To compensate for lateness in posting a birthday tribute to Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996), the Rifftides staff is pleased to bring you videos of Mulligan from three stages of his career.

First, we find him at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 with his quartet; Mulligan, baritone saxophone; Art Farmer, trumpet; Bill Crow, bass. This seems to be a clip from Bert Stern’s film Jazz on a Summer’s Day. The closing announcement is by Gerry’s friend Willis Conover of the Voice of America. The piece is “As Catch Can.”

In the early 1960s, bossa nova was becoming an important element in jazz and popular music in the United States. One of its founding fathers, Antonio Carlos Jobim, spent a fair amount of time in this country. He visited Mulligan in his apartment in New York and gave him a lesson in phrasing Brazilian rhythm

In 1992, Mulligan took an edition of his tentet to the Vienna Festival in France. Farmer was with him, along with Lee Konitz, Rob McConnell, Michael Phillip Mossman, Kenny Soderblum, Bob Routch, Bill Barber, Ted Rosenthal, Dean Johnson and Ron Vincent. Ignore the “Lee Konitz” super over a shot of Farmer soloing. A superimposed crawl at the end identifies everyone and his instrument. The composition is by one of Gerry’s heroes. Konitz copiously alludes to other Ellington pieces.

We’re missing Mulligan.

Have a good weekend.

Small town newspapers sometimes provide surprisingly interesting coverage of world-traveling jazz artists who pass through or live in their communities. For decades, Marvin Stamm and his wife Nancy have been residents of the Westchester County town of North Salem, an hour north of New York City. This week, the North Salem Daily Voice interviewed the trumpeter about why he lives there. This is some of what he said:

I tell people in my travels about our town, but they find it difficult to believe that I live in such a quiet space, affording reflection and renewal, while being so close to one of the largest cities in the world. . . I always look forward to coming home. I never tire of the reservoir, the hills and the woodlands. . .

To read all of the interview with Stamm, go here.

Pianist George Cables talked with the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, way out west where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific. He told about what he learned from Art Tatum, his favorite instrument other than the piano, and what it was like when he and alto saxophonist Frank Morgan played for prisoners.

We went to San Quentin and played. If you think being there locked-up is life-changing … being there a matter of hours is life-changing. You get to meet some of the people. Alto player Grace Kelly came with us and played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and there were tears in the hardened prisoners, an audience full of teary-eyed big guys that were locked up.

You’ll find all of the Cables story here.

Here’s a followup to the Sarah Vaughan birthday post of March 27. In his Crown Propeller’s Blog, Armin Büttner published a picture of the great singer in interesting company at the Crown Propeller Lounge in Chicago. The club thrived as one of the city’s most vital nightspots from the late 1940s through the 1950s. It specialized in jazz and R&B and booked some of the leading lights in both fields. Here we see world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis with Sarah and trumpeter King Kolax. Crown Propeller owner Norman Schlossberg is behind Louis and Vaughan.

Armin has not yet identified the women on either end. If you know who they are, send a comment and I’ll pass it along to Mr. Büttner. Go here to visit his fascinating blog, see other photos from the Crown Propeller’s heyday and hear music of the period, including a track by Kolax’s excellent little band. Thanks to Armin and the Schlossberg family for permission to use the picture.

The next logical step is to listen to Sarah in a recording from the same era. We might as well wrap our spring theme into this exercise in nostalgia and musicality. The trumpet player who introduces the piece is Miles Davis, a week before his 24th birthday. The rhythm section is Jimmy Jones, piano; Billy Taylor, bass; and J.C. Heard, drums. The clarinetist who joins at the end is Tony Scott. This was May 19, 1950.

All eight of Sarah’s sides with the George Treadwell All-Stars are in this box set of four CDs. In addition to the musicians you heard on “It Might as Well be Spring,” the band included guitarist Mundell Lowe, trombonist Bennie Green and saxophonist Budd Johnson.

Here’s the latest in the Rifftides spring series. The snow is melting fast in the mountains and the rivers are running high. From today’s early afternoon cycling expedition, you see the Naches River just before it merges into the Yakima and below that, a branch of the Yakima River near downtown.

