I’ve been sampling CDs by singers. For the most part, the CDs are new, but not all of the singers are. As an example, take Jimmy Rushing…please.
Jimmy Rushing, The Scene: Live In New York (High Note). Rushing became famous with the Count Basie band of the late 1930s and was with Basie until 1950. The cliché most often applied to him is “blues shouter,” and he was a magnificent one. The designation sells him short, though. Rushing was also a superlative singer of standard songs, particularly of what used to be called rhythm ballads. In the 1960s and nearly to the time of his death in 1972, He sang frequently with tenor saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. They appeared in other places, but most often at the Half Note in lower Manhattan. One of my imperishable memories is of Rushing, Sims, Cohn, pianist Dave Frishberg and a bassist and drummer jammed onto the Half Note’s little bandstand having the time of their lives, spreading joy. Most often, the drummer was Mousey Alexander. Frequently, the bassist was Major Holley. Alexander and Holley are on this album. Frishberg is the pianist throughout, although the liner notes and the tray card indicate that there is an additional pianist.
Alan Grant of New York’s WABC Radio regularly broadcast from the Half Note in the mid-sixties. His shows often featured Rushing and company. There is little question that these tracks come from those remote broadcasts, but the record company avoids identifying the club or the source of the tapes. That is of small moment, perhaps, except that this album is not only entertaining, it also documents a time and place in jazz history and should provide the facts. The CD includes two instrumentals by the Sims-Cohn group, Zoot’s “Red Door” and Al’s “The Note,” the latter misidentified as “It’s Noteworthy.”
Discographical inaccuracies aside, music is the name of the game, and the game is played no better than Rushing and his companions play it here. Rushing is in great voice and high spirits. Cohn, Sims and the rhythm section reciprocate. The rescue and release of these performances is good news.
The Scene is a fitting companion to Rushing’s last recording, The You And Me That Used To Be, an 1972 RCA Bluebird album with Sims, Cohn, Frishberg, Budd Johnson, Ray Nance, Milt Hinton and Mel Lewis playing Frishberg’s perfectly tailored arrangements. The bad news about The You And Me That Used To Be is that it’s out of print and selling for as much as $88.45 on Amazon. The good news is that It’s available for $1.65 as an MP3 download. Maybe there’s something to this digital commerce stuff after all.
Here is Jimmy Rushing in the 1960s accompanying himself in one of his favorite blues. This is from Ralph J. Gleason’s Jazz Casual public television series.

Briefly: Other Vocal CDs
Connie Evingson: Little Did I Dream (Minnehaha Music). The subtitle is Songs By Dave Frishberg. He traveled to his native Minnesota to record with Evingson, a fine vocalist. Their Twin Cities colleagues include his old St. Paul pal Dave Karr, an accomplished saxophonist. Evingson brings her individuality and spark to fourteen of Frishberg’s songs. Among them are “Zoot Walks In,” “My Attorney Bernie” and a touching treatment of “Listen Here.”
Retta Christie with David Evans and Dave Frishberg (Retta). Christie is a country singer who leads her own band in Oregon. Here, however, she teams with Frishberg and Evans in a strange-bedfellows set of greater- and lesser-known songs that work surprisingly well together. Her voice is light, her delivery straightforward. Frishberg gets plenty of solo time, as does Evans, one of the great undercover secrets among tenor saxophonists. There’s no drummer. Christie, Frishberg and Evans don’t need one. If you’ve always wanted to hear “The Thrill is Gone” and “Ridin’ Down the Canyon” under the same cover, this is the one for you.
John Pizzarelli with The Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra, Dear Mr. Sinatra (Telarc). What, another Sinatra tribute? Yes, and beautifully executed by the Clayton-Hamiltons and Pizzarelli being his musical self singing songs associated with Sinatra. He also plays satisfying guitar solos, incorporating that voice-single string unison voodoo that he does so well. The arrangements, mostly by John Clatyton, are subtle, only now and then hinting at Nelson Riddle. This has been sitting in my CD stacks unheard for a couple of years. I wish that I had put it on sooner.
Lisa Sokolov, A Quiet Thing (Laughing Horse). Intriguing in her eccentricity, Sokolov takes flying leaps at time, diction, intonation and interpretation. She usually lands right side up. She’s a vocal actress and a chance-taker well matched with adventurous musicians including bassist Cameron Brown, pianist John DiMartino and drummer Gerry Hemingway.

