2009 brought to the Rifftides doorstep an unprecedented number of albums hoping for attention. If I had listened all day every day this year, I could not have paid proper attention to even a small percentage of them. I have been attempting to catch up with some of the CDs in the stacks that occupy what’s left of my floor space (shelves are no longer available). In this series of posts, I will call to your attention a few of them. Some of these items will be not so much reviews as listening suggestions. I won’t bother you with music that bores or disappoints me, and I know that I run the risk of overlooking a masterpiece. C’est la vie et à l’écoute.
Plunge, Dancing On Thin Ice (Immersion). Plunge is among the best post-Katrina jazz developments in New Orleans music. In the city’s tradition of absorbing, assimilating and combining disparate elements, this unorthodox trio is indeed on thin ice at times, without losing sight of the shore of New Orleans convention. Trombonist Mark McGrain, saxophonist Tim Green and bassist James Singleton are out there with chancy harmonies, elastic time and forays into electronics, but they are also inside the blues and slow-drag feelings of their city. They generate moments reminiscent of music as various as the Jimmy Giuffre trio’s folksiness, 1960s free experimentalism, and that long march to the cemetery uptown or out by the lake. This is a lot of music from three people. The deep tones of Singleton’s bass are as evocative in Plunge as in Rhythm Is Our Business (Storyville). Svend Asmussen, Makin’ Whoopee…And Music (Arbors).
Asmussen turned 93 three days ago. He is not as overtly astonishing a violinist in the Arbors CD recorded this year as he was when he made the tracks in the Storyville compilation in 1953 and 1958. He is a deeper one. In the reissue, the novelty recordings that helped make him a Danish national figure include a couple of his vocals that are discomforting on grounds of taste (“Carry Me Back To Old Virginny”) or execution (his rush through “Darktown Strutters Ball”), but there is little of that. His playing is impeccable throughout and in several places palpably exciting. He has two exquisite duets with guitarist Ulrik Neumann.
On Makin’ Whoopee, if the nonagenerian Asmussen is less acrobatic than his 45-year-old self and slightly less sure of bow, his tone is darker, his expressiveness deeper, his celebrated harmonic sense intact and his swing steady. Highlights: his samba called “Fiddler in Rio,” a gorgeous reading of Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages” and a swaggering solo in Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Among his accompanists, pianist Richard Drexler and Asmussen’s longtime guitarist Jacob Fischer are superb.
Ithamara Koorax & Juarez Moreira, Bim Bom: The Complete João Gilberto Songbook (Motéma). Gilberto’s influence on Brazilian and much of the other music of our time has been pervasive for half a century. Yet, his repertoire primarily consists of songs composed by others, most prominently Antonio Carlos Jobim. In the development of modern samba Jobim was to Gilberto as Dizzy Gillespie said Charlie Parker was to him in bebop, the other half of his heartbeat. Gilberto has written only 11 songs, most of them less familiar than “Bim Bom,” each of them exquisite in its own way. This gem of an album by the Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax and guitarist Juarez Moreira gathers all of Gilberto’s songs under one cover for the first time. Gilberto himself has never done that. The purity and tonal accuracy of Koorax’s voice, the perfection of her phrasing and interpretation, beautifully serve the songs in ways that should delight the composer. Moreira accompanies her with subtlety and harmonic resourcefulness that suggest Gilberto’s own guitar playing. He has two tracks to himself. You may be familiar with “Bim Bom,” “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” and “Minha Saudade,” but unless you’re a Gilberto completist, “Vôce Esteve Com Meu Bem?” “Bebel” and the others may be new to you. Koorax and Moreira are a fine way to meet them. Early in the collection, Koorax sings “Hô-Bá-Lá-Lá” in Portuguese and later, in a separate track, in flawlessly unaccented English. I’d be hard-pressed to say which is the more charming.

This seems to be the week for unexpected videos to materialize. In the piece highlighted in the previous exhibit, Jack Berry joined me in lamenting that we could find no evidence of Vince Guaraldi on film or tape. Jazz writer Ken Dryden came to the rescue this morning with a reminder that Guaraldi’s trio backed Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster in a 1962 episode of Ralph J. Gleason’s Jazz Casual program on PBS. Here are two excerpts recalling one of the great singer-instrumentalist partnerships. There is no Guaraldi solo, but superb accompaniment by him, drummer Colin Bailey and a bassist hidden behind Witherspoon who is most likely Monty Budwig.

The Witherspoon-Webster encounter is available on a DVD with another Jazz Casual show devoted to Jimmy Rushing.
And here is Guaraldi finally getting to solo. This is a latterday version of the piece that twenty years earlier had made Webster famous when he was with Duke Ellington.

The recent reissue of music by Vince Guaraldi and subsequent Rifftides and radio ramblings led the veteran print and broadcast journalist Jack Berry to grace a new web site with an account of a piquant Guaraldi adventure. It has to do with Vince’s ability to make lemonade.

