Thanks to the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of Rifftides readers who sent birthday messages via Facebook and other social media. How the word got out, I have no idea, but you folks certainly know how to make a guy feel that maybe this blogging stuff is worth the effort.

“Schedule permitting” I wrote in the previous exhibit, “I hope to work in a bit of blogging.” The schedule did not permit. The Oregon expedition was a jam-packed (ahem) four days that allowed the Rifftides staff (plus one) time to sleep a little and to eat now and then, often on the run. It’s life on the road.

I hope tomorrow to bring you a compact account of the Jazz at Newport Festival on the Oregon coast. For now, let me tell you about Rebecca Kilgore and Dave Frishberg Thursday evening at the Touché in Portland. They performed two sets at the entrance end of that long, narrow restaurant. I have heard better pianos, but rarely better piano playing than Frishberg’s that night. I cannot recall Becky Kilgore in finer form, live or on record.

Their first set consisted of 18 songs from the stockpile of hundreds that the two have amassed in their 15 years or so of collaboration. A few highlights:

—The richness of Frishberg’s chord changes behind Kilgore on “A Fine Romance.”

—Kilgore’s blues inflections in her second chorus of “Easy Street” and the entirety of “Baby All the Time.”

—The relaxed swing phrasing of Kilgore’s chorus following Frishberg’s meaty piano solo in “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me,” with the counterpoint of her rhythmic shoulder hunches and Frishberg swaying gently on the bench.

—The verse of “You’re a Lucky Guy.” I’ve known the song since I first heard Louis Armstrong’s 1939 recording, but had no idea that it has a verse. “I love verses,” Frishberg said later. He and Kilgore have sensors that seek out rare verses. The one to “I’m Shooting High” is about singing in the shower—sample lyric: “I begin by making up my mind that it’s my lucky day”—an ideal vehicle for Kilgore’s essentially sunny performance disposition.

—The set ended with eight Irving Berlin songs, including some nearly forgotten, “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want What You Get,” for instance, and “Everybody Knew But Me,” which has a great verse and is not sunny. The Berlinfest also included “It’s Over,” “Lazy,” “Better Luck Next Time,” “The Best Thing for You” and “Russian Lullaby.” Berlin’s versatility and variety were amazing. What his songs have in common is that they have hardly anything in common. But that night they had Kilgore and Frishberg.

Without going into a play-by-play of the late set at the Touché, I’ll simply tell you that as good as the first set was, the second was better. Swing, phrasing, subtlety, mutual support and interaction, spontaneous key changes—everything worked. From Frishberg’s stompin’ solo and Kilgore’s vocalese riffs in “Stompin’ at The Savoy” through his Ellington references and her exquisite phrasing in “I’m Just a Lucky So and So” to the best “Detour Ahead” I’ve heard since Mary Ann McCall to their melodic variations in “My Ideal,” it was one of the most perfect performances I’ve ever heard from two people.

When it was over, I asked Kilgore if the set felt as good as it sounded out front. “Oh, yes,” she said, gazing into the distance with a dreamy look, as if she missed it already.

Tomorrow, the Rifftides staff plus one will hit the road to Oregon. The first stop is Portland, where we’ll hear Dave Frishberg and Rebecca Kilgore at the restaurant called Touché. In this album, they concentrated on Frank Loesser. Advance word is that at the Touché, they will tackle some of Irving Berlin’s more obscure songs.

Then, we head southwest to Newport, a coastal town of about 10,000 whose main occupations are in tourism, fishing and wood products. It is the home of the other Newport jazz festival, the small, intimate one. Among the musicians at Newport Jazz 2011 will be the Jeff Hamilton Trio, Terell Stafford, Holly Hofmann, Mike Wofford, Monty Alexander, Hassan Shakur, Anat Cohen, Howard Alden and Kristin Korb. To see the full list and schedule, go here. I look forward to again hearing the PDX Jazz Quintet, aka PDXV, and my first exposure to the Weber Iago/David Valdez Chamber Jazz Project. I’ve been asked to say a few words now and then in the course of the weekend. Schedule permitting, I hope to work in a bit of blogging.