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Ethan Iverson’s recollection of that quaint piece of audio gear, the reel-to-reel tape recorder, triggered even older thoughts from the eminent bassist and anecdotist Bill Crow.

My memories of early equipment go clear back to the Edison cylinder record player. My dad bought one (used) around 1933. It came with a box of cylinders, maybe a dozen, from which I learned a couple of Harry Lauder songs, some vaudeville tunes, and a song called “The Last Long Mile,” the lyrics of which I remember almost entirely. It was a slightly humorous complaint from a guy marching with the army, and I found out from Doug’s book many years later, that it was written by Paul Desmond’s father! I wish I had found that out while Paul was still with us… I could have cracked him up by singing it to him.
One of my mother’s pupils came by the house one day with a portable disc recorder, on which I engraved a child’s voice singing “On The Good Ship Lollipop.” My first personal record player (1943) was a tiny plastic turntable that I could wire into my table radio, and on which I played my beginning collection of jazz 78s.
When I got out of the army in 1949, I bought the first available tape recorder, a Brush Soundmirror, which had a fatal flaw: the tape went at too sharp an angle around a capstan, and that angle increased as the tape wound off the reel, causing drag that sometimes slowed the tape down. Their next model featured a straight through passage for the tape, but I waited until Wollensak came out with a small portable and I put a lot of music on that. Lost forever, since the tape that was available then was oxide on paper, which deteriorated in just a few years. My college friend went a different way, having bought a Sears wire recorder, on which he recorded my first efforts as a jazz trombonist. All gone, probably fortunately.

To visit Mr. Crow’s web site, click here.

For your listening, viewing and reading delectation, the Rifftides staff presents the new selection of Doug’s Picks. Please visit the center column.

The news from Connecticut is that Dave Brubeck’s two-week hospitalization for a viral infection is at an end. The setback made him miss the premiere in California last week of a new orchestral work inspired by Ansel Adams. He and his son Chris had been working on it for a year. Brubeck is back home and back at work, but his doctors felt that a transcontinental trip was not a good idea for a recuperating 88-year-old. In advance of the premiere, Paul Conley spoke with the Brubecks, father and son, and did a report for National Public Radio. To hear it and see one of Adams’ most famous photos, follow this link and click on “Listen.”

Comments are still arriving about Bill Kirchner’s list of recommended big band recordings since 1955. You will find the original item here and followups here. Not all of the comments are coming to Rifftides. As discussions will in the internet age, this one gravitated to other sites.
Here is a little of what the unfailingly provocative young composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote on his Secrety Society web site.

The thing is, there’s an awful lot of bigband music that is important to the history of jazz that doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I’m afraid this would include a s— -ton of music that is beloved by true bigband connoisseurs. For instance, I know this sounds heretical, but most of Count Basie’s output after Jo Jones left the group leaves me totally cold. Also, I’ve never really been able to develop much affection for the various Stan Kenton bands, etc, even when I respect the craftsmanship and inventiveness of some of the writing.
The stuff I like best and respond to viscerally and have invested time in studying in detail really represents only a small corner of the vast bigband universe. The center of this solar system is definitely the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra — especially the first edition of the group with Richard Davis on bass. This has been my favorite bigband since I was thirteen years old.

If Darcy wants to make “big band” one word, he’ll just have to deal with the usage police. To read all of his entry, which includes recommendations of his own, go here. His readers chime in with provocative comments of their own.
On Do The Math, Ethan Iverson, pianist of The Bad Plus, rambles engagingly with the big band discussion as a sort of touch stone. Here’s part of his rambling.

