Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
 Just for fun. In the first video, Tommy Flanagan on the left, Barry Harris on the right; with respect to Thelonious Monk, sometime, somewhere, in the 1970s.
In the second video, Dave Frank on the left, Dick Hyman on the right,
remembering Lennie Tristano, in New York, in 2011.
Have a pleasant holiday weekend.
After Coleman Hawkins left Fletcher Henderson in 1934, he spent nearly five years touring in Europe. Having established the saxophone as a serious jazz instrument, he provided significant inspiration among 
European musicians as jazz took a solid foothold on the continent and in the British Isles. Hawkins appeared with bands in England, Switzerland, France and Holland, recording often. Records he made in Paris with Benny Carter, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli are among the finest of the 1930s. He recorded with the Dutch group known as The Ramblers and while he was in Holland made a short film, recently discovered by Harry Oakley, who posted it on the web. Here’s Hawkins in 1935, aged 31, introducing his performance. His piano accompanist is Leo de la Fuente.
Hawkins returned to the United States in mid-1939. Shortly after, the success of his recording of “Body and Soul” made him one of the best known jazz musicians in the world.
A sad sidebar to a delightful clip; the pianist de la Fuente, a Jew prominent in Dutch music, was taken to Germany by the Nazis during World War Two. He died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Rifftides reader Mike Harris (more about him later) alerts us to a little-known piece of video catching Bill Evans in rehearsal for a 1966 Danish television broadcast. The 21-minute sequence lets us 
see and hear Evans and his trio preparing pieces he frequently included in his playlists: “Very Early,†“Who Can I Turn To,†“If You Could See Me Now†and, toward the end, “Five,†his rhythmically demanding original based on the “I Got Rhythm†chord progression. The trio includes bassist Eddie Gomez, who had recently joined Evans, and the young Danish drummer Alex Riel, whom Evans patiently instructs in the convolutions of “Five.†We don’t customarily post videos of this length, but we don’t often have this kind of opportunity to witness music being prepared.
Mike Harris, who tipped us to that video, is the dedicated Bill Evans fan who surreptitiously recorded the pianist at the Village Vanguard over nine years in the 1960s and ‘70s. In 1996, producer
Orrin Keepnews and engineers Joe Tarantino Kirk Felton transformed the Harris tapes into the eight-CD Evans set The Secret Sessions. In those recordings, Evans is heard with bassists Gomez and Teddy Kotick and a variety of drummers including Philly Joe Jones, Jack DeJohnette, Eliot Zigmund and Marty Morell. Here is a lightly edited excerpt from my notes that box set:
It is impossible to know whether Bill Evans would have agreed to release of the Harris tapes, but in a Canadian interview a few months before he died, he made an observation that addressed the general proposition of unauthorized taping and of the contrast between live club performance and studio recordings.
“You’re never going to hear on record what you may hear live,” he said. “Our best performance is gone into the atmosphere. We never have have really gotten on record that special peak that happens fairly often. And there’s nothing like that physical contact with an audience.”
Sixty-five years ago today in the early hours of the morning, Charlie Parker and his quintet were close to wrapping up their broadcast from the Royal Roost in New York City when someone requested a Christmas song. Parker obliged.
Christmas 1948 with Charlie Parker, Kenny Dorham, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Max Roach. I hope that your Christmas 2013 has been equally merry.
The Rifftides staff wishes you a Merry Christmas, a splendid holiday season and happy listening.
The bonus winter scene is of the magnificent Mount Adams in southwestern Washington State, about 60 miles away and easily visible from Rifftides world headquarters.
The roll call of distinguished jazz artists leaving us seems to grow longer by the day. Now comes news of the passing of Yusef Lateef, who died today at his home in Massachusetts. He was 93. As a youngster in Detroit, Lateef 
mastered several reed instruments and early in his career became a respected performer, composer and educator. He was an inspiration and model for a generation of young Detroit musicians who in the 1950s moved to New York and themselves became influences in the burgeoning jazz scene of that decade. Lateef was an early innovator in what became known as world music, melding his deep understanding of and emotional connection to the blues with concepts derived from his study of Middle Eastern music
In addition to performing and recording prolifically with his own groups, Lateef had tenure with two enormously influential leaders—early in his career Dizzy Gillespie’s 1940s big band, in the 1960s the Cannonball Adderley Sextet. In this 1963 clip, we hear Lateef playing oboe with the Adderley group; Adderley, alto saxophone; Nat Adderley, cornet; Joe Zawinul, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Louis Hayes, drums. Cannonball named the piece for John Coltrane, his former colleague in the Miles Davis Sextet.