There is confirmation that slightly more than a month after he celebrated his 90th birthday, trumpeter Uan Rasey died late last night. Heard on the sound tracks of dozens of motion pictures, Rasey was acclaimed as one of the most gifted trumpet artists of the twentieth century. André Previn, who was Rasey’s colleague in the MGM studio orchestra in the 1940s and ’50s, offered a birthday accolade typical of those who knew and worked with him:

He was not only the best trumpet player working at the film studios in Hollywood, but also a kind and good friend.

For a summary of Rasey’s career and to hear one of his most celebrated solos, go to this Rifftides piece posted on his birthday, when 40 trumpeters appeared outside Rasey’s house to serenade him with “Trumpeter’s Prayer.” His grandson, Tristan Verstraten, told me this evening that his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep at Woodland Hills Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles, where he had been taken after his heart and kidney problems worsened. Three of his children were with him.

Recalling Rasey’s spirit and character, Mr. Verstraten told this story:

When he was 89 years old, he learned that his seven-year-old granddaughter Taylor had no way home from school because her mother had been delayed. Rather than let her wait, possibly for a long time, he called Access Paratransit. Blind and in his wheelchair, he got into the Access van and traveled three miles to the school. When he got there, he wheeled himself into the school, found Taylor and took her home in the van. Then, when they got to the house he fixed her a meal, and when Taylor’s mom got home, she found the two of them partying, having a great time.

There will be no funeral service, Mr. Verstraten said, but a celebration of life, “a shindig,” will be scheduled in a couple of weeks.

On the heels of the announcement that he will be a Kennedy Center honoree later this year, Sonny Rollins appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS. He discussed his career, his philosophy and why he feels that the Medal of Arts is not going to him alone.

“It’s the people who came before me,” he told Smiley. “When I accept this honor, it’s for Count Basie, who got one. It’s for Duke Ellington, who didn’t get one. It’s for Lester Young, who didn’t get one. It’s for Thelonious Monk, who didn’t get one. So, I’m standing up there and I say, ‘Thank you for this honor, thank you. I appreciate it. But I understand that I’m them. We’re talking about this music now. I appreciate it for everybody who bled and died and suffered and still made this great music come about.’”

Here’s the video of the entire 24-minute segment.

This is short notice—sorry about that—but on his Jazz Northwest at 1:00 pm PDT today, Jim Wilke is presenting the Jeff Hamilton Trio with Tamir Hendelman and Christof Luty. Wilke recorded them this summer at the Port Townsend Centrum Jazz Festival. To hear Hamilton and company, go here and click on “Listen Live.” If you are in the Seattle-Tacoma area, you can listen on KPLU-FM at 88.5 If you miss the broadcast, the program will be in Wilke’s archive at this address.

Rifftides reader Svetlana Ilyicheva writes from Moscow:

Maybe it will interest you (I learned about it about a week ago myself):

In summer 1967 there was an international film festival in Russia. An American actress, Sandy Dennis, came to Moscow escorted by her husband bari saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.* Gerry was immediately taken to the Youth Cafe, a” hotbed” of jazz in Moscow. (BTW, Leonard Feather wrote about this cafe in his book). A jam session was arranged where Gerry had to play alto, as they hadn’t found a decent baritone and borrowed a brand-new golden Selmer from one of the sax players. If you click the link and scroll the text until you see the photo of Gerry (а dark figure close to Gerry is a popular Russian sax player, Alexei Kozlov. The photo is from his collection). Just above the photo you will see an MP3 of a recording where Gerry played with KM-Quartet. (As the recording belongs to the collection it is not allowed to be downloaded). It had certainly been a glorious moment for the Russian jazzmen of that time.

The recording above the one I described is that of “KM-Quartet” with Vagif Sadikhov at piano, whose 65th birthday is going to be celebrated by the Moscow jazz community and whose talent was appreciated by many a jazzmen ( Benny Green, Johnny Griffin among them).

