It’s time to catch up with a few of the CDs that make their way into my house from what is often described, puzzlingly, as the dying jazz scene. If jazz is dying, the people recording and distributing all this music haven’t noticed. Hey, at least I got the piles of recordings off the floor. Now they’re in cardboard boxes and a wicker basket crowding one another off the coffee table in the music room, and there’s no room for a coffee cup.

Ian Carey Quintet + 1, Roads & Codes (Kabocha)

Carey writes lines that flow on astringent harmonies. His trumpet and flugelhorn keep the listener’s attention not through volume, velocity and extended sorties into the stratosphere, but with story telling and a burnished tone. Kasey Knudsen, the +1 of the band’s new name, spells Evan Francis on alto saxophone, leaving Francis to concentrate on tenor sax and flute. With the audacity of her conception and sound, Knudsen is a stimulant. The series of blues choruses and phrases that she and Francis exchange on “Nemuri Kyoshirō” is an album high point. The three-horn front line expands Carey’s arranging palette beyond that of his 2010 CD Contextualizin’, allowing richer ensembles and deeper voicings in figures behind soloists. Pianist Adam Shulman, bassist Fred Randolph and drummer Jon Arkin constitute one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s finest rhythm sections. Carey acknowledges that nearly half of his compositions are under the influence of his heroes Charles Ives (“West London”), Igor Stravinksy (“Andante”), John Coltrane (“Count Up”) and Neil Young (“Dead Man [Theme]”). The influences are points of departure for the individualism of Carey’s writing.

Carey is a commercial artist whose graphics company shares the name of his record label, Kabocha. He created the CD’s package. The digipak features comic strip art that wryly describes the frustration in sending yet another album into the flood of new releases. Here is one panel.

I don’t know what it means, either. I’ll take the CD with me on my next trip to New York and see if the music sounds as good there as it does in the west.

Charles Mingus: The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65 (Mosaic)

For half a century, remnants of the electrifying music that Mingus made with his mid-1960s quintet and sextet have shown up in a jumble of LPs, CDs, cassettes and DVDs. The music is sublime, but the quality of reproduction was often abysmal, and many of the recordings quickly became impossible to find. Now, Mosaic, the National Archives of jazz record companies, brings together 38 performances by the bassist and a collection of sidemen that included some whose power and influence were as nearly great as their leader’s.

Four of the discs have trumpeter Johnny Coles, alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and the rhythm section of Mingus, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Dannie Richmond. They present the April 4, 1964 Town Hall concert in New York that preceded the sextet’s European tour and a concert six days later at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. As I wrote in a 2007 Rifftides piece about this band, “Dolphy the incredible flutist (and saxophonist and bass clarinetist) was a primary source of Mingus’s satisfaction, but far from the only one. This was a unit attuned and interlocked, every soloist in his creative prime, the band’s power and responsiveness at a peak.”

The set begins with relative calm, Byard’s stunning solo tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller, then a Mingus bass solo on “Sophisticated Lady” before the sextet uncorks its power in “So Long Eric.” The piece was titled in recognition of Dolphy’s plan to stay in Europe at the end of tour. That power, even in the ballads, rarely subsides through nearly four hours of concert performances.

Dolphy (pictured right) did leave the the band at the end of the tour and within weeks was dead in Germany following an episode of diabetic shock. Mingus went into depression. He recovered, and although his career had further periods of distinction through the sixties and seventies, none of his bands, large or small, reached the heights of this sextet.

Nonetheless, the reorganized sextet with trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer and saxophonists Charles McPherson and John Handy in for Coles, Dolphy and Jordan, was formidable by comparison with nearly any other small band of the day. Their performances at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis are top flight. When Mingus doubles the size of the group at Monterey with the addition of six premier west coast musicians for “Meditations on Integration,” the band reaches a level of excitement that inspires an extended ovation from the festival audience.

Even without its five tracks of previously unissued music, this set would have been important. With them, it is indispensable.

Duke Ellington: Newport 1958 (Mosaic Singles)

Columbia Records’ LP, and its later CD allegedly of Ellington’s ’58 Newport appearance, was a deception. Eight of the ten tracks were not recorded at the festival but later in a studio. Columbia tacked on real introductions from Peabody Park and mixed in festival applause and crowd noise. Such foolery was not uncommon in the ’50s and ‘60s. The results were nearly always obvious. In this case, the music was so good that generations of listeners put up with the fakery. Mosaic reissues the studio tracks identified, unadulterated and with sound improved through remastering. To those eight pieces, plus “Just Scratchin’ the Surface” and “Happy Reunion” they add four other tracks recorded at the festival but never before issued.

