Jerry Gonzalez Y El Comando de la Clave (Sunnyside)

Since Jerry Gonzalez changed his base of operations from New York to Madrid a decade ago, the trumpeter and congero has worked with many musicians while seeking a satisfactory combination of players for his own band. In Los Comandos de la Clave, he seems to have found it. This is his most stimulating album since the Fort Apache Band’s Rumba Para Monk in 1989.

In company with Cuban and Spanish players who feel rhythm as he does, Gonzalez unleashes his gusto, propensity for chancy high-wire walking and mastery of melodic improvisation. However important melody and harmony are to his conception, rhythm is at its heart. That is particularly evident on “Obsesión,” “Avisale a mi Contrario” and a stunning “Love For Sale,” but it extends to a treatment of “Tenderly” that honors the implication of the tune’s name while imparting a soft urgency. The fullness of Gonzalez’s flugelhorn sound is vital to “Tenderly’s” success, as it is to “In A Sentimental Mood,” done primarily with percussion accompaniment and vocalese by bassist Alaín Perez. As Gonzalez plays obbligato, the Ellington tune’s final choruses flow through a hypnotic group vocal on the repeated word “sentimiento.” Perez now becomes one of the few electric bassists capable of making me reconsider my reservations about the instrument. The impressive Cuban pianist Javier Masso, known as “Caramelo,” and drummer Kiki Ferrer round out the basic quartet. On selected tracks, vocalist Diego el Cigala, cajonista Israel Suarez (“Piraña”), and Alberto “Chele” Cobo playing clave join the band. Piquant nicknames abound in this group. When he lays down his trumpet or flugelhorn, Gonzalez’s congas are prominent in the percussion section.

For its intensity, power and variety, I would single out as the highlight Gonzalez’s and the Comandos’ thematic and metrical development of John Coltrane’s “Resolution”, but the entire album is a highlight. That’s why I voted for it as 2011’s best Latin album in the recently released Rhapsody critics poll. In the video of an extended performance of “Resolution” that just popped up on the web, the quartet come close to topping themselves.

In the days ahead, I’ll be writing about some of the other CDs that I voted for in the critics poll but have not reviewed.

Radio has no interest in music. It is in the advertising business. The record industry has no interest in music. It is in the business of selling pieces of plastic. It is a gigantic machine, almost entirely owned now by international conglomerates, whose only purpose is to accrue profits. It is indifferent to what is on its plastic discs, except insofar as it induces the undiscriminating to buy them. It virtually ignores the discriminating audience because the undiscriminating are so much more numerous.—Gene Lees, The Modern Rhyming Dictionary.

Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, “regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”—Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.—Herbie Hancock

There have been several inquiries about whether we are affected by the winter storms in this part of the world. Yes. My shoveling muscles are affected. Driving can be interesting. But when you wake up to sights like these, who cares if there’s a foot of snow.

Way off in the distance in the upper right is Mount Adams.

Such scenery inevitably leads to thoughts of this:

Woody Herman’s First Herd, recorded in December, 1945. The trumpet solo was by Sonny Berman, the trombone by Bill Harris. Neal Hefti’s arrangement was advanced for the time—his final chords still sound advanced—but there is no doubt that Woody’s vocal was what made the record a hit. If you’d like to hear the recording in better than 78-rpm quality, Mosaic did a splendid job of remastering it for this box set.

The careers of Johnny Otis and Etta James emphasize Duke Ellington’s often-quoted truth: There are two kinds of music—good music and the other kind. In only slightly different language, Igor Stravinsky offered the same wisdom. Otis died early this week at the age of 90, James today at 73. For decades, they made good music. Ms. James invested everything she sang with the power and sensibility of the blues. Her huge hit, Mack Gordon’s and Harry Warren’s “At Last,” was a standard ballad made popular by Glenn Miller in 1942. With the passion of her 1961 version Ms. James made it her own. In The New York Times, Peter Keepnews traces her life and music.

Maintaining a jazz core, Owens and his band freshened rhythm and blues and led the way to rock and roll. Even his slimmest works were underpinned with solid musicianship. He was an accomplished pianist, vibraphonist, drummer and singer. Most of the rockers inspired by Otis had neither his level of artistry nor the desire to achieve it. His obituary in The Los Angeles Times quoted him addressing that point:

“Today’s musicians are better technically,” Otis said in 1979, “but that’s not a virtue in itself. What’s important is the emotional impact…. Most rock or disco today doesn’t stir up anything in my heart — not the way a Picasso does, not the way the blues or gospel does.”

To read the entire article, go here.

Here’s Otis on his television program in 1959 with his biggest hit and, at the end, banter with a guest.

To see the entire half-hour program, including Otis with his band, his vocalists, a duet with Lionel Hampton, and live commercials, go here. The video struggles to get started, but it settles down after a minute or so. It’s worth the wait.

For a review of Otis’s career that puts him in just the right perspective, see the JazzWax piece that Marc Myers posted this morning.

In his debut commentary today on CBS This Morning, Wynton Marsalis recalled that he was in the second grade in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. He talked about being immersed in the black culture and life of New Orleans in the late 1960s, about having a poster of Malcolm X over his bed, about being angry well into his teens, about thinking that King was an Uncle Tom.

My job in New Orleans when Marsalis was a little boy involved reporting on the events and movements of those days when the Civil Rights Law had been on the books for nearly four years, black people were struggling for what the Congress had given them on paper, and much of the southern power structure was fighting—often violently—to see that they didn’t get it. By way of my reporting and my connection with the jazz community, I knew Wynton’s father Ellis, many other black musicians and hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary black citizens in the South. I understood something of their rage and frustration. I also knew of the tolerance, hope and humor that helped see them through that dark time.

