According to Norman Lebrecht, the proprietor of artsjournal.com’s
Slipped Disc, financial tap dancing led to reports that Abbey Road studios was–or
might be–for sale. That does not invalidate the sonic issues raised in this
February 21 Rifftides post. It may relieve the anxieties of audiophiles who
cherish the great old studios. To read Mr. Lebrecht’s followup, go here.

Unexpected and welcome news from a Danish web site:

Denmark’s once legendary jazz club Montmartre re-opens in May 2010 in its original premises in Copenhagen. During the 1960’s and 70’s the club served as a European home for American giants like Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Kenny Drew and many others.

Pianist Niels Lan Doky and a partner will operate the club as a nonprofit enterprise. For details, go here. For recent Rifftides posts involving the Montmartre, go here and here.

Jazz At Lincoln Center has just announced the artists posthumously inducted into its Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame for 2010. They are Bill Evans, Bud Powell, Billy Strayhorn and Sarah Vaughan. Those honored are chosen by vote of a panel of experts from 17 countries.
Jazz at Lincoln Center will present concerts dedicated to the inductees. Here is the schedule:
Intuition: The Music of Bill Evans (May 14-15, 2010)
The Music of Billy Strayhorn (November 5-6, 2010)
The Music of Sarah Vaughan (January 21-22, 2011)
The Music of Bud Powell & Earl Hines (April 29-30, 2011)
Hines was a previous winner, as were 34 others including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Gil Evans, Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Jo Jones. To see the entire list and their photographs, visit the Ertegun Hall of Fame site. The hall is named for the distinguished producer of recordings by musicians from Kid Ory to Ornette Coleman. It was funded by his brother Ahmet, Nesuhi’s partner in Atlantic Records. Nesuhi Ertegun (pictured) died in 1989, Ahmet in 2006.

In the right hands, the accordion can be a wonderfully evocative instrument. To name a few jazz masters of the accordion: George Shearing, Joe Mooney, Eddie Monteiro, Pete Jolly, Ernie Felice, Angelo DiPippo, Tommy Gumina, and Sivuca, whose harmonic and rhythmic use of the accordion enhanced so much fine Brazilian music. Gus DeWert was a splendid accordionist from Kansas City. In his time, Art Van Damme may not have reached the general fame of Dick Contino (“Lady of Spain”), but he was immensely popular. Rifftides contributor Paul Conley of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California, prepared a report on Van Damme, who died last week on the threshold of his tenth decade. To listen to Paul’s piece, click here.
In the wrong hands, the accordion can be reduced to an object of ridicule and cruelty so universal that there is a web site solely devoted to accordion jokes.

For fifty years, the master of cordeen humor has been Pete Barbutti, a triple-threat musician and a comic capable of reducing audiences to helplessness with his accordion routines. Here is his most famous one, from a Tonight Show broadcast during the program’s Johnny Carson zenith.

For more on the sound quality issues raised in the following exhibit (February 21), see the comments that piece has stimulated (click on the Comments button at the end of the item). Also, go here for a golden oldie updating news about Roy DuNann, a late-20th-century hero of recorded sound. That post, in turn, will link you back to the original DuNann installment from March, 2007. Welcome to the Rifftides time machine.
The staff looks forward to your comments on current and past entries.

In their list of priorities, most serious listeners put music’s content before the quality of its sound. In one of our listening sessions at my house, I apologized to Paul Desmond for the scratchy surface of the old vinyl LP I was playing for him. “I don’t care if it’s recorded on cellophane strips,” he said, “as long as I can hear what everybody’s doing.” Nonetheless, Desmond’s own playback equipment was state of the art. He preferred first-class audio.
The Desmond episode came to mind as I read Eric Felten’s Wall Street Journal “De Gustibus” column about the importance of studios to the enjoyment of recorded music. Felten used as his point of departure the report that EMI may sell its Abbey Road Studios. Musicians venerate Abbey Road for the sound quality of recordings made there not only by the Beatles, Radio Head, Duran Duran and dozens of other pop performers but also by classical artists. Sir John Barbirolli conducted the premiere performance of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 at Abbey Road. French Horn virtuoso Dennis Brain recorded the Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds there.
Now, any 18-year-old tenor saxophonist with a computer and a bedroom can be a record company. Felten argues that the loss of the great studios to digital wizardry has resulted in homogenization and a leveling of individuality in recorded sound.

The digital-recording revolution has allowed producers armed with laptops and a few padded rooms in a basement to forgo the expensive environs of the traditional recording hall. Yet this comes at a cost.

Felten singles out the lamented Columbia 30th Street Studio as an example of what we have lost.

The airiness of classic ’50s jazz owed much to the acoustic properties of an old Armenian church in Manhattan converted by Columbia Records into its 30th Street Studio.
Miles Davis’s masterpiece, Kind of Blue, was recorded at 30th Street, and so too, just a couple of months later, was Dave Brubeck’s album Time Out. David Simons, in his book Studio Stories, suggests that the success of those two records owed something to how they sounded, something that wasn’t just a function of the quality of the recording equipment. There was the sympathetic resonance of the studio’s unvarnished wood floor and the distant reverberations reflected by its towering ecclesiastic architecture: “To hear 30th Street is to hear drummer Joe Morello’s snare and kick-drum shots echoing off the 100-foot ceiling during the percussion break in Dave Brubeck’s great ‘Take Five.'”