I didn’t come from a family interested in music. We had a record player but hardly any records. However, my aunt and uncle had a small collection of 60’s-era stuff, and when we visited them I would head straight to their living room and start spinning platters. The two discs that just astounded me were This Time By Basie: Hits of the 50s and 60s and Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings by Art Simmons.
(Simmons isn’t well-known; I haven’t heard his record in about 25 years. In fact, I had forgotten entirely about Boogie Woogie Piano Stylings until today. Within a few minutes of reading Darcy’s post, I found and purchased a copy on eBay for a slight sum. Looking at this fabulous cover art really takes me back.)
After realizing that I always played them over and over, my relatives let me borrow the Basie and Simmons records so that I could tape them on my home reel-to-reel player.
Perhaps my younger readers don’t know what a reel-to-reel player is. The picture at the top of this post might look like serious studio equipment – and maybe it is, high-end ones are still used – but the one in my house looked just like that and was merely the clunky predecessor to the compact cassette tape. A reel-to-reel tape deck was the only common way to tape an LP before about 1970 or so.

I stole Ethan’s picture of the old Sony reel-to-reel machine. Iverson does get back to the matter of big bands. To read his entire entry, click here.
I still have the Revox reel-to-reel I inherited from Paul Desmond and use it frequently. I wish that some of my newer components were of Revox quality.

Bud Shank’s honesty, forthrightness and cheerfulness came through in his playing. Those qualities and his transcendent musicianship were evident to all but those deafened by categorical imperatives having to do with geography, race and style. He lived to be 82, and he worked to the end, one of the great alto saxophonists in jazz. Shank died Thursday night shortly after arriving home in Tucson, Arizona, from Southern California. He had been working on a recording project. Earlier this year, he recorded a CD in a club engagement with the rhythm section he spent a lot of time with over the past decade, pianist Bill Mays, bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Joe LaBarbera. Mays sent a message this morning:

Our last work together was in January (4 nights at L.A.’s Jazz Bakery). Some very memorable tracks were recorded that week and I hope they see release some day. Bud was always willing to let the music “go where it wants” and set minimum “controls” on the players. His enthusiasm, optimism, laugh, and sense of humor, were a delight (after moving to Arizona he bought a truck and installed his no-more-used clarinet in the rifle rack!). I will miss the man very much.

Shank was inconvenienced by the pulmonary problems that restricted his mobility the past couple of years. He spent more time in a wheel chair than suited him. Nonetheless, he traveled long distances to perform, as far as Japan, maintaining the vigor of his playing and the essential buoyancy that dominated his personality.
Over the years, we worked together on projects and I spent considerable time with him. When I was researching the long essay that became the booklet for the 1998 Mosaic box set The Pacific Jazz Bud Shank Studio Sessions (limited edition, long since sold out), I stayed with Bud and Linda Shank at their house in the woods near Port Townsend, Washington. Here’s a passage that says something about the man and about his lack of self-deception.

If the child is father to the man, then the thin, crew-cut diffident, inward-looking Bud Shank begat his opposite number. His substantial figure comfortable on a couch in a music room above a spacious lawn surrounded by tall pines, Shank agreed to do something he detests, look backward in music. With a mane of grey hair and a beard that squares off a solid jaw he has the look of a Victorian sea captain. His appearance is appropriate to the history of the seafaring town he lives in, but one floor below is a garage containing his collection of Porsches and an Infiniti Q45. Shank’s laugh comes often and usually accompanies strong opinions. It has resonance and a certain wryness. I persuaded him to listen to “Bag of Blues,” Bob Cooper’s unusual composition from 1956.
When it was over, he said, laughing, “I was very young at the time. Formative period. Still learning. Still searching. I could see evidence of some of those influences we talked about. Spots of Zoot Sims, spots of Lee Konitz, spots of Charlie Parker.
I told him, “When you were listening to yourself play a double-time passage, you said, ‘Show-off.'”
“Well, yeah, but I really wasn’t showing off in those days. It came from some musical reason but it didn’t fit the flow of what I was doing before or after. I guess that’s why it disturbed me. Again, that’s the mish-mosh of different influences that were in me in those days. I didn’t have it together yet.