The forecasters say that the rivers in the Pacific Northwest are within a foot of flood stage, which is plenty high enough. Just ask Jimmy Rushing.

We are back from vacation, and look what sprang while we were gone. We’ll have apricots.

There is regrouping, listening, reading and blogging to do. Stay tuned. But, how do we live up to that headline? Ah…of course; Stan Getz, Lou Levy, Monty Budwig and Victor Lewis, 1981.

Vacationing in Santa Barbara, Ojai and environs does not preclude observing Thad Jones’s 90th birthday. There’s no better way to do that than with Thad conducting the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra’s extraordinary version of Jerome Richardson’s “The Groove Merchant.” This is from a European tour probably in the fall of 1969—not ’68, as YouTube indicates.

The reed section: Joe Henderson, Jerry Dodgion, Jerome Richardson, Eddie Daniels, Pepper Adams.
Trumpets: Snooky Young, Danny Moore, Al Porcino, Richard Williams.
Trombones: Eddie Bert, Astley Fennell, Jimmy Knepper, Cliff Heather.
Rhythm: Mel Lewis, drums; Roland Hanna, piano; Richard Davis, bass.
Conductor: Thad Jones.

Be alert for the shot of Snooky at 2:35, enjoying Hanna’s three-minute piano introduction. Who wouldn’t? This got enormous response when I posted it three years ago. Let’s see if it still works.

The Rifftides staff is on vacation, but we took a vote and decided that Sarah Vaughan’s birthday warrants a break. We came across a couple of videos from Sarah’s 1985 appearance at the Satin Doll in Tokyo. They have not had the hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits awarded some of her other pieces from that celebrated engagement. She is in fine voice here—nothing unusual about that—and enjoying her relationship with the audience and her trio, Frank Collett, piano; Bob Maize, bass; and Harold Jones, drums.

I was saddened to learn this morning of the passing of Anthony Lewis, the New York Times columnist and, earlier in his career, nonpareil Supreme Court reporter. Lewis had a nearly unmatched ability to make complex issues clear and understandable. He set standards. For a comprehensive obituary and review of his life, see this Times article.

Journalist, trombonist and bandleader Eric Felten continues his multifaceted ways. He has added internet television to his repertoire, presenting, interviewing and sometimes sitting in with prominent jazz artists. His latest Wall Sreet Journal op-ed piece recalls how a tax rule now nearly forgotten had a dramatic effect on popular music and the evolution of jazz. It begins:

These are strange days, when we are told both that tax incentives can transform technologies yet higher taxes will not drag down the economy. So which is it? Do taxes change behavior or not? Of course they do, but often in ways that policy hands never anticipate, let alone intend. Consider, for example, how federal taxes hobbled Swing music and gave birth to bebop.

To read Felten’s full story of the cabaret tax that kicked in near the end of the second world war, go here.

The Voice of America is best known for its shortwave radio broadcasts overseas. But the VOA is also active on the worldwide web with, among other things, its Music Alley webcasts. Felten hosts Beyond Category, a series of half-hour visits with jazz musicians who live in or visit Washington, DC, his home base. Recent guests have included Larry Willis, Donny McCaslin, Tia Fuller, Eldar Djangirov and Gary Smulyan. His latest subjects are pianist Bill Mays and bassist Tommy Cecil. Here is the entire segment.

For links to previous episodes of Beyond Category or to see the Mays-Cecil segment again, go here.

No sooner do I review the new Ian Carey album (see the previous exhibit) than “Nemuri Kyoshirō” pops up on YouTube with moving pictures of another installment of that Evan Francis (tenor sax)-Kasey Knudsen(alto sax) blues chase and fresh solos by Carey and pianist Adam Shulman. We get a bonus (?)—occasional shots out the window of Oakland at night.

If you are wondering about the name of that tune, Nemuri Kyoshirō is the hero of a series of novels by Renzaburo Shibata. He is described as, “a sleepy-eyed outlaw swordsman, the son of a Japanese mother and a foreign father, who was conceived during a Black Mass.