Much of the intimacy and warmth of Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah-Um (another masterpiece from 1959) and many of Thelonious Monk’s Columbia records also came from the unique properties of the 30th Street Studio. The same can be said of how RCA’s Studios A and B benefited recordings like Mingus’s Tijuana Moods, Desmond’s quartet albums with Jim Hall and the Juilliard String Quartet’s recordings of Debussy, Ravel and Webern. You don’t get that kind of sound with a laptop in your bass player’s rec room.
To read all of Felten’s thought-provoking column, including his reflections on the dread Auto-Tune, go here.

Rifftides reader Lauren Kesner O’Brien writes from New Orleans:

I’m the founder of a new video magazine, www.telegraph21.com, and am contacting you because all week we are featuring great videos about jazz and New Orleans. In particular I thought today and tomorrow’s video feature, The Sound After the Storm, featuring well known musicians Lillian Boutté and Dr. Michael White would be of particular interest to your blog readers:    

http://www.telegraph21.com/video/the-sound-after-the-storm

If it has been a while since you’ve heard these exemplars of modern New Orleans music, now in their 32nd year, here’s your chance. It’s Astral Project on the road last fall at the Artists Quarter in St. Paul, Minnesota. The band is Tony Dagradi, tenor (and at the end soprano) saxophone; Steve Masakowski, guitar; James Singleton, bass; Johnny Vidacovich, drums. The name of the post-Katrina piece is “Dike Finger.” Think about it.

(All right, the headline is a cheap play on words. I tried to resist.)
Speaking of Dawn Clement (see the next exhibit), Jim Wilke will broadcast her trio in concert next Sunday, February 21, at 1 PM Pacific Standard Time. It will be on Wilke’s Jazz Northwest program on KPLU-FM, the Seattle-Tacoma jazz station. He recorded the concert, which was part of the Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz series. The trio is Ms. Clement, piano; Geoff Harper, bass; Jazz Sawyer, drums. Seattle-area listeners can hear it at 88.5 FM. Internet listeners will find it at kplu.org

Jane Ira Bloom, Mental Weather (Outline). This 2008 quartet album by the soprano saxophonist deserved Rifftides attention long before now. Bloom is noted for her control, intonation and full-bodied sound on a notoriously thin and cranky instrument, but those qualities merely serve her creativity, which is at a high level here. She teams with drummer Matt Wilson, bassist Mark Helias and pianist Dawn Clement. Electronic effects sparingly employed on a few tracks enhance the precision and clarity of Bloom’s placement of lines and the freedom of her interaction with the rhythm section. Helias and Wilson solo impressively and, in Wilson’s case, with his customary wit. Their contributions as ensemble players account for a good deal of the album’s richness.
Clement’s playing in this collection further explains why musicians on both coasts are recruiting her for her craftsmanship and the imagination of her soloing. The tone and dynamic variation of her keyboard touch are important elements in her individualism. Clement and Bloom have an ability to anticipate one another that prevents splatter in the execution of a challenging concept like the metric escapades of the title tune. Bloom’s compositions embrace the unsentimental romanticism of “Cello on the Inside” as well as the adventurism of “Electrochemistry,” which is the sort of thing Lennie Tristano might be doing if he were still around. She wrote all of the pieces except “This Nearly Was Mine.” Bloom plays the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad unaccompanied in one ravishing chorus of melody. This one goes into the permanent collection.

Gerald Clayton, Two Shade (Decca). In one dimension, Clayton brings to mind predecessors like Junior Mance, Monty Alexander, Oscar Peterson and Bobby Timmons. The spirit and verve of that brand of full-bodied pianism come across powerfully in “Boogablues” and his vibrant take on “All of You, ” among other tracks. He displays further aspects in the ethereal “Casiotone Pothole,” incorporating harmonized wordless voices and just enough electronic manipulation not to do serious damage; the pointillism of “Trapped in a Dream;” and the prayerful quality of “Sunny Day Go,” with its intimation of Chopin. Bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown help make this a substantial debut album by a pianist who has developed dramatically in the decade since I first heard him as a 16-year-old sitting in with his father, the bassist John Clayton. His power, judgment, taste and maturity are evident in the integrated, cooperative nature of the trio. This band is the antithesis of piano with rhythm accompaniment. Still Clayton’s six-minute performance alone of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma” all but steals the CD. His ad lib introduction is a composition unto itself, the fruit of a fertile mind.

Harry Allen, New York State Of Mind (Challenge). Has Harry Allen been around so long now that people take him for granted? That would be a mistake. He is only 44. He got an early start. Great tenor playing is never out of style, and Allen has long since melded his primary influences–Ben Webster, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims–into an approach with tonal and rhythmic qualities all his own. In this collection of songs about New York, he seems occasionally to also have Al Cohn on his mind. Allen’s rhythm section is drummer Chuck Riggs, bassist Joel Forbes and the young Italian pianist Rossano Sportiello, who can manage in the course of one solo to evoke both Fats Waller and Al Haig. On six of the 11 tunes, the great trombonist John Allred is Allen’s instrumental foil. Their romp through the elusive metering of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is nearly worth the price of the CD. Their out-of-tempo reading of the rarely-heard verse of “Autumn in New York” seals the deal. In his tag to “Broadway Melody,” Allen comes about as close to quarter tones as a saxophone can handle. When is the last time you heard “Sidewalks of New York” or “Chinatown My Chinatown” as serious jazz vehicles? Not since Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong? Maybe it’s time to hear what updated harmonies can do for warhorses. Serious doesn’t mean solemn.