In the second concert of their 50-stop national tour, the Blue Note 7 drew a full house Friday night at The Seasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington. From the opener, Horace Silver’s “The Outlaw,” to the encore, Bud Powell’s “Dance of the Infidels,” the all-star band dipped into the vast repertoire of compositions by artists who have recorded for Blue Note Records in its 70-years. 

The unforgettable 1959 Thelonious Monk Orchestra concert at Town Hall will have a 50th anniversary recreation next month at the scene of the event in New York City. Preserved on a famous Riverside album and performed by jazz repertory orchestras everywhere, Monk’s compositions in orchestrations by Hall Overton are perennially fresh, full of ensemble performance challenges and of opportunities for soloists. Reissued every few years on LP, then on CD, the recording is a basic repertoire item, as timeless as Bach, Stravinsky or Charlie Parker. 

Rifftides reader Peter Myers writes: 

In your liner notes from the great Christmas present CD I received, The Art and Soul of Houston Person, you mentioned a gifted 19-year-old jazz musician who plays few standards. I wondered if you were talking about Eldar. I was looking forward to seeing him at the Clearwater, FL Jazz Holiday back in October. I came away disappointed for the same reason. He played mostly his own compositions. Brilliant though he may be, his choice of music almost boredered on semi classical. I think he played one number, “Straight, No Chaser,” that was recognizable, and that you could tap your foot to. I wanted to approach him at the CD sales and signing booth and tell him, in a constructive, senior citizen way, but I did not.

No, it wasn’t Eldar. it was Sam Reider, an impressively talented and tasteful young man. You can find out something about him on his MySpace page and hear him in full performances, including one standard, with the Uptown Trio. You might also take a look at a Rifftides piece posted a day or two after I listened to him and his confreres in a concert. This is the paragraph from the Person notes: 

A gifted nineteen-year-old jazz musician recently told me why he and his band play few standards. With touching earnestness, he explained that people under sixty don’t relate to standards and that his generation has no connection to the classic songs of the last century. He had just played a concert of compositions mostly written by him or his band members. It evidently escaped him that the audience, with a sizeable component of young people, gave its most enthusiastic response of the evening to an adventurous performance of Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens to Me.” As his career progresses, it may dawn on our emerging young artist that when he provides his listeners a melody they can hold onto, they open up to him and accept considerable leeway when he goes beyond the familiar. That has been a fact of life in music at least as far back as Mozart.

Because of a digital malfunction the nature of which I am unequipped to explain, some of the pictures in the recent Rifftides archives have disappeared and been replaced by empty boxes. The artsjournal.com technical hierarchy assures me that the gremlins have been found and summarily executed, but their mischief remains until the Rifftides staff can repair it. That is a matter of one photo being restored at a time. The staff has plenty to do and will undertake restoration as time allows. If you are browsing the archive and disturbed by those ghostly frames, we offer the standard modern mea culpa in times of disaster large or small: we regret any inconvenience.

As readers of Rifftides know by now, The Wall Street Journal provides more than financial news and market reports. The newspaper has a Leisure And Arts section with extensive, varied, informed cultural coverage. It includes writing about music by several contributors. I am happy to be one on occasion. In today’s WSJ, Nat Hentoff brings together his friendship with Dizzy Gillespie and the need to care for sick or injured musicians with little or no health insurance.  

If you are at all disturbed by what we human beings are doing to one another in Israel, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Georgia, Russia, Colombia, the Koreas (sorry if I left out your favorite), spend a few minutes with a man who died 98 years ago. I wish I’d thought of this, but my artsjournal.com colleague Terry Teachout gets credit for recalling a classic piece of theater–and a great American philosopher. To see that man revived on Terry’s blog, click here.

Today is the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records, and — what a coincidence — I have at hand an advance CD by the Blue Note 7. That is the all-star band of Blue Note artists on the verge of a three months tour to celebrate the longevity of a company that has made a difference in music. The tour opens Thursday evening at the Moore Theater in Seattle. Friday, the band will be across the Cascade mountains in Yakima, Washington, at The Seasons Performance Hall. I will be there, listening intently after having the pleasure of introducing the band. It is my intention to give you a report reasonably soon after the event. For a list of cities and dates of the tour, go here. 