So much for the backstory. The late-period Ellington band is in fine shape, sounding happy. There are superior solos by Johnny Hodges, Clark Terry, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves, Shorty Baker, Ray Nance, Russell Procope, Cat Anderson and Sam Woodyard. This version of “El Gato” has one of the most gripping four-trumpet chase sequences ever recorded, Hodges’ work on “Multicolored Blue” can inspire deep sighs, and the stylistic spoofery in “Jazz Festival Jazz” is great fun. It’s good to have this album cleaned up, expanded and reclaimed.

I missed Marian McPartland’s birthday. Now, she’s 95 plus one day, and I wish her all the best. Here she is in 1955 with her Hickory House trio, Bill Crow on bass, Joe Morello on drums (courtesy of Steve Cerra’s Jazz Profiles), then in solo with her ballad “Afterglow” at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1975.

Happy birthday, McP. You’re a treasure.

At the risk of being a fuddy-duddy I don’t have a computer; I don’t have e-mail; and I really don’t need something in my house that I would be sitting in front of for hours.

By the way, I got a Grammy, which was a big thrill.

It’s awful to have to, but I’ve started thinking about that, you know. 86. I’m thinking, well, maybe I might make it to 90.—(2004)

The Brubeck Institute Festival—underway since Monday—gets into full swing tonight in Stockton, California, with a concert by the Tom Harrell Quintet. Other major musicians involved include The Brubeck Brothers Quartet, Gunther Schuller, Wynton Marsalis and Joe Gilman. Paul Conley reports about the festival for Capital Public Radio and KXJZ in Sacramento. To hear Paul’s story about the first major Brubeck Institute event since Dave’s death in December, click here.

For a compete festival schedule, go here.

…it’s another; in this case that pesky gremlin. Rifftides finally banished him after two weeks of intermittent computer attacks, so he moved on to disrupt power to the western data center that provides the energy artsjournal.com blogs need to get on the internet. Rifftides was out of business for several hours today and inaccessible to thousands of readers. The hosts have it fixed. (Fingers crossed.)

Most of my thinking about gremlins lately has been confined to cursing them, but it occurred to me that there might be gremlin music. Sure enough, there is. It’s by the prolific film composer Jerry Goldsmith for a movie called—what else?—Gremlins. Here, a suite from the score is played by the Tenerife (Spain) Film Orchestra, conducted by Mark Snow.

It turns out that since 2007 Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, has hosted an important film festival.

Twitter and I are not strangers, but I recognize the addictive potential of tweeting and try not to get hooked. Still, occasional Rifftides announcements via Twitter turn up followers whom I, in turn, follow. A new one is Ken Pickering, the artistic director of the Vancouver, Canada, Jazz Festival. He liked an item he found in the archive and tweeted about it. It was from this blog’s Neolithic era, about the late composer, arranger and bandleader Rod Levitt.

Mr. Pickering’s tweet reminded me how much I miss Levitt and how jazz now could use his rare combination of solid musicianship, adventurousness and wit. Levitt’s recorded work is increasingly hard to find. Here is that piece, revised slightly and illustrated.
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From January 15, 2007

Rifftides reader Russell Chase writes:

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1933 movie 42nd Street on TV. I promised myself that I would listen to Rod Levitt’s LP with the same title today. I wound up playing all of the four Levitt LPs that I have. They have always rated very highly among my favorite things. Such consistently interesting writing and fine playing over a span of four LPs is hard to match.
When your name popped out of the notes of the Insight album, you were immediately nominated as the person with whom I would share my elation at having a non-CD day, and the reason why.

Well, Mr. Chase, now you have shared your elation with all of us, and that’s good; Levitt’s music deserves recognition. Rod Levitt played trombone in the Dizzy Gillespie big band that that toured Latin America and the Middle East in 1956, and in Gil Evans’ orchestra. For a time, he made a dependable living in the orchestra of the Radio City Music Hall. But he had a compulsion to write music, and in the early 1960s, he began turning out ingenious arrangements for an eight-piece rehearsal band. Levitt made use of audacious harmonies and spacious voicings, and many of his horn players doubled instruments, so that the octet often sounded twice its size. He adored Duke Ellington, and reflected Ellington’s influence. Yet, without embracing free jazz, he also managed to impart a rambunctious feeling of abandon, and Down Beat included him in a survey article about nonconformist composers. All of the other subjects of the piece were card-carrying members of the avant garde. I remember Levitt’s being amused, if surprised, by the company in which the magazine put him.

