Arizona’s once-open arms close into fist
—Headline, Yakima (Washington) Herald-Republic, 8/3/10

If you live in New York City or are headed there this week, you’re in luck. Rebecca Kilgore is in town, sharing a gig at Feinstein’s with the tenor saxophonist Harry Allen and his quartet. I learned of her appearance by way of The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com, which has a New York Culture section that doesn’t show up in the national print edition. Will Friedwald wrote the piece about Kilgore. He underlines the rarity of her appearances in The Apple.

Once you do hear Ms. Kilgore, however, you’ll be hooked: With her opulent chops, lighter-than-air style, and, above all, her effortless rhythm, Ms. Kilgore is the living embodiment of the hippest singers of the big band era, like Maxine Sullivan, Mildred Bailey, and Helen Ward. Her partner in time for this three-night stand is saxophonist Harry Allen, a master of ballads and blues who plays so brilliantly behind singers because he essentially is one himself. Ms. Kilgore’s intonation has an instrumental perfection to it, while Mr. Allen’s tender tenor boasts a warmly human vocalized edge; together they should approach perfection.

True. All true. To read the whole thing and see a terrific performance photograph of Ms. Kilgore, go here. In case you missed the Rifftides review of her triumphant concert with her husband’s band at The Seasons earlier this year, go here.

Thanks to Rifftides reader Dave Lull for alerting us to a jazz blog that debuted in early July. Although its name, Tony Flood’s House Of Hard Bop, could hardly be more specific, in his first post Mr. Flood opened with a demurer:

Hard Bop: the Dominant, Not Sole, Focus Here.
I care a great deal about what came before it, and what came out of it, most of all the remarkable musicians who faced challenges (pardon the euphemism) posed by the British invasion of 1964. “Hard bop” is an abstraction, but if I manage to lead my visitor away from words about it and to the music itself, which my words might as easily dilute as illuminate, he or she will be able to put meat on the literary bones I offer.

That’s a good beginning. One of Mr. Flood’s early posts is a personalized piece about the little-known pianist Sadik Hakim, whom he knew. To read it, go here and scroll down to July 15.
When you come back (please do), you may care to go to this Rifftides archive piece, then this one, for additional reflections on hard bop.
Mr. Flood—welcome to the neighborhood.

Martin Drew died in London on Thursday of a heart attack. Drew was the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s club for 20 years beginning in 1975. He gained his greatest fame during the same period and into the new century playing around the world in Oscar Peterson’s trios and quartets. Recently he led his quintet The New Couriers, formed in tribute to the late saxophonist Tubby Hayes, with whom he played in the ’60s and early ’70s.
A master of his instrument who seemed uninterested in flaunting his considerable technique, Drew harnessed it in the service of swing and the dynamics of group interaction. Here he is with Peterson and bassist Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen in Berlin in 1985. Despite the erroneous titles on the YouTube screen as the playing begins, the piece is “Cakewalk.”

The French jazz critic Alain Gerber is also a novelist, or vice versa. He published a book in 2007 that may be a biography, a novel, or both. Its title in French is Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde, or Paul Desmond and the Feminine Side of the World. That is the extent of my ability to translate from French to English, and I owe it to Google. I’m the guy who gets by in France for two weeks at a time with Excusez-moi de vous deranger. Here is the Googleized English version of the French publisher’s description of the book:

He loved burning cigarettes at both ends. He loved scotch dewars with a youthful zeal, and then go home to around the early morning, waking in the middle of the afternoon and groping her horn-rimmed spectacles, and contemplate his hangover in the mirror of the bathroom, with a sense of accomplishment. He liked to kill time with extreme gentleness. Dying without impatience. discuss the eye. Talking about literature, poetry, ballet, film, comedy. But, above all, he loved women. […] They were his smoke without fire. telling and music prodigy, this dissipation of shimmer, this splendid infertility.

