When Marc Myers at JazzWax.com decides to solve a mystery, he goes into full Sherlock Holmes mode. He has done that in an attempt to track down the complete personnel of the Shorty Rogers combo in the Looney Tunes cartoon Three Little Bops, which ran last week on Rifftides. I agree with critic Larry Kart’s conclusion that the baritone saxophonist is

Jimmy Giuffre. Follow this link to see the cartoon again and read Kart’s message. Giuffre worked often with Rogers in the 1950s, and the baritone in the film has the sound of Giuffre’s celebrated spoof R&B hit “Big Girl” with the Lighthouse All-Stars (CD cover pictured). Myers takes an interesting route to reach another conclusion about the baritone player. His detective work produces plausible speculation about the identities of the bassist, drummer and guitarist. See Marc’s posting here.

What matters most is that a delightful cartoon period piece is getting renewed attention. Still, if anyone out there in cyberspace has definite information about the makeup of the band, please let us know by way of the comment link below.

David Sherr, OtherWorld Music (Bel Air Jazz). Sherr is a composer and player of reed instruments and flutes. His background includes work with Sonny Criss, the San Francisco Ballet, Nelson Riddle, Lalo Schifrin, Don Ellis, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Frank Zappa, Oliver Nelson, Robert Craft, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, among several dozen others from assorted fields of music. In this CD, he brings together extensive portions of his music with that of J.S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen.

Sherr enlists members of the Bach Aria Group and superb jazz musicians including drummer Joe La Barbera, pianist Tom Ranier and bassist Harvey Newmark. His unaccompanied clarinet exposition of the third movement of Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time is brilliantly executed. He integrates free jazz with elements of Messiaen’s formidable quartet and succeeds in making all but the most perceptive and experienced listeners wonder about the line between what is written and what is improvised. In his “…Then Have I The Eagle’s Powers, Then Soar I Up From This World,” Sherr accomplishes a similar feat with themes from Bach’s “Aria” from Cantata 56. In it, voices deliver lines in several languages as if they were instruments in counterpoint, the jazz players free-associate with one another at a high level and a solo violin melds with the entrance to the next piece, Messiaen’s flute-piano duet “Le Merle Noir.”

This is music full of rich satisfactions, more of which become apparent on successive hearings. If Sherr attracts the attention he should with this unconventional and intriguing project on an obscure label, we will undoutedly be hearing more from him.

In his teenage years during the waning days of the big band era, Sherr went on the road as a saxophone player. His web site contains a long, occasionally disturbing and very funny journal of that experience. Here’s a sample.

Ernie Fields And His World Famous Orchestra, that’s us. A big hit record, a couple of smaller hits, the Dick Clark Show, the Regal theater, the country’s Number One R&B band and bookings in some pretty classy joints, like the one the other night near Dallas. And then again…

Tonight it was Temple, Texas, just south of Waco. (Wyatt has been calling it “Whacko” since this morning.) The sign over the entrance said “Rec Center” but “wreck center” would have been more like it. It had broken windows and chairs, a tiny stage and a piano that may never have been tuned. Roosevelt counted thirteen keys that didn’t work. He tried to get around the missing notes and wound up sounding like Thelonious Monk.

Billy’s bass drum kept slipping. He took a hammer he kept for such emergencies and drove a couple of nails into the rotting floor of the stage to brace the drum. The guy in charge of the building screamed, “What are you doing to my stage,” and ordered him to remove the nails. Bill pointed out that the “damage” was already done, so why not leave them in until we were finished, but the guy said no. So Billy pulled the nails and spent the rest of the night trying to keep from kicking the drum off the stage.

To read all of “On The Road At 18,” click here.

 

TWO CDs BRIEFLY NOTED

Philip Catherine, Bert Joris, Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Meeting Colours (Dreyfus). This has

 been out since 2005. I loved the album when I first heard it and just rediscovered it in a stack of review copies. Guitarist Catherine and trumpeter Joris, both Belgian, are the principal soloists in this collection of Joris’s arrangements of Catherine’s compositions (plus Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”) for the superb Brussels Jazz Orchestra. Joris is one of the finest trumpet soloists in the world. His writing is as good as his playing. Catherine, most widely known for his work with Chet Baker, Tom Harrell and Larry Coryell, solos with his customary imagination, economy and love for Wes Montgomery.

