So many CDs, so little time. There are hundreds of review copies stacked up around here and no immediate hope of writing in depth about more than one or two. Therefore, I shall write not in depth about several. These mentions—a bit longer than tweets—point you toward albums that have impressed me on first or second listenings, CDs that I would like to hear again.

Tommy Flanagan, Jaki Byard, The Magic of 2 (Resonance)

In this previously unissued 1982 collaboration from San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, Todd Barkan introduces the pianists as two of the instrument’s “greatest virtuosos.” They then set about proving it at two grand pianos in six brilliant duets and three solo pieces each. Not identified by right channel-left channel separation, in the duets they meld and contrast in performances that sound like products of four hands directed by one mind. This is a treasure.

When Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Johnny Alf and other Brazilians were developing bossa nova in the 1950s, their influences included musicians on the west coast of the United States, among them Chet Baker. In turn, Baker’s music affected the development of many young Brazilian musicians. Two of them have acknowledged Baker in new albums devoted to music that he sang and played.

Luciana Souza, The Book of Chet (Sunnyside)

At tempos putting her in contention for the world championship of slow singing, Souza caresses 10 ballads. The sections of vocalise in her heartbreaking treatment of “I Get Along Without You Very Well” and other songs show thorough understanding of Baker’s musicality. Larry Koonse’s guitar work at the head of the accompanying trio makes him a co-star of the album. In a CD released at the same time, Souza continues her series of duets with outstanding Brazilian guitarists in Duos III, including a breathtaking “Doralice” with Romero Lubambo.

Eliane Elias, I Thought About You (Concord)

Elias’s 14-song tribute to Baker duplicates only one piece in Souza’s Baker collection. Her fundamentally sunny approach highlights her singing and piano playing, with bassist Marc Johnson, drummer Victor Lewis, trumpeter Randy Brecker and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves among the other musicians. Elias and Brecker shine in solo on “That Old Feeling” and “Just Friends.” She gives “Let’s Get Lost” a bright bossa treatment. Her way with “You Don’t Know What Love Is” recalls the wistfulness in Baker’s own recordings of a song that became a permanent part of his repertoire.

Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio, The Gift (Leo Records)

A Brazilian tenor saxophonist of Elias’s and Souza’s generation, Perelman operates largely free of restrictions, including those of the normal range of his instrument. He sometimes takes it from the low register up into sopranino territory. He and his frequent pianist partner Matthew Shipp have recorded together profusely in a series of albums that can be startling one moment and all but becalmed in serenity the next. The Gift, with the remarkable Michael Bisio joining them on bass, is one their most satisfying joint ventures, not least because of the wryness of their humor. “A Ride On A Camel,” a descriptive title if there ever was one, is a case in point.

Kenny Wheeler Big Band, The Long Waiting (CamJazz)

Wheeler’s playing and arranging will be immediately identifiable to anyone even slightly familiar with his work. The composer and flugelhornist’s first big band album in more than two decades displays his customary virtuosity in all areas. Now 83, he plays with melodic inventiveness, harmonic daring and technical virtuosity that can raise eyebrows. Wheeler’s writing for the 19-piece band achieves excitement and passion while at the same time triggering feelings of nostalgia and melancholy. The band is filled with some of London’s most accomplished jazz soloists and studio musicians. With her vocalese, Diana Torto plays a role as valuable as that of any of the instrumentalists. I have been known rail against albums made up only of original compositions. I’m not railing against Wheeler’s. They are dazzling.

Sandy Stewart & Bill Charlap, Something To Remember (Ghostlight)

The pianist’s and his mom’s second album—following their 2005 Love Is Here to Stay—finds them as compatible as they have been since he was a baby. Headed for a big career after her 1963 hit “My Coloring Book,” Ms. Stewart set it aside to raise Bill and her other children with her husband, the composer Moose Charlap. Following Charlap, Sr.’s death, she reestablished herself in music, reminding listeners of her way with phrasing and the meaning of lyrics. This intimate collection of ballads has a superb version of Johnny Mandel’s and the Bergmans’ “Where Do You Start?” and a touching interpretation of Moose Charlap’s “I Was Telling Him About You. ” Throughout, there is son Bill’s signature keyboard touch and way with chords.