Here is the link: http://jazzru.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/vagif-sadikhov-65/

The unique recording belongs to the collection of the late Arkady Petrov, musical expert, one of the elders of Russian jazz journalism and the first Soviet Jazz broadcaster.

*(Mulligan and Sandy Dennis were together for more than ten years but never married—DR)

Frank Driggs, a tireless jazz researcher and historian who collected photographs familiar to millions, died this week at the age of 81. In the 1950s as a producer for Columbia Records, Driggs oversaw the organizing and reissuing of historically important recordings by Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa. In 1991, he won a Grammy for Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings, the recorded work of the seminal blues singer and guitarist. He began documenting the history of jazz at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University when Marshall Stearns was its director.

As a collector, Driggs gathered more than 100,000 photographs that he cataloged primarily in his head. He was able to retrieve them when academic institutions, publishers and authors needed them. Photographs from his archive fill the book Black Beauty, White Heat, which he co-authored with Harris Lewine. Several of the photos in my biography of Paul Desmond are from the Driggs collection. His friend and associate Donna Ranieri told The Associated Press that Driggs was found dead of natural causes in his apartment in Manhattan on Tuesday.

Tomorrow is the first day of fall in the northern hemisphere. Coincidentally, Emil Viklický, who lives in an eastern precinct of the hemisphere, recently alerted me to new video of a performance last spring at the Prague Castle. Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, hosted a tribute to Miles Davis. It was a concert in the Jazz na HradÄ› series that the president initiated, with Viklický’s help, at the Czech counterpart of the White House.

The musicians are Viklický, piano; Jon Faddis, trumpet; Jaroslav Jakubovic, baritone saxophone; Tom Barney, bass; and Lennie White, drums. The tune is—what else?—”Autumn Leaves.” Following the performance, a bevy of beautiful Czech women presents flowers to the musicians, President Klaus goes on stage to offer his thanks, and White speaks for the band. It’s a class act, all the way around.

For another performance from the same concert, and background about Klaus’s concert series, go here.

Pat Metheny and Larry Grenadier and a truckload of equipment are on a 26-city tour. They warmed up the other night with a first stop at The Seasons Performance Hall in Yakima, Washington. The tour will end in mid-October with a week at the Blue Note in New York City.

The equipment played a major role in Metheny’s and Grenadier’s two-concert evening at The Seasons, but their most satisfying moments came when they dialed down the amplification, ignored the panoply of digitally driven instruments occupying the back of the stage and achieved the intimacy that Metheny said was his goal for the music. His solo on the piece that began the second concert, “All the Things You Are,” ranks with the best playing I’ve ever heard from him. His final chorus of ascending chromatic figures was an expression of sheer joy.

The guitarist’s name and reputation were the draw that nearly filled the hall twice. It may be that Grenadier was unknown to most of the audience when they walked in. By the end of the evening, the energy, musicianship and power of his bass playing made it unlikely that they will forget him. Introducing Grenadier, Metheny said, “He’s the only one I’d do this kind of tour with.” Grenadier managed to retain the woody acoustic essence of his instrument despite excessive amplification in a hall with near-perfect natural sound properties. The melodic inventiveness of his solos often matched Metheny’s. His rhythmic drive supplied consistent excitement. The blues groove of “Soul Cowboy” led Metheny to exquisite subtlety in his single-note lines. The nuances continued in his quiet accompaniment of a Grenadier bass solo that moved some listeners to audible “Yeahs” and a few indiscreet whoops.

Exotica reigned in the first concert with Metheny’s unaccompanied performance of “The Sound of Water” on an elaborate custom instrument. George Van Eps used to call his guitar a lap piano. Metheny could fairly describe his 47-string guitar as a lap orchestra. Darned if he didn’t approximate the sound of water.

