Digital video surprises pop up on the web. Here is an ad hoc edition of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. The valve trombonist is Mulligan’s frequent collaborator Bob Brookmeyer. Ray Brown, bass, and Art Blakey, drums, may have done this with Mulligan just once. YouTube tells us when, 1981. But who knows where?

Comments provide some of the most valuable content in Rifftides. We encourage everyone to submit comments. The staff decides which ones appear and is tolerant, but there are limits. We evaporate comments that would commercialize the blog by offering links to products or services, especially those of a—er—personal nature. Here is a comment allegedly in response to a post about Jelly Roll Morton. It had a link to a Las Vegas escort service. Considering some of the New Orleans parlors where Jelly played, maybe that makes a kind of sense, even if the comment itself does not.

It is very interesting for me to read this blog. Thank you for it. I like such topics and anything that is connected to them. I would like to read more on that blog soon.

Some of the sneak comments don’t have as much substance as that one. Here, however, is one reacting to reviews of Randy Weston and John McNeil that offers valuable information—if you own a bearded dragon.

I know the bearded dragon definitely does absorb some water via its
vent region and skin. Making them live and eat out of a container made of salt would be like having them ingest a lot of salt per day.

Can’t argue with that. The link was to a site selling Playdough. Maybe someone out there in cyberspace can explain the connection.
If you would like to react to what you actually read, watch or hear on Rifftides, please use the “Comments” link found at the end of each item. We would like to hear from you, unless you’re running the Bearded Dragon Playdough Escort Service.

Rifftidesers who live in or near New York City have the opportunity this week to hear and see together two musicians who have often received favorable mention in Rifftides—and elsewhere. Here is the announcement from one of them, the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson.

Hello everybody. 
Just wanted to let anyone who might be in New York know about the free duo concert I am doing this Wednesday with my dear friend and colleague Emil Viklický, who is making a rare stateside appearance from the Czech Republic. Emil is perhaps the most highly regarded pianist of his country and we have participated in many projects together, going back to the band we formed in college in 1977. Please come out if you can… Happy New Year to everyone!



Emil Viklický/Scott Robinson Duo
Wed., Jan. 5, 7:00 PM
Bohemian National Hall
Czech Center New York
321 E. 73 St., New York City
646-422-3399

Sorry for the late notice, but I just found out about this. The adventurous radio station KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon, is broadcasting a six-part series about the musician Butch Morris. The second part is this evening—soon. For how to tune in, go to the end of this piece. Morris is not merely a composer, arranger, bandleader or conductor. Or he is all of those things and more. Our colleague Howard Mandel, a specialist on the avant garde, says Morris’s music “is not jazz.” Or it is. This promotional clip for a film about Morris will give you a hint.

The Rifftides staff hopes that your 2011 will be as happy as this New Year’s Eve performance by Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. The conductor is Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Feliz Año Nuevo

At this time of year, those who write about music, books, plays, motion pictures, sporting events, chili cookoffs, hog-calling contests and—for all I know—goldfish breeding, are expected to compile lists of the year’s best. I have been complicit in this questionable activity, but I’ve been trying to quit.
In the case of jazz recordings, the notion is absurd that anyone can name the best. You could listen for 12 months during all of your waking hours and not hear, much less evaluate, a tenth of a year’s output of albums. After a few weeks you would be babbling, taken away in a straitjacket. As I have written here, possibly to the point of annoyance, it is impossible to keep up with jazz releases in an era when digital technology enables musicians to be their own record companies. The irony is that they flood a dwindling market.
Nonetheless, my resistance is no match for the irresistible force known as Francis Davis. Francis is the distinguished author and critic who compiles for The Village Voice its annual jazz critics poll. Once again, he persuaded me and 119 other critics (who knew that there are 120 jazz critics?) to submit lists. In the elegant introduction to his massive survey, Mr. Davis writes:

Oregon Music News has a line on its masthead listing the categories the online publication covers:
CLASSICAL, JAZZ/BLUES, ROCK/ROOTS, ACOUSTIC, INDIE, DJ/ELECTRO, SOUL/HIP-HOP, MELTING POT, FAMILY, MUSICALS
I don’t spend much time with two-thirds of those genres and although I found it enlightening to rummage through the OMN sections about them, I doubt that I will be delving deeply into, say, DJ/Electro. I’m glad it’s there for those who need it. The current lead story in the jazz section is Jack Berry’s “Saga of the not-so-lost Oregon Jazz treasure trove (part 2).” Berry updates questions about the fate of a cache of reel-to-reel audio tapes and videos recorded over the years by the late sound man Bob Thompson.
Among the musicians Thompson captured were Art Pepper, Jim Pepper, David Friesen, Dave Frishberg, Floyd Standifer, Nancy King and a few dozen other musicians better known in the Pacific Northwest than they are nationally. The recordings now belong to the Jazz Institute of Los Angeles, where they are stored with no apparent plan for their permanent preservation or eventual release. If there is other music of the quality of a clip of the late tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper, bassist David Friesen and drummer Ron Steen in a basement session, let’s hope that the institute has something in mind. To read Berry’s story and hear Friesen, Pepper and Steen play “My One and Only Love” (mistitled “Bolivar Blues”), click here.

Billy Taylor, a pianist who became a television and radio spokesman for jazz and made the music familiar to millions, died last night in a New York City hospital after suffering heart failure at home. He was 89. In his work on National Public Radio and CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning, Taylor’s playing and relaxed explanations dispelled for many listeners and viewers the notion that jazz was remote, impenetrable and difficult. He earned a doctorate in music in 1975 and chose to be called Dr. Taylor, a title that suited his professorial side. For a summary of his career and accomplishments, see the obituary by Peter Keepnews in The New York Times.
Taylor was born into a middle class North Carolina family and grew up in Washington, D.C. When he arrived in New York in 1943, he was educated, articulate and eager to build on his solid foundation in music. I spoke at length with him as I prepared the notes for the reissue of several of his early 1950s recordings in Billy Taylor Trio. An excerpt gives an idea of the intellectual curiosity he brought to his early music-making and of the difference he made in the development of jazz piano.

Many Rifftides readers may be familiar with Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” because performers including Jessica Williams, Jacques Loussier, Ximo Tébar and Herbie Mann with Bill Evans have recorded jazz or near-jazz versions of that classic of French music. It has not become a jazz standard, but it has assumed a modest place in the repertoire. For those who have not heard the piece as Satie wrote it in 1888, here it is, played by the eminent Satie interpreter Aldo Ciccolini. The performance is from a 1979 Canadian broadcast.