Larry Willis, This Time The Dream’s On Me (High Note)

Willis’s decades as one of the great journeyman pianists in jazz and the high regard for him in the profession have nonetheless left him strangely obscure in relation to the size of his talent. Anyone wondering why, won’t find the answer in this solo piano album. His playing on seven classic songs and three of his compositions has fullness of imagination and command of the instrument that throughout his career have had him in demand by groups as diverse as those of Cannonball Adderley, Blood, Sweat and Tears, The Fort Apache Band and Roy Hargrove. Willis’s loving care of Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose,” his “Silly Blues,”—which is anything but silly—and an expansive “It Could Happen to You” indicate the breadth of his talent.

Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway, Duke At The Roadhouse (IPO)

You might think that Daniels and Kellaway were going off on a free jazz tangent in “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” if it wasn’t apparent that they were working from an arrangement. Whether the arrangement was on paper is beside the point. It may have been a product of the intuition that the clarinetist and saxophonist and the pianist have shared for years. “Arrangements while you wait,” musicians sometimes say in such spontaneous situations. Oh yes: the point. The point is that Daniels and Kellaway play just short of an hour of music by or associated with Duke Ellington, plus one original apiece, and they have their usual rollicking good time. There’s an added element here, harking back to Kellaway’s celebrated cello quartets. On some pieces, classical cellist James Holland sits in and executes perfect jazz solos. Kellaway wrote the solos for Holland, whose feeling for jazz phrasing allowed him to play them as if he’d concocted them on the spot. This music was recorded before an audience at a theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but it has the road house spirit.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band, 50th Anniversary Collection (Columbia Legacy)

This collection revives memories of signing off the 10 o’clock news and wandering through the French Quarter from Royal Street to St. Peter to spend a few minutes, or an hour, with the tourists enjoying the Preservation Hall band. One of the earliest tracks of the four discs happened a few days before I arrived in 1966 for the first of my two stints in New Orleans. The Preservationists had George Lewis, clarinet; De De Pierce, cornet; Billie Pierce, piano; Big Eye Louis Nelson, trombone; Narvin Kimball, banjo; Chester Zardis, bass; and Cie Frazier, drums. That’s a tough band to beat for Crescent City authenticity. For the most part, later editions capture the spirit if not always the individuality of what I tend to think of as the George Lewis band, even though under the hall’s banner it was essentially leaderless. I was lucky to be there during Preservation Hall’s golden age. Hearing this set, which covers 1962 to 2009, I feel lucky again. Maybe the golden age continues.

There will be a public memorial service for Dave Brubeck in New York City next Saturday, May 11. Brubeck died last December at the age of 91. Along with, no doubt, hundreds of others I will be at the service in the cavernous Cathedral Of St. John The Divine on the upper west side of Manhattan.

A little known video of a Brubeck quartet performance recently surfaced. The other musicians are Jerry Bergonzi, tenor saxophone; Chris Brubeck, electric bass; and Randy Jones, drums. The piece is “All My Hope” from Brubeck’s mass To Hope: A Celebration, which premiered in 1980. This section of a Montreal television broadcast is almost certainly from 1980 rather than 1981, as YouTube indicates. It recalls the pleasure the pianist took in Bergonzi’s harmonic compatibility and daring during the saxophonist’s year or two with the quartet.

For information about the memorial service, including the list of performers paying tribute, click here.

This is the birthday of John Lewis (1920-2001), the pianist and music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Many of his compositions are staples of the jazz repertoire. None is better known than “Django,” named for the Belgian Gypsy guitarist who was the first European musician to become a major jazz figure. Lewis discussed the piece and his reason for writing it in a television appearance with Billy Taylor. The clip is a reminder of the pleasantness of John’s personality and the understated strength of his playing. After we see and hear him play “Django,” we’ll listen to Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France from 1940. This was Reinhardt’s first recording of his own most famous composition, “Nuages.” You may be able to detect a harmonic source of Lewis’s inspiration.

The Jazz Journalists Association today announced its members’ choices for the 2013 JJA awards. The organization honored saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter with its lifetime achievement award. Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith was named musician of the year. Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans is the JJA’s record of the year.

 In addition, there are 26 jazz heroes, described as “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz who have had significant impact in their local communities.” For the names and photographs of winners in all 29 music categories, plus the heroes, go to this page at the JJA Website.

As a part of the Evans Centennial project, here is Chris Hunter featured on alto saxophone in a concert a year ago. We hear the Evans arrangement of Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” The baritone saxophone soloist is Howard Johnson, the guitar soloist Oz Noy.

