Geri Allen & Timeline, Live (Motéma). Allen’s considerable strengths are on display in the pianist’s recording with her trio and a percussive guest. She integrates dancer Maurice Chestnut’s steely tapping with the time-keeping and soloing of her gifted young sidemen, drummer Kassa Overall and bassist Kenny Davis. Chestnut expands on the tradition established by Savion Glover and—long before—dancers like Baby Laurence who accommodated themselves to bebop. The crowds at the Oberlin Conservatory and Reed College concerts go wild at the exhilaration worked up by Chestnut and Overall. There is no denying the excitement of what they witnessed. It comes across even when one merely hears Chestnut in action. Near the end of Allen’s “Philly Joe,” the drummer and the dancer neatly encapsulate some of the licks the great drummer Philly Joe Jones inherited from his hero Sidney Catlett. It is impressive and somehow amusing to hear Chestnut dance the melody of Charlie Parker’s “Ah-Leu-Cha.”
It can be argued that the tapping, for all its bracing novelty, eventually becomes too much of a good thing. Allen’s playing more than compensates. It is a reminder of her high rank among the pianists of her generation who succeeded Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. Aside from her inspirational role in the rhythmic energy of the album, with Chestnut sitting out she has supremely lyrical moments in Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes” and an unaccompanied impressionistic treatment of Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.” She is firm in her own style but nonetheless manages to suggest Tyner’s power in his signature composition “Four by Five.”
At the summit of recorded collaborations between a tap dancer and a jazz band, this album may not supplant the 1952 sessions of Fred Astaire with Oscar Peterson, but it rewards repeated hearings. I recommend it for the substance of Allen’s playing and the quality of her trio. Chestnut’s tap dancing is a bonus.

The man who may well be the world’s oldest performing jazz musician is approaching his 99th birthday. Befitting a man nearly the age of the music itself, he’s from New Orleans. Lionel Ferbos was born July 17, 1911. He played trumpet in the 1920s with bands led by Walter “Fats” Pichon and Sidney Desvigne and in the 1930s with Harold Dejan and the quintessential New Orleans alto saxophonist Captain John Handy. In demand for his reading ability and lead playing, Ferbos is the trumpeter in the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra, a band founded by guitarist and clarinetist Lars Edegran in 1967. He plays regularly at the Palm Court Café on Decatur Street. The Palm Court is planning a bash for him on his birthday.

This video produced last year by the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s John McCusker traces Ferbos’s career. I am going to make every effort to adapt Ferbos’s concluding advice about how to insure a long life and a long marriage.

Benny Powell, the veteran trombonist, died last Saturday in New York. Born in New Orleans, Powell was treasured by his colleagues as a superb musician and teacher and as a gentleman who observed old-South standards of courtesy and consideration.
Among the bands that Powell graced were those of Count Basie, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Bill Holman, Benny Goodman, Duke Pearson and Terry Gibbs. Here he is playing the blues in the company of a few of his admiring colleagues: Dizzy Gillespie and Harry “Sweets” Edison (tp), Clark Terry (flh), James Moody and Buddy Tate (ts), Gene Harris (p), Freddie Green (g), Ray Brown (b), Grady Tate (d). Powell has the first solo in this excerpt from a festival in Switzerland in 1985.

Go here for a video montage that captures Benny Powell in several of his roles. DevraDoWrite has news of plans for his services.

As always, the Rifftides staff is trying to keep up with new releases. It can’t be done; the inflow never ceases and listening time is at a premium, but in the next few days we’ll alert you to a few.
Linda Ciofalo, Dancing With Johnny (Lucky Jazz Music). The dancing partner of the title is Johnny Mercer. Ciofalo applies her smooth, rangy voice and flexible phrasing to some of his best-known lyrics. She interprets Mercer beautifully, capturing the joy and irony he intended in “Tangerine,” the ache in “Early Autumn” the tenderness of “I Remember You” and—throughout—the essences of 13 Mercer songs. Pianist John DiMartino heads the excellent rhythm section, which applies occasional Latin or rockish touches. On some tracks, trumpeter Bryan Lynch and saxophonist Joel Frahm provide ensemble support and superb solos. Melisma slightly overburdens some of Ciofalo’s vowels. The drummer is heavy on the backbeat in spots. Those are minor distractions. This is a theme album worthy of its inspiration.

Rifftides reader Dave Bernard sent this inquiry:

What did muenster-dummel mean on the Norgran record jackets?

For those born after the LP era, the terms may draw a blank. Norgran was one of two labels founded by Norman Granz (1918-2001), who created Jazz At The Philharmonic in the 1940s. His other early label was Clef. Norgran and Clef eventually morphed ino Verve. Granz was a pioneer of the jazz concert and a tough, resourceful businessman. He guided the careers of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. He was an unyielding champion of racial equality. On JATP tours he fought back against bigoted bookers, promoters and police—and won. His mien was often dour. Whitney Balliett once wrote that he had “bullying eybrows.”
Still, as Dan Morgenstern observed when we were discussing Granz yesterday, “Norman was not without a sense of humor.” Granz found pretentiousness in the hifalutin’ hype that record companies ground out about high fidelity, so he concocted a phrase that ended up on the covers of his Norgran and Clef albums.

Jack Dummel was Granz’s favorite recording engineer. Muenster was his favorite cheese.
Looking around the internet for related information, I came across this audiophile chat list entry from a record collector excited about finding an old Billie Holiday album:

I found this gem at goodwill today. It needs some more cleaning but sounds pretty good. It says at the top-right Muenster-Dummel hi fi recording so I’m thinking it is a German recording.