Mark Stryker, the music critic of The Detroit Free Press, has covered Lateef for years and written extensively about him. For Mr. Stryker’s summary of Lateef’s career, please go here. But before you do, don’t miss this astonishing 1972 performance by Lateef on tenor saxophone with Kenny Barron, piano; Bob Cunningham, bass; and Albert “Tootie†Heath, drums. Heath also plays wood flute. Following the performance is a brief disquisition in French.
To hear and see more from that Lateef quartet, go here and here.
Thanks to the YouTube uploader known as uvisninewnew for providing those Jazz Harmonie videos.
We have word from Herb Geller’s family that the venerable alto saxophonist died on Thursday in a Hamburg, Germany, hospital. He succumbed to pneumonia. Geller had been under treatment for the past twelve months for a form of lymphoma. He turned 85 in November. As noted in this Rifftides post last 
June, Geller remained not merely active but energetic until fairly recently, performing in clubs and at festivals throughout Europe. He had lived in Hamburg since 1965. Until his mandatory retirement at age 65 he was a key soloist with the NDR Big Band, then spent much of the next 20 years touring and recording in a solo career.
Geller’s long residence in Europe gave him steady and reliable employment with a superb government-sponsored orchestra but kept him less visible than contemporaries like Phil Woods, Lee Konitz, Bud Shank and Paul Desmond who remained based in the US. Nonetheless, during his period of greatest US activity, when jazz burgeoned on the west coast, Geller was one of the busiest and most respected alto soloists of his generation. He was born in Los Angeles and began playing the saxophone when he was eight years old. Among his band mates at Dorsey High School in Southwest L.A. were fellow saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Vi Redd and the drummer Bobby White.
After he heard a performance by Benny Carter when Geller was 14, he decided to become a professional musician. Carter and Hodges were his early models, their influences soon leavened by the impact of Charlie Parker. Geller worked with a cross section of the major players in Los Angeles, recording copiously with, among others, Bill Holman, Shorty Rogers, Andre Previn, Quincy Jones and Chet Baker. He recorded three albums as a leader for Emarcy Records at a time when the label was riding high in the jazz world and was on hundreds of albums in the fifties. Among them, he recorded with Dinah Washington, Max Roach, Clifford Brown, Bill Holman, Clark Terry, Maynard Ferguson and Kenny Drew. Geller said in a
recent conversation that of the thirty or so albums he recorded under his own name his favorite was You’re Looking At Me. That 1997 Fresh Sound CD had a rhythm section of the young Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren and two Los Angeles stalwarts, the late bassist Dave Carpenter and drummer Joe LaBarbera. Lundgren became one of Geller’s favorite collaborators.
During the 1950s Geller’s first wife, Lorraine, was one of the premier jazz pianists in Los Angeles. The two frequently recorded together. She died in 1958 at the age of 30. Here are the Gellers in 1955 with a “Cherokee†variant called “Arapahoe.†Red Mitchell is the bassist, Mel Lewis the drummer.
One of Geller’s collaborators in his latterday playing expeditions around Europe was the pianist Roberto Magris. Following a lengthy introduction by the emcee and a bit of onstage preparation, we hear him play “If I Were a Bell†with Magris, bassist Nikola Matosic and drummer Enzo Carpentieri at the 2009 Novi Sad Jazz Festival in Serbia.
Herb Geller, RIP
(revised 12-23-13)
John Snyder, who produced some of Jim Hall’s best albums, sent a comment on Hall’s passing. It appears with the dozens of other observations sent by readers following the Rifftides remembrance posted on December 10, but the staff decided that the poetic eloquence of Mr. Snyder’s tribute stands on its own. We reproduce it here, followed by a performance from Jim Hall Live, the 1975 Hall trio album with bassist Don Thompson and drummer Terry Clarke recorded at Bourbon Street in Toronto and produced by John Snyder.
Jim left not only music behind when he finished the gig, he left an aesthetic, a “wayâ€, a path. It was the way of the individual heart, of unencumbered truth, of listening and honesty and the responsibilities of self-expression. Even in his absence, his music breathes with life and selflessness, innocence and humor.