The members of this edition of the Gil Evans Orchestra:

Drums, Kenwood Dennard
Bass, Mark Egan
Guitar, Ryo Kawasaki
Guitar, Oz Noy
Keyboards, Gil Goldstein
Keyboards, Delmar Brown
Baritone Sax, Howard Johnson
Tenor Sax, Alex Foster
Alto Sax, Chris Hunter
Tenor Sax, Billy Harper
French Horn, John Clark
Tuba, Bob Stewart
Trumpet, Miles Evans
Trumpet, Lew Soloff
Trumpet, Jon Faddis
Trombone, Conrad Herwig
Trombone, David Bargeron
Trombone, Tom”Bones”Malone
Bass Trombone, Dave Taylor

This is International Jazz Day. It was celebrated in a massive concert streamed live from Istanbul. Herbie Hancock gave the keynote speech and hosted the webcast. To watch and listen to it replayed, click here.

Here it is the night of Duke Ellington’s 114th birthday and Rifftides has left you bereft of a flowery tribute to his genius, immortality, indispensability and __________ (fill in the blank). Instead, let’s see all of that in action in a clip from the 1930 RKO film Check and Double Check.

Trumpets: Freddie Jenkins, Cootie Williams & Arthur Whetsol.
Trombones: Joe (Tricky Sam) Nanton & Juan Tizol (valve trombone).
Reeds: Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard.
Rhythm: Ellington (p), Sonny Greer (dr), Fred Guy (gtr), Wellman Braud (b).
Solos: trumpet, Jenkins; baritone saxophone, Carney; soprano saxophone, Hodges.

Did RKO brass order the makeup staff to blacken Juan Tizol’s face? Could be. In those days, movie executives were a bit nervous about mingling the races on screen. Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel were five years off.

That was not Ellington’s first film appearance. His Hollywood debut seems to have been five years earlier, a discovery announced today by The Library of Congress. The library’s blog posted details on this anniversary of Ellington’s birth. To see the explanation by their moving image maven Mike Mashon and a brief (extremely brief) clip, click on this link. After watching it several times, I concluded that the blink-of-an-eye scene runs from 37 seconds to 41 seconds of the sequence. I lifted a still from the movie and blew it up, but unless the sharp focus of your vision is better than mine, we’ll have to take Mr. Mashon’s word for what we’re seeing.

All that aside, to paraphrase what Ellington often said to audiences following a Johnny Hodges solo, as if addressing the deity:

Thank you for Duke Ellington.

This spring, the lilacs seem to have blossomed a bit earlier than usual. They are everywhere in this big valley, in shades from snow white to purple so deep it’s almost black. We have three banks of lilac bushes In our south 40. The one at the bottom end is the biggest and most glorious. Here are a couple of glimpses. Unfortunately, I can’t offer you the aroma.

What does this have to with jazz? It needn’t have anything to do with it; the subtitle of the blog is, “…on jazz and other matters.” But if you insist, we can work out a connection. We don’t have much rain around here now, which is fine with fruit growers worried about blossom damage. We have high winds sweeping down off the Cascade Mountains, which is not fine with cyclists and runners.

So, here’s the somewhat strained connection to the title of this post, which has some of the same words as the name of the song. “Lilacs in the Rain is a splendid popular song from the late 1930s. It was written by Peter DeRose as a piano piece. Mitchell Parish, the lyricist of “Stardust,” added words. The song became a hit, giving DeRose three hits in 1939. The other two were “Deep Purple” and “The Lamp is Low.” Several people recorded “Lilacs in the Rain” that year, including the bands of Charlie Barnet and Bob Crosby, the latter with Crosby’s vocal. As far as I know, Bob’s brother did not make a commercial recording of the piece but, trust me, Bing sang it better. Here he is in a recently discovered air check from his Kraft Music Hall radio program.

The arranger (John Scott Trotter?) deserves mention for those hip little interludes he placed in the 16 instrumental bars between Crosby’s first and final choruses.

Over the next 25 or 30 years, many people recorded the song, among them artists as diverse as CarmenMcRae, the doowop vocal group The Ravens, Junior Mance and Carl Perkins—not the “Blue Suede Shoes” Carl Perkins, but the pianist who was an important part of jazz on the west coast in the 1950s. Perkins played with Chet Baker, Harold Land, Dexter Gordon, Buddy DeFranco and the Max Roach-Clifford Brown group, among others. We see him here at a club date in Vancouver, BC, with the Curtis Counce quintet, between bassist Counce and tenor saxophonist Land. Frank Butler is on drums, Jack Sheldon on Trumpet.

Perkins’s “Lilacs in the Rain” is on the one album he made as a leader. The bassist is Leroy Vinnegar, the drummer Larance Marable.

