For his advanced composing and arranging students, saxophonist, composer, arranger and educator Bill Kirchner recently compiled a list of recommended big band CDs recorded since 1955. Kirchner teaches at The New School and Manhattan School of Music in New York City and New Jersey City University. Bill agreed to let me share the list with Rifftides readers, who may find some of their favorites but not others.

RECOMMENDED BIG BAND CDs, 1955-PRESENT–Bill Kirchner

Muhal Richard Abrams: The Hearinga Suite (Black Saint)
Count Basie: April in Paris, Frankly Basie (both Verve), Chairman of the Board (Roulette)
Carla Bley: Big Band Theory (Watt)
Bob Brookmeyer: New Works–Celebration (Challenge)
Miles Davis-Gil Evans: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain (all Columbia)
Duke Ellington: The Far East Suite, …and His Mother Called Him Bill (both RCA/Bluebird)
Don Ellis: Tears of Joy (Columbia/Wounded Bird)
Gil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions (Blue Note), The Individualism of Gil Evans (Verve)
Clare Fischer: Thesaurus (Atlantic/Koch)
Stan Getz: Big Band Bossa Nova (arr. Gary McFarland), Change of Scenes (w/ the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band) (both Verve)
Joe Henderson: Joe Henderson Big Band (Verve)
Woody Herman: Giant Steps (Fantasy/Original Jazz Classics)
Thad Jones-Mel Lewis: Consummation (Blue Note)
Stan Kenton: Contemporary Concepts (Capitol)
Joe Lovano (with the WDR Big Band arr. by Mike Abene): Symphonica (Blue Note)
Charles Mingus: Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia)
Mingus Big Band: The Essential Mingus Big Band (Dreyfus)
Gerry Mulligan: Verve Jazz Masters 36 (Verve)
Oliver Nelson: Verve Jazz Masters 48 (Verve)
Buddy Rich: The New One, Mercy, Mercy (both Pacific Jazz)
Maria Schneider: Evanescence (Enja)
Vanguard Jazz Orchestra: Up From the Skies (arr. Jim McNeely), Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard (both Planet Arts)
Kenny Wheeler: Music for Large and Small Ensembles (ECM)

I suggested to Kirchner that, despite Bill Holman’s splendid work on the Kenton Contemporary Concepts album, one of Holman’s own CDs should be on the list. He replied,

As much as I respect what he’s done on his own, I think that the Kenton CC album shows him at his very best–and is for students the best introduction to Holman’s work. (In the same way that Stravinsky did great things all during his career, but never wrote anything “better” than The Rite of Spring.)

If you submit a suggested addition to Bill’s list, kindly give a musical justification. For our purposes, “I like it” is not justification. Please use the Comments link at the end of the item. When we receive enough replies, we’ll post a followup.

I have written here from time to time about the harm the United States has done itself by failing in recent years to practice the cultural diplomacy that did it so much good for decades following World War II. After the Berlin Wall fell and European communist totalitarianism followed, the Clinton administration dismantled the United States Information Agency. The USIA’s functions, we were told, would be taken on by the State Department, but State has done little with them during a period when the US has been in crucial need of international good will. The Bush administration began taking down the Voice of America. It appears that the VOA has little chance of regaining its extensive international outreach which, of course, included a major component of jazz broadcasting. 

Charles Tolliver, Emperor March (Half Note). Tolliver received considerable attention for his part in the recent observance of the 50th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s Town Hall concert. Here, we have Tolliver’s big band playing his own music. As in the 2007 With Love CD that announced the trumpeter and composer’s resurgence, Tolliver melds new departures with traditional values that include dynamite writing for brass. His solos and those by veterans Stanley Cowell, piano, and Billy Harper, tenor saxophone, are superb. Among the youngsters who emerge impressively from the sections are pianist Anthony Wonsey, trombonist Mike Dease and tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland. “In The Trenches” is an expansion of an audacious blues the composer developed 20 years or so ago. The first and final passages of Tolliver’s title tune, inspired by the film March of the Penguins, has riff-like qualities that could embed it in the public consciousness – if the public were to again became conscious of jazz. 
Seamus Blake, Live In Italy (Jazz Eyes). Except for the use of electronics as, er,
enhancement in the opening track and wry punctuation in the last, this is an acoustic set. The New York tenor saxophonist out of Canada by way of Berklee affirms that he is one of the most consistently interesting soloists of his generation. Blake Is accompanied by stalwart contemporaries Danton Boller on bass and Rodney Green on drums, with the veteran pianist David Kikoski. Affinity among the group is notable on Blake’s “Way Out Willy” and an extended “Darn That Dream” that begins with a ravishing Blake cadenza. A long invention based on the second movement of Debussy’s string quartet objectifies the harmonic inspiration the impressionist master has long supplied jazz musicians. The journeyman Kikoski’s long presence as a reliable component of the New York scene does not mean that he should be taken for granted. Nor does his work here allow him to be. Live recording quality is exceptional.
Jaki Byard, Sunshine Of My Soul: Live At The Keystone Korner (High Note). Not to be confused with the late pianist’s 1967 trio album also called Sunshine Of My Soul, this is Byard at the lamented San Francisco club in a 1978 solo recording unreleased until 2007. Unclassifiable and irrepressible, he roars through more than an hour of stride, boogie woogie, bebop, interpretations of Mingus, transfigured pop songs, tone poems and a tour de force on one of his favorites, “Besame Mucho.” He includes his “Sunshine,” a swirling adventure in command of the piano and control of time. That piece is also on the other Sunshine Of My Soul with Elvin Jones on drums and David Ienzon on bass. Any Byard lover needs it, too.