Drori Mondlak, Point In Time (Lilypad). Mondlak’s quartet is integrated, balanced and musical, with no show-off features for the drummer leader. Mondlak, saxophonist and flutist Karolina Strassmayer, guitarist Cary DeNigris and bassist Steve LaSpina solo with conviction. Except for Frank Foster’s “Simone,” the pieces are by members of the quartet. The collection might have benefited from more of the grit of DeNigris’s “I’ve Paid Some Blues” and “No Name Blues” and Mondlak’s “The Prance,” but if Mondlak’s aim was to create an atmosphere of thoughtful relaxation, he succeeded. Mondlak has a witty solo on Strassmayer’s “It Once Was a Waltz.” LaSpina’s fluidity and strength are important to the success of this music. Strassmayer’s work shows why she is one of the most interesting alto saxophonists under forty. DeNigris’s and Mondlak’s like-mindedness contribute to the success of the venture.

In today’s Washington Post, Matt Schudel writes about Frank Wess. The 86-year-old tenor saxophonist and flutist is still active and about to play in Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his early career. Schudel quotes pianist Billy Taylor, Wess’s contemporary, about the saxophonist’s influence on him when they were in high school together.

“He’s the reason I don’t play the tenor saxophone,” Taylor says. “I was going to try to be the new Ben Webster,” the tenor saxophonist who worked with another notable Washington jazzman, Duke Ellington.

Then Taylor heard Wess, and he decided to stick with the piano.

“Even in his teens, he was really a remarkable player,” he says.

To read all of Schudel’s article, click here.

Wess was a principal arranger and soloist in Count Basie’s band during the 1950s and early ’60s. In this video clip, he solos on his composition “Corner Pocket,” following trumpeters Thad Jones and Al Aarons.

The You Tube heading for this video clip of Toots Thielemans at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1992 says that it has been viewed 40,422 times. Do yourself a favor and make it 40,423. Quincy Jones was the conductor of the WDR Big Band. He was enamored of Toots’s musicality, wit and warmth. Who isn’t?

Have a good weekend.

And if I have a strong point, it’s that I like to believe it’s not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality.

You can be in Tokyo or Alberta at four in the morning in your hotel and you can still practice if you feel like it. A trombone cannot do that at four in the morning.

The Rifftides staff is attempting to keep ahead of the CD tsunami described in this recent post. It’s an impossible assignment, but they’re a game bunch. Herewith, brief reviews of approximately 0.06% of the accumulated mass of discs.

Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy). In some of these previously unreleased concert performances, the tenor saxophonist reaches peaks of the intensity, drive, inventiveness and whimsy that have kept him inimitable for nearly six decades. His “Tenor Madness” solo from Japan in 2000 is one of Rollins’s most compelling recorded blues statements. There’s a remarkable “Easy Living” from Poland in 1980. “More Than You Know,” recorded in France in 2006, concludes with a ravishing extended cadenza that is a tour through the inner workings of a great melodist’s creative process. The most recent track, “Some Enchanted Evening,” from Rollins’s 2007 Carnegie Hall concert, is curiously tentative despite the presence of bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes. The architectonic “Blossoms,” from Sweden in 1980, is anything but tentative. Full of risk-taking, it is twelve-and-a-half minutes of Rollins at his most penetrating and complex.

Mike Melvoin and Kim Park, The Art Of Conversation (City Light). Pianist Melvoin and alto saxophonist Park, veterans who deserve wider recognition, shine in this aptly-named duo collaboration. It grew out of Park’s sitting in on a Melvoin gig in Kansas City. Park makes  engaging personal use of inspiration from his KC predecessor Charlie Parker, notably so in

his visceral, blues-inflected soloing on “I Remember You,” a tune lastingly linked to Parker. The fleetness and harmonic richness of Melvoin’s improvisations are consistent throughout this collection of familiar standard songs. As for justification of that title, he and Park truly listen to and stimulate one another’s ideas, as good conversationalists will. This music is available as a download.