Over three or four years in the mid-sixties, he turned out the four albums Russ Chase mentions. They comprise a body of recordings that are fresh, evocative and enormously entertaining forty years later. The writing was daring, finely crafted and marinated in wit. Most of his players were top studio professionals who were superb improvisers. Among them were the trumpeters Rolf Ericson and Bill Berry, the pianist Sy Johnson and the saxophonists Buzz Renn and Gene Allen. Levitt’s gutsy, often raucous trombone was at the center of many arrangements, but he also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. None of Levitt’s three RCA Victor albums has been reissued on CD. Five tracks made it onto a 1988 RCA compilation CD with other works by Hal McKusick and John Carisi. The disc is difficult to track down. Amazon continues to list it, but as “currently unavailable.” Trolling the web may now and then turn up vinyl copies of Insight and Solid Ground, but 42nd Street seems to have evaporated.

For the most part, the demand by a modest-sized core of listeners for reissue of Levitt’s albums has fallen on deaf ears (also known as recording company accounting departments), but there is a happy exception. Before his company sold itself to Concord Records, Ralph Kaffel, the president of Fantasy, Inc., succumbed to years of entreaties from pesky critics and reissued Levitt’s first album on Riverside as a CD in the OJC series. That was 1963’s Dynamic Sound Patterns. In his 2003 National Public Radio review of the CD, Kevin Whitehead said, “He liked blaring harmonies and primary colors,” and that’s true, but Levitt also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. He knew how to use space. He was a master of balance among the sections and a creator of droll surprises. The enthusiastic cadre of admirers he accumulated with those LPs wasn’t big enough to earn him a renewal with RCA. Now that the Victor catalogue has been absorbed into the massive Sony empire, chances of the Levitts being reissued seem small. By the early seventies, possibly discouraged but a cheerful realist, Levitt began making a living writing music for advertising and turned out some of the hippest background music ever to grace TV commercials in New York. He kept the octet going as a rehearsal group, playing occasional concerts and, sometimes, simply hiring musicians to play his charts for fun. He also played for a time in the 1970s in Chuck Israels’ National Jazz Ensemble, a pioneer jazz repertory orchestra. For the NJE, he expanded the arrangement of “His Masters Voice,” Levitt’s evocative tribute to Duke Ellington. Happily, it is available in a splendid reissue CD on the Chiaroscuro label. For the past several years, Rod Levitt has been living in Vermont, largely inactive in music.

A sidebar to the story: When I was anchoring and reporting television news in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-sixties, I was addicted to Dynamic Sound Patterns. Levitt came to his hometown to visit his parents, I invited him to be a guest on a series I put together, a hybrid documentary and discussion program. It was called Insight. I told Levitt the broadcast needed theme music and asked, with trepidation, what it would cost to commission him to write it. He named what I thought was a reasonable figure. The program manager approved the deal. When Levitt got back to New York, he wrote the music, recorded it with his octet, notified me that it was ready and sent an invoice. The management reneged. They wouldn’t pay the bill. I was angry and embarrassed. When I told Levitt, he said not to worry, he would make use of the music. It became the title tune of his next album. In the liner notes, he mentioned me and the station, kindly. That’s class.

The piece stands alone, but it was also perfect for its intended use. In the unlikely event that I ever go back into television, I’ll do a documentary series, call it Insight, use that music and see that Rod gets paid for it.
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Rod Levitt died less than six months following this post, on May 8, 2007.

The new batch of suggested listening and viewing—a long time coming—will be posted in the main column for a day or so before the recommendations move down for new exhibits. They will be in the right column under Doug’s Picks until the staff can be persuaded to post new ones. This time around, we have two trumpeters named Miles; one guitarist twice; an enchanting CD by a young singer with an (ahem) experienced pianist; and a music book held over because rereading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed has kept me occupied quite enough lately, thank you.

Just because:

The drummer Artt Frank is observing his 80th birthday and the impending publication of his memoir about work and friendship with Chet Baker (they are pictured together). On Frank’s website, Baker is quoted as saying, “Artt Frank is my all-time favorite drummer. He always seems to know where I’m going.” This performance from one of their 1981 gigs features impressive latterday blues playing by the trumpeter and highlights Frank’s propulsive brush work behind Baker.

For an appreciation of Frank that spun off a post about the pioneering drummer Tiny Kahn, see this piece from the early days of Rifftides.