It’s December and the gentleman to the left is calling your attention to the new Rifftides batch of things that we recommend you hear, watch and read. The CD suggestions include an indispensable collaboration finally being reissued after half a century, a mainstream trio and a decidedly un-mainstream quartet. The DVD catches Thelonious Monk concertizing in Paris. The book is a biography of one of the most public and most elusive of major jazz artists. The notices will appear under Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column until the next batch shows up and, for the immediate future, immediately below.

In the wake of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s recent programs about Bill Evans, Rifftides reader Brenton Plourde notifies us of a new BBC series to be streamed on the internet. Beginning tomorrow, Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz on BBC Radio 3 will air a weeklong series about Paul Desmond and his music. The BBC’s preview page does not make clear whether the shows will be available to web listeners outside the United Kingdom. For an advance look at the program rundown, go here.

This is a national holiday in the United States, important ever since the newly arrived Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag gave thanks in 1621.

To Americans observing it, the Rifftides staff sends wishes for a happy Thanksgiving. To readers in the US and around the world: thank you for your interest, readership and comments.

Every November 25th since Rifftides debuted in 2005, we observe Paul Desmond’s birthday. He was born in San Francisco on this date in 1924, which, that year, was Thanksgiving. To the left, we see Desmond six months before he died in May of 1977. He’s watching Jim Hall carve the turkey that Jim’s daughter Devra prepared when she hosted her parents and Paul for a 1976 Thanksgiving dinner at her New York apartment. Longtime recording partners, Desmond and Hall were close friends. One of their rare experiences playing together outside a studio came in 1969 when President Richard Nixon celebrated Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday with a lavish tribute at the White House.

The Voice Of America’s Willis Conover put together the band for the tribute. Below you see its members rehearsing in the East Room the afternoon of the party, April 29, 1969. From left to right: Hank Jones, Jim Hall, Milt Hinton, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Louie Bellson, Clark Terry, J.J. Johnson, Bill Berry, Urbie Green. Guest artists included Dave Brubeck, Billy Taylor, Earl Hines and the singers Joe Williams and Mary Mayo.

Mulligan and Desmond rehearsed Mulligan’s intricate arrangement of “Prelude to a Kiss.” The performance is included in a recording of that night’s music, finally released in 2002. From the Desmond biography, here is some of the description of that evening’s concert and aftermath:

It lasted an hour and a half and consisted of twenty-seven Ellington or Strayhorn pieces, several of them worked into medleys. Solos were distributed so that all of the musicians were featured. I was in the audience directly behind Cab Calloway, who was sitting next to Ellington. Duke had been lounging comfortably as he listened. He sat bolt upright when, on “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” with Brubeck at the piano, Desmond played a stunningly accurate impression of Johnny Hodges, Ellington’s star alto player of forty-one years. “Hey,” Duke said, and turned to Calloway with a grin, a reaction that pleased Desmond enormously when I described it.

Desmond was not happy about a medley that featured him on Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge.” When they came to the song’s middle section, the bassist, Milt Hinton, forgot the complicated harmonic changes and went into an unrelated pattern. Desmond managed to keep his composure and preserve the melody line. It is unlikely that non-musicians in the audience knew anything had gone wrong, but Paul was convinced that it had been a disaster. After the concert, he headed for the open bar and stayed near it the rest of the night, which turned out to be long. The Nixons headed for bed, but the President urged everyone to stay and have a good time. White House staffers sprang into action and cleared the East Room for dancing, and a jam session ensued. Desmond’s mood lightened eventually, though he rejected all entreaties to play. I hung out at the bar with him and Urbie Green, but went on to other conversations after the Dewars competition moved out of my league. When the party broke up between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., I wished Paul and Urbie a good night as they helped one another, unsteadily, through the entrance hall, down the White House steps and into a taxi. Later, Desmond was able to see humor in the “Chelsea Bridge” incident, but that night he worked at forgetting it.

In conclusion, I quote, not for the first time, what Brubeck told me years after Desmond’s death: “Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.”

Nearly all Americans who were alive when President Kennedy was murdered remember how and where they got the news. In announcing her revitalized blog, Carol Sloane asked her contacts to recall what they were doing on November 22, 1963. This is what I sent her:

My camera crew and I were in the ballroom of the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon, interviewing Denise Tourover, the national head of Hadassah. Mrs. Tourover was from Washington DC. She was a friend of the Kennedys. I had just asked her about the importance of Mr. Kennedy’s trip to Dallas when Richard Ross, the anchor at a competing station, burst into the room and announced that the President had been shot. It was soon confirmed that he was dead. KATU-TV had just been named the ABC affiliate in Portland, but the contract allowing us to carry the network’s coverage had not gone into effect. For the first several hours, until ABC made arrangements to hook us into the network, our news department carried the load of reporting about the assassination, depending on wire services and whatever guest experts we could round up. I persuaded Mrs. Tourover to come to the studio and go live with us. She became an invaluable source and a connection to other Kennedy contacts across the country. I did not leave the studio, or the air, for nearly 24 of the most demanding and emotional hours of my life.

In a pair of duo albums the protean Robinson confines himself to 10 instruments from his arsenal. Alphabetically, they range from alto sax to zither, sonically from the rumbling contrabass saxophone to the altissimo twittering of the sopranino sax. His accompanists are pianists, although in Záhadná Emil Viklický also plays organ and solovox and in Afar Frank Kimbrough doubles on electronic harpsichord, clavioline and two kinds of organ. As for the music, you were expecting maybe the Great American Songbook? Well——no.