When he climbed up on the bench and began his first tune, however, something ominous occurred. There was an entirely dead note on the piano. Guaraldi halted the song and looked into the middle distance with an expression of deep bemusement.
“Here’s trouble,” I predicted to Ms. Hoffman.
Guaraldi tapped the dead note, tentatively at first, then with increasing violence. THUNK, THUNK, THUNK. Dropping his head, he thought for a moment, then began gently tapping the conspicuously expired key.

To read all of Berry’s piece, go to Oregon Music News. It is good to know that he will be contributing often to that site.

When Terry Pollard died the other day, I scoured the internet in hopes of finding video of her playing. I had no luck. But moments ago, Mark Stryker of The Detroit Free Press notified me that a clip has appeared on YouTube of the pianist in Terry Gibbs’s quartet on The Tonight Show in 1956. They play “Gibberish,” on the harmonic pattern of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” then a riotous vibes duet on the Charlie Parker blues “Now’s The Time” with Tonight Show host Steve Allen accompanying on piano. This is an unexpected treasure.

In his accompanying e-mail, Stryker asks:

… while her piano playing is really out of Bud, after watching the clip a couple times, I hear some similarities with early Horace Silver in the pinging evenness of her articulation, the blues allusions and the rumble in her left hand. Do you hear this or am I imagining — Blue Note trio Horace, when he was still playing long 8th note lines, before he distilled his right hand into short, jabbing ideas.

Yes, and I detect in Pollard’s work another derivative of Bud Powell’s influence, that of Hampton Hawes. Pollard spent some time with Gibbs on the west coast when Hawes was at his peak.
But, influences, schminfluences; she was an original.
Pollard’s only album as a leader was a 10-inch vinyl LP on the Bethlehem label, recorded in 1955, less than a year before the Tonight Show appearance. Her quintet included guitarist Howard Roberts and the brilliant trumpter Don Fagerquist. It was never reissued on a 12″ LP, much less on a CD. The 10-incher shows up on e-Bay and other web sites as an expensive auction item. But three tracks of the Terry Pollard LP are included on this CD compilation of performances by Fagerquist, who died in 1974 at the age of 46.

San Francisco’s Company C Contemporary ballet company includes this item in the announcement of its spring season.

Charles Anderson, Beautiful Maladies
 Music by: Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, George Benson and others 

Arranged and performed by: Chet Baker
Expanded from last season’s You Don’t Know What Love Is, Charles Anderson’s Beautiful Maladies, is set to seven exquisite ballads arranged and sung by West Coast Jazz legend Chet Baker. Enveloped by Baker’s silky smooth sounds, this dramatic ballet’s lush, sensuous movement and saturated colors carry us on an emotional journey through the complexities of love.

For details, go here.

Two year after he took over the Isham Jones band, Woody Herman had infused it with his personality and leadership. We see and hear evidence in this piece from a film short made in 1938. It may seem a quaint choice of material, but in the late thirties, King Oliver’s “Doctor Jazz” was still a minor staple in the repertoires of groups small and large. This is the polished pre-Herd Herman enjoying a novelty piece that he had recorded for Decca.

Terry Pollard was a gifted pianist whose ability paralleled that of her fellow Detroiters Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris. She shared their grasp of the bebop vocabulary and, some admirers claimed, swung even harder. I became aware of her when she recorded with the vibraharpist Terry Gibbs in the early 1950s. She is with Gibbs on this album, one of her few recordings. In the picture below, which I pirated from the photo section of Bill Crow’s web site, Ms. Pollard is at Birdland with Gibbs, Crow and drummer Frank Di Vito.

For more on Terry Pollard, see Mark Stryker’s column in today’s Detroit Free Press.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Bob Brookmeyer, but Darcy James Argue gives me a good run for my money. Brookmeyer, the ground-breaking composer, arranger, leader and nonpareil valve trombone soloist, entered his ninth decade this week. Early in December, the Eastman School of Music honored him for his lifetime of achievement and he sat in with the students there. I cannot improve on the eloquence about Brookmeyer in Argue’s Secret Society web log. A sample:

Brookmeyer is one of the greatest living composers, full stop — that’s not hyperbole, that’s just how it is. He is also a tremendous soloist on valve trombone (Bob gave up the slide instrument at the earliest opportunity). His swing feeling is unstoppable and as authentic as it gets: he grew up in Kansas City in the 1930’s, and first heard the legendary Walter Page-Jo Jones edition of the Count Basie band live when he was all of eleven years old. (Bob says the experience “gave me my first full-body thrill.”) He is a true improviser, never reliant on stock licks or patterns, and is consistently inventive and surprising even on the most timeworn standards.

Argue includes five MP3 playbacks of some of Brookmeyer’s best big band work. He links to several other tributes and evaluations and to Brookmeyer’s own account of the Eastman event. To read — and listen to — the whole thing, go here.
Congratulations to Darcy on a fine installment, and happy birthday to Bob Brookmeyer, an American cultural treasure cherished abroad and overdue for official recognition by his country.

“Open Country” is one of Bob Brookmeyer’s notable compositions from the 1950s. Here, he plays it with Gerry Mulligan in Mulligan’s quartet. Wyatt “Bull” Ruther is the bassist, Gus Johnson the drummer/