Perkins died in 1958 at the age of 29.

In notes for the 1998 issue of Kenny Dorham: Blues in Bebop, I wrote:

More than a quarter-century after his death, Kenny Dorham is a beacon of encouragement shining across the landscape populated by young jazz musicians. In a generation of imitators, a few perceptive players have discovered Dorham’s lyricism, his magic with harmony, the wistfulness of his tone, and his articulation, which is like intimate speech. Dorham’s compositions increasingly make their way into repertoires and his “Blue Bossa” has deservedly become a standard.

KD’s hometown has honored its famous son with the plaque pictured above and a festival named after him. The main event takes place tomorrow night in Fairfield, Texas, a town of 3,000 about halfway between Dallas and Houston. For details and to read about the tribute, see this article in the Freestone County Times.

For a taste of Dorham’s lyricism and ability to construct a cogent melody “right through a chord structure,” as Charlie Shoemake put it after the last time we posted this video, here is a snippet that seems to be the only known film of Dorham performing. His rhythm section at the Golden Circle in Stockholm in 1963 was Goran Lindberg, piano; Goran Peterson, bass; and Leif Wennerstron, drums.

If you’re in the market for a more extensive KD fix, this YouTube page may meet your need.

When buried in deadlines and unable to create sparkling new material, give ‘em some Charlie Parker, that’s my motto.

Here is Parker on September 15, 1944, at the WOR studios in New York City. The leader on the record date was guitarist Lloyd “Tiny” Grimes. The other musicians are Clyde Hart, an important pianist in the transition from swing to bebop; Jimmy Butts, bass; and Harold “Doc” West, drums. “Red Cross,” is one of 3,427 (or so) jazz compositions based on the form and harmonies of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” Have you ever wondered what swing and bop musicians would have done for material if Gershwin hadn’t written “I Got Rhythm” and “Lady, Be Good?” This tune was named not in honor of the American Red Cross, but for Bob Redcross, Billy Eckstine’s valet, who was a sometime drummer.

When buried in deadlines and unable to create sparkling new material, give ‘em some Charlie Parker, that’s my motto.

This box set (that’s a link) has all of the tracks from Parker’s Tiny Grimes session and dozens of other recordings of early Bird.

Oh, all right. One more.

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The Stan Getz video posted here over the weekend drew an array of comments from Rifftides readers. One of them was from his daugher Bev, who took impassioned exception to praise for the late Don Maggin’s Getz biography. In response, I sent Ms. Getz a private message about the last time I spoke with her father. She asked if I would post the story.

I think it was in 1988 or ’89 that your dad played at one of Ken Poston’s West Coast Jazz celebrations. The concert was at a theater in Hermosa Beach. We got there early, and I wandered around for a while. In the parking lot behind the theater, I saw Stan sitting alone on a low cement barrier and went over to say hello.

“Who is it?” he said.

I told him. He focused those incredible blue eyes on me for several seconds, then said, “I think I owe you an apology.” He did, for something that happened more than two decades earlier. I accepted, we shook hands, and I continued my stroll.

The next time I saw Lou Levy, which was often in those days, without resurrecting what the apology was for I told him of the encounter. Lou said, “Yeah, he’s been doing that a lot lately.” I know that toward the end Lou visited Stan regularly in Malibu. He cherished the friendship that began in their days with Woody Herman. He often mentioned it. I miss them both.

In return, Ms. Getz sent this, printed with her permission:

He really wasn’t a monster. Yes, he was a haunted soul, but the drugs and alcohol made him ugly. That ugliness wasn’t the ‘real’ Stan, revealed. His heart was truly good. I’ve seen chemicals change people in the most shocking ways. So sad.

Two days before he passed, Lou, Shorty Rogers and Johnny Mandel came to the house to see him. The three of them stood in front of him with tears streaming down their faces. Dad looked like an Auschwitz victim at that point (the way that cancer can ravage a body) and he had basically lost his voice. I’ll never forget the way he looked at his three friends. If I can put it into words, it would be something like…”What the hell are you guys crying about?? I’m not dead yet! Tell me some jokes! Talk about good times past! Cry at my funeral, but I don’t want to see your effin’ tears now”! I had to take them aside and ask them to please try and put on a brave face, for their friend’s sake, which they absolutely did!

This memory has never left me. As clear today as it was then, June 4, 1991. A Tuesday.

On her YouTube page, Ms. Getz presents a variety of videos featuring her father, including this 1969 appearance on French television by his quartet with Flora Purim.