Robinson, Viklický and Kimbrough are masters of chord-based invention, but these albums from Robinson’s ScienSonic label are mostly free improvisation. In Záhadná there are also musings on a few folk melodies from Viklický’s native Moravia. The haunting “Ej, Lásko, Lásko,” with Robinson playing C melody sax, is a highlight. Little pieces played with abandon in eight pastiches called “Honička” (Czech for “chase”), live up to their title. Altogether, the music is packed with insights into the workings of three unconventional minds. In Czech, “Záhadná” means “mystery” or “eeriness.” These CDs have not only mystery, but also wit, profundity and remarkable musical sensibilities interacting with the speed of thought.

It dawned on me this evening that the post below was not the first time that Rifftides has addressed the question of Diana Krall’s popularity in the context of arguments about the quality of her artistry. An item from three-and-a-half years ago makes some of the same points. More important, it contains a video clip from a Paris concert that is worth seeing and hearing. It also has a quote from and a link to an astute article about Ms. Krall by the late Gene Lees. To find the May, 2010 post, click here.

Most of the sniping about Diana Krall follows the pattern of fire that successful jazz artists have long drawn when they achieve even moderate success in the commerce of show business. The list of those charged with selling out when they became solvent includes Nat Cole, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Wes Montgomery, Cannonball Adderley and, in his final crossover phase, Miles Davis. In recent years, market demand for jazz has not been high enough to develop many targets for critics who lie in wait to cry sell-out. Diana Krall is an exception. Not an innovator as a pianist or as a singer, she is talented in both areas, personally attractive, and has strong—if understated—leadership ability. She does not sell records or attract crowds in numbers approaching those of even low-level pop and rock stars, but as jazz audiences go in the new century, hers is sizeable.

Ms. Krall hires first-rate accompanists. She molds them into bands whose pleasure in working with her and in working together is evident. When inspired, she is capable of splendid solos. She knows to avoid set pieces when the music is finding its way. Audiences react to those qualities. All of that came to mind after someone sent me a link to a performance by Ms. Krall and her quartet at the 2010 Montreux Jazz Festival. Her band for the occasion was Anthony Wilson, guitar; Robert Hurst, bass; and Karriem Riggins, drums. As the concert proceeded, the band got tighter rhythmically and by the time they reached “Cheek To Cheek” about three-quarters of the way through, they achieved a riveting degree of cohesion.

Fair warning: If you decide to watch directly on You Tube rather than here on the Rifftides screen, the video of the concert features commercial breaks randomly inserted with no regard for what’s happening in the music. The viewer has the option of bailing out of each commercial after a few seconds. The production technique is irritating, but it’s the price for seeing an otherwise free performance. Either way, there is an opening airplane montage that must have something to do with something.

Have a good weekend.

Pianist, composer and Bill Evans expert Jack Reilly alerts us to a five-part program about Evans. Donald Macleod hosts the Composer Of The Week series about Evans’s life, with three of the episodes devoted to his work with Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and the producer Helen Keane. The BBC is making the series available on the internet for a short time. The opening segment will be heard for only two more days. The remaining four expire on successive days. To listen to them, Go here.

Visiting Santa Barbara, California, I was offered a ticket to last night’s performance of the traveling theatrical production Million Dollar Quartet. It is unlikely that I would have sought out a rock and roll musical, but my hosts took me along. The magnificent Granada Theater on State Street was nearly overflowing. The crowd’s appearance indicated that most people in the audience were of high school age when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the first wave of rock shock troops. They and Bill Haley stormed popular music as elements of rhythm and blues, country and pop music coalesced into early rock and roll. America’s culture—and eventually that of the world—was destined to change forever. The musical emphasizes again and again in taunts by Presley, Perkins and Phillips that predictions of the early death of rock and roll were flat-out wrong.

Million Dollar Quartet’s story revolves around a day in 1956 when Lewis, Perkins, Presley and Cash (pictured left to right) met in Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis. Presley had left Sun for RCA. Cash and Perkins were about to defect to Columbia Records. That sets up tension as Phillips, realizing that all three of his big stars are gone, determines to groom Lewis, a zany ball of fire, to be his next big recording success. In the course of 90 minutes or so, we heard two dozen songs including “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Hound Dog,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Long Tall Sally.” The actor-musicians who played the rock performers were uniformly effective in their roles. The opening announcement emphasized that there was no lip-synching or air guitar; the playing and singing on stage were the real thing. Cody Slaughter had Presley’s moves down cold and frequently caught his inflections. John Countryman captured Lewis’s borderline manic personality. James Barry had Perkins’ mixture of belligerence and sweetness just right. Scott Moreau was touching in his representation of Cash’s rumble of a voice and his peacemaker personality. Vince Nappo played Sam Phillips, the self-made blusterer whose cajoling, pleading and threatening were necessary to rein in the egos of his star performers.

The production was perfect in every respect— sound, lighting, pacing, script and performance. So why did I leave the building disturbed? It was because a brilliantly realized theater microcosm had encapsulated a phenomenon that 57 years ago established a lowest common denominator. The rock mentality spread so fast and so wide that every aspect of popular culture was diluted or distorted. The power of music to direct lives and attitudes has never been more starkly demonstrated than in rock’s influence not only on music but also on literature, theater and film, on sexual mores, on the general capacity or willingness of people to make subtle distinctions in civil discourse, on the flavor and fabric of modern life.

The program notes for Million Dollar Quartet conclude with a double-edged fact:

In his rudimentary, one-room studio, Phillips looked for innovation, not imitation. The music he recorded transformed the cultural landscape of the twentieth century, and its reverberations are still felt today.

Are they ever.