Billy Harper, Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2 (Talking House). Harper was one of the most profound of the tenor saxophonists to emerge in the wake of John Coltrane. This CD, full of post-Coltrane muscle and mysticism, recalls the swirl of free jazz in the sixties and seventies, even unto Amiri Baraka reciting his jazz-history-lesson poetry and Harper on one track singing a little like Leon Thomas did on all those Impulse! LPs. Fronting a relentlessly energetic septet of like-minded seekers, Harper solos with his full range of formidable technical mastery and the power and conviction of a gifted preacher. This CD seems to be hard to get. Although it was released in October, Amazon is the only web site I can find that is offering it. Amazon claims to have just one copy–used–at $90.00 U.S. (!) It may be available as an MP3 download.

Jerry Gonzalez y Los Piratos Del Flamenco (Sunnyside). Since he moved to Madrid, the trumpeter, flugelhornist, conguero and co-leader of the Fort Apache Band has gone well beyond taking an interest in Spain’s flamenco tradition. He has absorbed its mystique and

 even begun to have an effect on its evolution. The closely held flamenco community has let him in and Gonzalez has managed to get them to accept the idea of jazz improvisation in the context of contemporary flamenco performance. In a cultural feedback loop, Gonzalez brings jazz sensibilities inspired by Miles Davis and Gil Evans into the milieu of Spanish music that helped to inspire the classic Davis-Evans album Sketches Of Spain. His venture is a work in progress. This CD demonstrates the results so far. “Monk’s Dream (Monk’s Soniquete)” with Gonzalez overdubbed on multiple horns to the accompaniment of flamenco hand-clapping rhythm is, as they say in Madrid, un viaje.c

Some readers have reported a problem with the links to CD sources in the recent Rifftides piece about Kenny Wheeler and Don Thompson. The links have been remade and should be working fine.

Sometimes comments about Rifftides pieces show up considerably after publication. We just got one from reader Dave Mackey about an animated cartoon we linked to on April 30, 2007. Bless the readers. We wouldn’t have known about the cartoon if a reader hadn’t sent an alert in the first place. The paragraph immediately below is the original item. It is followed by the Looney Tunes itself, now embedded in the blog. And THAT is followed by Mr. Mackey’s comment. It’s a great reason to rerun a minor masterpiece.

Rifftides reader Bruce Tater came across a classic Warner Bros. cartoon from the Looney Tunes series. He called our attention to Three Little Bops, a perfectly preserved piece of 1950s hipness. Stan Freeburg is the narrator. Shorty Rogers did the music. Notice the stylized drawings of the nightclub audience. Don’t miss Shorty’s little sui generis muted solo near the end.

It’s likely those nightclub denizens were drawn by assistant animator Bob Matz; most of the heavy lifting was done by Gerry Chiniquy, who was simply one of the most brilliant animators in the Friz Freleng unit and deserved this showcase.

Now, a music question: anyone know who else played on the session? The music was recorded on the Warner Bros. soundstage by the regular crew that recorded the cartoon scores. The bare music score exists and was released on one of the recent Looney Tunes DVD’s, and it’s slated by Milt Franklyn, who was one of the studio’s two musical directors (the other being the legendary Carl Stalling).

Dave Mackey

If you know the other musicians, please let us in on it by way of a comment

Jazz isn’t dead or dying. It’s just waiting to be heard. The photograph shows an eleven-foot line of CDs on the floor of my music room. There are 352 of them. They are some of the review copies that have arrived in the past couple of months. Boxes and shelves in my office hold at least three times that many more.  A stack of DVDs on the credenza behind where I am writing reaches to within a few inches of the ceiling. None of these recordings is yet in the permanent collection. They are languishing, hoping to be reviewed.

 

I estimate that there are 1,050 CDs and thirty-five DVDs on hold. Let’s assume that each is an hour long, a low average. If I were to spend eight hours a day, including weekends, listening and watching, it would be–appropriately–April 1^st, 2009, before I finished. But I would not finish because long before then I would have been taken to the loony bin. In the meantime, at the current rate, a couple of thousand more recordings will have arrived. Did I mention the storage problem?

 

All a reviewer can do is hope that experience, knowledge, instinct and luck will guide him toward what to pull from that long line. If the next Armstrong, Young, Parker, Evans, Coleman or Coltrane is there and I miss him (or her), I’ll be sorry, but listening is a linear proposition, and there’s only so much time.

 

Below is the next installment in my attempt to keep up with the endless flow of recordings.