Wynton’s CBS essay, a beautifully produced piece of television, recounts the incident that began to turn around his attitude toward MLK. It goes on to draw a bigger conclusion about this life that we’re all in together and what we owe one another. It is worth watching. To see it, go here.

Using as his point of departure a review of Ricky Riccardi’s recent book about Louis Armstrong’s final decades, Steve Provizer concentrates on Armstrong’s debt to grand opera. In his Brilliant Corners blog, Provizer writes about the great man’s trumpet tone as perhaps his defining characteristic.

Hundreds of gifted and proficient trumpet players have come and gone through jazz history, but no one has ever had that tone. Not even close. Yes, others have had an identifiable sound, but their tone basically falls within the parameters of a given historical era. Give me the name of an early jazz player, a swing era player, a bop player, a free player, a neo-mainstream player and I can name you other trumpeters from that era who had a sound that was very similar.

Even though he always talked about his debt to his mentor Joe Oliver, Armstrong seems not to have been subject to that need for identification. His tone rides over jazz history as freely as his solos rode over orchestras and rhythm sections. I believe that Armstrong’s singular tone sent a unique message to the listener: “I am making myself completely vulnerable to you. While part of me is acting (and Armstrong’s acting talent was unassailable, if underutilized), part of me will die if you don’t love what I am giving to you.”

Armstrong’s genius also included melodic invention and revolutionary uses of rhythm that made jazz a soloist’s art and changed the music forever. Given those facts, one could argue that singling out tone as his central quality is out of balance in evaluating his overall contribution. Nonetheless, Provizer’s argument is persuasive enough that it deserves serious consideration. To read his essay, including the case that Armstrong’s latterday performances were “operatic in intention,” go here.

If you need to be reminded of that glorious tone—or of the origin of jazz singing—listen to this 1959 performance in Stuttgart, Germany.

The All-Stars with Pops were Trummy Young,trombone;
 Peanuts Hucko, clarinet;
 Billy Kyle, piano; Mort Herbert, bass; and Danny Barcelona, drums.

As I wrote the day Paul Motian died, Rifftides was not conceived as an obituary blog, but when an important musician leaves, I feel an obligation to observe the passing. I failed to do that when Gordon Beck died at 75, also in November. To many, Beck was best known as a pianist who frequently collaborated with singer Helen Merrill, and as a member of Phil Woods’ European Rhythm Machine in the 1970s, but his contributions to jazz were much more extensive. The Irish flutist Colm “Red” Sullivan, a frequent Rifftides correspondent who has lived in Brazil for the past year or so, is a great admirer of Beck. This week he contributed an appreciation to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math blog. Here is some of what he wrote:

He is most usually compared, or considered in relation to, Bill Evans – but I feel that’s less than half the story. As a soloist he was less narrative driven than a Tommy Flanagan (along with Russ Freeman, always one of his personal favourites, though) or a Barry Harris: not so much text in solo (as with, say, Sonny Rollins or Dexter): his music is all about colour and light, shards of amazing brilliance – and he did have that glorious and singing keyboard sound.

To read all of Red’s detailed and thoroughly informed essay about Gordon Beck, go here.

In this 1991 video, Beck supplies the lyrical opening and closing choruses of a vigorous and adventurous version of Bill Evans’ “Waltz For Debby.” It’s the Gordon Beck-Kenny Wheeler Quintet with Wheeler, trumpet; San Sulzman, tenor saxophone; Dieter Ilg, bass; and Tony Oxley, drums.

For more about Beck, including his discography of more than 100 recordings, visit his website.

Ken Dryden, estimable liner note author and Allmusic.com reviewer, writes in response to yesterday’s post about the Rhapsody critics poll.

Doug, please share your method of winnowing the huge list of new releases and reissues down to a manageable list from which to make your final picks, I think everyone would be interested. I know it is easier for me if I highlight possible picks monthly for possible inclusion on my new arrival log.

One thing I always have to note is that not all of us have had time to hear or even obtain some of these CDs listed by other writers over the course of a year.

Ken, as responsible reviewers trying to stay on top of a jazz scene in the throes of a perpetual population explosion, ideally you and I would listen to everything. In boxes on my office floor (shelf space is a golden memory) are approximately 600 CDs—most of them unsolicited. Assuming that each of them runs an hour, by listening steadily 40 hours a week for 15 weeks I could hear them all, if the men in the white coats hadn’t taken me away by week 10. By the end of the 15th week, a few hundred more albums would have shown up.

I log everything that comes in on a computer spread sheet and put Xs by the albums that are self-evident musts; a new Sonny Rollins, an Armstrong reissue, something by Charlap, Pelt, Jarrett, Mahanthappa or d’Ambrosio, to pull a few names out of the air. The little yellow things in the photograph are notes to myself about prospective review points. The CDs sticking up at an angle are albums I have sort of, maybe, decided to write about. Now that every recent Berklee or North Texas graduate is a record company sending CDs or downloads as business cards, I make choices by name recognition, instinct or the influence of something as subjective as package design or the readability of the accompanying news release. It’s amazing to me that most of these fledgling musicians seem to have press agents. (Did Bird have a press agent?) Well, we don’t want to overlook the next Parker, Evans or Coltrane, but we can’t hear everything.

As for your second point, I know one reviewer whose goal is to have a copy of every jazz record ever made. Samuel Beckett could have based a play on that. I’m willing to resign myself to missing a few.