Later, that night, or maybe the next day, we talked about his rise to fame in the 1950s when Los Angeles, always a good jazz town, became the center of what commercial interests and some critics decided was a school or movement. Shank’s quartet then had Claude Williamson on piano, Don Prell on bass and Chuck Flores on drums.

With the exception of those caught in the war between beboppers and moldy figs that was manufactured by know-nothing critics in the 1940s, no musicians have been more unfairly typecast than the young jazz players of Los Angeles in the 1950s.
“Neither Claude nor Chuck nor I was playing what was known as ‘west coast jazz’ music at that time,” Shank said. ‘That happened a few years before then and we were all breaking away from that.”
“Meaning what?” I asked. “What were you breaking away from?”
“The very delicate way that we all played in earlier years…” He stopped in mid-sentence. “I don’t even know what the hell west coast jazz is,” he said, with exasperation and no wry laugh. “It was something different from what they were doing in New York, so the critics called it west coast jazz. That Miles Davis Birth Of The Cool album, out of New York, probably started west coast jazz. It was also very organized, predetermined, written. It was a little bit more intellectual, shall I say, than had happened before. Jimmy Giuffre, Buddy Childers, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, Marty Paich, Bob Cooper, almost everybody involved; we all came from somewhere else, New York, Texas, Chicago, Ohio. The fact that we were in L.A. around the orange trees had nothing to do with it. I really think that everybody played the way they would have played no matter where they were. New York writers, they’re the ones who invented west coast jazz.”
“Those bastards,” I said.
“Those bastards,” he said, laughing uproariously.

It was a source of frustration to Shank that, for many listeners who didn’t keep up with music, his flute playing defined him. During his membership in the Lighthouse All-Stars in the fifties, he became one of the best jazz flutists in the world.

“I had always thought of myself as a saxophone player,” he told me, “but the flute thing just appeared and all of a sudden, it was ‘Oh, flute, flute, Bud Shank, flute,’ which didn’t sit too well, but at least people were noticing me, so, okay, let’s keep on doing it. I was a saxophone player. That’s all I’d ever thought of.”

He did a lot of flute playing in the sixties and early seventies, when rock and roll stifled opportunities in jazz and he supplemented his income with studio work. Shank is still a model for many who play the instrument. He disposed of the flute in the mid-seventies, along with his career in the studios. “From now on,” he said, “I’m a bebop alto player.” As he concentrated on the saxophone, the aggressiveness, even ferocity, of his playing expanded along with the size of his sound and a magnificent feeling of liberation.
What a bebop alto player he was.

The text of a remarkable address is making its way around the internet through the part of the world in which music matters, which is everywhere. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the Boston Conservatory’s music division, greeted the parents of incoming freshman students. He made the speech in the fall of 2004, but it has taken on new life lately, because of passages like this:

I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds

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And this, which he told the parents he would be saying to their children:

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

Before he reached that point in his address, Paulnack talked about the ancient Greeks’ recognition of the similarity between music and astronomy, about Olivier Messiaen in a Nazi concentration camp writing and performing his Quartet For The End Time, about how the September 11 attack made Paulnack question the value of music, about how the performance of a piece by Aaron Copland affected a pilot who had seen a friend die in war half a century earlier.
Paulnack’s talk is about the unifying, healing nature of music. You can read the whole thing by clicking here.
I have never heard Karl Paulnack play the piano. His speech makes me want to.