You may recall the Rifftides tip a year ago about a Michel Petrucciani documentary DVD. The film followed the pianist around the world and culminated in a memorable concert shortly before he died in 1999. If you didn’t know about Petrucciani before you saw the film, it is unlikely that you forgot him afterward.
In the current issue of The New Republic, David Hajdu does a fine job of placing Petrucciani in his time, assessing the importance of his music and tracing his refusal to let disability impede his art. Petrucianni’s osteogenesis imperfecta, the “glass bones” disease, stopped his growth at three feet and impaired his mobility. It never overcame his spirit. Here are excerpts from the early part of Hajdu’s piece.

I cannot think of a jazz pianist since Petrucciani who plays with such exuberance and unashamed joy. Marcus Roberts and Michel Camilo have greater technique; Bill Charlap and Eric Reed, better control; Fred Hersch has broader emotional range; Uri Caine is more adventurous. Their music provides a wealth of rewards–but not the simple pleasure of Michel Petrucciani’s. With the whole business of jazz so tentative today, you would think more musicians would express some of Petrucciani’s happiness to be alive.

Giddily free as an improviser, Petrucciani trusted his impulses. If he liked the sound of a note, he would drop a melody suddenly and just repeat that one note dozens of times. His music is enveloping: he lost himself in it, and it feels like a private place where strange things can safely ensue. Today, when so much jazz can sound cold and schematic, Petrucciani’s music reminds us of the eloquence of unchecked emotion.

Hajdu’s article, “The Keys to the Kingdom,” is on The New Republic‘s web site. To read the whole thing, click here.
Here is Petrucciani in Germany in 1993. YouTube identifies what he plays as “C-Jam Blues.” It is, except when it’s Monk’s “I Mean You.”

If you detect similarities between Petrucciani and the pianist in the next exhibit, don’t let it bother you.

I am adding to Other Places in the right column a link to Mule Walk And Jazz Talk, a web log posted from Madrid by Agustín Pérez. The legend Sr. Pérez erects below the name of his blog leaves no doubt en el que viene de, as they say in downtown Madrid.

Random thoughts, casual writings and specific research on early jazz styles. If you think there is no jazz before Coltrane, you may have come to the wrong place.

Mule Walk And Jazz Talk is bilingual and nicely organized. It is packed with treats, written and visual. Associated with a video clip of Dick Wellstood playing James P. Johnson’s “Caprice Rag,” for example, is this quote from Wellstood.

I would like to say, first, that I don’t like the term “stride” any more than I like the term “jazz”. When I was a kid the old-timers used to call stride piano “shout piano”, an agreeably expressive description, and when once I mentioned stride to Eubie Blake, he replied, “My God, what won’t they call ragtime next?” Terms, terms. Terms make music into a bundle of objects – a box of stride, a pound of Baroque -. [Donald] Lambert played music, not “stride”, just as Bach wrote music, not “Baroque”. Musicians make music, which critics later label, as if to fit it into so many jelly jars. Bastards.

To a three-part transcribed interview from 1952 with the stride (or shout) pianist Joe Turner, Sr. Pérez appends three video clips of Turner in action on French television in the 1960s. I am shamelessly appropriating one clip. But, then, Sr. Pérez appropriated all of them from Dailymotion. In this one, Turner plays his own “Cloud Fifteen,” charmingly, then James P.’s “Carolina Shout, too fast for complete coherency. Still, it is a rare opportunity to see a pianist who deserved wider fame and a plaque from the cigar industry.

The SF Jazz Collective rolls into town next week to play at the world class nonprofit performance hall we have here in an acoustically blessed former church. The local newspaper asked me to write an advancer.

YAKIMA, Wash. — For a few weeks each year, seven of the busiest musicians in jazz suspend their leadership roles and come together as the SFJazz Collective. Their 2009 tour will bring them to The Seasons on Wednesday.

According to alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, the band is having a great time.

“It’s a lot easier,” the Yakima favorite said, “when you start getting into the music and don’t have to worry about making mistakes and being stressed about playing the parts right. Then it just gets easier and turns into fun. We’re now starting to get to that point of this tour.”

Zenon, who has played The Seasons twice with his quartet, was calling just before a sound check for the Collective’s concert in Albany, N.Y. He has been a member of the SFJC since its founding. His colleagues in the septet are tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, trumpeter Dave Douglas, trombonist Robin Eubanks, pianist Rene Rosnes, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland.