Dena DeRose: Live At Jazz Standard, Volume Two (MaxJazz). Spontaneity and a sense of discovery continue in this second set by DeRose and her trio at the New York club. She, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson connect with one another and with an enthusiastic audience. The connection comes by way of taste, musicianship and a sense of shared enjoyment — outright fun, in fact. As in volume one, she concentrates on standard songs, but this time she includes three that are seldom done. 

A concert in memory of Richard M. Sudhalter, the distinguished jazz musician, historian, biographer, and critic, will be held on Monday, January 12, at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street, New York City, from seven to ten p.m.

Sudhalter died last September. For a Rifftides remembrance and appreciation of this extraordinary man, go here. 

Freddie Hubbard’s family has released information about his funeral service. 

Bill Ramsay is a veteran saxophonist widely admired in jazz circles
across the US but little known to the public outside the Pacific Northwest.
Accomplished on alto and baritone saxes,he co-leads the Ramsay-Kleeb band and
is the baritone sparkplug of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. Ramsay has
been a first-call sub on the Count Basie band for decades.  His good-natured jousting partnership
with tenor saxophonist Pete Christlieb never fails to produce hard swing and spontaneous
standup comedy.

Ramsay celebrates his 80^th birthday this month. Jim Wilke
will observe the occasion on his Jazz Northwest radio program on Sunday, January
4 at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time, 4:00 p.m. Eastern.  Wilke will include previously unissued music by Ramsay’s big
band, recorded in 1961. To hear the program in the Seattle-Tacoma area, tune in
KPLU at 88.5 FM. To hear it on the internet, go here.  

Ramsay and I are not related — except by mutual interests. Whenever I encounter him, he tells me to correct the spelling of my last name and I tell him to correct the spelling of his.    

The release of a new CD, The Film Music Of Ralph Rainger, is the occasion for my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Coupled with an article about the contemporary motion picture composer A.B. Rahman, it is headlined, Another Who Has Been Unjustly Forgotten and begins: 

For years, Jack Benny opened his CBS radio and television broadcasts with “Love in Bloom.” The comedian’s violin butchery of his theme song became a running coast-to-coast Sunday night gag. As a result, the piece became even more famous than Bing Crosby had made it with his hit record in 1934. Generations of listeners and viewers heard Bob Hope close his NBC shows with “Thanks for the Memory,” which he introduced in a movie, “The Big Broadcast of 1938.” The song was inseparable from Hope’s career. 

Ralph Rainger, the man who wrote those songs, was a pianist and recovering lawyer from Newark, N.J., who also composed such standards as “Easy Living,” “If I Should Lose You,” “Here Lies Love,” “Moanin’ Low,” “June in January,” “Please” and “Blue Hawaii,” most often with lyricist Leo Robin. Rainger and Robin turned out dozens of songs for Hollywood movies. They were frequently on the hit parade with Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and the Gershwins. George Gershwin died at age 38, Rainger at 41. But while Gershwin’s fame increased after his death, Rainger’s name faded. With their beguiling melodies and challenging chord progressions, Rainger’s works are frequent vehicles for improvisation. Yet, in my experience, most musicians who play those songs respond with puzzled looks when asked who wrote them. That might have been the case with bassist Chuck Berghofer, pianist Jan Lundgren, drummer Joe La Barbera and the incomparable vocalist Sue Raney until producer Dick Bank recruited them to record the CD “The Film Music of Ralph Rainger” (Fresh Sound). 

…it is the first all-Rainger album since pianist Jack Fina managed to reduce Rainger’s tunes to dreary cocktail music in a 1950s LP. Mr. Lundgren, a brilliant Swedish pianist, plumbs the songs’ harmonic souls. He illuminates even the prosaic “Blue Hawaii,” which — to Rainger’s horror — became a huge hit in 1937. “It will disgrace us,” he told Robin. “It’s a cheap melody . . . a piece of c-.” 

Rainger was a very good pianist. In 1933, Paramount featured him playing his music in a promotional short subject that included cameo appearances by Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier. It ends with superimposed shots of Rainger improvising separate parts simultaneously on three pianos. Sound familiar? Of course, but it was three decades before Bill Evans recorded Conversations With Myself. I wanted to put the film directly into Rifftides, but embedding the clip is forbidden. To see it, click here.