As Desmond’s English language biographer and drinking companion, I now have one more reason to regret his no longer being among us. I would give about anything—let’s say a bottle of Dewars—to read that passage to him, looking up and pausing after “groping her horn-rimmed spectacles.” Paul infrequently laughed out loud. He was more given to knowing chuckles, but that line might have done the trick. The French website offers this passage from the book:

“All it was – a saxophonist, star or unloved, Don Juan, a man without a wife, a writer without literature, alcoholic, desperate, lonely, good guest, a nostalgic, casual, maker of epigrams and witticisms, amateur puns, storyteller, and many other things – all he was, he never was really “

To see it in Alain Gerber’s native tongue, go here.
For the English translation of the web page, go here. I can find no evidence that Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde exists in anything but French.
Skill in languages is unnecessary for the enjoyment of Desmond, Jim Hall, Gene Wright and Connie Kay playing Matt Dennis’s timeless ballad “Angel Eyes.” This is from one of Paul’s RCA quartet albums of the 1960s. Seldom mentioned in assessments of Desmond’s and Hall’s playing is their ability to find blues implications in non-blues pieces.

The Rifftides staff is pleased to announce a new batch of the recommendations known as Doug’s Picks. Please proceed to the center column, scroll down and,

This rhetorical padding is used by countless politicians and, it seems, nearly everyone interviewed or quoted in the news, from President Obama on down:

Take it out of virtually any sentence and you will lose no meaning. Example:
“The administration will keep a close watch on this, moving forward.”
Getting rid of “moving forward;” now, that would be moving forward.
Of course, properly used, the phrase can be a source of inspiration…or amusement.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself—
Henry Ford

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We will move forward, we will move upward, and yes, we will move onward—
Dan Quayle

Jimmy Heath recently said he’s been hearing since he was a youngster that jazz is dying. The saxophonist and composer/arranger will be 84 in October. Joining him in discounting death rumors is a younger man, the veteran entrepreneur Todd Barkan, who runs the oddly named but vital Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, a bastion of jazz in New York City. Barkan is preparing a fall festival designed to help insure the music’s vitality by bringing together some of its wise elders with promising younger musicians. Pia Catton writes about the project in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“We are reaching a critical stage in jazz music because we’ve lost a lot of people in the last few years,” Mr. Barkan said. “Older artists teach a lot by example and the practice of jazz.”

To learn of Barkan’s plans for the festival and read all of the article, which includes an embedded video, go here.

Someone who identifies himself on YouTube as “liveacid” went to painstaking trouble to manufacture a video of Chet Baker and Paul Desmond playing “Autumn Leaves.” The music track is from Baker’s 1974 album She Was Too Good To Me. It was later reissued on the compilation Chet Baker & Paul Desmond Together. From disparate sources, the editor rounded up shots of Baker, Desmond, pianist Bob James, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Steve Gadd. You’ll hear Hubert Laws’ flute, but “liveacid” did not include shots of Laws.
The breaths Desmond and Baker take don’t match those in the music, although they often come uncannily close. Pay attention to what fingers and drumsticks are doing in relation to the notes and you’ll see the misses and near-misses. You never see the players together. The editor repeatedly recycles the same shots. Still, despite its flaws it’s a clever job of digital cut and paste. It is reason enough to listen again to players who, as the liner notes of that compilation remind us, were wonderful together.

Have a good weekend.