To read the whole thing and see a photo of the band, go here. If you’re in the neighborhood, see you at the concert. I’ll be the guy giving a very short introduction. Be sure to come up and say hello.

The recession seems to be doing little to stem the flood of CDs. This posting and others to follow constitute one man’s attempt to deal with the rising tide. The quick hits below are not full-fledged reviews, far from it. They are acknowledgements of a few releases worth investigating. Many of them, no doubt, deserve full analysis. The Rifftides staff regrets that we cannot provide deep consideration of all recordings of merit–or demerit. Listening and writing are linear activities, and the clock keeps ticking. Doomed never to catch up, we’re trying to stay abreast of the infinite surge of new recordings.
Geoffrey Keezer, Áurea (ArtistShare). Pianist Keezer is in the thick of the Peruvian movement that is attracting more and more jazz musicians. His playing, compositions and arrangements radiate authenticity and the freshness of Afro-Peruvian jazz. With propulsion by percussionists Hugo Alcázar and Jon Wikan and bassist Essiet Okon Essiet, Keezer crafts inventions based on shifting rhythms and deep harmonies. His colleagues include saxophonists Steve Wilson and Ron Blake, guitarists Peter Sprague and Mike Moreno, and the gifted Argentinian vocalist Sofia Rei Koutsovitis. Keezer’s setting of Eduardo Falú’s and Jaime Dávalos’ “La Nostalgiosa” is profoundly moving. He equals it with his own “Miraflores.”
Fat Cat Big Band, Meditations on the War for Whose Great God is the Most High You are God (Smalls). Angels Praying (Smalls). The bizarre cover illustration and the title mantra of the Meditations CD steeled me for an outpouring of anger, new age rumination, avant garde self-indulgence or, possibly, all of that. Instead, in both albums we hear an 11-piece ensemble of good young New York players cruising the modern mainstream and soloing well. The compositions and arrangements by guitarist and leader Jade Synstelien are tinged with Mingus, Ellington and possibly a hint of Gary McFarland. I finally got to hear trumpeter Tatum Greenblatt, and understood why established trumpet soloists like Jay Thomas are talking about him. Synstelien’s vocals in a style reminiscent of Frank Zappa would fit the Industrial Jazz Group or Reptet. In this context, they come as a bit of a jolt. Maybe that’s what he intended.
Joe Temperley, The Sinatra Songbook (Hep). Yet another Sinatra tribute? Yes, please. Temperley, the baritone sax anchor and soprano saxophonist of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, plays standards from Sinatra’s repertoire. The only original is “Moontune,” composed by guitarist James Chirillo on the framework of “Fly Me to the Moon” with a jaunty out-chorus for the octet. Temperley’s LCJO colleagues trumpeter Ryan Kisor and pianist Dan Nimmer and five other state-of-the-art musicians are aboard. Everybody gets plenty of solo time, but Temperley is the central figure. His caressing of “Nancy” on the big horn is a highlight. Everything Nimmer plays is a highlight.
Bill Henderson, Beautiful Memory: Live At The Vic (Ahuh). Henderson is a few days short of his 83rd birthday. Only 81 when this was recorded, he was as vigorous, rhythmically assured, in tune and full of blues and bop essences as when I first heard him singing as a stripling of 36. Embracing a sophisticated ballad (“Sleepin’ Bee”), updating a traditional classic (“Royal Garden Blues”) or improving on Elton John (“Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word”), Henderson is utterly convincing.

Rifftides reader Jim Eigo followed up on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece about Denny Zeitlin by sending this photograph. He took it last night at Zeitlin’s gig at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. From left to right, Buster Williams, Zeitlin, drummer Matt Wilson, fully involved. 

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I write about Denny Zeitlin. The piece is pegged to the simultaneous releases of his new trio CD on the Sunnyside label and a Mosaic box set with nearly all of Zeitlin’s Columbia trio recordings. The article begins:

In October 1963, a 25-year-old Johns Hopkins medical student sat at a concert grand piano in the East 30th Street studio of Columbia Records in New York and played a masterpiece of a jazz solo. Denny Zeitlin, from a Chicago family devoted to medicine and music, had come to New York for a 10-week fellowship in psychiatry at Columbia University. But the medical student, a pianist since the age of 2 and a professional musician during his high-school years, had also found time during his New York sojourn to study with the seminal composer George Russell, who became one of his champions, and to sit in with some of the city’s leading jazz players.

It goes on to tell the story of Dr. Zeitlin’s extraordinary life-long equal commitments to music and medicine, which…

… are not enough to absorb Dr. Zeitlin’s curiosity and energy. Tall, bearded, lean as a figure in an El Greco painting, he is also devoted to mountain biking, fishing, gastronomy and wine. Nor does he dabble in those interests. As with music and psychiatry, he pursues them.

To read the whole thing, click here, or pick up a copy of the Journal at your doorstep or the nearest news stand.