Since Rifftides began nearly four years ago, I have posted frequently about Ben Webster – but not frequently enough. That would be impossible. Few improvising artists have achieved Webster’s level of supremacy at speaking their pieces with eloquence and brevity. I would not suggest that eloquence has fled; it is possible to be eloquent at length. But in the post-Coltrane age of solos as tests of endurance it may be unnecessary to point out that succinctness is not one of the guidelines in most jazz playbooks. Webster is an antidote to the ennui induced by long-windedness.
This year is the 100th anniversary of Webster’s birth. You may count on my finding every opportunity to call to your attention the art of that incomparable tenor saxophonist. This is a link to a recent piece that addresses a reader’s distress with a tenor saxophonist who pays tribute to Webster. It also leads you to video of a heartbreakingly beautiful Webster ballad performance and a series of comments from Rifftides readers. This link takes you to a piece from 2005 in which a woman who is neither a musician nor a critic encapsulates in a sentence the essence of Webster’s musical persona.
Here is Webster in two videos that materialized on YouTube just last November. He is with Oscar Peterson, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; and Tony Inzalaco, drums. The first piece is the blues he called “Poutin’.” The second is “Sunday,” one of his favorites for decades. This would seem to be early 1970s. Webster died in 1973.

Okay, we’ve had enough fun with Sue Raney’s Scopitone romp in the park. To see it and the comments about it, go here. But first, watch and listen to Ms. Raney sing a Henry Mancini song that has long been one of her signature pieces. This is the sort of thing I had in mind the other day when I used the adjective “divine” in referring to her.

I don’t know who the alto saxophone soloist is. He did a lovely job with the bridge.

Old pal Tim Ryan called my attention to an interview Judith Schlesinger, our leading combination jazz writer/psychotherapist, did with guitarist Gene Bertoncini nearly a year ago. The interview ran on the All About Jazz web site, and I missed it last April. Maybe you missed it, too. It is fascinating for its insights into Bertoncini’s musical thinking, his quick wit and his interchanges with Dr. Schlesinger. Verbatim transcribed interviews are far from my favorite form of journalism, but when they work, they can be valuable. This one works.
Here is an exchange that grew out of Judith’s mention of Bertoncini’s study of architecture at Notre Dame. He didn’t realize that he and Antonio Carlos Jobim had architecture in common. Throughout, Bertoncini is identified as GB, Dr. Schlesinger as AAJ.

AAJ: In discussing your music, people often speculate about how your architect training informs your playing. There’s another great musician who was also into architecture, and that was Jobim.
GB: Really?
AAJ: Apparently he was always good at drawing, so when he got married and needed to make some reliable money, he took the entrance exams for architecture school. But he only studied a year before going back to music.
GB: Wow, that’s wonderful! I didn’t know that. I owe you for this. We met backstage once. Did he ever talk about being influenced by architecture?
AAJ: Not that I know of, but Goethe once said that architecture was “frozen music.” What’s your take on the connection?
GB: In architecture, you’re analyzing a couple of things: artistic balance, balance in design and what constitutes good design, and the needs of people. When designing a structure of any kind you have to be concerned about what’s going to be happening inside the structure, and how it’s going to make life better for the people in it, whether in a residential or commercial situation. And that opens up all kinds of sensitivities in you. This awareness can easily translate into your music: it becomes a combination of satisfying yourself and being concerned with the needs of the listener.
I’m always thinking about how my music will affect people–I can’t wait to play this for somebody, because I think it’s going to make them feel good. Then there’s the idea of making a presentation, because an architect always has to present a completed concept for a client. The whole concept is there on paper. I believe very much that this has influenced my sense of arranging: I present a concept for each tune I play, pretty much, that I’ve thought about. There’s a beginning and ending and a middle; there’s balance, you know, in a harmonic sense, and in a linear sense, like looking at the elevation of a building.
That’s one of the reasons why I work out a lot of things on the guitar. It’s not just learning the notes, or how to improvise, it’s working out arrangements to improvise from. There are things I just play off the top of my head, but for the most part, I want to have a really great concept for each thing I play.

To read the entire long interview, go here. To hear samples of Bertoncini’s splendid duo guitar CD with Roni Ben-Hur, click here.