Norman might have managed a smile.

James Moody, 4B (IPO). According to the evidence on this CD due for release in early August, Moody at 85 is undiminished in energy, endurance, chops and harmonic imagination. In the companion to last year’s 4A, the winner of the JJA’s 2010 lifetime achievement award moves at deliberate speed— swinging—through jazz and standard classics including “Take The ‘A’ Train,” “Hot House,” “But Not For Me,” “Bye Bye Blackbird” as a waltz, and compositions by Kenny Barron and Todd Coolman. Barron, on piano, and bassist Coolman reconstitute two thirds of Moody’s superb 1980s rhythm section. The impeccable Lewis Nash is the drummer. Nash’s solo on “Take the ‘A’ Train” is a highlight. All hands get plenty of solo time. Throughout, Moody plays the tenor saxophone, his preferred horn. The proceeding has the air of a high-level jam session. That is a compliment. As usual with Moody, joy predominates.

Fred Anderson, who exemplified the Chicago avant garde as a tenor saxophonist and as a club owner gave it work, has died at 81. The Chicago Tribune‘s Howard Reich followed Anderson’s career. He writes in the newspaper:

His was a rigorous, demanding brand of jazz improvisation that bridged the bebop idiom of Charlie Parker (an Anderson hero) with the “free jazz” experiments of the 1960s and thereafter. The fast-flying phrases and blues-driven energy of bebop converged with the non-chordal, anything-goes song structures of “free jazz” in Anderson’s best work.
Whenever Anderson held the stage, he famously leaned forward a bit, unleashing torrents of notes, one phrase cascading atop another, solos often unfolding over a Herculean 20 minutes or more. Even at his 81st birthday show, last March at his beloved Velvet Lounge, the man packed an avalanche of ideas into every soliloquy.

Reich’s obituary of Anderson includes a video interview. To read it, go here.
This brief, rather disjointed, promotional video for his Timeless DVD gives you Anderson playing at his beloved Velvet Lounge and talking about his early career.

Tom Varner, Heaven and Hell (Omnitone). When Varner moved from New York to Seattle in 2005, he left behind none of his French horn virtuosity, compositional skill or avant-garde daring. Heaven and Hell is his meditation on changes in the world and in his life since the 9/11 attack, and on the evolution of his approach to music. The 15-part suite reflects a sensibility that is at home with the influences of, among others, Gil Evans and his fellow arrangers for the Miles Davis nonet, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Mingus and—in a startling segment titled “Birds and Thirds”—the power of triadic ensemble chord voicings that might have come straight from Brahms.
Varner’s lapidary skill in the written sections is complemented by interludes of collective free improvisation connecting the principle movements. Throughout, in addition to the strength of Varner’s audacious French horn, there are superior interpretation and improvisation from trumpeter Russ Johnson; trombonist Chris Stover; clarinetist Jesse Canterbury; saxophonists Saul Cline, Hans Teuber, Mark Taylor, Eric Barber and Jim DeJoie; bassist Phil Sparks; and drummer Byron Vannoy. Johnson is a New Yorker. All of the others are from Seattle. Their excellence emphasizes one of the underground secrets in jazz; the rainy city is one of today’s strongholds of adventuresome creativity.
Among the many highlights is Sparks’ and Vannoy’s bass/drum conversation in “The Trilling Clouds,” with the typically reserved Sparks going farther out than I have ever before heard him. Another is the saxophone pas de trois among Teuber, Taylor and Barber in “Waltz for the Proud Tired Worriers.” Strategically placed in solo and ensemble is Varner’s astonishing horn, featuring one of the most capacious low registers ever heard on the instrument. The ache and agony expressed in Varner’s composing and the soloists’ statements in “Structure Down” are at the heart of the work. This music, in all of its starkness and loveliness, should be heard as a continuum. Taken piecemeal, it would lose its cumulative impact.

The following news release arrived late yesterday:
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) today announced the recipients of the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters Award–the nation’s highest honor in this distinctly American music. For the first time in the program’s 29-year history, in addition to four individual awards, the NEA will present a group award to the Marsalis family, New Orleans’ venerable first family of jazz. All of the 2011 recipients will be publicly honored at the annual awards ceremony and concert on January 11, 2011 at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and receive a $25,000 fellowship award.
The 2011 NEA Jazz Masters are:
Hubert Laws Flutist
David Liebman Saxophonist, Flutist, Composer
Johnny Mandel Composer, Arranger, Trumpeter, Trombonist
Marsalis Family:
Ellis Marsalis, Jr. Pianist, Educator
Branford Marsalis Saxophonist, Composer, Bandleader
Wynton Marsalis Trumpeter, Composer, Educator, Bandleader
Delfeayo Marsalis Trombonist, Producer
Jason Marsalis Percussionist, Vibraphonist
Orrin Keepnews, a jazz producer and author from El Cerrito, California, will receive the 2011 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy.

Rifftides reader Deborah Hendrick e-mailed the following question:

I have noticed that when talking about Louis Armstrong, musician Wynton Marsalis carefully, almost deliberately, pronounces “Louis” as Lou-iss, not Lou-ee, which is how I usually hear the name.
How did Armstong pronounce his name?

He invariably pronounced it Louis, not Louie, as he demonstrates here, with help from a friend.