Jim had more than ten fingers; it’s just that he just didn’t use them all. He knew that guitar playing often obscured the heart of the player and I think that’s what he meant when he said to his student, “don’t just do something, sit thereâ€. There are fantastic instrumentalists in this world and it has always been thus, but there are only a few whose music and expression transcend the instrument and it becomes transparent, rather like the architectural drawings of a Frank Gehry building. Necessary and
important, they and the technique they manifest disappear into the awe we feel inside the aesthetic experience they create.
Jim was kind and funny and he loved irony. He fought with himself and won, he lived his life on his own terms and had no cynicism or bitterness about the music business that provided him with the occasional opportunity to share his music with us. He was always grateful for those opportunities and always made the most out of them. He loved the people he played music with (or had really good stories about them) and he loved the people he played for.
Jim added to this world and to the lives of those his music touched. How will we miss our friend, who will be remembered for as long as there is music? With joy, with thankfulness and smiles on our faces.
Steve Cerra, the proprietor of the endlessly interesting Jazz Profiles blog, has posted a new piece about Take Five: The Public And Private Lives Of Paul Desmond. In it, he says that the book would make a good Christmas present, a suggestion that I wouldn’t dream of challenging. Steve observes that any stocking the book might stuff would have to be huge. That was true in the days when Take Five existed only as a hard cover volume. Now, it is an eBook, meaning that the recipient’s stocking can be the size of a Kindle or a bunch of digital 0s and 1s.
To read Steve’s embarrassingly flattering assessment of the biography, with extensive excerpts, go here. To find out how to obtain the eBook version, go here. Many thanks to Mr. Cerra for his kindness.
Try as I might to ignore requests to vote in polls, I don’t seem to be able to say no to Francis Davis. This year, the eminent critic persuaded 136 people to take part in his annual critics poll, which he has moved to the website of National Public Radio. He asked writers, broadcasters, bloggers and others to name their choices for the best jazz recordings of the year. The results are in.
The overall winner, hands down, is Wayne Shorter, 80 years old and, evidently, indefatigable. In his introduction to the poll results, this is some of what Mr. Davis has to say about Shorter.
It says a lot about his enduring hold on jazz listeners that over a half century into his career, the descriptive phrases most commonly put in front of Wayne Shorter’s name — along with “the great saxophonist and composer” — remain “the elusive” and “the enigmatic.” The inside tray card to Shorter’s Without a Net, the runaway Best Album winner in this year’s NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, pictures him from the back, in spotlighted silhouette. It’s reminiscent of the cover of 2002’s Footprints Live!, where only half of his face was visible in the mirror of a navigator’s compass. Both poses are evocative of his solos, his tunes and his persona, all of which routinely invite us to fill in the blanks.
For the August Rifftides review of the Shorter album, go here.
Here is the poll’s list of the top 10 finishers.
1. Wayne Shorter, Without A Net (Blue Note)
2. Craig Taborn Trio, Chants (ECM)
3. Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran, Hagar’s Song (ECM)
4. Cécile McLorin Salvant, Woman Child (Mack Avenue)
5. Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Functional Arhythmia (Pi)
6. Tim Bern’s Snakeoil, Shadow Man (ECM)
7. Dave Douglas Quintet, Time Travel (Greenleaf)
8. Terence Blanchard, Magnetic (Blue Note)
9. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon (New Amsterdam)
10. Mary Halvorson Septet, Illusionary Sea (Firehouse 12)
The other categories are Reissues, Vocal, Debut and Latin. To see those results and a list of the top 50 choices, go to the NPR Music site. For what it’s worth, this is how I voted.
Best New Releases
1. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Somewhere (ECM)
2. Wayne Shorter, Without A Net (Blue Note)
3. Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway, Live in Santa Fe: Duke at the Roadhouse (IPO)
4. Dave Holland, Prism (Dare2)
5. Bill Frisell, Big Sur (Okeh)
6. JD Allen, Grace (Savant)
7. Dave Douglas, DD/50 Special Edition 50th Birthday Recordings (Greenleaf Music)
8. Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, Whit Dickey, Gerald Cleaver, Enigma (Leo Records)
9. Steve Turre, The Bones of Art (High Note)
10. Rudresh Mahanthappa, Gamak (ACT)Reissues
Jeremy Steig, Flute Fever (International Phonograph)
Lester Young, Boston 1950 (Uptown)
Woody Shaw, The Complete Muse Sessions (Mosaic)Best Vocal Album
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Woman Child (Mack Avenue)
Best Debut Album
Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, Imagery Manifesto (Lefkowitz-Brown)
Best Latin Jazz Album
Mark Weinstein, Todo Corazon (Jazzheads)
