Freddie Webster revival, of sorts. In recent weeks, through internet contact jazz musicians, researchers and writers have again been discussing Webster, the trumpeter generally thought to have been an influence on Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Webster died in 1947 at the age of 30. If you have been told or read about Webster but never heard him, David Brent Johnson offers the opportunity to listen to just about everything the trumpeter recorded. In 2005, Johnson devoted an hour to Webster on his Night Lights program. Between recordings, he provides considerable biographical information. To hear the archived program on Johnson’s web site, click here. See if you detect the pre-bebop ideas that may have inspired Davis and Gillespie.

Viewing Tip
The current offering on Bret Primack’s web site is a video in which the Blue Note 7 all-stars play a complete performance of Thelonious Monk’s “Criss Cross.” It is worth your time. To see it, click here.
For the Rifftides review of a Blue Note 7 concert as they got underway with their national tour, go here.

When I was looking for something on You Tube the other night, what to my wondering eyes should appear but the Kessler Sisters. I hadn’t seen them in forty years, and they still looked terrific. Paul Desmond introduced me to them in 1965 at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Desmond had just played a concert with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at Willamette University down the road in Salem. I couldn’t go because I was working. When I got off the air, I met him for a drink. Here’s the story from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

In the Hilton bar, he was high on the success of the concert he had just played and delighted to see the Kessler sisters again. The Scopitone was a film jukebox. The first ones were made in France, in part from used World War Two airplane reconnaissance camera equipment. The more finished version that made its way from Europe to the United States in 1963 looked rather like a big old soda fountain Wurlitzer with a screen at the top. Scopitone films on sixteen milimeter stock with magnetic sound tracks ran on endless loops through a projector inside the jukebox. They were descendants of the Nickelodeons of the first decade of the twentieth century and the soundies of the thirties and forties, and ancestors of the music videos seen on MTV and VH-1. French businessmen persuaded U.S. investors, who in turn persuaded bar and lounge operators, that Scopitone was going to get Americans away from their television sets and back out to night life. The films ran two or three minutes, with production values on a scale from almost absent to spectacular, and featured artists with talent to match. At the low end of the scale were groups like The Casualeers singing on a fire escape while two mostly nude girls gyrated. At the upper end were Scopitones starring the Kessler sisters, a pair of blonde, leggy young women who sang and danced with exhilarating zeal through pieces like “Cuando, Cuando” and “Pollo e Champagne.”

Desmond pumped quarters into the Hilton Scopitone, sending the Kessler Sisters cavorting again and again through an amusement park, singing as they leapt on and off a train, with a corps of dancers in the background executing routines that would have done Busby Berkeley proud. He was convinced that the Scopitone was going to be bigger than television and almost had me persuaded that we should invest large sums in the phenomenon. The more Dewars we had, the more sensible the investment plan became. Fortunately, the Oregon closing law kicked in before I committed to anything irrevocable. I don’t know whether Paul signed up for a share of the company, but I am glad that I didn’t. By the end of the decade, Scopitones were gathering dust in warehouses all over the world.