The Japanese have a longstanding love affair with jazz piano. Albums by jazz pianists sell consistently well in Japan. Leading pianists from around the world perform there in concerts and clubs. Indeed, the country has produced its own crops of world-class pianists, among them Toshiko Akiyoshi, Makoto Ozone, Kei Akagi, Junko Onishi and the current phenomenon Hiromi Uehara. A Japanese promoter organizes an annual tour called 100 Gold Fingers that features 10 prominent pianists in concert. The tour has included at one time or another Hank Jones, Roger Kellaway, Eddie Higgins, Jessica Williams, Junior Mance, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, Cedar Walton and Ray Bryant, among many others.
No one in Japan is more committed to jazz piano than Tetsuo Hara. He records horn players and singers, too, but his Venus Records catalog is packed with CDs by some of the music’s most prominent keyboard artists. Hara records many of them in New York under his supervision and that of the veteran producer Todd Barkan. His recordings have superior sound by first-rate engineers like Jim Anderson, David Darlington and Katherine Miller. For years, it was difficult and expensive for people outside Japan to acquire Venus records. Now, most of them are available in the US and elsewhere; at import prices, it’s true, but bargain offers show up on some web sites. Although original compositions occasionally materialize on Venus albums, Mr. Hara’s inclination is to have his artists record familiar music. In general, the results confirm that the song form offers endless possibilities, as even the famously iconoclastic saxophonist Archie Shepp demonstrates in his four Venus CDs.
Today’s topic, however, is pianists.
Roland Hanna, Après Un Reve (Venus). In this exquisite little recital, the pianist bases his improvisations on music by Schubert, Fauré, Borodin, Chopin, Mozart, Dvořák, Mahler and Anton Rubenstein. He recorded it less than two months before he died in November, 2002. Ron Carter’s bass lines and Grady Tate’s all-but-weightless drumming are perfect complements to Hanna, who reaches deep into the harmonic opportunites in pieces generations have loved for their melodies. Hanna’s clarity of conception and lightness of touch are beautifully captured in this flawlessly engineered recording. Among the pleasures here are his chord substitutions as he makes his stately way through Mozart’s indelible “Elvira Madigan” theme from the Op. 21 C Major Piano Concerto, the gravity of the trio’s treatment of the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 and—between those mostly solemn reflections—a Dvořák backbeat boogaloo on “Going Home” from The New World Symphony. This is a gem in Roland Hanna’s discography.
Eddie Higgins, If Dreams Come True (Venus). It is an indication of Higgins’s (1932-2009) popularity in Japan that the Venus catalog has 29 CDs under his name. Several of them, including this one from 2004, are trio or small band albums with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Joe Ascione. In accordance with the Hara dictum, all of the pieces but one are standards. That one, “Shinjuku Twilight,” is an attractive A-minor theme that stimulates Higgins and Leonhart to some of their best soloing in an album in which both are at the tops of their games. “Standards” doesn’t necessarily mean warhorses. “A Weekend in Havana” and “Into the Memory” are hardly overdone, and Higgins does them to a turn. It’s good to hear Higgins caress Xavier Cugat’s rarely performed ‘Nightingale,” convert “Days of Wine and Roses” into a “Killer Joe” soundalike and recall Django Reinhardt with a jaunty revival of “Minor Swing.” Alec Wilder’s “Moon and Sand” becomes a modified samba. The piece de resistance is “St. Louis Blues,” with a boogie woogie component that may not have been intended as tribute to Earl Hines but would surely have generated one of Hines’ thousand-watt smiles if he had heard it.
Stanley Cowell, Dancers In Love (Venus). Cowell recorded this in 1999 with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, young lions beginning to make their names. He had already established his own reputation among musicians but to this day remains unfamiliar even to many dedicated jazz listeners. In part, that is because Cowell has dedicated much of the latter part of his career to jazz education, most recently with tenure at Rutgers University. He is a complete pianist, capable not only of demonstrating the formidable technical aspects of Art Tatum but also of capturing the elusive subtleties and eccentricities of Thelonious Monk. In this album he employs his absolute command of the keyboard not in the service of display but of musical expression. Over the years, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” has become a vehicle for speedsters. Cowell takes it at the pace of a leisurely walk, disclosing the lyricism concealed in its intriguing harmonies. In a brief exposition of Duke Ellington’s “Dancers in Love,” he gets inside Ellington’s whimsy. He laces the cowboy song “Ole Texas” and a South African folk song with musical values and plays the whey out of Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag,” complete with bebop moments that make perfect sense. Cowell includes two originals, a bittersweet ballad called “I Never Dreamed” and “St. Croix,” which sparkles with calypso verve. His inventiveness in Gershwin’s “But Not For Me” is dazzling. This rarity of an album, like Cowell himself, should be better known.