After speaking about his long love of music-making through electricity—”My first instrument was a wall plug”—Metheny announced that he and Grenadier would indulge in pure improvisation. They began as a duo but were soon joined by an illuminated device that flashed and sounded gongs in rhythm. Then with swift drama, the road crew lifted black covers off an astonishing array of equipment—an accordion, a marimba, a glockenspiel, sets of cymbals, a bass drum, a conga drum, a snare drum, ranks of jugs filled with varying levels of mineral water, and a few things it was impossible to see from the cheap seats. It was the orchestrion, or Metheny’s computerized variant of it, controlled through solenoids actuated by his guitar and several foot pedals.

Well, it didn’t work too well at the first concert. At the second, all of the synapses of the electronic brain were firing and we got a wild few minutes of rhythmic and visual display complete with echo, looping repetition, a percussion fiesta and accordion sounds that sometimes approximated trumpets. In one section, as Metheny wailed away, Grenadier used his bow to set a bass riff. It was fascinating and funny, a kind of musical vaudeville. When it ended, Metheny said, “That’s impossible to explain, so we’re just gonna keep playing.” And they did. In the course of the evening, they visited several of Metheny’s greatest hits, among them “James,” “Bright Size Life” and “Farmer’s Trust.”

What Metheny said would be the closing number turned out to be a highlight of both concerts. It was Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma,” with no orchestrion supplements, fine solos from both musicians and a tag ending in which they anticipated one another beautifully. There was an anonymous-sounding Metheny solo encore, but it was the pure music of “James,” “Con Alma, “All the Things You Are,” “Autumn Leaves” and a few other pieces that lingered in the mind as the orchestrion entertainment extravaganza faded away.

In this video from the 2009 Umbria Jazz festival in Italy, Metheny and Grenadier play the kind of music they made in the quieter moments at The Seasons. If you don’t understand Italian, you may want to fast-forward to 1:15

If you’re interested in knowing more about the orchestrion, go here for Metheny’s explanation and demonstration.

In his newest column, Mr. P.C., the jazz advice columnist, tackles the controversial issue of jazz as a disappearing resource. In answer to a question, he offers possible solutions, including this one:

But conservation alone won’t be enough; we must turn to alternative, renewable sources of jazz. These, of course, are colleges and conservatories, which efficiently convert tuition dollars into vast numbers of jazz performers and composers able to crank out low-grade jazz in tremendous quantity. There’s no end to the number of programs our planet can accommodate, and no limit to the number of notes their graduates will produce.

To explore the problem further with Mr. P.C., you can find him on All About Jazz, but if you go to his Facebook page, you get the bonus of a realistic drawing of him consulting a troubled musician. In the column he also addresses a drummer’s counting habit and the dilemma of a musician’s wife looking for a way to communicate with her husband.

We have it on reasonably good authority that under the name Bill Anschell, Mr. P.C. moonlights as a pianist. You may see a resemblance to the man in the drawing. Here, soprano saxophonist Brent Jensen accompanies Anschell, and vice versa.

For an account of a previous Anschell-Jensen encounter, go here.

Steve Cerra (pictured), the proprietor of Jazz Profiles, found himself desperate for material and put me in an unaccustomed position——on the answering end of an interview. The results are posted on his excellent blog, which you can reach by clicking here. If you make it through that piece, you’ll arrive at Steve’s news posts about Ernestine Anderson and Carmel Jones.

When we posted the Rifftides observance last month of Bill Evans’ birthday, a reader suggested that we follow up on the anniversary of his death, which was September 15, 1980. Here is Evans with his last trio—Marc Johnson, bass; Joe LaBarbera, drums—playing the piece he wrote in memory of his father.

The new batch of Rifftides recommendations covers CDs by one saxophonist inspired by Paul Desmond, another inspired by his native land and a bassist who is simply inspired. We also suggest an intimate DVD performance by Gerry Mulligan and a book about the life of the woman who inspired “Pannonica,” “Nica’s Dream” and “Nica’s Tempo.” Please scroll down the right-hand column to Doug’s Picks. Temporarily, due to digital circumstances I have yet to fathom, they are also immediately below in the main column.